Some of the films of Mike Leigh are a good example of this. The astonishingly frequent criticism that the wealthy (or ‘negative’) characters within them are ‘caricatures’ is telling to say the least. As Leslie Manville said of her portrayal of the abominable yuppie ‘Lætitia’ in High Hopes; ‘we could have gone much further, because the research that David Bamber and I were doing threw up (laughs) complete monsters’. For some people , it seems, such ‘complete monsters’ don’t exist.
Due to property speculation taking over from productive investment.
Which are increasingly dominated not just by wealthy artists but by layer upon layer of artistic bureaucrat — producers, curators, design managers, ‘creative-consultants’ and God knows what else — all of whom stifle actual creative output even further.
As opposed to that imposed and acquired; such as that of those most cultured of people, ancient Romans and modern Nazis. Cultivation of culture from above is a sure sign that its living roots are dead.
Check out contemporary comedy on the bbc, or the ‘jokes’ that journalists share on twitter.
Was Shakespeare widely accepted by his time? Given that you can’t read of his life — i.e. that we have so little material we have about his life, including a reliable portrait — it seems very unlikely. We also know that he was soon dumped, lying in obscurity for a hundred years while second-rate dramatists had their strutting hour. See The Art of Literature by Arthur Schopenhauer — himself, one of the great ignored voices of history — for a superb, and hilarious, account of how genius is systematically ignored. Presenting artistic truth is, for Schopenhauer, like putting on an astonishing fireworks display to people who are not just blind; but are also fireworks makers.
If Bach turned up at the Proms he’d feel much as Jesus of Nazareth would listening to an Anglican bishop read the sermon on the mount in Winchester Cathedral.
Amazingly, the system actually functions better if the mythic bad-guy is the corporation, the bland company man or the monolithic otherness of the modern world. It is superficially accurate, and therefore superficially reassuring, to see one’s anxieties projected onto the cinema screen — to see the techno-beast overwhelm us, or the plucky young misfit crushed by work — but it all happens in the realm of the known. The structure of human society as we find it, modern ways of thinking and feeling and communicating, these are accepted, unchallenged. Except of course in the finest art.
20. The Myth of Fun
It can be observed that speech becomes gross and hyperbolic, music loud and nervous, ideas giddy and fantastic, emotions limitless and shameless, actions bizarre and foolish, whenever boredom reigns.
Anton van Zijderveld, On Clichés
The system can only manufacture monotony. Living in the system is, therefore, stupendously boring · · · The system permits you to overcome boredom through the system; through access to privilege, and through consumption of narcotics · · · Privilege and narcotics are sickening, but they are preferable to overcoming boredom outside of the system, which can never be permitted, or even considered.
The system is fun if you have a second home in Padstow, or if the Tate have commissioned a retrospective of your work, or if you exist in an advert for supermarket loyalty cards, or if mum and dad are financing your fascinating internship, or if you haven’t logged off since 2010, or if your life-standards are so low that you count being a passive consumer of centrally or artificially organised spectacle as ‘enjoyable’. Back on planet Earth, living death prevails; grinding, debilitating boredom at home, at work1 and, most conspicuously, on the roads which connect them. Lack of adventure, absence of collective delight, soul-crushing futility, deep-grained dissatisfaction with the dreary predictability of living, and the overwhelming sense that nothing is happening are all endemic to the system, which can only exist by creating degrading, uncreative and tedious work for the vast invisible majority, by blocking access to individual and collective sources of creativity, by suppressing spontaneous, active, liberating joy (and its concomitants, radical generosity, wild humour and peace of mind), and by replacing it with system-friendly surrogates.
Because work is an activity in which all initiative and energy is extorted from the individual in order to generate profit for someone else (see myth 21), and because it is unbearably unpleasant, futile and barren, so-called ‘free time’ looms before labour as a garden paradise. Fake sick days are then engineered and labour-saving devices are purchased in order to extend the Pastime Arcadia by a few more minutes, but because access to genuine nature and culture are curtailed, weekenders are forced to buy their pleasure as they buy everything else, from enormous corporations which, to turn a profit or support power, appeal to the lowest common denominator of its demographic, thereby producing, in lieu of satisfying art, addictive titillation and anxiety (see myth 19). In other words, once we have freed ourselves from work, we then have to submit to a world made by work.
