{ 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.”
Desirefulfil-ness is a term born out of the coldness of the freezers of the fulfilment 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 shelf CH-D-088-14-1.
This fast-speed desirefulfilled game[1 2 3], was invented by advanced capitalism, to extract and capture[4] our racialized desires and violent passions,[5] until exhaustion.
To desirefulfil the fulfilment center is to theorize it as a site of “collective racial delirium”, in Franz Fanon’s words. To desirefulfil is to think with and through the fulfilment center as a container and retainer packed full of the viscosities and intensities of the racialized affects of us, its breathers,[6] the cybernetic immigrant workers.
To desirefulfil the fulfilment 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 affect of structural racism differently and much more intimately.[9]
Then perhaps we can start unpacking a different kind of 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.
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 find 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 Gamification, Profaning Gamification’. Volume, Playbor (56), pp. 39-43.
[& 3] profaning gamification, 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. Agamben, G. (2005). Profanations. New York City: Zone Books, pp. 85.
[4] extraction & capture, Galloway. What if there is a form of affective 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, Mouffe, Freud. Of course, “passions” can also be of an individual nature, but I have chosen to use the term with its more violent connotations, because it [passions] allows me to underline a dimension of conflict 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 affective libidinal bounds in processes of collective identification. Mouffe, C. (2017). ‘The Role of Affects 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 viscosity of abject, Kristeva, Morton. -fear. The phobic has no other object than the abject. But that word, “fear” —a fluid haze, an elusive clamminess—no sooner has it cropped up than it shades off 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 reified 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. (2015). ‘Elementality’. Cohen, 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 externalized, 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, Breathers, Conspiracy: Forms for Atmospheric Reckoning’. in Papadopoulos, 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 knowledge and affects based on four hundred years of Dutch imperial rule plays a vital but unacknowledged part in dominant meaning-making processes. Wekker, G (2016). White Innocence: 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 affect 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 affective about the “unreachable,” we might even begin the task of making “race’’ a rather queer matter. Ahmed, S. (2006). Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. London: Duke University Press.
