The play's the thing

BY PAT KANE

Macmillan, 12.99

THE FUTURE THAT MANY OF US were brought up to expect never actually materialised: no shimmering to work through skyscraper-cities by monorail. Much of our urban environment still looks much as it did in Victorian times; the outward accoutrements of life, in many respects, have hardly changed.

There has, of course, been a "digital revolution", even though most of us are vague about what that actually means. It might be fun to look at the Los Angeles Times online, swap sporting wisdom on message boards or catch up with old classmates, but such things in themselves hardly add up to an overall "paradigm shift". And if the advent of e-mail and video-conferencing have had a profound impact on the old-fashioned world of work, they certainly haven’t abolished it altogether. Many sorts of manual work remain much the same as ever; and white-collar workers often feel they’re becoming technoserfs.

When the option of working flexible hours or from home slides so easily into an obligation to be on standby 24/7, where exactly is the benefit for the employee? Is a mobile phone or modem really an empowering thing, or just an infinitely extendable tether tying the individual to their place of work?

They could indeed be the instruments of our liberation, if Pat Kane is to be believed, but it will require a complete overhaul of our attitudes and values. Nothing if not radical, he goes beyond liberal bleatings about work-life balance and paternity leave to call for a complete abandonment of the work ethic itself. It’s not just, he argues, that we need leisure to recharge our batteries, but that the experimental and exploratory elements of play make it such an inexhaustible source of creativity. Matthew Arnold is one of the few authorities not referred to here, but Kane’s schema recalls the Victorian sage’s contrast between that dogged conscientiousness he described as "Hebraism" and what he called "Hellenism" - a term for giving our consciousness free play and enlarging its range.

With its 20-a-page allusion habit - they’re all here, from Adorno to Zygotsky - this book is hard to take entirely seriously. There are naff neologisms ("soulitarians") and moments of cringeworthy self-congratulation ("On my last invitation to the Cabinet Office..."). At one point, Kane confides that he left the one real full-time job he’s ever had because it caused him too much "cognitive dissonance". Everything is presented in a style that seems quite spectacularly pleased with itself. With its "playful" reluctance to get to any point, this book is neither brief nor clear enough to be the ‘manifesto’ it purports to be.

But in the end, ironically, the values of the much-maligned work ethic come to Kane’s rescue: readers who persevere will find the effort exasperating but by no means unrewarding. If Kane can offer only hints of insight rather than some grand overarching plan, that’s at least in part the nature of the problem. The issues addressed are genuine and increasingly urgent, yet the ideas involved are still fantastically elusive. Most of us are only just beginning to sense the scope of a revolution that could involve our most seemingly solid social structures and assumptions.

Whether Kane’s frankly acknowledged Utopianism is justified, who can say? It’s one of those glass-half-full, glass-half-empty judgments. But, whatever his weakness for a soundbite or a laboured wordplay, Kane has read widely and thought intelligently about a subject of the most immediate importance. There’s as much here to stimulate as there is to irritate and provoke.