Looking for, and so far unable to find, my copy of Hill’s A Treatise of Civil Power. I’d been reading Without Title on the train, thinking it was his most recent and wondering why it wasn’t as good as I remembered (it has its moments). Most of the lines I wanted to quote from it are also quoted in this review. It’s good - really good:

The poor are bunglers: my people, whom I
nonetheless honour, who bought no landmark
other than their graves. I wish I could keep
Baconian counsel, wish I could keep resentment
out of my voice.

I’m trying to home in, at the moment, on the question of, as Evan puts it, “how to turn the idiosyncratic into the deeply felt of the commons”. That’s Hill’s problem in a nutshell, a problem which I once tried to pinpoint through a never quite adequate or articulated notion of “cultural politics”. I now think that was simply the wrong lens to try: “culture”, in spite of Raymond Williams’s valiant attempt to give a generic sense to the term, is something we have ministers for: not the commons at all but the variously enclosed. Here’s Hill in The Triumph of Love:

Active virtue: that which shall contain
its own passion in the public weal -
do you follow? - or can you at least
take the drift of the thing? The struggle
for a noble vernacular: this
did not end with Petrarch. But where is it?
Where has it got us? Does it stop, in our case,
with Dryden, or, perhaps,
Milton’s political sonnets? - the cherished stock
hacked into ransom and ruin; the voices
of distinction, far back, indistinct.
Still, I’m convinced that shaping,
voicing, are types of civic action…

“Noble vernacular” deserves underlining: it speaks of an ambition that Hill shares with William Morris, to model (here through poetic “shaping” and “voicing”) a vernacular that presupposes the intelligence of the common hearer or reader. Hill is so often so recondite in his references and allusions that this aim seems wholly incongruous with the means employed; but part of what he’s getting at is that if my intelligence and yours are indeed to be presupposed, and mutually honoured, then we should not expect to find each other immediately and transparently intelligible: we will find that after the initial pleasantries have passed, we will have some questions to ask, and some explaining to do.

Speaking of William Morris, here’s Hill in a recent interview triangulating Morris, Milton and one Bishop Butler:

I greatly admire [Milton's] political sonnets. I believe that, were he alive now, he would be the people’s champion against plutocratic anarchy.

Until very recently I thought that I had invented the term plutocratic anarchy, but it appears to have originated with William Morris. A few days ago I happened upon the text of a lecture delivered at University College, Oxford in 1883 (“John Ruskin in the Chair”). Morris’s term, to be precise, is “anarchical Plutocracy”.

Anarchical Plutocracy destroys memory and dissipates attention; it is the enemy of everything that is summoned before us in Bishop Butler’s great pronouncement of 1729; “Everything is what it is, and not another thing”. Bad poetry, bad art, also dissipate the sense of things at once exactly and numinously understood. Great poetry is an act of unfailing attention; its frequently cited “music” must so be understood.

I doubt whether anyone reading this will need to be told that Mark K-P has written brilliantly on Michael Jackson, or that Shaviro has too, and so has Owen. I’m afraid I’m not going to write about Jackson, brilliantly or otherwise, because I haven’t much to say besides the obvious: Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough defies emotional gravity; Bad and almost everything subsequently denies it, initially with panache (Smooth Criminal) but increasingly luridly as time goes by.

Shaviro makes a couple of points that stick with me: the first is this one about aesthetic singularity:

The point of a successful aesthetic singularity is that it crosses over directly into the form of the universal, without all those mediations that usually come between. Something is so absolutely unique (even when we can trace all the sources from which it arose) and so absolutely, achingly, joyously or heart-wrenchingly right, or just itself, that it becomes a kind of universal value. (In philosophical terms, this is what Kant was getting at with his insistence upon the universal communicability of an aesthetic judgment devoid of cognitive principles and rules; or what Badiou is getting at when he speaks of an event; or what Deleuze was getting in his account of what he called “counter-actualization”).

There’s a kind of short-circuit implied in this crossing over without mediation: the “successful singularity” is “just itself” (I can’t not hear “justly itself” here) in a way that breaks the usual contexture of identity (a matter of being positioned and formatted in a way that makes the object intelligible to discourses of identification). And this leads us on to the other point of Shaviro’s that struck me:

In a certain sense, Michael Jackson’s diffuse expression of sexuality, which so many people have found disturbing, because it doesn’t fit into any normative paradigm, is the “line of flight” along which he continued to singularize himself, to a point beyond which universalization was no longer possible. It has a sort of negative relation to the deployments of sexuality in American popular culture today, where an evident explicitness and overtness of expression are purchased at the price of an increasingly narrow and normative range within which such expression is permissible, or even thinkable. You can be as raunchy as you want to be, as long as you remain even closer to the pre-established stereotypes of masculinity and femininity than was required in the pre-”sexual liberation” times of the 1950s. Michael Jackson’s refusal, or inability, to give more than rote lip service to this requirement, is the aspect of his persona, or expression, that is least understood today, and that desperately needs to be more fully explored.

