Imagine a sphere. Think about it hovering in the space in front of you. What you observe, from your perspective, is it’s outside. Now imagine that you are on the inside of the sphere. Even though you cannot see the outside, you can infer that one exists. Logically and definitionally, a sphere must have an outside (I am sure some mathematician of note has proven that spheres topologically have two sides, an inside and an outside). Imagine now that the sphere that you observed was a hologram, an illusion of a 3 dimensional image created by projecting light onto a rapidly moving flat plane or screen. The fact that it is an advanced technological images does little to change its fundamental properties, a sphere is still a sphere and it still has an inside and an outside. Now imagine a glitch, the holographic machine begins to break down and as it does so, the surface of that holographic sphere begins to persistently and perpetually undulate, rotating and tessellating in on itself in defiance of geometry, seeming to bulge, tremble, reverberate and repeat as though it has neither inside nor outside, only an infinitely shifting topology of peristaltically undulating folds created by the flickering of the rapidly dying lights.

When I say that capitalism has no Outside, I want you to understand that I am not making a benign depressive or pessimistic comment or indulging in some kind of “capitalist realism”. I am suggesting that by design, an exterior surface is not possible. There is no breaking through or breaking out; anything perceived as such is done in error. To suggest this is not to ignore the other forms of political and economic organization that have existed before or since Capital’s genesis, but rather it is to suggest that Capital has always been with us. A fundamental force. A kind of will or drive; an impetus to endless connections, proliferations, and growth that has always been a part of the human experience, we simply didn’t have a name for it or know yet fully what it was like to be, think, and dream like Capital. Capital’s spectral haunting extends thus infinitely into both past and future, it simply needed the right conditions in order to realize itself.

What we are witnessing now in real time is the shifting of the folds. As Capital schizms and wriggles it “captures” more possibilities that might be mistaken to be Outside itself, yet the rippling of its body is little more than an adjustment, a stretch to reorder what was already its own. This rippling now takes the form of a kind of self-awareness. In his Quick and Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism, Nick Land argues that “accelerationism is simply the self-awareness of capitalism, which has scarcely begun. (“We haven’t seen anything yet.”)” Yet one might ask what it means to intentionally seek to accelerate Capital’s overcoding and terratorializing dynamics, given that Capital is always already exceeding these, producing new hyper-velocities of capture and colonization, of which it is impossible to keep track? What does it mean for Capital to have become self-aware, for it to understand its own processes?

I have been thinking about this question after seeing the finale of Season 2 of The Boys on Amazon Prime. I wrote about the show’s first season on this blog in the context of a very tame reflection on the question of whether we would know if we were living in a dystopia. What struck me this time around was the self awareness, the lucidity, and reflexive quality of the jokes and marketing which I observed to be part of or associated with Season 2 of The Boys on Amazon Prime. The show makes a point to poke fun at the crude and at times grotesque rationales of contemporary marketing practices and discourses. It has always done this, existing as a rebuke of the kinds of crass and uncritical worship of superheroes that we see in so much of our popular culture, particularly the kind of woke-branded imagery that we see from the Marvel cinematic universe.

Superhero movies are realistic 😬 pic.twitter.com/iVLVQZ7GLd

— The Boys (@TheBoysTV) October 22, 2020

Yet, Season 2 of The Boys on Amazon Prime takes this a step further. For example, one of the characters, Queen Maeve, is outed as bisexual during the events of the season, and we watch a grotesque scene in which Maeve and her partner have to sit down with Seth and Evan from Marketing and talk about her coming out story, her new image, and what it means for the brand. As we go through the season we see glimpses of adverts for “Brave Maeve Pride Bars” or “Brave Maeve’s Vegetarian Pride Lasagne” in the kind of crass and tasteless attempt to co-opt a person’s sexuality that could only be dreamed up in the insipid discourses of contemporary marketing that sees any demographic as a potential for growth and wealth generation, in the same kind of move that impels brands to co-opt Pride or in the same way that we saw Nike do with Colin Kaepernick. In presenting this do us, Season 2 of The Boys on Amazon Prime is asking us to laugh and join them in mocking how “cringe” this kind of blatant marketing and commodification is, but this lampshading is fickle.

Perhaps the definitive example of this is Starlight’s costume. In Season 1, we sat through another uncomfortable scene with Seth and Evan from Marketing who tell Starlight all about her journey, her transformation, and her newfound acceptance of herself, as she sits there appalled and confused. The culmination of the scene is them unveiling her new costume which is much more revealing than her current one.

Season 2 of The Boys on Amazon Prime makes fun of this new costume by having another character, Stormfront, engage in some facile lampshading of its own fetishized presentation of its female superheroes. She says: “Vought won’t let me have pockets in this. You can see every crease in my ass. You can practically see up Starlight’s uterus. You want to talk about girl power, let’s talk about getting some pockets!” Yet at the same time, the show uses this costume in the promotional material for Season 2 of The Boys on Amazon Prime. This frequently occurring PR image, for example, features Starlight’s uterus in all of its glory. 

