leisure networked

Right:

In disciplinary societies, leisure was itself commodified and ordered, and yet it remained socially and temporally distinct to work, even as its mirror.

In control societies, leisure and work effectively collapse on another, both temporally and socio-spatially. I only ever see my best friend at work; the girl in the Tic Tac ad bounces candy off the cubicle wall into her mouth; I line up to get into the movie.

museumification

We do not need to wait for Children of Men's near-future to arrive to see this transformation of culture into museum pieces. The power of capitalist realism derives in part from the way that capitalism subsumes and consumes all of previous history: one effect of its 'system of equivalence' which can assign all cultural objects, whether they are religious iconography, pornography, or Das Kapital, a monetary value. Walk around the British Museum, where you see objects torn from their lifeworlds and assembled as if on the deck of some Predator spacecraft, and you have a powerful image of this process at work -- Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism.

After my own trip to this place, I have to say I thoroughly agree - this passage from Fisher illuminates that nagging feeling I had the whole time. However, I still think hierarchies persist even within this system of equivalences:



Thus, whilst I'm inclined to agree, I'm not sure if Fisher repeats the same kind of blunt logic (mirroring the bluntness of the logic he is critiquing, in fact) that McKenzie Wark's essentialism of the digital also evinces - i.e., the notion that the binary nature of the digital, and these bits' indifference to what it is they carry, creates a similar situation of flattened, endless exchangeability.

On that note, I think there's conceptual similarity between Fisher's 'capitalist realism' (the current condition in which no social system alternative to capitalism seems even a potential) and Wark's 'atopia' of gamespace, something like the dystopia of the now.

Also up for consideration here is the very question of the artefact, and its politics: "In the conversion of practices and rituals into merely aesthetic objects, the beliefs of previous cultures are objectively ironized, transformed into artifacts" (Fisher). And yet Benjamin saw something redemptive in the collector.

the racial draft

In each season of Chappelle's Show, one can see moments where the mobilization of stereotypes arguably confront and conform to popularly, if silently, held racial stereotypes -- Bambi Haggins.

You know what's cool about being in America? We all mixed up. I'm talking about genetically, we all got a little something in us, right? -- Dave Chappelle.

The sonics of race is key to Dave Chappelle's comedy, especially in his vocal modulations during standup - the way he impersonates a typical WASP tone and then lapses slowly back into his over-emphasised black voice, but there's a confusion or duality in that interim that's very interesting, a space that opens up for understanding the performativity of whiteness and blackness, and their potential deconstruction even whilst they are stereotypically hardened on either end.

precariat

there is an ironic yet devastating demand being placed on the labourer:
while work never ends (as one is never out of touch, and always e...xpected
to be available, with no claims to a private life or other demands),
you as a worker are nonetheless completely expendable (and thus a member
of the precariat: and so one must sacrifice all autonomy from work so
as to keep one’s job).
...
This contemporary condition of on-call ontology or on-demand da-sein
produces an emotional economy of stress. To live under such
instant-demand duress is stress-inducing indeed. Life becomes a series
of panic attacks in the face of never being able to live up to such
workplace demands without completely dismantling ‘life’ itself as
distinct from ‘work’. The managerial class uses techniques of
guilt/loyalty to enforce workers to labour at a moment’s notice,
scheduling with less than a few hours or days time, without hope of a
raise, without benefits or reward, and all for a minimum wage.

Fugitive Philosophy on why casualisation is the new archetype of capitalist exploitation.