glossary of desirefulfilment: a theory under construction...
Notes for a glossary of desirefulfilment
1, 2 a desireful game, Mary Poppins, Vega de Santiago. In every job that must be done there is an element of fun. You !nd the fun and... snap! The job’s a game / She felt good. She went faster. Obviously. How couldn’t she? They are always looking. Vega de Santiago, D. (2019). ‘Loving Gami!cation, Profaning Gami!cation’. Volume, Play- bor (56), pp. 39-43.
& 3 profaning gami!cation, Agamben. The cat who plays with a ball of yarn as if it were a mouse knowingly uses the characteristic behaviors of predatory activity in vain. These behaviors are not ef- faced but deactivated and thus open to a new possible use. Agam- ben, G. (2005). Profanations. New York City: Zone Books, pp. 85.
4 extraction & capture, Galloway. What if there is a form of aec- tive expenditure that cannot be recuperated? Galloway, A., Jepson, G., Vega de Santiago, D. (2019). ‘The Rapture of Play: interview with Alexander R. Galloway’, Volume, Playbor (56), pp. 6-9
5 violent libidinal passions, Moue, Freud. To be sure “passions” can also be of an individual nature, but I have chosen to use that term, with its more violent connotations, because it [passions] allows me to underline a dimension of con#ict and to suggest a confrontation between collective political identities - two aspects that I take to be constitutive of politics / Freud brought to the fore the crucial role played by aective libidinal bounds in processes of collective identi!cation. Moue, C. (2017). ‘The Role of Aects in Agonistic Politics’. Cherepanyn, V., Havranek, V., & Stejskalova, T. (Eds.) 68 NOW. Kiev: Visual Culture Research Center, tranzit.cz, Archive Books Berlin, pp. 69-81.
6 the viscuousity of abject, Kristeva, Morton. -fear. The phobic has no other object than the abject. But that word, “fear”-a #uid haze, an elusive clamminess no sooner has it cropped up than it shades o like a mirage and permeates all words of the language with nonexistence, with a hallucinatory, ghostly glimmer / Art as climate. I mean precisely art not as rei!ed or distanced thing over but yonder but as infectious, viscous givenness from which one finds oneself incapable of feeling oneself, like Luce Irigaray’s air. Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers Of Horror: An Essay On Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press. Morton, T. ‘Elementality’. (2015). Cohen, J. J., & Duckert, L. (Eds.). (2015). Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and Fire. University of Minnesota Press, pp. 69-81.
7 breathers, Choy. “Here is the unpaid cost: the externality,” I remember him saying. “These are real costs, but they are exter- nalized, meaning they are not paid.” “But someone does pay,” he continued. “Who pays?” He waited a beat, then answered himself. “Breathers pay.” Breathers pay. Choy, T. (2021). ‘Externality, Breath- ers, Conspiracy: Forms for Atmospheric Reckoning’. in Papado- poulos, D., Puig de la Bellacasa, M., Myers, N. (Eds.), Reactivating Elements. Reactivating Elements: Chemistry, Ecology, Practice. London: Duke University Press, pp. 231-256.
8 white innocence, Wekker. It is my admittedly ambitious and iconoclastic—aim to write an ethnography of dominant white Dutch self-representation. An unacknowledged reservoir of knowl- edge and aects based on four hundred years of Dutch imperial rule plays a vital but unacknowledged part in dominant mean- ing-making processes. I am intrigued by the way that race pops up in unexpected places and moments. Wekker, G (2016). White Inno- cence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race, Durham and London: Duke University Press.
9 queering the matter of race, Ahmed. The “matter’’ of race is very much about embodied reality; seeing oneself or being seen as white or black or mixed does aect what one “can do,” or even where one can go, which can be redescribed in terms of what is and is not within reach. If we begin to consider what is aective about the “unreachable,” we might even begin the task of making “race’’ a rather queer matter. Ahmed, S. (2006). Queer Phenom- enology: Orientations, Objects, Others. London: Duke University Press.
{ high tech, low life }
{ desirefulfilment }
To be fulfilled means “to be satisfied or happy because of fully developing one’s abilities or character”. When we use the -ful of fulfill in a word like desire, it becomes desireful, a quality. To be desireful means “to be filled with desire: eager.”
Desireful!l-ness is a term born out of the coldness of the freezers of the ful!lment center. It was conceived, during an evening shift, between the aisles D and E, at the moment when the hand/ scanner of the cybernetic picker immigrant being I have become reached the plastic skin of the pink hummus, located on the shelf CH-D-088-14-1.
This fast-speed desirefulfilled game1 2 3, was invented by advanced capitalism, to extract and capture4 our racialized desires and violent passions,5 until exhaustion.
To desirefulfill the fulfilment center is to theorize it as a site of ‘collective racial delirium’ in Franz Fanon’s sense. To desirefulfill is to think with and through the fulfilment center as a container and retainer packed full of the viscosities and intensities of the racialized aects of us, its breathers,6 the cybernetic immigrant workers.
To desirefulfill the ful!lment center is to throw ourselves in, with and through this viscous soup, fuel of the racialized capitalist cosmology of desire.7 It is to be attentive to its extractivist machinery of innocent whiteness,8 so we can perceive the affectivity of structural racism differently and much more intimately.9
Then perhaps we can start unpacking a different kind mythological cybernetic tale for us, its worker-breathers. As a way out, as an alternative viscous soup fuel for other modes of being, breathing and relating in the anti-extractivist, anti-racist cosmic machinery of desire.
ambient
pallets
receipt checks
bagging machine
picking
internet stopped working
portos
portos
totes
self-tests
walking 20km
operator
thermal jacket
captains
chilled
frozen
whats your average?
frames
shoppers
picking
frames
bagging
slack
speed records
spill
roll-containers
electric forklift
flow
leadership
trainers
scanners