Autotelic / Towards Play

Introduction

This year’s Summer Lodge symposium takes up the provocation ‘Autotelic /

Towards Play’ for exploring ideas around playfulness and experimentation,
alongside immersion and absorption.

This theme develops from previous Summer Lodge symposia provocations –

which have included Speculation, Conversation, Inquisition,
Positionality/Interstitiality; Attention/Detail, Wildness, and more recently
the invitation last year of Doing Deceleration. In one sense this call towards
play, and towards autotelic activity, could be conceived as an exuberant,
gleeful counterpart to (or perhaps even a different version of) ‘doing
deceleration’.

Both the practice of deceleration and of play (in different ways) can be
considered antidotes – even modes of resistance or subversion – in relation to
the increasingly instrumentalised, achievement-oriented or outcome-driven
tendencies of contemporary culture – including the art world, the art school
and academia more broadly.

At times then, it is necessary to activate a counter-measure to the ubiquitous

demands to do more and more – faster and faster – that arguably underpin
our contemporary culture of immediacy and urgency, with its privileging of
multitasking, perpetual readiness and ‘just-in-time’ production. Both ‘slowing
down’ and ‘playing around’ reconfigure the relationship between process and
product, or more specifically both practices invite us to shift from a telos- or
goal-driven mode of productivity towards one that opens up space for
exploration, for speculation, for the unexpected. You can witness this in
practices that privilege meandering, tarrying, waiting and deviation above
finding the quickest path; that favour opening things up rather than reaching
a conclusion. Deceleration – one could argue – is resistant to telos, it operates
against telos. It has no telos.

Telos – with its etymological origins in the Greek télos (end), téleios (perfected)
and teleîn (fulfillment) – refers to an ultimate object or aim, a specific end or
purpose. In teleological terms, the value of action is goal-oriented, determined
in relation to achievement and attainment, the event of completion, of
reaching the designed destination or target. Autotelic activities also refuse the
reward-driven, outcome-motivated tendencies of contemporary culture,
however, they are not pitched in antagonistic relation to the idea of a goal or
end: they are not against telos as such.
Autotelic (autos, ‘self’ and telos, ‘goal’) refers to an activity or a creative work
that has an end or purpose in and of itself. Autotelic activity exhibits a sense
of intrinsic meaning or curiosity – that is internal to it, emerging through it –
where the sense of its worth or value is not established or measured according
to external criteria. You could think of autotelic activity in relation to the
‘flow states’ of total absorption or immersion where action and awareness
merge. Often conceived as synonymous with ‘being in the zone’, flow
describes a hyper-focused state of ‘optimal experience’ — or mental state. It
has been conceptualised by Hungarian-American psychologist Mihály
Csíkszentmihályi as a state of ‘total involvement’ in the process of an activity,
where the individual stops ‘being aware of themselves as separate from the
actions they are performing’. Csíkszentmihályi argues that flow states involve
an experiential transformation of time, where actions become spontaneous,
even automatic — intrinsically rather than extrinsically meaningful. Here,
states Csíkszentmihályi, ‘Life is justified in the present, instead of being held
hostage to a hypothetical future gain’. The intrinsic motivation associated
with flow states (with heightened value on the process and its challenges)
operates in an entirely different register to that of extrinsic motivation, which
is dependent on external factors including the ‘success’ of one’s ‘work’
specifically as it is measured by the normative criteria of economy, status,
reputation or other forms of exchange value (or else through performance-
based systems of threat or reward).

Alternatively, you could think of autotelic activity in relation to play, for play
has no end or purpose other than itself. Play is radically wasteful — in Roger
Caillois’ definition, “Play is an occasion of pure waste: waste of time, energy,
ingenuity, skill, and often money”. For Caillois, play is inherently “uncertain
activity. […] An outcome known in advance, with no possibility of error or
surprise, clearly leading to an inescapable result, is incompatible with the
nature of play”. Indeed, as Caillois observes, “A characteristic of play, in fact,
is that it creates no wealth or goods … At the end of the game, all can and
must start over again at the same point”. Within play, the pleasure is in the
playing rather than simply attaining an outcome, especially the outcome
known, knowable or predicted in advance.

Whilst some of us might well end up with ‘results’, products or even

outcomes from our Summer Lodge experiments, the very act of ‘performing
the lodge’ has a value in and of itself. For philosopher Paolo Virno, the
virtuoso activity of performing, of the performing artist is “an activity which
finds its own fulfillment (that is, its own purpose) in itself, without objectifying
itself into an end product … the purpose of their activity coincides entirely
with its own execution.” However, he goes on to stress that performing is “an
activity which requires the presence of others, which exists only in the presence of
an audience.” He argues that, “Lacking a specific extrinsic product, the
virtuoso has to rely on witnesses.”

I add this final reference to Virno because I am interested in the ‘act of

witnessing’ that he describes, or rather more specifically in what happened
when we perform our ‘playing’ in the company of others, rather than in the
privacy of our own studio spaces. What happens through witnessing the play of
others? What is the nature of the community that arises in and through the
sharing of play and of practising together? Rather than the utilitarian
(arguably extrinsically motivated) idea of a social ‘network’ (virtual or
otherwise), what emerges from a community that is itself autotelic – whose
value cannot be extracted or measured but is in and of itself. Arguably, this
potential for an autotelic community could also be seen as one of the
aspirations underpinning the Summer Lodge ethos.

So rather than choosing between outcome or open-ended activity, between

process and product, our focus on autotelic activity seeks to playfully navigate
the spaces in-between, refusing the binary of either/or. We ask: what
motivates your own practice? The invitation is to reflect on both the intrinsic
and extrinsic motivations at play, whilst considering how we might strike a
balance between working towards resolution whilst still leaving things open.
How can we further cultivate understanding of the intrinsic value of our
practices and indeed of our communities of practice? How can we set up the
conditions for play?

Emma Cocker, 2018