Conversations with Jesse about play in relation to Warm Data Labs
Martin Petersen: narrator. Jesse Bailey: actor, playmaker & rascal
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Conversations with Jesse about play in relation to Warm Data Labs
1. Martin writes
The original article about his conversation with Jesse…
I had an for an article for this issue of unpsychology. The article should be about the edges between play and not play and how these edges pertain to Warm Data Labs. So, I sent a drafty version of an article titled The edgy playfulness of Warm Data processing to the editors. Julia — one of the editors — connected me to Jesse. That was a good idea.
Jesse is all about play. All about the medium being the message so, therefore, he would talk about play in a playful way as it otherwise wouldn’t be about play. Then, what did it mean to be playful? Jesse kept talking about a little girl whose attitude, I think, to him epitomized playfulness.
This little girl would play with the other children but whenever the play turned into a game, into some regularity or some rules emerged, she would return to the freedom of open play. I am not sure, but I could look at her as the spirit of ambiguity. Whenever the ambiguity disappeared, she would do the same.
I had a project. I had a mission. To write something with a preliminary headline being ‘The edgy playfulness of Warm Data.’ My idea was to nail down some not too ambiguous points about the relationship between play and Warm Data Labs.
Jesse didn’t seem particularly helpful in the endeavor of not being too ambiguous. He went on about the medium being the message and this little girl and a lot of other stuff much of which to me seemed to be deconstruction of all definitions and deconstruction of every conceivable framing of whatever, leading to something more akin to free associations. We both, Jesse and I, had the experience of the other not sticking to a topic or being in accordance with an agenda of any kind.
But then again, we were not unambiguously ambiguous as the edges kept reappearing in our conversations. The edges of distinguishing between what is play and what is not? What are good ways of playing and what are not? What are good ways of distinguishing? Is distinguishing between good and bad a good distinction? And as the medium was the message: What is a playful way of communicating that conversation to the readers of Unpsychology?
My point of departure was that playing would be an essential part in healthy human development. Children ought to play, that is, engage in activities that do not have a purpose other than the activity itself, so-called autotelicity, in the safe space of some secure base so that nothing seriously bad could happen. Playing that promotes healthy development should be non-instrumental activities in a circle of security where some signal saying This Is Play would mark the context as such a context.
There is a classic book about play titled The Dangerous Edge: The Psychology of Excitement by Michael J Apter.1 The main thesis of this book is that when a context is marked as play, there is a positive relation between joy and arousal. Thus, when the context is defined as play, the more arousal, the more joy and excitement. On the other hand, when there is low arousal in this context, there is greater boredom.
Quite the opposite is the case when the context is defined as not-play: Then high arousal is stressful and low arousal is blissful relaxation.
The context is defined as not-play when the activity is ultimately extrinsically motivated: When the motivation for working ultimately is the salary, when the motivation for studying in the end is grades, when winning a game of football becomes more important than participating. And conversely when the context is play, the motivation for engaging in the activities are ultimately intrinsic such that participating in the game of football is more important than winning the game.
The above may be relevant to Warm Data Labs as any rationale involving the benefits of this activity is disavowed. This is the very thing that makes Warm Data Labs a hard sell. This is the very thing that makes Warm Data Labs a hard sell. If you consider buying into Warm Data, you may ask — What is it good for? And there is not a definite answer to that question.
So maybe Warm Data Labs should be contextualized as some kind of play. Then the answer to someone asking what it is good for could be: “Nothing — but it is great fun!” The same rationale as play or going to the Pub. So not expecting any extrinsic benefit for participating in Warm Data Labs somehow frames the activity as play. And if a playful activity is made in an atmosphere of low arousal, it easily gets boring. So how to increase arousal? If playing poker gets too boring, you could increase the stakes. If driving a car for the pleasure of driving gets too boring, you could increase the speed.
In Warm Data Labs the main activity is essentially talking. Normally talking is a low arousal activity. Which is fine if it is about serious stuff. Talking calmly about serious stuff is a hallmark of rationality and professionalism. Serious conversations may easily go awry if there is too much excitement.
Seriousness and importance do have potential for increasing arousal in conversations. It is this very potential that we often strive to keep at bay to keep the conversation rational. And it is this very potential which could be unleashed to increase the arousal in Warm Data Labs, thus making it funny and exciting.
However, having fun treating matters that are no laughing matter may offend, may scare may even horrify people with stakes in these matters. Attempts to mitigate this risk are of course made. But any of these attempts run the risk of then making the conversation boring.
This brings me back to my conversation with Jesse. Jesse is all about play. And the girl who had little interest in participating in play that became bound by rules was the one who epitomized playfulness.