Here is Jackson as a different kind of sexual outlaw: not taboo-infringingly explicit (in fact, never that, for all the frantic pelvic action), but somehow subtracted from “adult” sexuality, not altogether asexual but not identifiably (or actionably…) sexual either. No-one will ever quite be able to say what Jackson was, sexually, and whatever questions might remain about his conduct with children, it’s impossible to identify a coherent sexual agenda (whereas we generally recognise in paedophilic abuse the imposition on children of an adult sexual hunger). I don’t find myself willing or able to follow Jackson very far along this particular “line of flight”, but agree with Shaviro that its “negative relation to the deployments of sexuality in American popular culture” merits examination.

Since everyone and his maiden aunt is doing electropop now, I thought I might have a go. Here’s a Red House Painters tune given the treatment.

Venomenology begins…

Here to my mind is the objection to taking love as ultimate. There is no higher form of unity, I can agree. But we do not know love as the complete union of individuals, such that we can predicate of it the entirety of what belongs to them. And if we extend the sense of love and make it higher than what we experience, I do not see myself that we are sure of preserving that amount of self-existence in the individuals which seems necessary for love. - F. H. Bradley

On the face of it, the premise of The Shack is a promising one. A human individual whose life has been enveloped by a “great sadness”, a man haunted by the odious death of a child, receives an invitation from God to return to the place where she was murdered. Answering the call, he encounters the three persons of the Trinity (plus - not to spoil things - a fourth personifying the divine Wisdom) and rediscovers the possibility of faith, hope and charity in a seemingly blighted and chaotic world. The book, compared by some to Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, seems to offer, in the spirit if not the style of the great Christian apologists, a point-by-point overturning of the cold world of spiritual desolation, a contemporary address stripped - as it must be - of religious piety but upholding the central gospel message of grace and forgiveness. This is something I should like to see done well, by a writer with something of Bunyan’s vernacular seriousness. It would be unreasonable to claim that The Shack squanders the opportunity, since a great many readers have found it very affecting, but the position of “contemporary Pilgrim’s Progress” in my view remains unoccupied.

Partly this is due to The Shack’s distracting mawkishness; partly it is due to a theological problem of which I suspect the mawkishness is a symptom. The Pilgrim’s Progress traverses a terrain in which evil (understood as a moral power capable of forcing the pilgrim out of his path) exists and must be struggled with; it is a work of pastoral imagination which acknowledges extremes of religious euphoria and dejection, and proposes as the only sure guide through these vicissitudes a continually-renewed subjective courage. The Shack, by contrast, takes up the “problem of pain” in order to de-problematise it: the subjectivity it indicates is ultimately the cosmic complacency plotted by the Desiderata: you are a child of the universe, which no doubt is unfolding as it should; don’t worry, be happy.

There is a serious line of thinking running through The Shack, with which I agree entirely - up to a point. In the rest of this post, I’m going to try to identify where that point lies. Rather than deal directly with the book’s theodicy (its attempted justification of the ways of God to men), I’d like to start with the question of human “perfectibility”, in particular the notion that Jesus represents a perfected humanity. The immediate difficulty confronting this notion is that human imperfection is not merely a lacking in degree of some attribute that could potentially be raised to the highest degree (e.g. we’re not loving enough, or wise enough, or sensitive enough, but we could be made perfectly loving, wise and sensitive - must try harder!). The crux of our imperfection is rather the mutual incompatibility of our desires and conceptions, the inherent inconsistency of our mental life. Not only are we not who we think we are, but our self-image is itself a chimera, a mish-mash of heterogeneous elements that only look like they fit together because we never get to see them all at once from the outside. (We can tell that this is so because we can see that this is what other people are like, and have no compelling reason to suppose that we are any different from them). The Shack presents its tormented Everyman, “Mack”, as an object lesson in imperfection of this kind.

Accordingly, when we speak of a “perfected humanity”, it is unclear which parts of our contradictory selfhoods are to be retained and which eliminated (since they cannot all be retained at once without contradiction). Is there any part which could be separated from the rest and shown, by itself, to be wholly innocent and good, or is it all a hopelessly inextricable tangle? The answer given by Paul is that there is no rule we can use to separate a good part of ourselves from the rest, no way to become pure by keeping the “base” and “corrupt” aspects of ourselves at bay; this is essentially the path of legalism, of reliance on the moral law which discriminates between the pure and the impure. Instead, Paul says, we must surrender ourselves entire to grace, which accepts the whole incorrigible tangle and “perfects” it by including it in the body of Christ (here to be understood as the historical form of an ongoing process of salvation). It is a mistake to think that we can be, or become, good in ourselves; rather, we must trust in a perfection that is the perfection of all creation, in which we are elected by grace to participate.

