Abstract
Today we are inhabiting an era of accelerated digitized global capitalism, what Slavoj Zizek calls the “new dark ages” and Alain Badiou refers to as the “dialectics of black”. The need is for updated new theorization of this formation and better empirical accounts. This essay looks at the recent development of digital leisure cultures around popular music in Manchester (UK) especially since the global financial crisis, which still permeates our globe in unforseen ways. This understanding of the contours of a rapidly accelerated digitized capitalism utilizes various resources. Building on this idea this article argues that what we see as “claustropolitanism” (the feeling that we want to escape the planet because we are now so foreclosed) is fast becoming a post-crash cultural condition spreading globally. For Paul Virilio, who is claustrophobic, Joy Division’s mantra “feel it closing in” from “Digital” is personal, but the mediatised global pop culture is also experiencing the same feeling. This paper draws on the author’s long-term empirical research into the city of Manchester and its popular cultural history to tease out some theoretical implications for the study of digital society and capitalism in general.
Highlights
Today we are inhabiting an era of accelerated digitized global capitalism, what Slavoj Zizek calls the “new dark ages” and Alain Badiou refers to as the “dialectics of black”
We are in an era of accelerated digitized global capitalism —what Zizek (2014) calls the “new dark ages” and “trouble in paradise” and Badiou (2017) refers to as the “dialectics of black”—we urgently need new theorization of this formation
This essay looks at the recent development of digital leisure cultures around popular music in Manchester especially since the global financial crisis which still permeates our globe in unforseen ways especially in the rise of a radical right wing populism in the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States
Summary
Since Ian Curtis, Stephen Morris, Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook began playing regularly as Joy Division in 1978, that’s effectively 29 years up to 2007 (Morley, 2007) when the Curtis-less New Order officially ended their reign in the rainy city. For Zizek, though he is a fan of the digital world, there is a perceived danger in the virtual—homogenization, monopoly and standardization in the internet and the web. He agonizes that: Everything happens out there. Our struggle should focus on those aspects that pose a threat to the transnational public sphere Part of this general push toward the privatization of the “general intellect” is the recent trend in the organization of cyberspace towards “cloud computing”. A decade ago, a computer was a big box on one’s table, and downloading was done with floppy disks and USB sticks; today, we no longer need strong individual computers since cloud computing is internet based—ie. software and information are provided to computers or smartphones on demand, in the guise of web-based tools or applications
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