If we went back only 20 or 30 years, we would be astounded by the sheer non-utility that made up good parts of society, which to us today look incomprehensibly wasteful, irrational and non-transparent: jobs maintained to keep people in employment, national sports team still amateur and unregulated, universities free of league tables and regimented performance assessment exercises. Even at the level of everyday culture and aesthetics, our currently condition perspective would view the formalities of the early 1970s as alien, meandering and uneconomical.
The tactics and practises of everyday life recorded by Certeau still implicitly hold onto the rather liberal assumption that a life is indeed possible within the universe of capitalism.
… our attempts to live, that futile optimism that fools even the most enslaved, is stymied at every turn by an existential darkness that denies complete synthesis. Our embodied and inexorable modi operandi are defined by a breathless and depressing, ‘It cannot go on like this’, things must change. But they never do change, and somehow continue as before.
… the most politically abject and ignored in our society must be considered foremost if the totality is to be understood. The absolute ‘worst off’ that part of the whole life we like to consign to the status of an exception or aberration, is really what gives the totalized system its false positivity. Its part is the part of everything. That is why society despises its untouchables so much, because in them we see the untruthful structure that bears witness to society’s own mendacity.
We now need to give our abandonment depth so it corrupts the smooth plane of one-dimensional rationality that makes the curve of capitalist reality seem unending. This is the ‘lost dimension’ of industrialised modernity. Are you worthy of your abandonment? If you are, then what are you going to do with the absolute impossibility that is now the defining quality of the late-capitalist worker? Where will you go, what will you say and who will you take with you?
Fleming, Mythology of Work