Play is freedom: Freedom to bend or break rules. Even the rules defining the context of play: Rules defining where, where and how the playing is supposed to play out? Play may get boring and unplayful if it is confined to the sandbox. The nature of play may very well be to defy any framing even the famous frame This is play. So the distinction between play and not-play must be malleable. Otherwise it gets over-serious. This, I think, was Jesse’s point.
Still, distinctions must be made. Otherwise, differences couldn’t make differences. And without such differential differences, no communication, no meaning is possible. That was my point.
Jesse agreed to this but added that such distinctions should be played with, should be regarded as fictions and not to be taken over seriously. Otherwise, all kinds of oppressive ways of classifying people, genders, social roles, identities and contexts would ossify and thus maintain all kinds of illusions, constraints, and suppression. Since all this cannot be done away with as there needs to be differences that make differences, then at least it could be played with. All these distinctions should be kept ambiguous. Playing with the distinctions could do that trick. And should do that trick.
This made me think about all the systems that are set up to avoid ambiguity. Will this plane land safely? Will I wake up alive from this surgery? There will always be some ambiguity in answering such questions. But effort is clearly made to reduce such
ambiguity. Systems are set up to reduce the complexity and the ambiguity. According to Niklas Luhman (1982) this is the very rationale for structural differentiation of society.2 An entire society will always be complex and ambiguous. But subsystems each with a central way of distinguishing are set up to reduce the general complexity and ambiguity. These subsystems are law with the distinction between just and unjust; science with the distinction between truth and not-truth; health with the distinction between illness and not-illness; family with the distinction between love and not-love; economy with the distinction between money and no money; religion with the distinction between sacred and profane; politics with the distinction between majority and minority; education with the distinction between credentials and no credentials — more sub-systems could be added as there is no a priori way of distinguishing between the subsystems.
It so happens that this way of delineating subsystems in society very much coincides with the contexts between which trans-contextuality is supposed to happen in Warm Data Labs. Those contexts are contexts of the same logical type — that is the contexts are equally abstract — and thus, you may say, carry comparable weight when trans-contextual mutual learning — symmathesy — between the contexts can happen.
The overlap between the subsystems in the Luhman tradition and the standard contexts in Warm Data Labs is not complete. But neither the Luhman tradition nor the Warm Data labs are completely fixed.
For instance, ecology with the distinction between environmentally friendly and not environmentally friendly could be added as a subsystem in the Luhman tradition. Ecology is also one of the contexts in Warm Data Labs.
When those subsystems are combined in trans-contextual processes such as a Warm Data Lab, the potential for ambiguity is increased. But it occurs to me that it is an ambiguity that tries to respect the integrity, that is, reduced ambiguity of each subsystem.
Or is it a way of deconstructing the subsystems? Jesse, I think, would say yes. He would applaud the subversive potential of trans-contextuality. Combining all the systems each with an ossified unambiguous way of classifying things like people, relations and processes may challenge and expose the arbitrariness of it all.
I am wondering if there are other subsystems of a higher logical type systems to deal with ways of combining systems thus being meta to the subsystems.
I am wondering because some recurring distinctions in the conversation between Jesse and I, were madness vs sanity. Subversive vs not subversive. Emancipation vs not emancipation. Even experience vs not experience. And — above all — play vs not play.
Maybe Jesse and I were trans-contextual between some systems that are meta to the subsystems in the Luhman tradition and thus the contexts in Warm Data Labs.
Metasystems such as psychiatry with the distinction between mad and insane; critical theory with the distinction of between emancipation and suppression; postmodernism with the distinction between subversion and power; postcolonialism with the distinction between oppressor and oppressed. And — hmm — yes what? — but some-thing — maybe something emerging with the distinction between play and not play.
The latter being the territory explored by me and Jesse. The contexts, I think, are not being trans, but more like alternating meta to each other. Is that what trans-contextuality is about? Or maybe it is exactly about avoiding that one context becomes meta to another? Is that why it is important that contexts in trans-contextuality are of the same logical type? This being a way of placing the contexts on an equal footing. Such that one context doesn’t get reduced to another context, which would compromise the integrity of the contexts that get reduced.
Such reduction of other contexts to one particular context could be statements like It is all about money, reducing all the other contexts to the context of economy. Or All You Need is Love, reducing all the other contexts to the context of family — and so on. All contexts have the potential of being made the metacontext to reduce all other contexts. I think one of the rationales for Warm Data Labs is to avoid this.
Psychiatry, critical theory, postmodernism and postcolonialism may be contexts with extra meta-potential. Contexts with potential definitional power to reduce all other contexts.
I think Jesse and I alternated between being trans-contextual in ways that included psychiatry, postmodernism and so on — with the contexts being on equal footing and sometimes one context vying for the upper hand being the meta context of all meta contexts.
