Cheers

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?

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.

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.

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.