Dysphoria: not a lifestyle choice
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.
June 17th, 2009 at 7:55 am
Yes, but James isn’t talking about militant affluenza, is he? I think that’s what’s confusing about this. I think, honestly, a further articulation of the militancy aspect would help to answer a lot of my questions. As of now, you’ve got a description of (gothic) ahediona, a way of seeing that as structural rather than personal, and then a sort of unanchored polemical swing toward making a politics of this.
Of course, not your problem that I don’t understand. I can certainly wait to read the book, and look forward to doing so!
June 17th, 2009 at 8:48 am
and another thing; perhaps the theorisation of dysphoria will be usefully applicable in discussions of ‘harm’ at the more analytical end of Philosophy.
I often find that kind of work (after Parfitt) very difficult to appreciate due to its deeply basic notion of ‘harms’ and ‘benefits’ (most often, uncontroversially pain=bad pleasure=good). A position on dysphoria would have greatly improved ‘Better Never to Have Been’, for example…
June 17th, 2009 at 8:56 am
Prior art.
June 17th, 2009 at 6:40 pm
Would have sent this in an email, but I couldn’t find your address.
A band I think you’d love:
http://cosmichearse.blogspot.com/2009/06/raate.html
Also, I’m writing a response to the whole Badiou betrayal debate from a black metal + Tronti perspective that focuses less on the aesthetics/politics of dejection and more on the wolfish antagonism and sense of a world that has historically betrayed us, rather than the sickness of suicidal/depressive BM. I’ll let you know when it’s up.
June 17th, 2009 at 6:54 pm
Dominic- I have many sympathies with this line of thought, but some questions (which may well be answered in the book)… Your vision of dysphoria is (in a manner not so different to Mark Fisher’s) essentially a structural, impersonal pathology (a social pathology)- no choice, no decision, not to be emulated. But beyond a critical diagnostic, how are we to develop this further? The issue appears to be of, once dysphoria is identified as properly social, collective, (non-privatised) how to organise it, and that is the difficulty, how to arrange ensembles of negativity (or at least, affective withdrawal or subtraction). The other question I have is as to what you said at the end of the other post on dysphoria, which was that the aim is not to work upon a praxis to erase the dysphoric relation, to flip it into pleasure, enjoyment, etc (a better enjoyment)… but rather to be able to “suspend the verdict of pleasure where it serves reactionary political ends”… if the extension of dysphoria itself is not the means to do this (no educative programme of emiseration) then where does the politicisation occur?
Finally- is capitalism not quite able to comodify dysphoria into saleable products? And is not dysphoria more than merely either an endogenous property of certain brains or a visceral (pre-political?) affective response to unpalletable situations/stimuli, that it is actually a learned response, a refined form of specific socialisation? And wither the relation then to misanthropy (and the other qualities of a prospective “cold-world”– those which have a more complex relation to capitalism- anti-empathic conditions like sociopathy, antisocial behaviour disorders, autism etc…?
June 17th, 2009 at 7:08 pm
I guess we might talk about Ligotti here- or the gothic libidinal economy more generally– in plain words, it must “do” something for them- serve a psychological purpose (perhaps to protect from relation to that which is deemed unenjoyable)- but moreover there must be a degree of enjoyment here (even Ligotti continues to write, after all- a purely withdrawn “frozen” anhedonic would surely be incapable of anything, an Agambenian instance of bare life, a tick in a jar in a lab, utterly paralysed, on the border of non-life- babies in limbo and all that…). Since the aim is broadly political (however we might want to construe that) pure remove or absolute inactivity is surely out of the question- and hence the iciness of the cold world is only so from the perspective of the hegemonic form of libidinal economy (to enjoy the enjoyable)- which forbids the enjoyment of the unenjoyable- there is a strong element of the perverse here surely? But that would seem to simply fold everything back into a competitive set of enjoyments…
June 17th, 2009 at 8:25 pm
But simply saying that there’s a place for dysphoria in political resistance is not to say that it is “good” or a “better” way to be, simply that it is a means to an end, and that it can be very instrumental in achieving goals.
This is where the issue keeps getting confused. There are certain goals that are posited (resistance to the status quo, or norms, or broadly, capitalism) and everyone agrees on these being worthy goals. But then if anyone makes a suggestion regarding how a person might go about achieving these goals, whether through organic means or through genuine effort, this person’s suggestions instantly morph into a set of “prescribed” behaviors that rely on clearcut notions of “good” and “bad” or “good” and “evil”. Why is a suggestion or a proposed method always a prescription? I don’t think it is. Deleuze and Guattari didn’t think it was. No one, to my knowledge, thinks you were making a prescriptive claim.