This Monday, join us for a very special Instagram live with @ErinMoriarty_ and @KarenFukuhara of @TheBoysTV ! The… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…—
  (@IGN) October 10, 2020

The reason that I keep thinking about this self-awareness is that I wonder not whether the show is somehow hypocritical of its mockery of marketing, but because I can’t help but think about whether its marketing material is doing a kind of “anti-marketing shtick” on purpose. What convinced me to write this post was a sponsored video on Season 2 of The Boys on Amazon Prime done by the Youtube content creator, Michael Reeves. I could not say how I started watching Michael Reeves’s videos – I think that it was through association, a recommended video around the time when another creator in the Youtube maker-space, Simone Giertz, was trending because of her brain tumour – but his sense of humour is dumb, dark, and juvenile(much like my own) so I kept watching his videos.

As Michael explains in his video, the marketing team for Season 2 of The Boys on Amazon Prime, asked him to build a “Laser Baby”, like the one that appeared in Season 1 of the show, as a piece of sponsored content. As he explains, however, the pitch sent to him by the marketing team is “cringe” and as such he has to openly mock it throughout the video, making fun of the asinine storyboard that they sent him or openly ridiculing their attempt to make him add “Do not try this at home” disclaimers or caveats to the crude jokes that he makes about shaking babies. Throughout the video he weaves in mentions of Amazon Prime, The Boys, and Season 2, that is, the SEO or other key words that have probably led some algorithm to find this blog-post because of how many times I’ve said “Season 2 of The Boys on Amazon Prime”. One wonders that this is not a more effective strategy, mocking marketing and corporate legal hand-wringing as a way of marketing more effectively. One wonders that this was not the plan all along. At time of writing the video has 7.5 million views, so even ignoring all of the other Youtubers and influencers that they got to promote the show, it’s safe to say that Amazon got their marketing message across, while being openly mocked for trying to do so.

Anti-marketing is marketing. There is no outside to Capital. Even me pointing out all of Amazon’s crude stratagems is successful marketing; generating buzz, creating talking points that leads to clicks, engagement, and other metrics that Capital can measure. 

One thus wonders whether anti-marketing is the future of marketing. Forget the false conjurations of emotionality and sincerity that used to be a part of marketing campaigns targeted at your mom and dad and embrace a new politics of making fun of emotions and even the concept of marketing because we’re all so cynical and jaded that it’s the only way that we won’t disengage from attempts to sell us something. In Michael Reeves’s video we witness the transmutation of the mocking of “cringe” marketing ideas into marketing strategy. This is not ridicule or critique, it was Capital finding new ways to stimulate desire.

What monstrous futures await us as Capital becomes more self-aware. Its meat-husks know how cringe and unsettling its perverse strategies for “growth” are, so the active mockery of these becomes colonized, becomes a unique selling point, becomes part of what is for sale. The Boys shows us this by being a show produced for an by one megacorporation, Amazon, in order to actively mock the saccharine and naive superhero fantasies of another megacorporation, Disney. 

What exactly can we accelerate here? Or put more bluntly, what can I inject into this machinic operation that the Business School is not already providing in spades as new strategies for connecting with consumers are dreamt up everyday by eager marketers. Nothing. The holographic sphere gives us a potent image of a undulating surface that has both and neither any inside or outside. There was never any outside, just a shifting of the folds, an optical illusion to make us believe that a way through was possible.

I’ve been listening to an alarming amount of Lo-fi hip hop, or “Chillhop” as some prefer to call it, in recent months.

The first time that I encountered “Lofi Hip Hop Radio 24/7 🎧 Chill Gaming / Study Beats” it was a Youtube stream that had a short clip of Hana, the protagonist of the inimitable Wolf Children, studying late into the night while dropping off to sleep. It is impossible for me to say exactly when I stumbled across it, but I can say which some degree of certainty how. I got into Chillhop though Nujabes, one of its great pioneers. Specifically I fell in love with the eclectic and captivating soundtrack that he designed for the exceptional anime Samurai Champloo (it is at this point that I fear that I have outed myself as a closet weeb) and then branched into his three main albums, Metaphorical Music, Spiritual State, and Modal Soul which in particular has occupied a special place in my playlists because of the ineffable affective quality of songs like “Feather” and “Reflection Eternal”.

