“Private faces in public places”
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.
June 18th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
Interesting you mention a “folk-physics of anger” here- how would you position the relation between anger, hate/misnathropy, and dysphoria? Anger as actualised displeasure, misanthropy as a kind of infolded, malignant-individualistic dysphoric trap?
In mnay ways I completely agree with Meinhoff’s stance on diversionary energy absorbing “buffers” to severe political revolt- but would add in the protest model (in the UK at least, possibly not Iran)– as well as human rights, identarian politics etc- each of which can be indulged without threatening capitalism in a serious sense, indeed some of which enable an expansion of capitalistic processes (eg- women’s rights enabling the maintaining of consumer demand in last thirty years or so whilst keeping wages down, by simply bringing large numbers of new people into the workforce)
June 18th, 2009 at 6:08 pm
These are points that have been made a trillion times.
June 18th, 2009 at 7:32 pm
These are points that have been made a trillion times
I’m tempted to write a spambot to post this as a comment on every blog and message board, as a response to every new post and topic, from now until the world runs out of electricity. Just think of the enlightenment it will bring!
June 19th, 2009 at 12:19 am
I was including myself in there. What I should have said is: of course we need to link up speech acts, the question is, how? Also, it’s difficult for me to separate a medical definition of dysphoria from a theoretical one, so I’m not sure exactly what’s being discussed. But I do think it’s noteworthy that medical dysphoria is most closely associated with schizophrenia and the bipolar spectrum. D&G are haunting this discussion.
June 19th, 2009 at 7:27 pm
Belatedly.
” … if “militant dysphoria” seemed like a good idea to Ulrike Meinhof then one ought to be exceedingly careful with it.”
Yes, and your reference to “bourgeois adventurism” shouldn’t be underestimated. Attempting to isolate some ‘personal pathology’ by tracing a historical trajectory (with the assistance of some Youtube videos)of Meinhof’s transition – from 1967 to 1969 – from confident and articulate professional journalist to dysphoric and alienated depressive overcome both by a superfluous media simulacrum and the oppressive gravity of child-rearing domesticity, may be premature (in other videos of her from 1969, outside the ‘privacy’ of jaded domesticity, she is closer to her 1967 public persona than her 1969 one in the video you linked to). It is no coincidence that many of the members of the militant groups that formed circa 1969 – Germany’s RAF, Italy’s Red Brigades, America’s Weather Underground, among others – were from middle- and upper-middle class families. Contrast this with other groups that formed at that time, the most obvious example being the Provisional IRA (formed from the splitting of the old, dormant IRA circa 1969 into the Official IRA [peaceful civil rights students and protesters like Bernadette Devlin and Eamonn McCann] and the physical-force violence Provos], which was entirely comprised of a
subjugated and brutalized working class. Further, if you examine video of the members of the Weather Underground in 1976, roughly the year all of these Western groups dissipated (see, for instance, Warren Beatty’s pal Emile De Antonio’s “Underground” documentary, where he interviewed, despite some 200 CIA/FBI agents actively seeking them at the time, the remaining members, including Cathy Budeen and Bernadette Dohrn: they remain just as arrogantly articulate, militant, and confident as they were in the late 1960s, though it should be added that their violent acting out was never as extreme as that of the European groups, confined to ‘property’ targets).
Zizek, as usual, provides a much more disturbing Lacanian analysis of groups like the Baader-Meinhof, but one which also accounts for their rapid move to the far right (eventually becoming Nazis, spouting anti-Semitic and Holocaust-denying rhetoric, and, like the historical Nazis, finally commiting suicide): it wasn’t that their rage, their disgust and disillusionment was (partly) due to the discovery that Germany – its businesses, its government – was largely still being run by ex-Nazis now turned social-democrat liberals, but precisely because of the shock that they were no longer ‘Nazis’ – ie they were spoilt kids seeking a new authoritarian Master. An extreme analysis, yes, and perhaps more fitting for someone like the fascist-aesthete Mishima, who at that time was forming his ‘revolutionary’ (ie counter-revolutionary, fascist) private army in Japan. In some respects, it was because the dysphoria of these otherwise elite groups (unlike perhaps the IRA or the Basques) degenerated into a brutally militant ego-mania that its acts could never be “acts that link with other acts”, exactly because Germany was no longer a brutally authoritarian state (unlike Northern Ireland at that time, or many other states today, and now a real possibility in Iran as the state predictably moves to violently shut down all protest, with horrendous results).
Alex writes of “women’s rights enabling the maintaining of consumer demand in last thirty years or so whilst keeping wages down, by simply bringing large numbers of new people into the workforce”
There’s a double move here (and quite apart from the effects of immigration and racism). While women’s rights in and out of the workplace were, obviously, directed at achieving a ‘parity of esteem’, equal pay, equal employment rights, equal educational opportunities, and largely made significant progress in the more well-paid middle-class and petit bourgeoise occupations (lawyers, accountants, etc), gender ghettoization resulted in numerous working-class occupational sectors remaining poorly
paid, eg cleaners, secretaries, carers, nurses (It’s always tragic-hilarious, though rare, when a male defiantly points out, as though it urgently needed clarification, that he’s a male nurse; much as, in a reverse move, I recently witnessed a woman at pains to emphazize that she was a female construction engineer). But this was a secondary effect; it wasn’t the primary mechanism(s) that maintained consumer demand or kept wages down over the past thirty years, which were more due to the liberalization of consumer credit availability, de-unionization, the export of manufacturing and many service industries, and the ‘re-engineering’ of the technology of the self – the latter orchestrated by re-attributing career success/failure to the personal subjective, the ‘hijacking’ of a potentially militant dysphoria via subjective destitution by the ego-psychology, self-help, and motivational-training industries.
It’s revealing how in many countries, including Britain, the ‘unemployed’ were gradually re-defined throughout the 1990s as ‘job seekers’, one such ‘motivational’ device that effectively turned unemployment into (an anxiety-laden, ‘euphoric’ form of latent) ‘work’: to be seeking work itself became work, positively ‘participating’ in the workplace market (which as most freelancers well know constitutes most of their work, with the actual work, when they finally get it, almost serving as a relief or convalescence from the euphoric/dysphoric-hysteria of seeking it). It could be argued that the dysphoria of the millions of job seekers searching for non-existent jobs is structurally manipulated by the market-driven state via the threat of loss of state benefits (ie one’s livelihood, all income) into a stark (false)choice: if you can’t find a conventional precariously ’stable’ job, then you MUST become EITHER a petit bourgeoise freelancer OR Officially Disabled, structurally pathologized until it’s then subjectivized (select an approved ‘illness’ – depression, anxiety disorder, panic attacks, acute paranoia, ME, OCD, back pains, etc – and the state-sponsored placebo effect will ensure a comfortably secure end-of-history structural social position for you with subsistence benefits), until, as Dominic concluded, “your “subjective position” (to borrow a phrase) with respect to that dysphoria is one of helpless, self-blaming inarticulacy”. Somehow, it is difficult to envisage “some symbolic articulation through a collective political project” emerging from that condemned army of unemployed in a state of forcibly induced disability and chronic ontological insecurity, at least not without major strategic interventions within that zombified dysphoric-entropic ‘cybernetic network’ …