But it is true that on the one hand, you seem to be saying that the only way to be militantly dysphoric is if you are organically unable to function socially in a non-neurotic manner, to the point where this brings you a negative jouissance, but on the other, that there is no one way to resist that is “better” than others, so there’s no reason to bother making an effort to become dysphoric. What’s organic and what isn’t, when it comes to affects and general “orientations” toward the world, is a complex issue, as I’m sure you realize. Which came first, the lack of social engagement or the dysphoria? I’m not so sure that dysphoria only comes second. I think it can and often does come first.
You can see how it is difficult for people to understand why you are glad to describe your personal social dissatisfaction, or the dissatisfaction of a particular subculture, and the forms this takes, as entirely organic and organically “pure” (i.e. lacking in effort or performative gesture) while denouncing anyone else’s discomfort or methods of managing this discomfort because they are not identical to the “goth” kind.
June 17th, 2009 at 9:21 pm
“even Ligotti continues to write,”
exactly. I think this problem is crucial. Even he gets his jouissance…
Is it the case that anhedonic dysphoria can only lead to a kind of Derridean aporetic injunction politics? I imagine you’d say no, Dominic, but I’ll just have to wait and read I suppose.
June 17th, 2009 at 9:41 pm
Oh, great, now I’m valorising pure, natural, spontaneous dysphoria (my own special, personal kind) over other people’s made-up dysphorias…
You can certainly make yourself dysphoric – people paint themselves into all kinds of corners – and it can be undertaken as a sort of deliberate exercise too (in the book, I describe black metal as having the character of a kind of perverse “spiritual” exercise, related to religious asceticism etc.). There is no clear distinction to be drawn between self- and socially-inflicted distress, since it’s in the very nature of a “cybernetic” system of the kind we’re talking about that its “inflictions” are all self-inflictions at one level or another of its functioning. Finally, yes, there is something to be said for finding what distresses you and getting to know it better – S&M / going to Swans concerts / posting on Dissensus or whatever can all be tools for exploration in this area.
I don’t see myself as saying that “the only way to be militantly dysphoric” is to be “organically” dysphoric. The “militant” aspect has to do with the character of the stance one takes with respect to the predicament, not the predicament itself or how one ended up in it. Passive, self-blaming misery is one stance; kritical, gothic-gnostic Durcharbeitung is another. The latter becomes “militant” when it becomes symbolically articulated, whether through some collective political project or through artistic creation (as in the later poetry of Geoffrey Hill, but that’s a topic for another post). But as the examples I’ve discussed so far should make painfully clear, there are a lot of ways this can go very badly wrong; the point of talking about Baader-Meinhof, for example, is not to gush about how cool they were but to see where they went wrong, what they were fundamentally most wrong about.
June 17th, 2009 at 9:45 pm
I think the question of the “fold” (unpleasure->pleasure, speculation->return, dysfunction->commodification) is crucial in all this. Folds don’t just happen. Closed systems have to work to close themselves. Dysphoria marks the place of an interval.
June 17th, 2009 at 10:32 pm
I’m ‘organically’ dysphoric to the point where it’s life-threatening (I wouldn’t count something like Dissensus–if you can find dysphoria on a message board I’d wonder how bad you really have it). I spent most of my life not medically treating this, and bad things happened. Now I take medications everyday that would render the average person immobile, just to be able to sit here typing, or to get up and do anything. Should I stop taking medications? These are very pressing questions for some people.
What I’m getting at is that I’m not sure what you mean by dysphoria, since what I’ve experienced of it did not seem very amenable to militancy. So I’ve tried to think of non-organic forms, let’s call them dysphoric activities, actions that help amplify a feeling dysphoria, or create a dysphoric atmosphere or situation that can be read politically, in order to locate the locus of dysphoric political potential.
Anyway, I thought you were someone who criticized Deleuze because he encouraged people to make “symbolic” articulations of political militancy rather than directly political ones?
June 17th, 2009 at 11:41 pm
I wouldn’t count something like Dissensus–if you can find dysphoria on a message board I’d wonder how bad you really have it
The sound of a joke sailing over someone’s head, there.
June 18th, 2009 at 6:07 pm
How hilarious.