In the latter case stuff in one context tends to be reduced to another context. Sometimes that is exactly what we did. But we certainly did so in a playful way and it was great fun even if it sometimes got out of hand.
2. Jesse and Martin continue their conversation
Three months on, Jesse and Martin continue their conversation about an description of a conversation about play…
JESSE
How are we connecting this to the piece that you've already submitted?
MARTIN
Yeah, it's a conversation about that piece. Which it was. That was the whole frame. Now we were going to continue that conversation.
JESSE
Three months later. Yeah... To be honest, I felt like what you had submitted didn't, you know, didn't really get to the heart of what we were talking about I guess, which perhaps we more got to in this conversation, and it required the perspective of, you know. We were both probably quite deep in it at the time we were discussing it before and it requires some sort of standing back and looking at it again with fresh eyes, and it's clearer now than it was before.
MARTIN
That's another maybe frame you can say. Yeah. When you stand back then. So I think maybe they could be inches to each other, the two pieces.
JESSE
Yeah, that might be a good way. This is the edge.
I was going to say thinking about play as a starting point for approaching society, maybe. Like thinking about it as, you know, thinking about positioning it more as a starting point than we do. Because it seems to lead to quite a lot of interesting ideas and trajectories, like whereas we might often think of, where do we start our discussions when we think about society? Often we start with our prejudice. So we start with control or we start with - I don't know - I mean, where do you think we start when we start these discussions about society?
MARTIN
Always there will be some kind of way of framing stuff, or maybe framing the frames, then and framing the framing of the frames and this in some way could be like an infinite regress. But it will not be that, it could be like framing the frames: that it's some kind of, you could say Nietzschean power struggle, becauseI think that's the will to power: to frame and to create a way of framing stuff.... actually I think that's what warm data also is about: trying to place those different kinds of framing on equal footing. You can say you have a preferred way of framing, would it be that we have this suppression: we have those adults and [tacitlity refering to previous mention of adultism and adulteration.] … you could call [it] intersectionality of those things, and different kinds of oppression. And if there's like a Rousseauian view of of stuff like this, and then me trying sometimes to maybe challenge this.
JESSE
But I wouldn't say that, I wouldn't say that my starting point is oppression or anything like that.... I'm hoping here that the starting point is play, you know, which also is sort of -
MARTIN
Yeah, that was the starting point. Yeah, but you could say as some kind of liberation from oppression. That's my impression.
JESSE
And the understanding of players, as some kind of liberatory force in some way maybe. And I mean, I guess that goes back to like, probably goes back to this whole notion of edges, right? And that you know, rather than starting within a frame, which most of our social discussion does, that we start at the edge of the frame and at the edge of the frame is where we are inside and outside at the same time, and that's where we're not. You know. We're neither. We're neither or both at the same time. Whatever. Anyway, on that edge. That's where you're playing anyway. Or you know you're on the precipice of the mountain or whatever you're walking on, which is a cliff. That's where you're playing, you know, like, maybe…..
MARTIN
At the edge of the frame, yeah.
JESSE
At the edge of the frame, so we start - at the edge.
MARTIN
It's just a frame. Well, I like that: the edge of the frame. Because then you're not within a frame, you're thrown at the edge of the frame, meeting another frame. Actually I think that's exactly, I think that's another way of putting what Nora Basteson would call trans-contextual. Ways of thinking actually being at the edges of frames.
JESSE
I guess then what I'm saying is: I'm trying to connect that to play. I guess it is that once you're on that edge, that is where you have the space to play.
MARTIN
That general idea was what I was trying to communicate in the written piece I sent to Unpsychology. Actually trying to say, hey, there are different ways of framing and could they be put at some kind of equal footing? Because otherwise, those frames will tend to eat each other, like, frame the frame to some degree, and then try to take some control...
JESSE
Yes. Then you're also trying to prevent the possible paradox of the edge becoming its own frame. Yes, right. You know, whether you then like flip it over and it's like: well, now the edge has just become a frame. And so you're, like, well, we don't want that, right? We then need to go to the edge of the frame that we've -
MARTIN
Yeah, well maybe it's a little bit like meditation really. Because that's where you, because every time you you slip out of meditation, that's when you go into some kind of trajectory where it's all a kind of frame. Then you can stand on the edge of that. So maybe that's the same kind of thing, because of course the frames are there... but if you can be somewhere else, then playfulness could happen there.... and in some way is a precondition because you cannot just have like no frames at all, because that would be nothing.