Thus life becomes a series of ever more complicated, stressful or boring obstacles to overcome in order to get a few emotionally over-active moments ‘free’ to browse instagram, watch a superhero film, down half a bottle of wine, have an ‘exciting experience’ on holiday, pull one off to a webcam or consume any other product you miserably manufactured in your unfree time. This addiction to market-produced porn is what we call fun or, if the activity in question is an attempt to squeeze one’s deepest life-purpose into a few exhausted moments at the end of the week between the cleaning and the admin, hobby. Due to the addictive nature of this process, any attempt to bring it to consciousness is registered as pain and met with instant dismissal, ridicule or antagonism.
The most emblematic entertainment of the highly developed system is probably the video game, in which the system reaches a kind of apotheosis. The typical video game is an unreal, mind-made, soft-porn environment of near constant competition, built on a colossally wasteful technological infrastructure, in which an individual, sitting sense-dimmed and prostrate in a darkened room, staring at a visual display unit, attempts to solve rational problems or exterminate terrifying enemies under extreme time-pressure and resource-scarcity in order to achieve a high score, completely cover the map or achieve total victory over everyone. This is ‘great fun’.
The disastrous consequences of fun on one’s own body or psyche and on those who must suffer our company, are not so difficult to disguise, but the system provides us with ample opportunities to blame our guilt, insomnia, impotence, loneliness, suicidal thoughts and existential dread on everything but addiction to it (see myth 16), or to annihilate our pain with market-sponsored narcotics, bromides about ‘deferment of gratification,’ hope that we will one day be free of work or courses in so-called ‘mindfulness’ — which is to say techniques of self-mastery stripped completely of revolutionary action and revolutionary joy so that you might serenely accept corporate sodomy.
A sparkling minority don’t need to be pacified. Those who are granted inspiring jobs operating on children’s brains, working for the un or designing actor’s hats just don’t see what all the fuss is about; yet cling to their wonderful tasks like grim death and turn a blind eye to the compromise and shame of living on the golden peak of Job Mountain. Those who can afford to have meaningful relationships with lions, or are paid to compete in high-tech bicycle races, or swan around award ceremonies, enjoy their fun by suppressing their awareness that the glitzy party is, actually, intensely dull and weirdly repressed; as all spectacles are.
Guy Debord first recognised the pivotal role that passive spectacle plays in the system. The role of the masses in capitalist culture is and can only be, that of the fan, the viewer, the audience or the consumer. This isn’t to say that non-participation is inherently sickening, but a society in which ritual, art, adventure, festival and joy can only reach the individual via vast centrally-directed, technologically augmented displays of ‘creativity’, corrupts the power of ordinary people to create their own culture. You may choose your team, or your channel, or your journey through Hyrule — you might even actively create the cultural artefacts of the spectacle, which in late capitalism depends more and more upon the work of a ‘voluntariat’ populating its digital platforms with their work — but you must never be allowed to choose a world of genuine, sensate cultural participation and togetherness.
This is why all late-capitalist fun is, despite much blather to the contrary, intensely lonely; because you are prevented from independently, collectively creating your enjoyment, much less your environment. The mad laughter of togetherness cannot be heard in the twitter feed, the reddit sub or the massively multiplayer online game, and the notion that we could create actual adventures together, in the real world, is met with perplexity or anxiety; indeed, very often, with accusations that those who suggest such a possibility are… wait for it… no fun!
