The Politics of Fun

Alfie Bown, Enjoying It: Candy Crush and Capitalism

Zero, 96pp, £7.99, ISBN 9781785351556

reviewed by Stuart Walton

The status of enjoyment within the cultural economy of capitalism has been in question at least since it was posited by Marx and Engels that capitalism, despite its own best intentions, is a machine for generating misery. It makes possible a flourishing cultural superstructure, to which only the economically privileged and educated have access, while for the rest there is only reduction to the animal functions of biological existence (eating, drinking, having sex), the solace of religion, and the alternating rhythm of working and not working, which takes on the character of a parodic natural cycle.



In the classical Marxist view, the enjoyments in which alienated workers engage in their leisure time do nothing other than prepare them, through mindless self-indulgence, for a more or less reinvigorated return to another period of alienating work. The proletariat cannot produce their own creative self-identity when their entire existence is for others, but might just, in their estrangement from their own conditions of life, summon the collective will to throw off the system of alienation altogether, and incidentally liberate the whole of society.



The further turn that Alfie Bown gives this analysis in his book-length essay on enjoyment is to suggest that enjoyment functions not just to give everybody a break from work, so that they can return refreshed to it, but that precisely as a result of the ways in which modern forms of enjoyment are structured, and the ideological assumptions they comport, they help produce the required attitudes to work itself, manufacturing conformity to the mental structures that present-day work demands, producing exemplary capitalist participants whose subjectivity is constructed with work, not self-production, in mind.



As well as delivering compliant players to the global economy, modern enjoyment also reinforces a sense of legitimacy in returning to work, exactly because its own mindlessness, of which the superego convicts it in repressed guilt, is relieved by coming back to an activity that is theoretically more productive, more worthwhile, or at least instrumental in helping to pay the bills. In this way, what Zizek has called the 'obscene superego injunction to enjoy' is satisfied.



The examples of contemporary enjoyment that Bown puts forward include gaming apps for mobile phones, such as Candy Crush, Angry Birds and Football Manager, the already half-forgotten novelty hit 'Gangnam Style', and the novel and film franchise Game of Thrones. Widespread indulgence in these entertainments, rather than offering a refuge from capitalist identity, all powerfully assist in the construction of it, even where they appear to be disavowing their own status, as in the auto-ironic functioning of Gangnam.



More surprisingly, Bown detects the ideological version of enjoyment in the supposedly more dignified activity of reading radical critical theory. When critiques of capitalism, such as those of Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard, even Zizek, are enjoyed for their prosecutorial tone, they become part of the very system of lack-producing desire that they are conceived against. Between the critical text and the reader's enjoyment of it, the capitalist subject is constructed as much as it is while spending six hours playing Football Manager.



The need to be seen to be deriving the maximum possible enjoyment from life has undergone a transition from the prescriptive nostrums of Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism to the condition of a subjectively assumed competitive stance. Users of Facebook and Twitter are determined to demonstrate to their friends, and the friends of their friends, that they are having fun, living it large, smashing it, playing a blinder, or just getting chilled and blissed out. People who say they are fed up are hounded out by a raucous chorus of yea-sayers, as though their low mood might be as contagious as typhoid.



What all this leads to is a suspicion that the forms of happiness characteristic of globalised society are profoundly suspect. Already in the mid-1950s, Adorno spoke of 'the misery of fun' and wondered whether laughter, which often has its roots in derision, could be as innocent as the comic productions of the culture industry appeared to claim it was. 'Laughter is the condition of ideology,' declares Mladen Dolar, quoted here. 'It is only when we laugh and breathe freely that ideology truly has a hold on us.' Which is not to say that breathing freely might not eventually be desirable, but that within the suffocating conditions of reified economic relations, breathing freely is as polluted as any other apparently blameless activity.



Bown is a self-confessed gaming addict, whose devotion to Football Manager Handheld is so all-consuming that he 'replays his imaginary press conferences in his head on the way to work.’ Much of this brief text is focused on the question of the differential values that people accord to what are classified as 'productive' and 'unproductive' enjoyment. While the former might involve having one's intellectual faculties stimulated by a critical excursus on 'Gangnam Style,’ the latter could well involve playing the video again on YouTube. The author proposes that, by dissolving these artificial classifications and not elevating one type of enjoyment above another, a more nuanced understanding of the function of enjoyment might be attained.



In one sense, this results in a productive approach. The urge to balance what are termed, with hideous coyness, the ‘guilty pleasures,’ to which nobody alive is immune, with the theoretically worthier ventures of reading semi-literary novels, spending a twice-weekly hour at the gym, trying out a recipe from the otherwise purely decorative cookbook, is worth interrogating. If enjoyment is universally commanded by the system, why does it not mind the fact that people secretly chide themselves for enjoying much of what they enjoy?



The problem arises when the different manifestations of enjoyment are rendered all but homogeneous for the sake of what looks like a radical move in the critical argument, or as Bown puts it, '[t]he perceived gap between enjoying philosophy and enjoying a tabloid newspaper is too great.' The more radical position is to insist that it is not great enough. It is exactly by assimilating everything to the status of its own trash that capitalism achieves its greatest victories. The dichotomy between productive and unproductive enjoyment mirrors that which obtained up to around fifty years ago between high and low culture, itself a reflection of capitalism's division of labour. Nothing suits a homogenised culture better than to be reassured that it has subsumed everything, including the culture that once resisted assimilation to mediocrity, within its own standardising operations, and to which that culture itself submitted as another index of its failure.



Not for nothing are unproductive enjoyments predominantly structured as flights from reality. Universal game-playing, in which fully grown human beings are hypnotised by what would once have been seen for the infantility it is, the childish fantasy-worlds of sci-fi warfare, medieval sorcery, industrially manufactured mythological sagas, sixth-form surrealism, swill-bucket comedy arrested at the adolescent stage are all predicated on returning consciousness to a pre-critical level of passive amusement. Social reality itself, at once sufficiently real to require mindless mitigation but not real enough to satisfy real human need, permits the subject to regress to an earlier stage of development, in which games were the indication that it had not yet attained to a mature apprehension of reality.



The essay's final section hints at illegal enjoyment, but fastidiously refuses to go into detail, though this might be the most fertile line of enquiry of all. Where does the use of controlled substances stand, as between productive and unproductive enjoyment? Is it productive in the sense that it refuses the legal strictures of the licensed capitalist economy, partaking instead in a far more savage hypostasis of capitalism, which cheerfully reveals that absence of scruple that the official version does its best to hide? Or is it as unproductive as all half-witted self-indulgence, the idle shortcut to genuine joy?



What seems to have been left out of account here, and is very much integral to the experience of recreational drug-taking, is the coexistence of enjoyment and non-enjoyment. While Bown channels the demanding and undemanding versions of enjoyment together, the opposite of enjoyment slips past unnoticed. It is one thing to accuse yourself of falling short of your own expectations by playing a cretinous video-game over and over, quite another to enjoy not enjoying something, not in the pathetic masochistic demeanour, but in the sense that despising video-games might be fundamentally constitutive of the critical self.

Stuart Walton is Associate Editor of the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, and author of Introducing Theodor Adorno, In The Realm of the Senses: A Materialist Theory of Seeing and Feeling and A Natural History of Human Emotions.