Welcome to Play Fool, a newsletter about the games we play and the games which play us. This post attempts to explicate an underlying theme which animates Play Fool, a theme which found form in my experiments with my improvised theatre company, Only the Human. I propose a politics of the 'Middle Way’ outside the state and the market, and suggest that reclaiming our basic capacities to be in community, and friendship, underpin any viable politics for the future. If you enjoy it, please consider sharing and subscribing.
I am entering in to a busy few months, so Play Fool will be on a ‘when it is ready’ publishing schedule. I’ll also share a few excerpts from my book: Yes, But: Essays on Improvisation.
“The dream of a peaceful society to me is still the dream of a potluck supper. The society in which all can contribute, and all can find friendship. Those who bring things, bring things that they do well. [We must] create conditions under which a potluck is possible.”
- Ursula Franklin
My old gym is in a neglected part of the city fringe, where most of the real estate is owned by the Church. A bricolage of residents, social services, small businesses, warehouses and green space occupy this narrow slither of a not-square kilometre or two. A flag distribution warehouse sidles up against an afrodance company, a mechanic backs on to a cement mixing facility, and a small art gallery is wedged between a church-run mental health service and a dentistry chain’s IT office.
It is, I suspect, in a bit of a local government blind spot, and the local business owners have to chip in on maintenance and upkeep. The gym owner trims the overhead foliage so that people can walk to the cafe after a workout. The art gallery manager weeds the pavement. The youth evangelists turned a vacant office in to a public coworking space. A colleague’s non-profit even runs a small microgreens social enterprise in a vacant lot1.
These small vignettes of social action typify an uncoordinated version of what I describe as a ‘Third Way’ politics. The thrust of the Third Way is to seek opportunities for social action outside the realm of the state (including the not-for-profits the state funds to achieve its aims) and the market (including so-called social enterprise). More ambitiously, it seeks to reclaim, for communities and personal networks, what has become the providence of the state or market, and to return to individuals and communities the things they have lost or left behind.
The ‘third’ here refers to the subaltern status of associational life in our imagination around social change. The term ‘third spaces,’ for example, has been used to speak of a broad swath of associational organisations maintained by their members (e.g. small churches, Returned Services Leagues, sporting associations, and activist groups). A former Surgeon General of the U.S., Vivek Murphy, described the need for ‘third bowl’ societies which combine the deep belonging of the community with the wide inclusion of liberal societies. He describes this as a ‘bowl’ because it needs to be both deep and wide in order to contain all of us. He described it as ‘third’ because we have already tried the other two bowls: deep yet exclusionary social conservativism, and wide but shallow social liberalism.
The Third Way gives us an alternative to the false dichotomy between state and market. Indeed, as the state and market increasingly define contemporary life, I'm going to call it a ‘Middle Way’ rather than a ‘Third Way’ as I believe we are charting an increasingly narrow course which threatens to enclose us.
There are people who have argued far better than I that the combined growth of state and market, and their increasing entanglement, is the most helpful frame through which to think about our contemporary cultural milieu, and our pervasive sense of exhaustion and anomie. See
and ‘Care, Not Control’ for a short treatment, and ‘The China Convergence’ for a longer treatment, James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State for a book-length treatment, and Yin Paradies’ yarn on Dystopia Australis for a uniquely poetic Indigenous take.My personal interest in this topic is not the Middle Way per se, which has been appropriately covered elsewhere, but the strange ease with which we have consented to the encroaching logic of the state and the market and, as a corollary, the latent potential to reclaim the exiled capacities we have allowed it to colonise. We have given up slowly, willingly, like an ambient surrender, deeply held and uniquely human capacities for independence, care, culture, and community. Fortunately, these capacities are not so much lost as forgotten. They are waiting for us.
In Unforbidden Pleasures, the essayist Adam Phillips retells the story of the reconfiguration of the traffic system of Drachten, a town in the Netherlands. An ambitious and ‘counterintuitive’ engineer tore up the traffic lights — a state-based form of traffic regulation whereby driver behaviour is submitted to an algorithm — and replaced them with roundabouts. The engineer had noticed that traffic lights had ‘led drivers to take their eyes off the road,’ or, as Phillips puts it, to ‘behave automatically, as sleepwalkers.’ The rules established by the lights, Phillips said, made people ‘less sentient.’ The roundabout, by contrast, made people ‘more attentive to what they are doing, more alert,’ and enabled the ‘unforbidden pleasures of cooperation and its attendant talents to reveal themselves.’ Significantly, for the engineer, the change reduced the rate of accidents and improved traffic flow. His experiments in Drachten led to a wave of red light removal schemes across Europe and the U.S.