When the Pauline Christian tradition speaks of Jesus as the “perfect human”, therefore, it does not primarily mean that Jesus was - in himself - perfectly sensitive, wise or loving; or, indeed, good-looking, athletic or charismatically attractive. Where the Byzantine icon shows Christ as exhibiting some “holy” attribute to the highest degree - bathed in glory and radiating cosmic calm - it does so in order to proclaim the mystery that this rather common, plain and sometimes irascible human being was himself a kind of icon through which the very nature of God displayed itself. When Mack first encounters Jesus, he is initially disconcerted by how emphatically semitic he is. (I have to give the book some credit for reminding a predominantly US audience of the fact that the Christ they claim to adore would have borne a marked physical resemblance to some of the human beings their - and our - military forces have lately been bombing, shooting, torturing etc.). In fact, for “perfect humanity” not to be a contradiction in terms, it must denote, rather than a set of positive intrinsic attributes raised to the highest degree, a relation between the human (in all its tangled imperfection) and the divine (which exceeds every criterion by which this imperfection might be measured and found wanting).

As the story of Job illustrates, our relation to the divine is one of absolute, not relative, inadequacy. Jesus, who addresses God as “Abba” (which The Shack translates, gratingly but accurately*, as “Papa”), refounds this relationship as one of filiation, an act of creative blasphemy that Jewish and Islamic monotheism alike reject as nonsensical. One should take this objection seriously, as it in a sense constitutes the singularity of Christianity. It’s not a crucifying offense to say that Zeus, for example, produced human offspring by procreating with a mortal woman. Christianity’s formal signature is to be found in the passage from monotheism to the Trinity. Another virtue of The Shack is that it is impeccably Trinitarian, and raises up the Trinity as an emblem of the centrality of relationship to the divine nature.

So far, there seems to be very little disagreement between what I’ve been saying here and the Christology underpinning The Shack. The Jesus it presents is essentially a human being in perfect relationship with God, a configuration which is indistinguishable from God’s being in perfect relationship with Himself in human form. There is no discernible point on which The Shack’s Jesus is more or other than human; he represents, rather, the vanishing point at which divine self-limitation (The Shack understands kenosis primarily as surrendering divine potency or the ability to act as God) coincides with human other-actualisation (the capacity to be acted upon, or through, by God). His full divinity, in other words, is an in-filling of the human with the divine, which is simultaneously the full assumption by the Word of human nature.

Where I think The Shack goes wrong (or stops working for me) is in its image of redemption. The story takes a particular suffering human creature and shows its deepest wishes, for understanding, forgiveness and reconciliation, being fulfilled in a series of emotional tableaux. There are tears, there is laughter; the suffering creature comes to see itself as loved and known to a degree that its own capacity for self-love and self-knowledge cannot encompass. This may well be due to an emotional flaw in my own nature, but I found the whole sequence infuriatingly schmaltzy and pandering. The trouble is that it renders the divine love for the creature as an amplified, imaginary version of the creature’s self-love: “Jesus loves you” essentially as you love yourself, only more so, confirming your inner goodness and lovability. In between theology lessons, Mack is gently guided into the comfort zone of a pampered infant unshakeably assured that it sits at the centre of its parents’ libidinal universe. While in intellectual terms the trauma of his daughter’s abduction and murder is dealt with by rationalising divine non-intervention as kenotic self-limiting (God is a kind of agonizingly scrupulous pacifist), in emotional terms the remedy seems to be infantile regression.

Well, why not? Maybe that’s how one ought to feel. No doubt there’s more than a touch of hurt, angry pride in my refusal even to contemplate this as a valid emotional stance. But there is also a theological problem here. We have a notion of human perfectability, of which the icon is Christ, which rests wholly on relationship with God  precisely because we know - and this is Paul’s lesson - that human nature is a chaotic amalgam from which no innocent part can be extracted. The amalgam cannot be purged or partitioned in such a way as to make it uncomplicatedly good; the only thing to do with it is to surrender it to grace. Now this awareness, which is constantly refreshed by Bunyan, is sacrificed the moment we pose, in terms dictated by the creature’s own emotionally-needy agenda, an image of redemption as restored innocence, a fantasy of emotional purification and the accomplishment (in Mack’s case) of a kind of saintliness. If we understand healing as the gratification of a sick desire, then we have not understood the sickness.

This will perhaps seem callous. What the sick desire is to be well, and The Shack follows the conventions of self-help literature in constructing an image of wellness that involves the surrender of false notions about oneself, acceptance of the past, and a healthy confidence about the future which makes it bearable to live fully in the present. What’s absent from this picture is, essentially, angst, and the subjective torsion that it generates: the subject relieved of his angst is finally able to straighten himself out. But it is on just this point that Christianity differs, for better or worse, from the canon of self-help. The Christian tradition gives another name to angst: it calls it “consciousness of sin”. The dialectic of confession and forgiveness of sin works to transform sinful consciousness (the conscience twisted by angst) into consciousness of sin (the direct experience of angst as a subjective “pressure point”), and consequent repentance. Its purpose is not to evacuate the present of spiritual anxiety, but to make the causes of anxiety present so that they can be addressed.

