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The Play in the System: The Art of Parasitical Resistance
What does artistic resistance look like in the twenty-first century, when disruption and dissent have been co-opted and commodified in ways that reinforce dominant systems? In The Play in the System Anna Watkins Fisher locates the possibility for resistance in artists who embrace parasitism—tactics of complicity that effect subversion from within hegemonic structures. Fisher tracks the ways in which artists on the margins—from hacker collectives like Ubermorgen to feminist writers and performers like Chris Kraus—have willfully abandoned the radical scripts of opposition and refusal long identified with anticapitalism and feminism. Space for resistance is found instead in the mutually, if unevenly, exploitative relations between dominant hosts giving only as much as required to appear generous and parasitical actors taking only as much as they can get away with. The irreverent and often troubling works that result raise necessary and difficult questions about the conditions for resistance and critique under neoliberalism today.
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The Play in the System: The Art of Parasitical Resistance
What does artistic resistance look like in the twenty-first century, when disruption and dissent have been co-opted and commodified in ways that reinforce dominant systems? In The Play in the System Anna Watkins Fisher locates the possibility for resistance in artists who embrace parasitism—tactics of complicity that effect subversion from within hegemonic structures. Fisher tracks the ways in which artists on the margins—from hacker collectives like Ubermorgen to feminist writers and performers like Chris Kraus—have willfully abandoned the radical scripts of opposition and refusal long identified with anticapitalism and feminism. Space for resistance is found instead in the mutually, if unevenly, exploitative relations between dominant hosts giving only as much as required to appear generous and parasitical actors taking only as much as they can get away with. The irreverent and often troubling works that result raise necessary and difficult questions about the conditions for resistance and critique under neoliberalism today.
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The Play in the System: The Art of Parasitical Resistance
What does artistic resistance look like in the twenty-first century, when disruption and dissent have been co-opted and commodified in ways that reinforce dominant systems? In The Play in the System Anna Watkins Fisher locates the possibility for resistance in artists who embrace parasitism—tactics of complicity that effect subversion from within hegemonic structures. Fisher tracks the ways in which artists on the margins—from hacker collectives like Ubermorgen to feminist writers and performers like Chris Kraus—have willfully abandoned the radical scripts of opposition and refusal long identified with anticapitalism and feminism. Space for resistance is found instead in the mutually, if unevenly, exploitative relations between dominant hosts giving only as much as required to appear generous and parasitical actors taking only as much as they can get away with. The irreverent and often troubling works that result raise necessary and difficult questions about the conditions for resistance and critique under neoliberalism today.
Anna Watkins Fisher is Assistant Professor of American Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and coeditor of the second edition of New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations Introduction. Toward a Theory of Parasitical Resistance Interlude. Thresholds of Accommodation Part I. Redistribution: Institutional Interventions 1. User Be Used: Leveraging the Coercive Hospitality of Corporate Platforms 2. An Opening Structure: Núria Güell and Kenneth Pietrobono's Legal Loopholes Part II. Imposition: Intimate Interventions 3. Hangers-On: Chris Kraus's Parasitical Feminism 4. A Seat at the Table: Feminist Performance Art's Institutional Absorption and Parasitical Legacies Coda. It's Not You, It's Me: Roisin Byrne and the Parasite's Shifting Ethics and Politics Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index
What People are Saying About This
The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism - Steven Shaviro
“Anna Watkins Fisher's figure of the parasite offers us insight into the contemporary condition in which, due to ubiquitous appropriation and financialization, every oppositional gesture seems to have already been coopted in advance. Her explorations illuminate the space in which artists and others are forced to operate today and outlines ways in which it may still be possible, albeit quite ambiguously, to maneuver, resist, and express opposition.”