The Drachten experience reveals to us how state/market schemes to make life safer, easier, and more comfortable may involve a hidden tradeoff: the relinquishment of certain intrinsically human capacities. It also reveals that those capacities return to us rather quickly when we are liberated from the boring depredations of the anxious and controlling state/market. Perhaps most significantly, the Drachten experience shows that the politics of the Middle Way is not principally in the theatrics of federal government policy or the wild swings of the market, but hidden, tucked away, in our daily interactions and acts: the things we instinctively regard as apolitical.
I am old enough to remember, for example, walking to school with my next-door neighbour’s daughter. I was five or six years old, my neighbour was seven or eight, and we grew up in a very poor suburb. Within a generation, this ordinary act of community has become almost unthinkable (Jonathan Haidt has joked: “It used to be that thirteen-year olds were babysitters, now thirteen year-olds need babysitters). The banality of our exiled capacities is why we have given them up so quietly, enthusiastically, and imperceptibly. They are simple things we have surrendered in pursuit of the comfort, certainty, and security of the state/market. To walk to school is to claim a capacity to decide for oneself (or our children) what counts as an acceptable risk. To befriend a neighbour is to have a capacity for a relationship based on proximity rather than likeness: to be less dependent on state/market defined identities of interest or similarity as a precondition for closeness. Today, we mostly spend time with people who remind us of ourselves.
I can also remember when the politics of race, class, and gender were primarily of interest to activists, community groups, and left-wing academics: those on the periphery of the state/market. As an early member of the Australian Youth Climate Coalition, I remember a potluck supper where our leadership group had raucous conversation about whether or not one of our female members should shave her legs to appear more ‘professional’ for a meeting with a Member of Parliament. This was in 2012 or so: a time before companies like Woodside were touting their gender quotas. It was before issues of race, gender, and colonisation became the providence of well-paid thought leaders and big government institutions. It was culture being worked-out and worked-through at the scale of friendship, not institutions. It was messy, draining and emotional work. It wasn’t without its problems, but close friendships are rarely without problems. The flipside is that I still remember that leg shaving conversation, whereas every expert-led Zoom workshop on inclusive language or co-design has long been delegated to the dustbin of faint memory.
As I write these words, I feel a strange recognition that what is emerging in the Middle Way is a synthesis of the best parts of liberalism and conservativism. It’s a worldview in which the goals haven’t changed (inclusion, acceptance, tolerance, and diversity) but which respects the deep communal bonds forged by shared history and place. Only in hindsight have I realised that the potluck supper — the time and energy required to make and share food — mattered at least as much as the argument about feminism. The supper established the thick relationships of trust, agreement, and camaradarie that made an argument possible and productive in the first place. The potluck supper and the argument each drew from a shared groundwater of human capacities for care and collaboration. Today’s identity politics attempts to circumnavigate the thick politics of relationships with the thin veneer of expertise. It wants the outcome, but does not honour the process required to get there.
A short story typifies this way of seeing things. When I hired Emma Ross as the first Executive Officer of my theatre company, Only the Human, we received a small government grant to buy some equipment to help her undertake her work. It was a relatively easy application process, and before final signing we received a call from a representative at the grantmaking body, Vision Australia. The employee called to thank us for “creating a position for a person with a disability.” I burst into laughter over the phone, composed myself, and told the representative quite frankly: “We did not create a position for a person with a disability, we created a position for Emma Ross.” The state/market sees the identity, whereas the community sees the individual. The state/market addresses issues with replicable interventions, whereas the community addresses issues with tailored care, attention, and concern: the same way that drivers navigate a roundabout.