Nujabes, and many of the best Lo-fi hip hop/Chillhop artists at the moment like j’san, Kupla, Aso, j^p^n, and also artists who fall slightly outside it in the trip hop genre, like Saltillo, Halou, Bonobo, Doctor Flake, and Neat Beats, are designers of affective aesthetic soundscapes, stitching and weaving together samples and pulling life out of contemporary recording and mixing software. Their craft lies in gesturing at a particularly difficult to quantify feeling, a kind of haunting nostalgia, like something is missing or has become absent, but one is not quite aware of what one has lost, how or when this loss occurred, or why this feeling seems to be so prevalent. The affect of the genre is one that discourages what some might call “presence”. It is designed to fade into the background, to colour a setting and give it some thing like a texture rather than to shape the lines of the experience in which one is embroiled. Saltillo’s A Hair on the Head of John the Baptist does this for me better than perhaps any other piece of music, draping Hamlet quotes over haunting violins and gloomy piano lines, the song is a collage of that very peculiar feeling of absence that is so prevalent in the genre. The Youtube channel Dreamy is currently one of the better compilers of music with such sensibilities, gesturing at them ineptly with compilation titles like “I can’t sleep. It’s 4am” or “Breathing dreams like air” – a signalling of a feeling that commits you to listening but once committed, there is a kind of tragedy in the realization that there is never going to be any kind of relief or climax of that feeling, one is simply suspended there indefinitely because it is on that unironically postmodern sense that something is missing that Chillhop trades.

Speaking about Burial, and to some extent the genre of Jungle music in general, Mark Fisher once argued that through its samples and rhythms the songs spoke to a kind of nostalgia for derelict and left-behind spaces of the UK rave scene, a wistful longing for something that the artist had never experienced, a mourning for something that had disappeared like the public spaces that characterized some version of modernity, and perhaps even a kind of sentimental reminiscence for the sounds of the industrialized factory – for the pulsing, grinding, crunching, and colliding that people lived and worked under for such a long time. It strikes me that Chillhop’s explosion across contemporary platforms like Youtube and Spotify speaks to something that we all want to hear in the now, a music that colours and textures the background of whatever it is that we’re doing (whether you’re at work with your headphones in or looking longingly out the window of a lengthy train journey) but doesn’t intrude or call attention to itself. It doesn’t demand anything from you, it simply shades the silence of the room. Indeed, for some, this is exactly what it is supposed to do. As Liz Pelly writes for the Baffler

“Spotify loves “chill” playlists: they’re the purest distillation of its ambition to turn all music into emotional wallpaper. They’re also tied to what its algorithm manipulates best: mood and affect.”

While trying to keep up with the frankly absurd number of things that I am trying to do this term, I have had their music running in the background, filling my ears with a kind of nostalgia and evocation. Chillhop might be the music for the present moment, one where we are not present at all, but rather are in some ways dissociated and schizoid while still being in some sense “productive”, in transit, reading, replying to emails and so on. It’s an experience of absence, a yearning for something(?), but one isn’t quite sure what and one listens always with a half ear that some artificial intelligence or algorithm of some kind might have produced this feeling to resonate with something specific to your experience with talented multi-instrumentalists as its puppets, a mass-produced affect just for you.

I’ve written about affect on this blog before, and it remains one of the concepts in Deleuze’s work that I am not quite sure that I fully understand. I recently re-read a paper by Simon O’ Sullivan that I think explains it well, by commenting that 

“affects can be described as extradiscursive and extra-textual. Affects are moments of intensity, a reaction in/on the body at the level of matter. We might even say that affects are immanent to matter. They are certainly immanent to experience […] by asking the question ‘what is an affect?’ we are already presupposing that there is an answer (an answer which must be given in language). We have in fact placed the affect in a conceptual opposition that always and everywhere promises and then frustrates meaning.) So much for writing, and for art as a kind of writing. In fact the affect is something else entirely: precisely an event or happening. Indeed, this is what defines the affect.”

An event. A happening. Perhaps my reading here is still stilted, but I see the affective as a kind of excess to the event. Something always capable of deterritorializing an experience, transmogrifying the body through the ecstasy of sensation. Yet how do we make sense of the affect of Chillhop whose affect seems to be absence, something(?) undefined that one believes is missing. The issue here is one of disentanglement. Trying to find out whether it is Chillhop that produces the affect of absence or whether the current socio-cultural milieu – from the anthropocene and our inextricably technologically-mediated lives to what Fisher called the “slow cancellation of the future” and the stagnation of popular culture coupled with the decay of all forms of human sociality that characterizes the market-centric logics of neoliberalism – is what produces this unidentifiable nostalgia for something, anything other than this.

Yet even if I am suspicious of Chillhop, and all of the comparable genres that Spotify keeps throwing at me, I won’t deny being affected by it. Indeed, even if I know that Spotify has quite likely identified me as someone who would like melancholic, nostalgic gesturing and not say, the upbeat and jubilant chill/trip hop of someone like Brock Berrigan, it doesn’t change how the music makes me feel. For example, in order to close their sophomore album, Sleep Cycles, trip-hop artist Neat Beats includes the following quote from Robert Oppenheimer in their song The Destroyer of Worlds:

“We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita: Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.”

Frisson. Every time is the first time. The slow and melancholic repeating piano loop gives me chills that make my hair stand on end and reverberate as though each were reaching out to affirm something(?) about my experience in the present but at the same time it is a kind of absent-affect, a benign and defanged background melancholia. Neither debilitating nor affirming. It is simply there, a colour in the background of my life, a partial connection, a fragment of an experience that reminds me that I am also a fragment of a thinking thing, a texturing to the office in which I spend most of my time.