LSE RB feature essay: opening capitalist realism by Alfie Bown

In Opening Capitalist Realism, Alfie Bown pays tribute to the work of the late writer and philosopher on all aspects of capitalism, Mark Fisher. Drawing on the glimmers of hope enfolded in Fisher’s 2009 work Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, Bown argues that the events of the past year have turned the glimpses of optimism identified by Fisher into concrete and pressing opportunities for rupture in the workings of capitalism – ones that he urges the Left to seize

Book review: create or die: essays on the artistry of Dennis Hopper by Stephen Lee Naish

While perhaps best known as a compelling screen actor with a cult following, Dennis Hopper’s influence extended into photography, music, visual art and advertising. In Create or Die: Essays on the Artistry of Dennis Hopper, Stephen Lee Naish not only expands our understanding of his artistic reach, but also offers an illuminating example of how to trace a catalogue of unsettling enjoyments that collect around one figure – in this instance, the enigmatic Hopper, writes Alfie Bown

Interpassive Online: Outsourcing and Insourcing Enjoyment in Platform Capitalism

For Robert Pfaller, who first proposed the concept in 1996, interpassvity is most straightforwardly ‘the preference of particular subjects for delegating their enjoyment rather than having it themselves’. Interpassivity describes the pleasure yielded by a subject when his or her acts of pleasure are experienced via the body of another. Simple examples include telling your friends to ‘have a drink for you,’ egging them on to create an online dating profile or asking your kids to send you a postcard. Something like the common parlance for the idea is the concept of ‘living vicariously.’ For Pfaller, ‘rather than delegating their responsibilities to representative agents, interpassive people delegate precisely the things that they enjoy doing – those things that they do for pleasure, out of passion or conviction’. To put this into the language of contemporary capitalism, we can call interpassivity outsourced – rather than delegated - enjoyment

Losing the Self: Transgression in Lawrence and Bataille

Transgression is the crossing of a boundary or limit. It carries with it a legal implication, and a moral one. In Middle English, transgression is disobedience to God’s law. As Lydgate writes in 1426, the earliest use in English retained by the OED, “transgressyoun ys for to say A goyyng fro the ryht[ë] way.” D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) and Georges Bataille (1897-1962) both reconfigure the concept of transgression. Criticizing the traditional conception of transgression as the immoral yielding..

Do Digital Games Promote Capitalism?

Interview with Alfie BOWN by Silvester Buče