Call center rage is directed at a fellow victim with no effect
Evidence
The call center experience distils the political phenomenology of late capitalism: the boredom and frustration punctuated by cheerily piped PR, the repeating of the same dreary details many times to different poorly trained and badly informed operatives, the building rage that must remain impotent because it can have no legitimate object, since – as is very quickly clear to the caller –there is no-one who knows, and no-one who could do anything even if they could. Anger can only be a matter of venting; it is aggression in a vacuum, directed at someone who is a fellow victim of the system but with whom there is no possibility of communality. Just as the anger has no proper object, it will have no effect. In this experience of a system that is unresponsive, impersonal, centerless, abstract and fragmentary, you are as close as you can be to confronting the artificial stupidity of Capital in itself. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 132
Categorization
- QUESTION: Fisher calls the call-center crisis a moment of confronting ‘the artificial stupidity of Capital in itself’ — does this offer a starting point for anti-capitalist pedagogy?
- XREF: connects to: Capitalism has no center, only entities incapable of responsibility; Call center rage is impotent because it lacks a legitimate human object — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 132
Related
- Call center rage is impotent because it lacks a legitimate human object (similarity 0.95)
- Call centers give consumers their most direct experience of capital’s centerlessness (similarity 0.86)
- Call centers reveal Capital’s systemic inefficiency as a profit fixation (similarity 0.79)
- Call centers give consumers their only direct experience of capitalism’s centerlessness (similarity 0.78)