The human creature cannot live fully in the present, because the present it inhabits is a fractured one (Augustine’s “land of unlikeness”). The Shack vividly portrays Jesus as living moment by moment in the presence of God, but confuses this somehow with being effortlessly comfortable in one’s own skin. Christlikeness is not insouciance. He sweated blood. The two “presents”, the temporal and the eternal, are not identical; the latter contains the former, but only at the cost of its complete transformation, a bit of heavy lifting that the Christian tradition calls, amongst other things, “judgement”. It may be that the root cause of my discomfort with The Shack is not Christological but eschatological: its message is that the temporal present is already, in its immanent unfolding, a moment of eternity; that apparent “chaos” is already the “fractal” creativity of the Spirit providentially at work in all things. This is a consoling message, a message of infinite mercy; but it misses - for me - the dimension of judgement, of what Karl Barth called God’s great No to the world. The melodic strain that is largely absent in The Shack, and heard at key moments throughout The Pilgrim’s Progress, is that of laus et vituperatio, praise and blame, witness to judgement. I missed it, and no amount of pathos about the self-defeating folly of human “independence” could quite make up the loss.

* Or perhaps not. Hat-tip to Alex Andrews for this link…

Jane Dark’s Sugarhigh! continues to post extracts from this, by the looks of things tremendous, publication. Today’s, on Sinead O’Connor’s reading of Prince’s Nothing Compares 2 U, especially caught my eye for what should by now be fairly obvious reasons:

But there is another way to describe the matter, intrinsic to the song and the particularity of its distant, echoey keen. This is in the attenuated shock of realizing that the song is beautiful anyway — that beauty is possible even in this death-in-life, this world where nothing can ever happen.

As promised, a response to questions about “militant dysphoria”. I’m going to respond very broadly rather than going point by point, and inevitably there will be some (good) points I won’t have addressed here; the purpose of this is to get some general orientation on a couple of areas that commentors highlighted as problematic.

A common thread seems to concerns the relationship between dysphoria as illness and dysphoria as sensibility. Obviously my interest is much more in the latter: Cold World is all about the “aesthetics of dejection”, and the kind of “unlife-world” towards which the dysphoric body comports itself. But the title of the last chapter is, nevertheless, “The Brain of Ulrike Meinhof”, and the question of whether a dysphoric sensibility might have some neurological* correlate is never far away.

I’m loathe to naturalise dysphoria - to say, for example, that some people just have certain sorts of brains - but at the same time it feels icky, at best, to culturalise it, to turn “the dysphoric” into a sort of modern equivalent of “the consumptive” (it would be useful at this point if I still had my copy of Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor to refer to). Part of the point of talking about the cold “world” is to emphasise that “the dysphoric” is always dysphoric relative to some situation of which s/he is an inhabitant. There is some virtue, here, in purposeful equivocation between the “natural” and the “cultural” - the term “sensibility” is itself difficult to locate precisely with respect to this opposition.

This plays a little like the impairment/disability distinction in the “social model” of disability, and there’s a useful parallel between the politics of “militant dysphoria” and that of disabled rights. One goal of disabled activists is to make the social world less practically disabling of people with various sorts of common impairments, less exclusively organized around the requirements and capacities of the “temporarily able-bodied”. Another, arguably more radical, is to critically dismantle the model of health, physical normality, performativity and so on that underpins the identification of the deaf or wheelchair-using person as “impaired” rather than simply different (difference being “what there is”). There is an oft-remarked tension between the broadly identitarian (or strategically essentialist) demand for rights, inclusion, recognition and so on, and the de-essentialising move towards a “generic” politics of suspending norms: the latter tends to undermine precisely the categories (”the deaf”, “the blind”, and so on) that the former uses as a basis for identification.

With respect to dysphoria, we might focus critical attention on both the notion of neurotypicality and the social formatting of sensibility, its normative standardization (an operation not broadly incompatible with “diversity”, so long as the latter can be cleanly segmented into discrete demographics). A key difference here, poignantly evoked in Naomi Klein’s No Logo, is that between the individuation of subcultures, which is a function of human creativity responding to the particularity of its circumstances, and the “branded” reification of subcultural identities for marketing purposes. I’m not willing to give up on individuation, “shared communities of practice” and other figures of emergent collectivity just because there’s a rapaciously efficient axiomatic machine waiting to reterritorialise them as soon as they achieve any visible consistency, but clearly this is a problem.

Part of the solution, it seems to me, is to try to derive the generic consequences (to grasp the trans-worldly truths) of any particular individuation: what, for example, did the practical experimentation of militant lesbian separatists in the 1970s have to teach everyone about the construction and defence of spaces of physical and psychological autonomy, or the political dimension of sexual orientation? (At present, the dominant subjectivation of this moment is reactive, identifying it only with the catalogue of its failures and pathologies, declaring its only “truth” to lie in its eventual, inevitable-with-hindsight exhaustion. The fact is that these women accomplished something, and that we have all but lost the ability to say what it was). What have goths, as a subculture, to show in the way of the creative reconfiguration of dysphoria and social negativity? Can we demonstrate the compossibility of these truths?

* An earlier version of this post had “neuropathic” here - which sounded right but wasn’t (or at least I’d have a hard time defending the usage against the standard sense the word has in medical terminology - not an argument I want to be having…)

Misi ergo ad eos nuncios dicens: opus grande ego facio et non possum discendere; cur cessare oportet opus, si desistero et discendero ad vos. - Nehemiah 6:3

That’s (in Latin) the epigraph of Geoffrey Hill’s The Triumph of Love, about which possibly more soon. I started a project - a PhD thesis, no less - on Hill that I didn’t finish, for reasons I imagine I understand better now than I did at the time; thinking of it as an “opus grande” probably didn’t help.

