The sound of a joke sailing over someone’s head, there.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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…?

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.