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Sunday, June 28, 2020

David Graeber on Fun at the Heart of Being [common glad impulse]

Except for the addendum, which is new, this post is from 2014. I'm bumping it to the top on general principle.
David Graeber, most widely known as the author of Debt: The First 5000 Years and a theorist of the Occupy movement, has an article in The Baffler arguing that freedom and play inherent in the nature of things. After a certain amount of opening throat clearing about play among inchworms and lobsters he gets around to the modern economic view of things, according to which all animal behavior (including that of us featherless bipeds) is to be accounted for by appeals to rational self-interest, a view that embraces (if only metaphorically) genes, which are just (odd) components of certain molecules.

For various reasons, which he explains, Graeber's not buying it. This is what he ends up proposing, via self-organization:
Let us imagine a principle. Call it a principle of freedom—or, since Latinate constructions tend to carry more weight in such matters, call it a principle of ludic freedom. Let us imagine it to hold that the free exercise of an entity’s most complex powers or capacities will, under certain circumstances at least, tend to become an end in itself. It would obviously not be the only principle active in nature. Others pull other ways. But if nothing else, it would help explain what we actually observe, such as why, despite the second law of thermodynamics, the universe seems to be getting more, rather than less, complex. Evolutionary psychologists claim they can explain—as the title of one recent book has it—“why sex is fun.” What they can’t explain is why fun is fun. This could.
I'm sympathetic, both with his reservations about economic rationalism, and with his advocacy of ludic freedom.

Common Glad Impulse

Charlie Keil reminds me of: W.H. Hudson, The Naturalist in La Plata, D. Appleton and Company, 1895. Here's a passage:
Birds are more subject to this universal joyous instinct than mammals, and there are times when some species are constantly overflowing with it; and as they are so much freer than mammals, more buoyant and graceful in action, more loquacious, and have voices so much finer, their gladness shows itself in a greater variety of ways, with more regular and beautiful motions, and with melody. But every species, or group of species, has its own inherited form or style of performance; and, however rude and irregular this may be, as in the case of the pretended stampedes and fights of wild cattle, that is the form in which the feeling will always be expressed. If all men, at some exceedingly remote period in their history, had agreed to express the common glad impulse, which they now express in such an infinite variety of ways or do not express at all, by dancing a minuet, and minuet-dancing had at last come to be instinctive, and taken to spontaneously by children at an early period, just as they take to walking "on their hind legs," man's case would be like that of the inferior animals.

I was one day watching a flock of plovers, quietly feeding on the ground, when, in a moment, all the birds were seized by a joyous madness, and each one, after making a vigorous peck at his nearest neighbour, began running wildly about, each trying in passing to peck other birds, while seeking by means of quick doublings to escape being pecked in turn. This species always expresses its glad impulse in the same way; but how different in form is this simple game of touch-who-touch-can from the triplet dances of the spur-winged lapwings, with their drumming music, pompous gestures, and military precision of movement! How different also from the aerial performance of another bird of the same family--the Brazilian stilt--in which one is pursued by the others, mounting upwards in a wild, eccentric flight until they are all but lost to view; and back to earth again, and then, skywards once more; the pursued bird when overtaken giving place to another individual, and the pursuing pack making the air ring with their melodious barking cries! How different again are all these from the aerial pastimes of the snipe, in which the bird, in its violent descent, is able to produce such wonderful, far-reaching sounds with its tail-feathers! The snipe, as a rule, is a solitary bird, and, like the oscillating finch mentioned early in this paper, is content to practise its pastimes without a witness. In the gregarious kinds all perform together: for this feeling, like fear, is eminently contagious, and the sight of one bird mad with joy will quickly make the whole flock mad. There are also species that always live in pairs, like the scissors-tails already mentioned, that periodically assemble in numbers for the purpose of display. The crested screamer, a very large bird, may also be mentioned: male and female sing somewhat harmoniously together, with voices of almost unparalleled power: but these birds also congregate in large numbers, and a thousand couples, or even several thousands, may be assembled together: and, at intervals, both by day and night, all sing in concert, their combined voices producing a thunderous melody which seems to shake the earth. As a rule, however, birds that live always in pairs do not assemble for the purpose of display, but the joyous instinct is expressed by duet-like performances between male and female. Thus, in the three South American Passerine families, the tyrant-birds, wood-hewers, and ant-thrushes, numbering together between eight and nine hundred species, a very large majority appear to have displays of this description.