My eye was drawn to this headline in today’s Grauniad: Britain needs anger management. Not to calm the fury, but to gather its force. In order to effect, apparently, constitutional reform. Well, that would be something to warm up with, I suppose.

Do go and listen to Evan’s selection of “anti-dysphoric” BM. As it happens, I agree: there can be a euphoric anger, a joyous collective raging: as Evan says, “all feeling like Satanic hawks carrying toxic bone spears forged from a lost past when we knew how to be together and fight for something we loved enough to mourn its loss with yells and noise and rasps, not the soft mewing whimper of the retreat to the darkened room”. Which sounds a bit Fight Club, a bit Iron John, not to mention a bit middle-class-football-hooligan. But it pinpoints something about the pleasures of that particular variety of headbanging atavism, and should certainly be retained as a data point in our ongoing investigation of the genre…

Alex and others ask various good questions in comments on the preceding posts - my immediate response in almost all cases is “how the heck should I know?” - but one can always, with a litle effort, do better than that, so I’ll try to address them in a round-up later on…

1969, just prior to going underground. She looks, here, simply depressed - the body language screams at you - agitated and heavy at the same time. Not a good way to be:

Here she is in 1967, groomed and made-up, speaking on television. Some of the mannerisms are there - the downward glance, looking away - but she turns back to face the camera, speaks emphatically, raises her eyebrows in punctuation. The self-presentation is challengingly articulate and intelligent; this is not some yahoo malcontent ranting about the evils of society, but a serious person defending a serious position:

Lieber wütend als traurig.

What is political engagement for those under the enchantment of the state? In thought, it is the browsing of newspapers; in deed, the conduct of “high-profile” media campaigns. What the papers say, and what one says about it in one’s turn, constitutes the fabric of “political” discourse, the world of current affairs. What “The Concept of the Urban Guerrilla” metonymises as “the Springer press” is this manufactured un-world, a simulacrum which absorbs and sublimates political discontent, refashioning it as opinion. For Meinhof, herself a successful journalist prior to her conversion to the cause of armed struggle, the entire world of political discussion, from the bully-pulpit oration of newspaper columnists to the obscure and earnest analyses of leftist groups, is simply a means by which potentially revolutionary displeasure is cathected, dissipated, drawn off and recirculated. The passage from concerned leftist political discourse to concerted militant activism is a passage from that which soothes, placates and mollifies to that which concentrates displeasure and directs it towards its source: a militant dysphoria.

Cold World, forthcoming

As I’ve already suggested in the comments to previous posts on this subject, if “militant dysphoria” seemed like a good idea to Ulrike Meinhof then one ought to be exceedingly careful with it. My gut feeling about Meinhof is that she was smart, angry and committed, and worth listening to even if only to understand the ways in which smart, angry and committed people can get things dreadfully wrong (in a word, or two: “bourgeois adventurism”).

Anyway, above you have what Cold World presents as (a) militant dysphoria: “that which concentrates displeasure and directs it towards its source”. The oppositions in play in this passage are concentration/dissipation, direction/recirculation and potential/actual (”potentially revolutionary displeasure” versus displeasure actualized through “militant activism”). There’s a sort of folk-physics of anger at work here; the Freudian terminology (”cathected”) should give some sort of clue as to its genealogy. These are roughly the terms I think Meinhof was thinking in; and one can certainly see in a project like Capitalism and Schizophrenia an attempt to think somewhat beyond those terms, to move beyond the impasses they seem to commit one to.

In what I’ve been saying about dysphoria as “predicament” and militancy as “stance”, there’s the implication that what matters politically is not how dysphoric you are, or whether your dysphoria is authentic enough, but whether your “subjective position” (to borrow a phrase) with respect to that dysphoria is one of helpless, self-blaming inarticulacy or whether it can find some symbolic articulation through a collective political project.

A subtlety here is that the fantasy-omnipotent, other-blaming stridency of a personal vendetta against the world remains, at its core, fundamentally inarticulate: it reverses the polarity of the “abject” subject position, but does not dissolve it. That is partly why I want to reject the notion that “militant dysphoria” should aim at making the world conform to what suits me personally (you wouldn’t like such a world; but, crucially, neither would I: a world conformed to my organic pleasures would not display, in others, the lineaments of gratified desire). By “symbolic articulation” I mean speech that links with other speech, acts that link with other acts, such that the linkages form a chain which extends beyond the limited breadth and scope of the personal. The point, if you like, is to raise up the private burden within the common weal.

A point I should have thought was obvious - but you can’t rely on these things - is that I’m not endorsing dysphoria as a good or better way to be, or saying that one should cultivate one’s dysphoria or learn to (pretend to) be dysphoric. The message here is not: dysphoria is the new black, the new ego-supplement. When I say that goth is a dysphoric subculture, I don’t mean we should all go goth because, hey, those guys are really good at being dysphoric. Nor should we all sit around wearing hair-shirts and watching the most brutal movies we can find, in order to discover our inner dysphorics. Really, honestly: fuck all that.

