Edited by Pat Kane (email)


:: Harry Potter and the Kidults of Gloom ::

Most parents will have their tales to tell about their children reading the latest Harry Potter book. I’m wondering whether my own 13-year-old daughter’s reaction is just her own, or symptomatic of something much wider and deeper. For most of her reading of Harry Potter and The Order of the Pheonix, she was in a state of fevered exultation - literally breaking off to have a lie down, and ponder the latest plot twists.

But when she got to the end of the book, she was actually tearful – genuinely distraught that one of her favourite characters, Harry’s godfather Sirius, had to die. Last time I asked her, she wasn’t re-reading the book, which she’d done furiously with all the others. “I’m too traumatised”, she said, heading for her R’n’B CD collection.

The Potter books give us all a chance to examine what our relationship with childhood and our children actually is these days. The Play Ethic is interested in “kidult” media – whether Disney theme-parks, or cross-generational toys, or “Graystation” computer games – because they represent a zone within Western family life which is historically unprecedented: parents and children as conscious participants in self-definition, using games and stories and playful objects.

There’s a lot of anguished talk about the “kidult”, mostly on the side of those who have a vested interest in the restoration of a certain hyper-rationalist version of adult authority (which is usually part of a recoil from a whole range of other social and cultural complexities). For what it’s worth, I think it’s a promising field for change – particularly for men. Many might be willing to embrace a more “ludic” and playful identity – whether as singletons or as fathers - as a positive and creative option, rather than something second-best to work culture.

So I’m reading the new Potter, and I can understand why my daughter is so upset with the book. Harry is grumpy, hormonal and adolescent, suffering slights to his reputation and filled with a sense of foreboding, troubled by moral ambiguities (the news of his father’s bullying tendencies, his deep connection with Voldemort). Potter, in short, is growing up – and so is the kidult world that Rowling has brilliantly created over the previous four books.

A.S.Byatt’s usefully dissenting (and controversial) review (free, but registration req'd) doesn’t give Rowling enough credit for really beginning the dissolution of the Potter spell: that magical kidult space where the idealism of children and the realism of adults had been suspended together, in a story which mingled wizard’s spells and office politics, demonic monsters and tabloid culture, mythic heroism and peer-group pressure.

These cultural forms (movies like The Lord of the Rings, books like Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy) are still marvellous spaces within which adults and children can find a true “play-moment” - adopting the rules of a virtual world so that they can more profoundly address the limits and potentials of their actual worlds.

So in a historical period fraught with anxiety, it seems appropriate that Harry should be discomfited, his scar throbbing with pain, his friends becoming strange to him. The balance between child’s play and power play that marked the books is now tilting decisively towards the latter. From a book series begun at the height of the go-go decade in 1997, and coming to its conclusion in the homeland security era of the oughties, Potter’s gradual darkening is a moment of truth for us all.


:: The Not-Quite-Good-Enough Life ::


Interestingly playful noises are coming from the ideas-sector of the current Labour government. Richard Reeves (whose aim to coin a new word, "workful", was noted in an earlier column) writes in the Guardian that we should be attending to John Maynard Keynes' predictions, in his 1930's essay, "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren". Once affluence had been achieved, then only "those peoples who can keep alive and cultivate the art of life.. will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes".

One could argue that, in the developed West at least, this affluence has now arrived. For Reeves, this means (among other positions), defying the utilitarianism of the latest education minister - who sees "schools and universities as training camps for UK employers" - and making subjects like philsophy, music, politics and creative writing "compulsory to the age of sixteen".

All of this joyous rhetoric is partly incited by the vogue of "happiness" research (see "Play Times" in this previous PlayJournal). As Reeves glosses it, "we know from the research literature that friendship, good family relations and learning and now more associated with life-satisfaction than money" in the affluent countries. Yet what's interesting is the role that Reeves outlines for policy makers:

There is a clear role for public policy in helping to manage the transition from the pursuit of economic goals which have served us so well in the past to the arts of life which will do so in the future.

Many of my discussions with politicians and policy-makers (including Richard) have been on exactly that theme - a play ethic as a new public narrative for a mass creative society, in a post-scarcity age. So I'm happy that the theme is finally emerging, and in strategically crucial places.

But one caveat (as much to myself as anyone else): isn't there an element to the "arts of life" which must make people fundamentally ungovernable? We'd like it to be the case that, as Keynes put it, "freedom from pressing economic cares" would make us live "wisely and agreeably and well".

Yet as Keynes' own history in the Bloomsbury set makes clear, that freedom also must allow for lives conducted unwisely, disagreeably and with considerable difficulty. Bohemianism, in short, is as much an option in the age of affluence as a bucolic, convivial "good life": the ars de vivre, vigorously pursued, often involve the kinds of lifestyle experimentation (drugs are the classic example, but free downloading of music might be another) which politicians often find it difficult to turn a blind eye to. (I explored this in my Strategy Unit seminar last year).

None of which is intended to cavil at a welcome change in the otherwise schizophrenic work-play culture of the New Labour project (which, as Angela McRobbie reminds us, seems to have forgotten its intellectual roots). But we'll see just how diverse the visions of the good life promoted by these new philosopher-kings are allowed to be. The players' imperative - dynamic autonomy in an open, responsive world - will out.


:: Play Times ::


To The Graystation Should we be happy at the end of ageism in the workplace - or should the "new old" be allowed to escape from the workplace early, with its "ceaseless round of jostling competitiveness and desperate flirtations"? (Terence Blacker, paid-for-article)? Perhaps this 3D video-gaming granny is a ludic portent...

French Artists Are Revolting Fascinating insight into French unemployment regulations: their artists can do a week's show, claim a week of benefit, and then work again. Now it's been extended to the entire freelance economy, the politicians are tightening up, and the artists are withdrawing their creative labour - threatening France's arts festival season. While in the UK, Presbyter Brown threatens benefit withdrawal to those who don't want to practice the skills that the labour market offers (he should watch Ken Loach's Sweet Sixteen). Is it so difficult to find ways to collectively sustain human aspiration?

Hitting Bard Times The Royal Shakespeare Company is pulling out of management consultancy. Do "dramatic solutions" have their limits?

I-Yam-An-Aerobicisst-A! Punk rock pogo-ing is the newest fitness craze (also see this Google search). Can Bez's Monkey Dancing Classes be far behind?

Browser Angel Great backgrounder on the man who put up the fake 404 error page "These Weapons of Mass Destruction cannot be displayed".

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