The Play in the System: The Art of Parasitical Resistance by Anna Watkins Fisher (review)

Materialized at the intersections of performance studies, feminist studies, digital media studies, and critical theory, Anna Watkins Fisher's debut monograph The Play in the System is a pivotal and provocative interdisciplinary meditation on 21st-century artistic resistance and institutional cooption of creative and political praxis. Fisher considers the politics and aesthetics of artistic creation when dissidence and disruption are seen as commodifiable, responding to trends in the neoliberal economy toward a rise in automated technologies and the resultant insidious power that operates not by constraining its subjects but by inciting and allowing them to participate in the system. These powers, both sociocultural and institutional, present themselves as open and flexible, with the aim of not incapacitating or debilitating their subjects, but optimizing them.

Fisher's proposed solution to artists working within these constraints is to embrace what she calls parasitism, adopting the behavior of the parasite as an undetectable subversive technique under neoliberalism. This book prompts the following questions: Is it possible to change the system from within? How has this cultural shift, from institutions condemning acts of resistance to embracing them, created new conditions for feminist and anticapitalist critique? Fisher's parasite feeds and grows within preexisting systems while doing nothing to help them function; by working from within the system, the parasite is able to redirect the mechanisms of power to gain and privatize access to its own power.

In one case study, Fisher examines the Ubermorgen tactical media collective, which in 2006 programmed a series of bots to trick Amazon's preview mechanism into supplying completed volumes of books to be distributed as free PDFs via peer-to-peer networks. The collective did not merely hack Amazon's digital library; instead, they exploited the company's invitation to preview their books at a much greater rate and volume. By adhering to, yet subverting the design of Amazon's platform, this artwork revealed the hypocrisy of Amazon's use of digital technology to privatize access to its content while failing to redistribute profits to the rightful authors. Fisher establishes parasitism as less radical than more overt forms of political intervention, such as protest and revolt, however she does not believe one can easily be replaced by the other. Fisher believes that protest and parasitical action can, and must, exist and work in tandem.

Fisher's thinking around concentrations of power within institutional as well as sociocultural systems is both articulate and deeply relevant. Pertinent for academics as well as students and practitioners, this timely publication has come at a crucial moment in the art world when operational funding, including grant money for independent artists, is sourced largely from corporate and government pools in the wake of arts council cuts and divestments from cultural sectors. Fisher takes particular interest in the tactics employed by artists of marginalized groups, as well as digital activists and interventionists, and examines how these have evolved as ramifications of institutional control that seeks to optimize artistic dissidence. The Play in the System does not take up artistic pleasure or merit. Instead, it focuses on art's political function, what it can do, and what it reveals to us about the systems in which it operates.

Part one of this book describes state and corporate performances of hospitality wherein institutions that appear to be open and welcoming use that guise to undermine and manipulate their workers. Chapter 1 examines the performative transparency of platform capitalism, describing the efforts of global corporations such as Walmart and McDonald's to adopt digital and automated technologies, as well as a predominantly virtual presence, to feign egalitarianism and make it increasingly difficult for customers and workers to self-advocate and challenge their conditions. By substituting their in-person administrators with faceless automations, these companies are able to perform hospitality and neutrality while undermining employee labor. Here, hospitality is presented as a corporate ruse in...