The Myth of Fun is usually invoked by highlighting the difference between the multi-coloured Huxleyan dystopia of the modern, ‘individualist’, ‘capitalist’ or ‘democratic’ first world and the monotone dystopia of the pre-modern, ‘conformist’, ‘socialist’ or ‘totalitarian’ Orwellian second or third world. It is inconceivable that vast, centrally or artificially-managed spectacles could be depriving us of actively generating our own rituals. It is inconceivable that access to an endless torrent of stupendous porn could be literally sucking us dry of the energy and presence to love. It is inconceivable that tremendously ‘enriching’ holidays could be exercises in exotic consumption at the expense of far-away lands. It is inconceivable that the fun we are having is pseudo-entertainment unconsciously designed to pacify us. And it is inconceivable that zombie-survival games on the x-box could be depriving us of defeating demons or rescuing princesses in the real world. Worse than inconceivable — an active source of unpleasure. This is why such ideas are violently rejected, or superciliously dismissed, before they reach full awareness.
Humans first became aware of the intense boredom of capitalism unlife once it started to overcome the misery of the nineteenth century. For most of the nineteenth and early twentieth century those on the lower stages of the Stairway to Heaven lived lives of horrendous deprivation. When breeze-blocks and tinned corned-beef had sufficiently eased the physical pain of the masses, at least in the West, everybody suddenly realised how profoundly bored they were. The response — the sex, revolutionary art, psychedelic drug use, dropping out and interest in Eastern religions which we generally call ‘the sixties’ — horrified capitalists, who immediately set about co-opting the movement (whilst simultaneously ridiculing it), outlawing its practices, expanding work to fill idle spaces and spending more energy coming up with attractive market-friendly alternatives to actual entertainment. These alternatives — blockbuster movies, video games, niche products appealing to consumer identities, a calender of distracting spectacles (particularly sport) and, latterly, social media — effectively neutralised the threat of agonising boredom, at least amongst those sufficiently domesticated to not consciously realise that anything was missing, and replaced it with far more potent forms of social control; anxiety and impotence, the wages of un-experience.
The hypermodernite, existing in virtual or intensely mediated environments, experiences, and therefore expresses, nothing. He is forced to substitute content in his speech2 with hyperbolic exaggeration of minutia (anecdotes founded on breathless, manic overreaction to microscopic stimulus) or with the reproduction of ‘culture’ (things that he has read or has seen on the screen, created by the same discarnate minds). Or he dries up, shuts down, withdraws into a colourless state of neutered anomie, uncanny disinterest and disengagement. Because he identifies with this state — the un-experiencing self — the appearance of experience, or even the suggestion of it, is greeted with more anxiety, sadness, unease, boredom, neediness, hysterically defensive overreaction (see myth 30) and craving for un-life. All this is acceptable to the power systems of pre-collapse, which desire anxious, intellectually able, permanently consuming technophiles; cautious, modest, dull, half-dead, socially inept, restless, reactive, semi-schizoid ghosts clinging to an entirely formal, friable, volatile ego. These people are fun.
According to a worldwide Gallup poll, 13% of employees are engaged at work. The misery of the common (international) working experience doesn’t tend to find its way onto the teevee too often. Western governments tell us, with pride, that unemployment figures are down — as if this were a good thing; as if what we need to feel happy, fulfilled and secure is to get a job!
Actual or virtual. When the phone is idle conversation resembles social media interaction..
21. The Myth of Work
The idea has occurred to me that if one wanted to crush, to annihilate a man utterly, to inflict on him the most terrible punishments so that the most ferocious murderer would shudder at it beforehand, one need only give him work of an absolutely, completely useless and irrational character.
Fyodor Dostoyevski, The House of the Dead
Turning labour into a commodity inevitably leads to exploitation and alienation; from nature, from society and even from the body · · · As the system colonises more and more experience, more and more of what we do takes on the alienating and exploitative character of work · · · This makes people more unhappy, more stressed and more stupid; which generates more opportunities for the market, and therefore more work.
We have jobs! Joyous proclamations from the capitalist wing of the system are rare; the coming of the Olympics, the winning of a war and New Year’s Eve more or less exhaust the range of official reasons to celebrate, with the crucial exceptions of a 4% growth rate and falling unemployment, which are synonymous with paradise. Nevermind what growth actually means (see myth 12) or what it is like to do these jobs; they ‘produce prosperity.’ That’s all you need to worry about.
