Materialized at the intersections of performance studies, feminist studies, digital media studies, and critical theory, Anna Watkins Fisher’s debut monograph The Play in the System is a pivotal and provocative interdisciplinary meditation on 21st-century artistic resistance and institutional cooption of creative and political praxis. Fisher considers the politics and aesthetics of artistic creation when dissidence and disruption are seen as commodifiable, responding to trends in the neoliberal economy toward a rise in automated technologies and the resultant insidious power that operates not by constraining its subjects but by inciting and allowing them to participate in the system. These powers, both sociocultural and institutional, present themselves as open and flexible, with the aim of not incapacitating or debilitating their subjects, but optimizing them.

Fisher’s proposed solution to artists working within these constraints is to embrace what she calls parasitism, adopting the behavior of the parasite as an undetectable subversive technique under neoliberalism. This book prompts the following questions: Is it possible to change the system from within? How has this cultural shift, from institutions condemning acts of resistance to embracing them, created new conditions for feminist and anticapitalist critique? Fisher’s parasite feeds and grows within preexisting systems while doing nothing to help them function; by working from within the system, the parasite is able to redirect the mechanisms of power to gain and privatize access to its own power.

In one case study, Fisher examines the Ubermorgen tactical media collective, which in 2006 programmed a series of bots to trick Amazon’s preview mechanism into supplying completed volumes of books to be distributed as free PDFs via peer-to-peer networks. The collective did not merely hack Amazon’s digital library; instead, they exploited the company’s invitation to preview their books at a much greater rate and volume. By adhering to, yet subverting the design of Amazon’s platform, this artwork revealed the hypocrisy of Amazon’s use of digital technology to privatize access to its content while failing to redistribute profits to the rightful authors. Fisher establishes parasitism as less radical than more overt forms of political intervention, such as protest and revolt, however she does not believe one can easily be replaced by the other. Fisher believes that protest and parasitical action can, and must, exist and work in tandem.

Fisher’s thinking around concentrations of power within institutional as well as sociocultural systems is both articulate and deeply relevant. Pertinent for academics as well as students and practitioners, this timely publication has come at a crucial moment in the art world when operational funding, including grant money for independent artists, is sourced largely from corporate and government pools in the wake of arts council cuts and divestments from cultural sectors. Fisher takes particular interest in the tactics employed by artists of marginalized groups, as well as digital activists and interventionists, and examines how these have evolved as ramifications of institutional control that seeks to optimize artistic dissidence. The Play in the System does not take up artistic pleasure or merit. Instead, it focuses on art’s political function, what it can do, and what it reveals to us about the systems in which it operates.

Part one of this book describes state and corporate performances of hospitality wherein institutions that appear to be open and welcoming use that guise to undermine and manipulate their workers. Chapter 1 examines the performative transparency of platform capitalism, describing the efforts of global corporations such as Walmart and McDonald’s to adopt digital and automated technologies, as well as a predominantly virtual presence, to feign egalitarianism and make it increasingly difficult for customers and workers to self-advocate and challenge their conditions. By substituting their in-person administrators with faceless automations, these companies are able to perform hospitality and neutrality while undermining employee labor. Here, hospitality is presented as a corporate ruse in which the concept of an “open platform” (52) is inherently manipulative, implying an equitable arrangement between user and host but, in actuality, facilitating closedness and limiting opportunity for grassroots mobilized action. Fisher cites the Robin Hood Cooperative as an example of parasitism; by creating an algorithm that mimics patterns in the New York Stock Exchange, the collective was able to make a financial profit and redistribute it to activist causes. This project professed to mimic the structural exploitation of the financial market by appropriating and reinvesting some of its capital.

Chapter 2 explores attempts by two artists, Núria Güell and Kenneth Pietrobono, to subvert the hospitality of the Western-neoliberal democratic state. Güell ventures to resist the nation state by striving to legally renounce her Spanish nationality; Pietrobono seeks to claim a piece of private property as unowned. By hiring lawyers to navigate legal bureaucracy and move through contractual loopholes, both artists parasitically pose challenges to the structures of the state, consequently unmasking the congeniality performed by the government to its citizens. The difficulties faced by these artists in their respective processes reveal the tightly controlled and hostile nature of the state regarding issues of citizenship and property ownership; Güell and Pietrobono expose the friction where freedom and individualism are marketed by the state as obtainable.

Part two focuses on disruptive performance works that are primarily feminist in orientation, examining the more patriarchal I Love Dick by Chris Kraus and Sophie Calle’s Take Care of Yourself, culminating with a discussion of the institutions of feminist art and the complicated legacy left in the wake of Marina Abramovic´’s body of work. In The Artist is Present (2010), Abramovic´ frames herself as a “generous” (151) host while enforcing strict conditions on her visitors, as well as positing herself as the “original” artist whereas younger and lesser-known performance artists were hired to reperform her works, oftentimes with untenable pay and no compensation for preparation time, breaks, or injury. Performance artist Anya Liftig enacted parasitism by visiting The Artist is Present and sitting for a day across from Abramovic´ in her exact style and pose—a standoff marking Liftig’s refusal to concede to Abramovic´’s power.

In The Play in the System’s last moments, Fisher turns to her own correspondence with conceptual artist Roisin Byrne, in which she finds herself ironically appropriated when a piece of text that she had written on Byrne was reproduced without consent and used as a press release description of Byrne’s upcoming exhibition. Byrne reclaims the position of parasite from Fisher, causing her to ponder the parasitical or symbiotic nature of the critic-object relation. Here Fisher positions the parasite as both generative and dangerous, precisely “because there are no guarantees against its mechanisms” (213).

The Play in the System operates at both the macro and micro level of interrelationships, treating parasitic state-citizen relations with as much detail and depth as independent artists working against sociocultural forces. Is it fair to consider a group working against and then parasitically with large corporate institutions as analogous to people with a much smaller scale confrontation? What can we make of the comparison of the Ubermorgen Collective’s manipulation of Amazon digital libraries to a young performance artist’s subversion of Abramovic´’s installation? Despite Fisher’s acknowledgement of the largeness of its scope and the necessity for examples across contextual scales, I was left with the question of where the line might be drawn in considering institutionalized actions as parasitical. Fisher’s examples are grounded in a specific intellectual weight, yet their material implications and consequences vary. I wonder if Fisher would consider oppositional thought itself parasitical and, if so, if parasitism as a concept is malleable to its benefit or detriment. How might we concretely identify further exemplars of parasitism and determine what their features would be?

Overall, The Play in the System is an expertly crafted and widely accessible publication that bridges disciplines with masterful detail and precision. Compared to other publications that explore similar intellectual terrain, such as Gregory Sholette’s Delirium and Resistance (2017) and Andrei Erofeev and Lena Jonson’s Russia: Art Resistance and the Conservative-Authoritarian Zeitgeist (2018), Fisher’s monograph provides the artist-activist under neoliberalism with a set of practical strategies to challenge institutional cooption of politically disruptive work. The Play in the System differs from related literature by centering the practitioners as parasites to their respective institutions, and by privileging individual and collective acts of resistance over more generalized institutional critique. The Play in the System looks on the neoliberal conditions not with deterministic pessimism, but with genuine interest in actionable sociocultural and political change.