Dysphoria revisited
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.
June 16th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
Excellent stuff. I’m very much looking forward to your book as it chimes with a lot of the ideas I have had about my own life, and which I see expressed everywhere in our culture.
A couple of thoughts though :
I think your use of the gothic sub-culture as a touchstone is fascinating as goth is mainly a teenaged sub-culture and I think you feel the authoritarian nature of hedonism a lot more acutely as a teenager as a failure to acknowledge the consensual reality of drink-sex-drugs-parties can lead to you getting beaten up and bullied by authority figures who insist that if you tried these things you would enjoy them. By contrast, as an adult, the refusal to buy into that reality results only in marginalisation. It’s only half a step from “that bloke’s a bit… odd” to “I think there’s a mental health issue there”.
On an unrelated note, where do you stand on dysphoric experiences in the arts? For example, I’m thinking of the masochistic aspects of experiencing a Horror film and the disgusting/shocking aspects of films such as Irreversible or In My Skin or indeed the nihilistic and depressive aspects of films such as Ken Park or Requiem for a Dream. Are these not examples of dysphoric pleasures?
June 16th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
Dominic, this sounds really great. I’m looking forward to reading it when it comes out.
June 16th, 2009 at 2:53 pm
of course I can’t wait to read this, but in the meantime, this short text conjured up the memory of Billy Connolly describing how the appreciation of nature has to be enforced onto children : “Sky, Mountains, Trees, in that order – repeat after me – OOH, AAH, THAT’S NICE!” “oh ah, that’s nice.” (smack).
June 16th, 2009 at 7:00 pm
I just posted comparing your outline of militant dysphoria to the BwO (apologies in advance)– I wonder if you think these two approaches to resistance differ significantly, or if they are entirely incompatible…
June 16th, 2009 at 8:23 pm
The difference, if I can put this succinctly, is between saying that the dysphoric body “can become the support of an imaginary negation”, and saying that it is already, through its immediate acts and passions, that negation in practice. In fact there are all kinds of problems involved in making the passage from imaginary negation to practical action; if this is not to be a futile acting-out, it needs some cogent symbolic articulation – which bring us, I think, into the domain of the collective.
Other than that, are D&G’s schizos and “my” dysphorics so far apart? Clearly they’re both very localised digressions from a general regime of “functional” cybernetic effectiveness – points where that regime’s ability to format experience breaks down somewhat (I wouldn’t say completely). I get the impression that for D&D the schizo “out for a stroll” is already, immanently, a vector of deterritorialisation. For me this is a sort of “left deviation”, a mirror-image of the “right deviation” that automatically assigns the schizo to the role of permanently-narcotised hospital inmate (or the dysphoric to that of impotently miserable self-harming teenager) – a real danger, but not the only way things can go.
Jonathan M asks, above, about horror movies; you mention S&M. Certainly there’s a scrambling of “pleasure” and “pain” in both instances; to that extent they perhaps resemble (for the person who doesn’t find them simply pleasurable, or simply painful) the dysphoric experience of “normal” life. Personally I find that experience one that I want to avoid, in the same way and for much the same reasons as people with Asperger’s tend to avoid situations full of complex social cues. (Are there masochistic autists who deliberately seek out such situations, for the thrill of becoming agitated and overwhelmed?). I’m happy to accept watching horror movies as a way to denaturalise scopophilia, or S&M as a way to denaturalise sex (“anti-genital tantras”, indeed; I quite like this phrase), but both perform their own renaturalisations (in particular, retrenching the notion of the “adult consumer” who can always yelp the safeword or hit the stop button*), and are arguably simulations of a state the actual dysphoric is usually trying to get out of.
* Gaspar Noé wages a singular war against this notion, staging in Irreversible a trauma that cannot be un-experienced. Or so I’m told – I find the film interesting to read about, but on the whole would prefer not to allow M. Noé to prove his point on me.
June 16th, 2009 at 11:54 pm
“Are there masochistic autists who deliberately seek out such situations, for the thrill of becoming agitated and overwhelmed?”
