On the Knife’s Edge: Dissociative dreamscapes and the banality of risk

Keywords: New Orleans, art, futures, crisis
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Labor and work have always been dissociative, whether through resistance to capital’s ownership of our lives and bodies, or by taking enough drugs to get through the day, through work slow downs and stoppages, or stealing copies. Work is also dissociative when we drink the kool-aid, where the good-job-feeling and power and inside-ness are the reward, the drug, the escape, the promise, the hope. On the other hand, instances of dissociative leisure—dissociated from the banality or violence or oppressive facts of everyday life—are rarely if ever not also some kind of work. Are quotidian escapes—dissociative, psychedelic or otherwise—from the monotony, bosses, or violence of capitalism and the workplace the best we can imagine? It is at the scale of everyday life that the effects of systemic failure—the good life denied—are most visible: decaying infrastructure, bankrupt insurance companies, tax levies for energy companies. This paper considers the possibilities and limitations of dissociation as a framework for radical politics and critique through an examination of risk, resilience, and reward in New Orleans.