ABSTRACT
One might recall a time in Western Europe when backed by labour unions the ‘exploited’ were once able to find forms of solidarity and combine to resist those who were busy with the exploiting. This is how Han glosses this historical moment and its current perversion as recently evidenced in Fall 2019 by people described as ‘working-class commuters’ piling into Extinction Rebellion protestors at East London’s Canning Town Station: Such is the logic on which Marx’s idea of a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat is based’. The partial and somewhat arbitrary catalogue of the performatariat’s recent media appearances could be repeated for any country in the world with a regular mainstream TV tradition. All that was needed was a populist appetite for the truism that that media has been definitively co-opted by the eruption of the audience.