5 comments:

  1. Interesting that you put "abundance" rather than "play" or "word games" or "fun" or "pleasure principle" or "Humo ludens collaborans" as the word next to "philosophy". I've come to distrust "philosophy" because the words gamed with are abstractions of earlier abstracts. Whereas Graeber's play for play's sake and fun for the fun of it does explain why I've sent Born To Groove off to Wheatmark for on demand publication. Sooner or later the demand for play, fun, pleasure, the joys of simply living, will put an end to corpstate's unilateral, preemptive, perpetual wars of domination. Sooner the better for the diversity of species and cultures.

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  2. Really, CK? Graeber's words did that? It's not like there's a new idea there, just an old idea you like. Do you really think we can make it through the next century if we just stop thinking and play play play?

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    1. 3 years and a few months later, I realize that a lot of my so-called 'thinking' has really been stewing, or what some 12 steppers call 'stinking-thinking.' Whereas any playing with words I do (so-called 'poetry'), or playing pocket trumpet (getting Horace Silver's "Cape Verdean Blues" back into my finger memory this morning) or drumming, singing, dancing with kids that I do, helps me play 5 different ways toward life-affirming thinking, creative thinking, via the "one tone worth a thousand tomes" (Roz Rudd) principle.
      Drop some tones along a melodic path in rhythm and there are bound to be some "participatory discrepancies" happening // to Pema's "When the world is filled with evil, transform all mishaps into the path of bodhi."
      For sure, we the people are not 'all the same sap sap' and we will be happier and more creative living out our Humo ludens collaborans identity to the fullest.

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    2. "Stinking-thinking"–sounds about right to me. Yes, there's a lot wrong, but beating yourself over the head with it, in justified – justified! – high dudgeon just gives you a headache. Too much stewing leads to ungluing & all the kings horses and all the kings men can't get the toothpaste back into the tube. Groove on, CK, groove on!

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  3. Just so you know, CK, I was wondering where you got "abundance" next to "philosophy" from in your comment. Then I looked up at the bottom of my post and saw them next to "labels." I case you don't know what's going on there, I stick one or more labels on to every post (they're called tags at TnT, which uses a different blogging platform). If you click on one of those labels you get all the posts I've tagged with that label. The idea is to help readers to find posts on some given topic.

    So, you click on "philosophy" and you get all the posts I've tagged with that label. The same with "abundance."

    Why not "play" or "fun" or any of your other suggestions? Obviously I've not used them as labels. Why not? Obviously because I didn't think those were particularly useful labels. Why not? you might ask. Well, look over there to the right and scroll down 'till you find a bunch of words and phrases headed by the title "All tags/labels alphabetically." There's a lot of them. I suppose that I could add "play" to that pile, but do I really want to created more labels? Would that be helpful?

    Don't know. It's not a particularly good system. But it's what I've got.

    If I add "play" – which might in fact be useful – do I go back and retrospectively add that to appropriate posts. Well, I could do that, but I've got almost 2500 posts already. Do I want to search through all of them? No.

    I suppose that most of the posts I've labeled jamming would qualify, and jazz too, then there's dance, and creativity, what about literature? film, cartoon – is that the same as cartoons? I don't know. It seems silly to have both of those labels. One should suffice, don't you think?

    Heck, I don't even know what I've got here. 2500 posts! Yikes! And a fourth to a third of them are mostly photos.

    And you know what I discovered while writing this comment? I've already got a fun label. It's a rather odd set of posts, six of them now that I've added this one to the list. Totally forgot I had that label when I originally wrote this particular post.

    And then there's funny.

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