It’s as if readers of Oliver James’s Affluenza took away from it the message that the affluent should all try to be more miserable about their affluence, that the misery it generated was its redeeming feature. Or as if readers of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble concluded that the best way to undermine patriarchy was for us all to play at being transsexuals. (Oh…wait…)

Dysphoria is, to repeat my own words, a stance and a predicament, a stance taken in response to a predicament. It is an incapacity with respect to a norm, not a deliberate transgression of it. It is not something you choose; it is a difficulty you find yourself saddled with. If you happen not to have that particular difficulty, don’t worry: I for one won’t think you’re any less cool. The dysphoric are not the elect.

What is it men in women do require.
The lineaments of Gratified Desire.
What is it women do in men require.
The lineaments of Gratified Desire.

Contrary to expectations, the older I get the more I appreciate Blake.

Since the phrase appears prominently on the cover of my book (Cold World, which I hope will see the light of day around September of this year), I feel I ought to give some account of what I mean by “militant dysphoria”.

The key notion is that taking pleasure in things requires a synthesis of experience. “Unbound” stimuli are often not immediately assignable as pleasurable or painful. An aspect of socialization is learning to enjoy certain things, to find the pleasure in them. It is probably quite spontaneously pleasurable to suck on a mother’s teat while simultaneously filling one’s nappy, but enjoying things like picnics (where the pleasures of the afternoon have to be separated out from a good deal of troublesome nuisance - wasps and suchlike) or classical music is another matter. The naturalization of social forms, like going on picnics or attending classical music concerts, goes hand in hand with the naturalization of pleasures. It is antisocial not to enjoy the things one’s peers enjoy.

This certainly applies to sexual pleasure, and the social pleasures of courtship. Not liking or wanting sex is pathologised; sexual release is characterized as a natural urge, a biological need. People for whom the urge is weak or the need uncompelling are commonly regarded, and even tend to regard themselves, as defective in some way, although less monstrous than those who deliberately suppress and deny their appetites. Sexual frigidity is something you try to get yourself cured of (but for whom?). W. H. Auden’s memorable phrase “the distortions of ingrown virginity”, and his poem “Miss Gee” about a buttoned-up spinster who dies of a cancer presumed to have been somehow brought on by thwarted libido, typify the vulgar Freudianism (and later Reichianism) that correlated sexual expression with creative vitality. The healthy organism is one that enjoys intercourse - and, it goes without saying, the social dance of sexual negotiation. Don’t be shy.

The hallmarks of goth subculture are a disdain for “natural”, “healthy” pleasures and an inclination towards “unnatural”, “unhealthy” ones, an embrace of “morbidity” in place of “vitality”, and a valorization of “deep” - reserved but meaningful - social interaction over “shallow” gregariousness. These predilections are typically understood as ways of engineering and emphasizing social “difference”, affirming a subcultural identity based on nonconformity, with all the usual pitfalls (snobbery, in-group conformism, bad faith) that entails. But I think this misses the point: the fundamental motivation for goths is not wanting to be different (a banal ambition that they share with everybody else) but an inability to accomplish the syntheses of experience that make up the consensual pleasures of teenage (and “adultescent”) life. Goth is a dysphoric subculture: if its adherents describe themselves as “outcasts”, this is not mere posturing (for all that their social position may in fact be quite comfortably secure) but reflects an acute apprehension of being on the outside of what others promote as “life”.

Dysphoria, then, is not merely discomfort or unease, but specifically non-pleasure in what is “normally” pleasurable. This may take the form of a chimerical jumble of sensation, a feeling of unpleasant “wrongness” (such as that recorded by the lesbian crime writer Patricia Highsmith on attempting heterosexual intercourse with a male partner), or it may come out as a numb confusion, a feeling of dissociation in which nothing connects (the disaffection felt at one time or another by most adolescents). We tend now to interpret such dysphoria as a symptom of mistaken identity: the person who expresses an aversion towards heterosexual intercourse is assumed to be a closet homosexual, the person who finds that his or her male or female body “feels wrong” is understood to be in need of gender reassignment, and so on. Eventually we hope that the disaffected adolescent will “find himself”, and will begin to feel comfortable in his own skin. But there is something superstitious about the assumption that problems of identity formation are always caused by the secret, disrupting presence of another identity, either a “true” identity that has yet to be revealed or a “false”, demonic identity that has to be exorcised. There is something about the body that cannot fit itself into its environment, that is painfully at odds with its world, that cannot be explained or resolved in this way.

Where this joins up with a political perspective is that the stance or predicament of dysphoria often finds itself confronted by mandatory pleasures: compulsory (hetero-)sexuality, the comforts of domesticity, the various amusements and distractions offered by consumerism. There are certainly worse problems to have, of course; the point here is not to plead for the special awfulness of privileged Western middle class existence. Only where the management of society takes place through the management of enjoyment, where marketing and public relations are among the dominant forms of public discourse, does the dysphoric body achieve any kind of visibility (as the conspicuous absence of pleasure, where it is decreed that pleasure should be) or public significance. Nevertheless, in such contexts, the dysphoric body is a problem, and a political problem to boot. Because its imaginary is incompatible with the imaginary projected by the dominant ideology, it can become the support of an imaginary negation, what I call the “counterfactual” will that the world be other than it is.