This brings me, in a circitous way, to reflect on the political project which quietly animated my work with Only the Human. I wanted to both grow improvisation in Perth and to change the way we do improvisation. I believed we could align it with the politics of the Middle Way. As a practice, improvisation requires us to rediscover many of the exiled capacities I have been discussing. We must trust, listen, intuit, be vulnerable, be joyful, take risk, make offense (and make amends), and trust, always trust, both each other and — and this is often forgotten — the unfolding of the scene itself. Humour is ultimately about our shared vulnerability as humans, and so comedy, in the Middle Way view at least, is not possible without community. My goal was that the Middle Way informed not only our art, but also how we run our organisation, by making it a truly co-operative and communal enterprise.
Five years of running Only the Human has reminded me that the Middle Way is extraordinarily narrow, as if trying to steer a dinghy between two cliff faces. New members risk becoming customers, who expect fun in exchange for a fee (market). Members with complex needs may seek care that they themselves cannot reciprocate (state). Some leaders in the community risk becoming a therapist, teacher figure, martyr, or guru (state). Other leaders risk exploiting the community for a narcisstic personal project (market). All are at risk of seeing Only the Human as an institution, rather than as something sustained through networks of care and concern.
The logic of the state/market looms large for any community-based project, and threatens the community with fragmentation, stagnation, and potential irrelevance. The future of the Only the Human community qua community is uncertain, and I am unsure how it will be sustained without tipping into the inevitable logic of the state (and become a conventional non-profit) or the logic of the market (and become a social enterprise). Such a transformation may be inevitable, and indeed, it may be that it has already occurred in all but name. Describing ourselves as a community may be a form of sophisticated self-deception, or yet another case of the term ‘community,’ becoming reduced to ‘a group of people.’
Without community, the Middle Way feels perilous, if not impossible. As the African Proverb would have it: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” If community is not possible, then what? What options exist before us to kindle the flame of the Middle Way if the bonfire of community is not possible?
I suspect Viola Spolin, the grandmother of improvisation, may have an answer. Spolin suggested that “revolution could only come from primeval wisdom.” Her project with improvisation was not the creation of community, but the liberation of the individual, which is a precondition for community. I learned from Spolin, amongst others2, that there are scales of belonging worth thinking about well before thinking about community. The most basic scale is the ‘primeval wisdom’ of the individual: the individual’s capacity to feel at home in themselves and their world. The next scale up is the dyad, then the small group. Today, I find myself longing for those two things which seem, to those not acquainted with paradox, to be at odds with one another: independence and friendship.
In the Middle Way view, independence is independence from the imperatives of the state and the market. It is about refusing state-based ideas of care and culture, and it is about refusing the productive and consumptive addictions of the market. The from is significant: it is not about being independent to pursue the things we want, because our wants are limitless (that there exists no satisfaction on the other side of getting something we want is a lesson baked into every human spiritual tradition since time immemorial). The freedom of independence I value is via negativa, the negative way, a freedom from constraints, including the constraints of desire3.
A measure of independence — and a measure is all that is possible in our troubled world — makes us available, spiritually and emotionally, for friendship. As the social critic Ivan Illich put it back in 1973:
“I believe that a desirable future depends on our deliberately choosing a life of action over a life of consumption, on our engendering a life style which will enable us to be spontaneous, independent, yet related to each other, rather than maintaining a life style which only allows us to make and unmake, produce and consume...”
My project at Only the Human is no longer community as such, but the more modest goals of independence and friendship (friendship, of course, being a particular kind of interdependence). Community is still the ultimate aspiration, but it is not a place I have personally visited, and is therefore not a place I am capable of leading others towards. Community, once the birthright of every human on Earth, is today a rare and exceptional thing, possible perhaps only under the most favourable conditions. Improvisation, and play, are not community itself but may be within the two inches of humus which precedes, and gives life, to community. We can retreat from community in pursuit of community: that is no paradox. It just means we are wayfinding rather than marching forward. A retreat from community can be a strategic retreat on the winding path of the Middle Way, or Icarus making a controlled descent before burning his wings4.
See Richard Bartlett at Microsolidarity. I also learned a lot through my experiences with enkel, a semi-dormant changemaker collective in Perth.
Freedom from desire informed the first piece I wrote on this blog, Foolishness and Mere Stupidity.
Icarus metaphor courtesy of Christian Mauri.