Play in the System: The Art of Parasitical Resistance

"In THE PLAY IN THE SYSTEM Anna Watkins Fisher asks what kind of room for maneuver remains in a system from which there appears to be no way out. Arguing that traditional leftist modes of opposition and refusal, which presuppose an autonomous or emancipatory subject, have proven ill-adapted to today's murky political terrain, Fisher focuses on new media artists and activists who embrace what she calls parasitism. Fisher defines parasitism as a tactical mode through which precarious subjects (at least, those with enough capital to get a foot in the door) can leverage the minor advantages of appearing familiar and non-threatening to those who hold power over them. Using powerful entities' pretense of benevolence to gain access, parasitical artists are then(like Trojan horses) able to disrupt the smooth functioning of these entities. In acknowledging our inevitable entanglement in the oppressive systems and institutions we most need to resist, Fisher's parasites create space to relinquish investments in purity and weaponize complicity. The first half of the book focuses on works that target large corporations-major "hosts"-whose appropriation of transparency and facilitation masks their proprietary gatekeeping and monetization of public goods. But Fisher'sbook does not only laud parasitical activists like the collective Ubermorgen, whose Amazon Noir project exploited Amazon's "search inside the book" feature to produce open access versions of over 3,000 books. The book's second half considers what happenswhen the boundary between host and parasite becomes blurrier, grappling with the more messy contradictions posed by parasitical works that share a genealogy with feminist performance art. Here, works like Chris Kraus' I Love Dick and Sophie Calle's Take Care of Yourself play on the intimacy of the author/artist's relationship with a privileged man. In the book's coda, Fisher considers her own parasitic relationship with feminist performance artist Roisin Byrne, reflecting on the shifting parasitical relationships between artists and critics. This book will be of interest to readers in media studies, especially new media studies, as well as those in contemporary art and performance studies, feminist studies, political and social theory, and cultural studies, as well as those interested in neoliberalism and anti-capitalist activism"--
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.
Acknowledging the difficulty for artists in the twenty-first century to effectively critique systems of power, Anna Watkins Fisher theorizes parasitism&;a form of resistance in which artists comply with dominant structures as a tool for practicing resistance from within.