JESSE
Well, it's interesting because in the literature on the play process or the play model, it's often brought up in this course (on play therapy that I took): the idea that play turns into a play frame, and then the play frame continues for a while and then it sort of is annihilated and then continues again. In this model it positions the play frame before flow like play, flow. So the frame comes first, then the flow. Whereas I'm like no: the flow comes first and then the frame, right? So like the play is flowing, it's autonomy, it's just going, it's on the edge. You look and then the frame comes in, which is basically when a game suspends the play, restricts it in some way and then it collapses, whereas in the actual model it's 'the frame precedes the flow' but surely it's the flow that precedes the frame.
MARTIN
Maybe it's like a hen or the egg kind of problem.
JESSE
Yeah, it is. Because it's like: does the frame preceed the edge of the frame or does the edge preceed the frame I? Which comes first, the edge or the frame?
MARTIN
Well, there cannot be a frame without an edge and the edge will have to be the edge to something so...
JESSE
Yeah, it's co-dependent origination, like in Buddhism. You can't have good and bad together; in and out together. You know, you can't have one. It's just co-dependent origination.
MARTIN
What did you call it? Your word.
JESSE
Co-dependent origination. That's what they say in Buddhist literature, yeah.
MARTIN
Okay. Co-dependent origination. Yeah. Hmm. Yeah, of course, because that's how things emerge. I think that's the process of emergence.
JESSE
Yeah.
(This transcript of Jesse and Martin's conversation was edited by Julia Macintosh).
NOTES
Apter, Michael (1992). The Dangerous Edge: The Psychology of Excitement. New York: The Free Press
Luhmann, N. (1982). The differentiation of society. Columbia University Press.
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In contemplating the discourse between Martin and Jesse on the nature of play, especially within the context of Warm Data Labs, a few central themes emerge that speak to the fluid boundaries between play and structure, ambiguity and clarity, and the emergent properties of human interaction.
The exploration of play, as discussed, challenges the conventional distinctions we often make between 'play' and 'not play,' a dichotomy that typically aligns play with freedom, spontaneity, and intrinsic motivation, while relegating not-play to domains of utility, order, and extrinsic reward. This dichotomy is useful but also limiting, as it risks oversimplifying the rich, layered experiences that occur at the edges of these categories.
The little girl’s reluctance to adhere to the rules once they solidify suggests that play, in its truest form, resists closure—it thrives on the ongoing tension between structure and fluidity. This mirrors the philosophical tradition where meaning and understanding are never fixed but continually emerge from the interaction of ideas, much like how play emerges from the interaction of players and their environment. Jesse’s emphasis on play as a medium for navigating and perhaps dissolving rigid distinctions brings to mind Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, where connections proliferate horizontally without a central point, reflecting an openness that is inherently playful.
In Warm Data Labs, the principle of trans-contextuality suggests that play can serve as a model for how different domains of knowledge—law, science, art, and so forth—can interact. These domains, like the subsystems described by Luhmann, often function with their own internal logic, seeking to reduce ambiguity to maintain order. However, when these systems intersect, ambiguity inevitably rises, creating a space where rigid boundaries dissolve, and new forms of understanding can emerge.
This interplay between different contexts echoes Bateson’s ideas about the ecology of mind, where the interaction between various systems generates meaning. The edge, where contexts meet, is not a mere boundary but a fertile ground for new possibilities—an idea that aligns with Jesse’s vision of play as something that happens precisely at these edges. It is where the frame of one system touches another that play—and thus, creativity—flourishes.
Martin’s concern about maintaining the integrity of each subsystem within Warm Data Labs points to a necessary caution. While play can deconstruct and reconstruct meanings, there is a tension between allowing for creative ambiguity and ensuring that some degree of stability remains. This tension is reminiscent of Derrida’s notion of différance, where meaning is always deferred and different from itself, yet within a system that relies on some stable elements to communicate at all.
The meta-systemic nature of their dialogue—oscillating between psychiatry, critical theory, and postmodernism—reflects this dynamic interplay of structure and play. The challenge lies in how to engage with these meta-systems in a way that remains playful without losing sight of the very real stakes involved in their traditional distinctions. This is where the philosophical question of co-dependent origination becomes relevant: play and structure, freedom and constraint, are not oppositional but mutually constitutive. Each gives rise to the other, and neither can be understood in isolation.
Thus, the conversation between Martin and Jesse, like the play it seeks to understand, is not about arriving at fixed conclusions but about staying engaged with the process of emergence. It invites us to consider how our ways of framing the world are themselves subject to the play of forces that they seek to regulate. In this light, Warm Data Labs, and indeed any space of learning and inquiry, can be seen as arenas where the distinctions between play and not-play are continually negotiated, creating a dynamic equilibrium where new forms of knowledge and understanding can arise.
The crux of their discussion, then, lies not in resolving the tensions between these concepts but in embracing them as the very conditions that make play—and by extension, creativity and transformation—possible.