What is it like to work for forty, fifty, sixty or seventy hours a week turning over hotel beds, working on a production line for toasters, trimming cow hides, picking tomatoes, working in an Amazon ‘fulfilment centre’, making pies for m&s, sorting the contents of recycling bins in Essex, stitching Gap pants in Islamabad, mining sulphur on Java, tiling luxury flats in Rio, cleaning shoes for TaskRabbit or working at any productive (making things) or reproductive (taking care of things and people) task in the system?
Such questions do not trouble those who monopolise the scarcest (see myth 3) jobs of joy (i.e. professionals: see myth 28), nor those who express delight at a booming jobs market, nor those poor souls who are so in need of money they confuse five more minutes of survival with gratitude to those who benefit from their slavery; none of whom pause to consider that labour, like land, is not, nor ever can be, a commodity.
Turning labour into a commodity, so that it might form a part — indeed, with commodified land and money, the integral part — of the economic system, destroys it; which is to say, destroys us, humanity. The market system cannot tolerate labour which is in control of its time (able to stop work when it wants), in control of its production (genuinely skilled) or in control of its surplus (what it does with what it produces), and must appropriate this control,1 by depriving labour of the capacity to self-sufficiently provision itself, autonomously create or care for itself without the direction of management or the pressure of market forces, or decide for itself what to do with its surplus, which must always belong to the system.2
Thus labour (or human activity) is transformed into capital (or money and property). The system demands that a proportion of the productive activity of people is stolen by the proprietor in order to enlarge his enterprise and his bank balance with more money and property, particularly land and tools, with which yet more capital can be generated. He who works in the system can, therefore, never be free. He may be able to change jobs, but he must always sell his activity to the system and must always direct his activity within the system to its ultimate needs,3 which is how he finds himself in the strange position of living in a world in which a billion things clearly need to be done, and yet there are hardly any jobs. The worker can also never be rewarded fairly; he must always hand over a portion of what he produces to the owner, thereby creating the conditions for the further exploitation of life on earth — which must be continually deformed into saleable commodities — and the further purchase of living creatures — which must be made poor, helpless or mad enough to submit to the demands of capital for workers and consumers4.
And so ‘autonomy,’ ‘skill,’ ‘excellence,’ ‘creativity,’ ‘drive,’ ‘fairness’ and ‘commitment,’ despite forming the larger part of copy for job-adverts, are as out of place and threatening in the workplace as generosity, honesty, creativity and justice; but, as ever in a highly-developed system, there is no need to consciously stamp them out. The system does the work of the tyrant automatically, by embedding productive life in the overarching social mechanism, which cannot operate unless workers are intensely time-disciplined, are terrified of unemployment and unable to handle free time, are unable to provision or care for themselves or their environment, are full of enthusiasm for their given task5, are inured to the hopeless futility of working life, have a trivial relationship with nature (including their own bodies) and are ‘trained’ (in many cases stupefied and retarded) for a lifetime of hyper-specialism.
Division of labour — the natural, pleasant and extremely useful tendency for individuals and groups to do more of what they do best — is mechanically degraded by the system into hyper-specialism, or the fixing of man — screwing him — into the mechanism of the system. Hyper-specialism, which begins at school, where humans are sorted according to systemic function, and fully manifests in the working world, comprises two main divisive elements; the division of activity; the separation of skilled processes, with all their variety, into a series of minute and gut-numbing sub-tasks which pound to mush the conscious minds of those employed to do them over and over and over and over again, and the division of purpose; the separation of physical activity from mental activity and will, and the consequent division of people into two antagonistic groups; on the one hand labourers, focused on a microscopic segment of a productive or reproductive process they once oversaw in its entirety, with no control over the direction and outcome of their (‘blue-collar’) work, and, on the other hand, management, paid to divide tasks, and thereby people, into the work mechanism, in order to, firstly, make a profit for those who sit at the output end with their big buckets, collecting golden power credits and, secondly, to service the expanding and interlocking sub-routines that the system is comprised of. The consequence of these two processes — the generation of vast amounts of profit and the generation of tasks designed to measure, monitor, manipulate and manage the ceaseless expansion of the system — leads to the creation of an enormous quantity of bullshit jobs6; ‘white-collar’ tasks with no purpose other than to fill a money-making hole, or create and organise pointless information. Examples include teaching English in an Abu Dhabi secondary school, writing user-guides for private banking software, writing code for a start-up tech company doomed to failure, managing funds for a custodian bank, and most of the work done by the world’s administrators, consultants, clerical and accounting staff, hedge fund managers, political consultants, marketing gurus, lobbyists and corporate lawyers, all of whom could go on permanent strike tomorrow and not be missed. Even the much-vaunted ‘essential’ work of doctors, teachers and scientists is only so by virtue of its existence in a sickening, cretinising and deeply frustrating system.
