moralizing on the "harlem shake"

Of the multitude of “Harlem shake” videos now on the internet, why are the most disturbing ones those that take place in work spaces?

In a normal office, in which people are either working or passing time in boredom (the difference is hard to tell), the idiotic techno music begins. With the music, there appears a disturbing element—typically a masked or helmeted creature that begins to make obscene gestures. Importantly, this obscene stain of enjoyment is at first ignored, left to exercise its pathetic routine alone, not even perceived by others. Then, suddenly, with a brief caesura in music and a cut in the image, the whole room will explode into a kind of generalized ritual of obscenity, in which individuals will—not without a certain degree of industriousness—hump each other, beat stuffed animals and other objects, perform clichéd versions of all kinds of “eccentricity”, and all in all behave in less-than-animal-like ways. To be sure, any actual orgies will be avoided, for the videos are made to be seen on YouTube and sex would not pass censorship. But, perhaps for the same reason (namely, that nothing here is being smuggled into the image illegally), any comedy or laughter will be absent from the scene as well. It is, finally, only people at work that are seen the whole time.

The videos thus present montaged together two images of a humiliated humanity: in the first image, we are humiliated by what now is labor, what now is our work-space, and our work relations; in the second, by what counts as our fantasy of liberation from the constraint of all that.

It is all reminiscent of a statement often heard from acquaintances and friends as they were slowly sinking into the misery of their well-paid careers: “I will work for 20 years, until I’m 45, make a lot of money, and then I will enjoy my life.” Our times are characterized by this double relation to enjoyment. We can only imagine it as either something to ascetically postpone or as something we should be fully immersed in. Preferably, i.e. if you are a “normal” subject, you will do the former and then only think of the latter. But there are institutions and experts waiting also for those who for some reason (maybe to give the “normal” ones something to look forward to) want to reverse the order. They too are necessary.

This duality—the proper form of superegoic discipline for our times—suggests we have lost all means of constructing any distance to jouissance. We do not know how to catch enjoyment and deflect it in the intelligence of the Appearance; in such a way that we would not have to act as though it is not unconsciously devouring us nor turn it into our supreme and only duty.

UPDATE: It does not seem necessary but perhaps it should nevertheless be pointed out that the above is in no way meant to refer to the actual Harlem shake, the one invented by the Harlemites. The difference between the latter and this recent mass appropriation of it is clear and can be expressed in the following way: what in the more recent viral phenomenon exists as a cut between two images, the image of ascetic boredom and the fantasy of a fully realized juissance, is in the case of the original Harlem shake displaced onto the body itself. The cut is made to appear within the body, which is simultaneously ascetically arrested in its normal functioning and becomes the vehicle of a rather disorganizing force of enjoyment. Instead of two images of a body at work (presented as work and negation of, liberation from work), one gets in this way and very precisely a body that does not not work.