I was talking to a friend the other day, eating breakfast over the the Werner Herzog interview in the Times on Sunday. We’ve often idly noted that Herzog’s mannerisms recall Aspergers, and in the Times interview Herzog almost obsessively repeats that he does not have routine in his day, does not know what will happen.
We were speculating if this might be one way of dealing with Aspergers – rather than the classic lurch towards routines, you deny yourself routines naturalise the experience and into the bargain ensure that you don’t experience the thwarting of a desire (for routine) because you’ve ruled out that possibility in advance.
This is all ridiculously speculative – and I think our pathologisation of Herzog is a bit dubious, not to mention patronising. I wouldn’t have dragged it outside of the land of idle chat except for the fact that I thought the idea that came out of it was interesting and chimed with your points here.
June 17th, 2009 at 6:28 pm
I see…well, there is also a danger in “glamorizing” what can be a very scary and debilitating illness, and that is the question that haunts me most, partially from a medical perspective but also just a ‘human’ one–it’s easy to say that becoming-schizophrenic is a lofty goal when you don’t have to be one everyday, or to take those heavy medications just to manage your life. So I try to make some distinction between what can be achieved through real or organic illness and what is just a political pose meant to be a sympathetic, public stance with schizophrenics and the pathologized against all that it means to be “normal” (maybe this could be called hysterical schizophrenia). Not really an easy task, especially when one has organic problems of one’s own.
You’re right, in a way– the first unspoken rule of S/M is that nobody ever uses safewords, although their existence and importance is essential to the mythology. But how do we avoid retrenching our ideals with some notion of the adult consumer when that’s what–for better or obviously for worse–we all are from the perspective of the global markets?
I don’t know about Herzog, but I’ve half suspected Zizek might have alternately extreme ADD, a cocaine problem, and/or mild autism, in some combination, after seeing a few documentaries featuring him. It could just be that he’s excitable, I don’t know. I’ve read that there are new treatments for autism getting decent results–they’re just intensive (involve daily therapy), expensive, and reliant on early intervention.
June 19th, 2009 at 9:49 am
Forgive me if my question has been covered elsewhere on your blog, I’ve only just stumbled across it.
This is an excellent piece, and your characterisation of the position of goth certainly rang true (the taunt of ‘you’re just trying to be different’ always seemed so beside the point to me, as a goth), but I’m concerned that militant dysphoria may be another type of identity politics. The problem with identity politics is that ideology is not just immune to them but can actually assimilate them; shifting identities (queer, rebel, etc) become in danger of sliding into just more consumer choices under capitalism. Does the dysphoric stance hold a privileged position against this?
June 21st, 2009 at 3:44 am
Ello to the author of this fascinating post. I just read this and thought it was dead interesting, I read it as a link from the kpunk blog which I sometimes read. I think I may well find ur book very much worth reading. I would like to ask a question though which is, would you say that your literature would be comprehensible to someone who has not studied or read much 20th century philosophy? Or would it require a background in fairly complicated terminology? If you would like to reply to my question by commenting here or email, please do
Cheers
June 21st, 2009 at 7:48 am
The book’s not too heavy on the philosophy, although I say that having lived with the jargon for so long that it no longer looks like jargon to me. There is a fair sprinkling of unusual words in it, as the copy editor pointed out to me a while back (have a guess what “cacotopia” means…), but it’s not generally built around a scaffolding of unusual words pointing to other unusual words (“now the quasi-phenomenality of the arche-fossil eventuates as a kind of cryptontological efflorescence, whose divagations we will schematise over the following 13 chapters…”), as much as that kind of thing amuses me. If you can hack k-punk, you should be able to get on with OK…
June 22nd, 2009 at 12:20 am
Thanks for the reply, great. I just finished doing an Int Relations degree and have found thinking about social science in an academic context at times fascinating and at other times, deeply frustrating. Off to work now but, like with the interest in the book, I would like to keep half an eye on the world of liberation headscratching!