“Militant dysphoria”, or “politicised unpleasure”, is a name for the shift from experiencing dysphoria as a personal pathology (depression, anhedonia, guilt) to recognizing that the syntheses of experience that bind together all but the most rudimentary pleasures are part of a larger cybernetic network: personal “dysfunction” must be understood in the context of this system and its (naturalised) functions. The aim is not to reform the world so that one will at last be comfortable in it (what suits me wouldn’t suit you, just as what suits you doesn’t suit me), but to be able to suspend the verdict of pleasure where it serves reactionary political ends.

Labour MP John McDonnell has given his backing to the cleaners.

He said said: “As living wage campaigns build in strength, we are increasingly seeing the use of immigration statuses to attack workers fighting against poverty wages.

“The message is that they are happy to employ migrant labour on poverty wages, but if you complain they will send you back home.

“It is absolutely shameful.”

Yes.

One of the occupying students said: “Universities should be sanctuaries, places free of violence and aggression.

“SOAS’s reputation as a university has been tainted due to the complicity with state brutality in the arrest of the cleaners.”

Yes.

“Every program eventually becomes rococo, and then rubble.” - Alan Perlis (talking about software systems, but you get my drift…)

Do read Reza on unbinding and complicity (and bear in mind that “nested interiorities”, e.g. containment hierarchies, are very close to some of the topological notions I’ve been discussing here recently).

I have it in mind to do some posts on the mathematics of decay, contagion, convolution and so on; the point would be to prove that rigorous systematicity is entirely compatible with the development of these topics, and can even push them beyond our “spontaneous” conceptions of them in interesting and possibly counter-intuitive ways. What’s more, there are demonstrable sonic and visual correlates to some of the operations I’d want to talk about, which might help to persuade people that there was some effective, material etc. dimension to the otherwise rather abstract entities under discussion.

Sod the lot of yer! I’ll defend Badiou to the last…

…er…

…hang on, where’s everybody going?

In the last paragraph of Alex Williams’s Badiou piece, he mixes up (or so it seems to me) an objection to Mark K-Punk’s characterization of the present political conjuncture as “a new year Zero” with an objection to (Badiou’s or, we must suppose, anyone at all’s) systematic philosophy, which supposedly maintains the mirage of “a purified realm, somewhere apart from the rot of the flesh”, a kind of clean room or sterilized environment for the birthing of pristine subjects. Although both of the targets of Alex’s polemic are, in my view, defensible, I don’t especially want to try to defend them together, because I don’t think they particularly belong together; having partly addressed the latter in my previous post, in this post I’ll concentrate largely on the former.

It is a matter of political narrative: how do we tell the story of what is happening to us right now? Control of the story is, as Thatcher learned quite early on and Blair seems to have understood from the beginning, key to the effectiveness of any political programme pursued in the parliamentary-capitalist sphere. A Conservative government under David Cameron will have a particular story to tell about why the various austerity measures it will try to push through are painful but necessary, disciplinary actions undertaken for the sake of the nation’s morals. What they will mean is “painful for you, necessary for us“. The danger we are facing here is that this will turn out to be the “year Zero” of a rebooted neo-liberalism, with privatization (of the post offices, the health service, prisons, roads…) once again touted as the only way to increase the “efficiency” of a public infrastructure we can no longer afford. Labour has already effectively capitulated to this narrative, promising to cushion the blows that must inevitably fall but still insisting, with a truly bizarre dedication to unreality, that the electorate will not forgive them if they fail to uphold the “tough decisions” that will be dictated to them by - in all probability - the IMF. This is not a process that I wish to see pursued “all the way down” - it’s done enough damage already. We need a compelling counter-narrative, one that can uphold the premise that neo-liberalism has failed, is wholly and irreparably discredited, and should be forcibly repudiated.

It isn’t as a systematic philosopher that Badiou turns out to be a useful ally here, but as a trenchant opponent of Sarkozyism whose conjunctural analysis identifies the need to nominate and defend particular “points” against the disorientation of electoral politics and the imposition of managerial necessity. The question of “management” here is not the same as the question of “organization”, and the difference is precisely one of class and class interests. A coinage such as “conspiratorial management”, while attractive on the face of it, blurs this useful distinction to no useful purpose. Public anger can be mobilized around issues where the stakes are clear and the difference between “their” interests and “ours” produces a visible antagonism; the points and prescriptions of Badiou’s political interventions are chosen for their polemical potential, their divisiveness. Quite where anybody gets the notion that this - in certain respects classically “French Maoist” - view of what is to be done is “prissy” I’m not sure. The antagonisms here are not between “cleanliness” and “contagion” but between - to a first approximation - those who are concerned with what they make and do, and those who are concerned with securing the profit their class derives from what (mostly other) people make and do. The “corruption” of the latter is not their motive, to be opposed by a purer motive, but their ontological signature, the subjective form their objective interests call into being and inscribe under the banner of worldly realism. To oppose this “realism” is not to seek a purer realm, but an alternative, painstakingly “worlded”, subjective figure.