Divided not just from each other, not just from their land and their communities, but from their own whole selves, the labourer becomes a moron on the (physical or digital) assembly line, a stranger to his class and society (which become abstract in his experience) and an exile from his own nature, which inevitably sickens, thereby subduing and pacifying him; disciplinary benefits which have been widely appreciated by industrialists for centuries. The manager, for her part, either becomes a tyrant (preferably a chummy one; see myth 15) developing ever more sophisticated techniques to keep the labourer efficiently producing7, or she becomes a zombie, dealing with ever more absurd and pointless administrative tasks demanded by hyper-specialisation, hyper-expansion of the power of institutions, hyper-financialisation of the global economy and all the hyper-waste, misery, sickness and boredom which all this produces. All the while she is haunted by the sense that her life is devoid of meaning or purpose.8 No problem though! The system provides an education system to produce pre-alienated work-enthusiasm, a medical system to patch up or dispose of broken units, a legal system to quarantine defective units, an entertainment system to distract exhausted units from the cause of their misery with amazing experiences, and an academic-media system to justify the indignity, futility, fraudulence or outright evil of their working lives; all of which at great profit to the market and the professionals employed to maintain it.
A key component in the management of labour is the welfare system. In advanced capitalist states this is used for two purposes. Firstly, to keep the so-called ‘reserve army of labour’ in a state of disciplined readiness to work (i.e. in near-starvation). These prime-movers in the job-seeking industry are (along with shipped-in immigrants9) used to discipline those in work with the knowledge that twenty thousand others, just like them, are desperate to take their place. They must, however, be closely monitored and tightly controlled, because they are never far from comprehending the meaning of the word ‘fair.’
As the system piles on the pressure, it generates revolutionary heat in the mass of miserable, exploited labourers which it depends on, and is then forced to throw a few more bones to the dogs. These scraps from the elite table — a minimum wage here, an nhs there, an income support payment perhaps, or a bit of housing benefit10 — are accepted as fair by the subservient classes, who have forgotten all about the community welfare we had before states dismantled it. This is the second reason why the system tolerates the state welfare system; it can be used to diffuse revolutionary pressure.
Can, but certainly doesn’t have to be. Simply allowing people starve to death, or locking them up, or even exterminating them, are also disciplinary options. The important thing is to shaft workers from every conceivable angle; to force them to work more hours, for more years, for smaller wages, shrinking pensions and non existent benefits; to reduce their power in the workplace, rarely imposing, to non-existence; to enable management to put intense pressure on workers, to make it easy to shift them into precarious roles and ‘release’ them if they prove recalcitrant; to make sure that everyone, everywhere, works harder (the so called shadow work at automated tills and so on) and pays more (for everything we do, everything we eat, everywhere we live and everything else we need — with a few notable and much vaunted ecologically and socially ruinous exceptions, such as clothes and electronics); and, all the while, pump them full of fear of destitution, guilt for not working hard enough, desire for consumer delights and, crucially, the absurd but entirely necessary illusion that because they have ‘worker participation,’ ‘profit-share’, access to suggestion boxes, a union card and a friendly t-shirt, that they are somehow in charge of their working lives.
