Play's the Thing: Some post-conference thoughts

A day or two after the end of Play's The Thing: Creative Approaches to Wellbeing, and the best I can do is to cite one of our wonderful speakers, Bridget McKenzie: "after this, my mind feels a like a bucket of wriggling eels. Or a shoal of fish". Meaning, I guess, that the conference did its job in stimulating thoughts and perspectives on the wellbeing agenda. What follows is my personal list of themes, memes and highlights - I'd be delighted to see some corrective and expansive comments below.

After the first day, it seemed clear what that agenda was, at least from the top-down perspective of government and policy-makers in UK and Europe. Commercial and industrial growth has ceased to be the only reliable indicator of societal progress - our status-driven consumerism inducing anxiety, depression and physical ill-health (as William Davies noted), a dysphoria compounded by our slowly growing awareness of its toxic material impact on a limited planet (as Andrew Simms elaborated). 

To complement this, psychology and neurology is discovering the benefits of "flourishing". If you actively pursue the opposite of the "common mental disorders" (in Felicia Huppert's words), there are benefits in recovery from illness, even capacity for creativity. We heard that Gus O'Donnell, the chief civil servant in the current UK Coalition government, has a slogan: "What gets treasured, gets measured". 

Yet many of our speakers cautioned against too militant a top-down push towards "positive" wellbeing. Happiness achieved despite a damp flat and low/no-pay might be delusory, noted Libby Brookes - though she admitted that the wellbeing agenda forced us to consider the "subjective" as well as the "objective" conditions of living, A service economy which demands performativity, enthusiasm and ingenuity from its workers, might well be the "competitive production of uncertainty", in Chris Groves words. And where might a joyful anger fit into this picture - or even a "depressive realism", that might found the basis for activism or resistance? 

We attempted to occupy the middle ground between governments looking for new reasons to rule, and workers/citizens struggling to hold body and soul together, by looking at community initiatives towards wellbeing. Again, the urgency of environmental action loomed large: Marek Kohn wondered whether we could inculcate a "duty to the future" among people who find it difficult to connect their current polluting actions to later generations. 

Indy Johar and Ben Irvine wanted to clear away some of the capitalist/anti-capitalist language, and ask deeper questions about how a "purpose-driven" economy could replace both the laziness of consumer pleasures, and our acceptance of dissatisfying work in creaking organisations. Both walk their talk: Johar in the foundation of HubWestminster as a new space for freelancers, Irvine in his activism for a Cycle Network Map for London. 

We began the second day with a real sense that the social, political and economic zone demarcated by "wellbeing" was full of possibilties for new language, rationales and initivatives. But this day was all about tapping into the depths, and the extremes, of a flourishing life. What are the enduring sources of wellbeing, beyond the exhortations of a Cabinet minister? And what are the technologies and systems which might change the very conditions for wellbeing itself? 

In our "Cyberbeing" discussion, Bill Thompson made a strong claim for network society as justifying that much-misused term "paradigm shift". If our wellbeing depends on "alignment with broader goals of society", then if we deny how much digitality is shaping our sense of what working, learning and socialising is under its influence, we risk huge unhappiness - the unhappiness of being illiterate in a new literacy. 

Bridget McKenzie sought to emphasize how a good internet experience generated a state of flow, and how social media proved that "affiinity is more important than structure", our networks often composed of peers, whose consciousnesses we valued. Yet Ann McCrossan wanted to alert us to how getting into a "flow state" with something like Facebook might turns us into "mechanical people", or at least mind-controlled by the subtle mechanics of interaction that Facebook is constantly developing. 

Our final two speakers sessions pushed further to the boundaries. Does the freedom of the artist have anything to say about any aspiration towards wellbeing - other than that the exercise of the imagination, like the act of play, excites neurons and broadens perspectives and empathy, through image, narrative and form? Hannah Hull showed us a history of art-movements using play as protest - the traditions of Dada, Fluxus and Situationism - but whose stunts and manoeuvers sounded almost nostalgic to some audience members, and certainly easily incorporatable by advertisers and mainstream media. 

"Yet the boundaries keep changing" said street artist Lottie Child, who showed us how even the act of walking down a street wasn't "normal but normative", and could be easily and joyfully subverted. Improviser Alex Fradera believed that even when his craft was dragged into the coils of organisational life - a means of sharpening performance around the water-cooler - it had an excess which could only profoundly dent the conceit and over-confidence of his managerial participants. 

Is a good target for wellbeing an amateur society of folk artists, where audience and artist become much more interchangable? Or does that remove the ability of artists, as Hannah Hull complained, to call some work "bad" when it deserved it? "Be aware of running things off the battery of the ego", cautioned an audience member - who also reminded us that the post-Romantic meanings that we load onto art and artists (authenticity, display of craft, performance) might now be becoming distributed throughout society.

Disconnecting from ego-power was very much the theme of our session on wellbeing and mindfulness - already mentioned by Felicia in her tour d'horizon at the beginning. Gay Watson and Ed Halliwell laid out a prospectus from Buddhism which urged us to "pay attention" - meditation as decluttering the mind, in order to clarify one's agency in the world. Ansuman Biswas showed some of his art experiments - involving sensory deprivation, collective music making, even weightlessness in a "vomit comet" - to demonstrate how we could "re-member" our consciousness: that is, release it from the ego and back into the "body", whether that body be physiological or social. 

Our penultimate session on Humanity 2.0: "smart suffering", transhumanism and well-being, was a sparky hour. Our basic question was whether the whole debate about "authentic flourishing" might easily be upended, if our baseline assumptions about the natural performance of bodies and minds was to be radically altered by human enhancement technologies - everything from the contact lenses that deliver you emails (coming soon!) to the smart drugs that boosted your smarts before a job interview, or further into the artificial intelligence that might allow humans to exist in a disembodied, virtual form. 

Steve Fuller laid out three scenarios of possible response to this future - an eco-centric response, which emphasizes not our unique ability to extend ourselves with technology, but our commonality with other non-humans; a steady creep of improvements, regulated by the usual process of ethics and regulation; and a full transhuman ambition, marked by a kind of "moral entrepreneurship" about how far to take these posthuman techniques. 

Our panel included Jonathan Rowson from the RSA's Social Brain project, who asserted that if the question was, "what is a Humanity 2.0?", then what made him feel most human was a response to human fragility, whether the very old or the very young. Bill Thompson asked us to remember that, in terms of human rights of security, sustainability and citizenship, too many billions are at only "Humanity 0.5" - this could be the ultimate first-world argument. 

And a passionate exchange between Steve Fuller and social activist Dougald Hine at the end revealed some of the subtler aspects of identity and technology. For Steve, the story of a divorce which took as its basis infidelity in a virtual world was evidence of our post-human reality: for Dougald, it was no different from an exchange of secret love letters in the 19th century being discovered by an outraged spouse. A romantic, all-too-human way to leave the debate... 

We closed Play's The Thing with some thoughts about the "future of wellbeing". Indra Adnan left the stage to remind us of how many men were on the final panel, and how many women were watching in the audience: could a future wellbeing conference begin to grapple properly with the role of family and parenthood, as it might shape policy and activism? The first moment of Play's The Thing began with a harmonic jam session organised by Ansuman Biswas - and we ended the two days with a collective vocal improvisation led by Briony Greenhill of Fun Fed, a play consultancy. A demonstration of a truth that we'd come to realise over these last two days - how the most sustainable wellbeing draws a Mobius loop between the mind and the body. 

An hour of excitable conversation afterwards proved, at the very least, we'd forged some kind of constituency around the topic. Watch this space and time, next year...