Late capitalism makes people identical with their jobs, colonizing sleep and dreams
Evidence
Campagna’s call for a “radial atheism” is based on the recognition that the precariousness that cannot be eliminated is that of life and the body. If there is no afterlife, then our time is finite. Curiously, however, we subjects of late capitalism act as if there is infinite time to waste on work. Work looms over us as never before. “In an eccentric and an extreme society like ours”, argue Carl Cederström and Peter Fleming in their book Dead Man Working, “working has assumed a universal presence — a worker’s society in the worst sense of the term — where even the unemployed and children become obsessed with it.” Work now colonises weekends, late evenings, even our dreams. “Under Fordism, weekends and leisure time were still relatively untouched”, Cederström and Fleming point out, “Today, however, capital seeks to exploit our sociality in all spheres of work. When we all become “human capital” we not only have a job, or perform a job. We are the job.” — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1629
Categorization
- XREF: Echoes the earlier noise/chatter material: exploitative attention-colonizing work parallels how constant information overload serves commercial interests. — connects to: Under knowledge capitalism, idleness gets absorbed into producing the person as Capital. — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 115; Shared-dreaming fiction encodes its era’s political economy, collective versus commercial. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 521; Late capitalism replaces the Freudian unconscious with corporate-authored dream spaces — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 532 (+5 more)
- DEFINE: Introduces ‘human capital’ as a concept where workers do not merely perform a job but are the job.
Broader Connections
- Late capitalism is the purest form of capital, colonizing nature and the unconscious
#expands(0.92) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 128 - Late capitalist life forces individuals to identify with the power that oppresses them
#expands(0.85) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 116 - The inner self is colonized by capitalist productivity norms
#corroborates(0.82) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 82 - Just-in-time capitalism rewires workers’ nervous systems for perpetual instability
#qualifies(0.70) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 73