TY - JOUR
T1 - Chained to the Digital Camp
T2 - review essay of Byung Chul Han’s Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power
AU - Lushetich, Natasha
PY - 2018/10/18
Y1 - 2018/10/18
N2 - Capital thrives on chaos and the ‘libidinization’ of value. Its ceaseless self-reinvention is systemically violent; it grinds habit, destroys existential territories and deracinates stability. The working of capital is like that of a RIP [radically invasive projectile] bullet. Small, compact and elegantly shaped, a RIP doesn’t just penetrate the body. It triggers a series of explosions yet cannot be removed from the body without dismembering it. The aesthetic and affective tools of late capitalism – easification, gamification and that forever-out-of-reach-remaining ‘final gratification’ or ‘added value’, which, after a century of advertising, is experienced as deserved in all spheres of life: wealth, talent, even looks – are similarly smooth yet deadly. Agent-lessly, they produce automated misery.
AB - Capital thrives on chaos and the ‘libidinization’ of value. Its ceaseless self-reinvention is systemically violent; it grinds habit, destroys existential territories and deracinates stability. The working of capital is like that of a RIP [radically invasive projectile] bullet. Small, compact and elegantly shaped, a RIP doesn’t just penetrate the body. It triggers a series of explosions yet cannot be removed from the body without dismembering it. The aesthetic and affective tools of late capitalism – easification, gamification and that forever-out-of-reach-remaining ‘final gratification’ or ‘added value’, which, after a century of advertising, is experienced as deserved in all spheres of life: wealth, talent, even looks – are similarly smooth yet deadly. Agent-lessly, they produce automated misery.
M3 - Book/Film/Article review
SN - 2557-826X
VL - October 2018
JO - Media Theory
JF - Media Theory
ER -