I rather imagine Alex Williams picking up his copy of Logics of Worlds for the third or fourth time, turning at random to a page somewhere in the middle of the exposition of the “materialist postulate” with respect to objects and their real atoms, and sighing forlornly to himself. Is it worth another slog up the Hill Difficulty? Even clevver branes need a rest sometimes. The libidinal exhaustion of his “I Hate Badiou” post is recognizably that of a serious theory-head recovering from the Stockholm Syndrome induced by a previous pass through the migraine barrier. It doesn’t sound, to be honest, like he really hates Badiou; he just…doesn’t love him any more.

I can sympathise - of course! - with the dejection expressed in Alex’s portrait of Badiou’s system as “a ridiculous hyper-structure of nonsense piled upon nonsense, an unsteady philosophical folly…a ziggurat of ruins” (very like a Xasthur song title, that last phrase). Really, who wants to climb that thing? Why not just stand back and let it topple into ruins, exposing the “minimalist elegance” of the “ontological position” on which it was erected? Why not, in fact, make a virtue of this standing-back and letting-topple? Perhaps even, in the spirit of Ballard’s late story about the fall of the leaning tower of Pisa, give it a little push…?

I don’t myself find Logics of Worlds nonsensical, although it is at times mischievously baroque. As with Being and Event, the core question is whether the mathematical framework, which is exact but necessarily non-referential, can obtain any purchase on the inexact but referentially rich domain of human sense. This is not unlike the problem I face on a daily basis in my work as a software engineer, trying to mediate between specifications made up of such nebulous entities as “business requirements” and implementations which take the form of computer programs. There’s no programming language sufficiently close to the way human beings make sense of the world for non-programmers to be able to use it comfortably, and there’s no human-friendly specification language exact and unambiguous enough to be machine-translated directly into code. There’s also good reason to think that the gap between the two domains is uncloseable: what programmers do, like Badiou galloping back and forth between “the poem” and “the matheme”, is try to effect a cogent, if at times “unsteady”, translation between them.

With Being and Event, the wager is that “the thought of the Cantorian multiple” can be apprehended philosophically as ontology. Hanging off that wager is a second, even more tenuous, supposition: that what orthodox (Zermelo-Fraenkel) set theory rules out can be used as the basis for a theory of the event as ontological exception. I’ve always been a bit dubious about the both the philosophical specification (that an event must be ontologically anomalous) and the mathematical implementation (the mathème of the anomaly is that of a non-well-founded multiple, or a set that has itself as one of its elements), but nevertheless it’s reasonably evident that there’s a “fit” of some kind between the two. Logics of Worlds raises the stakes by calling on a somewhat higher-order mathematical language, and taking as its domain of specification the multifarious “worlds” of phenomenal appearance, but Badiou is engaged in essentially the same kind of operation as before.

In Nihil Unbound Ray Brassier makes the objection that the binding between the domains of mathematics and philosophy in Being and Event is radically insecure: in particular, there’s no mathematical rule or ontological norm that establishes how “ontological [mathematical] situations” relate to “non-ontological situations”. His conclusion, like Alex’s, is that Badiou’s ontology should be prized for its minimalist elegance, but finally regarded as the inscription on the tombstone of ontology itself: its virtue lies in its demonstration that ontology, to be “mathematically” consistent, must so thoroughly evacuate itself of referential pertinence that it is no longer the ontology “of” anything. Once this demonstration has been effected, there’s ultimately no need to carry on system-building, adding rococo flourishes to the empty scaffolding. From this perspective, an enterprise like Logics of Worlds appears both quixotic and otiose.

My response here is to suggest that asking for a radically secure binding between philosophy and one of the domains it takes as a “condition” is asking for a relationship of translation to be turned into one of domination: either philosophy must become maths (or politics, etc.), or vice versa. It is of course a compulsion of philosophy itself to attempt this kind of self-founding domination of its conditions, and although Badiou explicitly repudiates this compulsion, he does not always successfully resist it. But the “shakiness” of the structure, its failure to accomplish a complete and self-validating consistency, is not immediately its ruin. Alex is too hasty, in my view, in announcing the degringolade of Badiou’s philosophical system, which like any work of translation is a production of time in love with eternity. Like any major philosophical work, Logics of Worlds establishes its own duration. It will rot in its own sweet time.

UPDATE: Of course Alex said a whole lot of other things, which I had a vague notion I might get around to addressing in a later post…but as Reid Kotlas has done such a stunning job, I suggest you just go and read him…

POSTSCRIPT: Readers under the age of 30 may need the pun in the title of this post explaining to them. I hadn’t realized that the actress who played Marmalade Atkins (the late Charlotte Coleman) later played Jess in the television adaptation of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. And then the slightly “punky” one in Four Weddings And A Funeral. That means I’ve fancied her* in three entirely distinct contexts, without realizing it was the same person…

* Obviously I don’t perve over Marmalade Atkins any more. Who do you think I am, Lawrence Miles?