The political argument, redux
There is no possible world without dysphoria (there may be some possible worlds without my dysphoria, but there is no possible world in which there is no dysphoria; the projected remedies for dysphoria are incompossible. Foucault: it will always be intolerable to the necrophiliac that he is denied access to the mortuary). Therefore it cannot be the object of a politics of dysphoria to “make it better”.
In fact, dysphoria does not provide politics with an object; it deprives life-worlds of whatever legitimacy they claim on the basis of their ability to satisfy their inhabitants, and foregrounds the question of what, other than personal satisfaction, can legitimise a political order. I might accept a world in which I personally was unhappy in certain ways, if I could see that it was also just. (Anyone who isn’t a complete egomaniac does already accept some aspects of the world that chafe against them or deprive them of personal satisfaction, because those aspects at least of our common life do seem more or less just and equitable).
Dysphoria is probably not very politically interesting outside of a particular context: that of societies whose citizens (that is, a privileged segment: not slaves) expect to be happy, and believe that their society is a good society to the extent that it provides them with a life-world in which they are comfortable and able to enjoy themselves. A good society is – to a first approximation – one in which the construction of a shared life-world is the ongoing concern of everybody in that society, and in which dysphoric exceptions and exemptions are part of the critical intelligence that society brings to bear upon its own constitution.
October 6th, 2009 at 1:29 am
“There is no possible world without dysphoria (there may be some possible worlds without my dysphoria, but there is no possible world in which there is no dysphoria; the projected remedies for dysphoria are incompossible. Foucault: it will always be intolerable to the necrophiliac that he is denied access to the mortuary)..”
- So far, so followable. In a material world, living and therefore mortal material bodies will inevitably suffer misfortune and unhappiness. So far, so undeniable. Some of us will lack the stamp that completes our collection while others will be deprived of the corpse their heart desires. All of us will die.
But:
‘Therefore it cannot be the object of a politics of dysphoria to “make it better”.’
- IF a “politics of dysphoria” means a policy of promoting and/or maintaining chronic depression (and what else could it it possibly mean??), then your conclusion simply doesn’t follow. It is a non sequitur, followed by a mere tautology; because no one can promote or maintain anyone’s chronic depression while ‘making it better’, i.e while doing the opposite. So much is painfully obvious.
But IF a “politics of dysphoria” does not means a policy of promoting and/or maintaining chronic depression, then your alleged conclusion is a mere falsehood;; for it could in fact easily be the object of an alternative “politics of dysphoria” (what DOES that mean, exactly?) to persuade the necrophiliac that his desire to fuck corpses is a contingent result of his inevitably individual biography, and therefore — at least in principle, and sometimes at least in practice — alterable. (You could, for example, stop wanting to fuck corpses and instead start wanting to fuck live human beings who want to fuck you, perhaps because you have attained some — no doubt painfu)l — insight into your own history and motivations.) Such things are demonstrably possible; and it’s the possibility that needs to be asserted, and demonstrated, because what you’re up to here is very close to a restatement of the doctrine of Original Sin. Which is not just vile but, much worse, wrong.
All of us go through phases, but no one necessarily has to want to fuck corpses all his life. It is in fact possible to be unhappy (“dysphoric”) in other ways, including those of Marx and Gerard Manley Hopkins. not to mention Bakhunin and Martin Luther King. To name but four. And the mere existence of unalterable unhappiness (“dysphoria”") neither disproves nor discredits the existence of other (sorry for the banality of the word, but it is, I think, exact) moods.
Death Valley does not negate the Cotswolds. And the existence of necrophiliacs is no more surprising than the existence of tsunamis, but a hell of a lot more alterable,
October 6th, 2009 at 6:47 am
IF a “politics of dysphoria” means a policy of promoting and/or maintaining chronic depression (and what else could it it possibly mean??)
Well, it doesn’t mean that. For some reason I’ve not yet been able to fathom, various people have taken it to mean, essentially, “dysphoria – that’s the tonic!”. No.
In the context of the subtitle of my book, “the politics of militant dysphoria” means “the kind of political stance or vision that arises from a dysphoric predicament”. It is not a recruiting kind of politics; not the kind of politics I want or expect everyone to have.
Now it so happens that dejection and dysphoria, mostly not all that acute (but this is not my criterion for distinguishing “the real thing”, and I’m not interested in getting into competitions about whose misery is most intense; no worst, there is none), are fairly widespread in this happy society of ours, and so an interesting question is whether we as a society can learn anything from or about this fact. But it is not to my purpose to try to intensify misery (so that, for example, we might all come to realize what a terrible world we were really all living in), but simply to make it an occasion for understanding and solidarity rather than medicalised private suffering. Dysphoria is “militant” when it refuses to be framed as a personal mishap, and instead poses itself as a question and a challenge to the society in which it occurs. Such questioning and challenging is small-p “political”: it doesn’t in itself constitute a political project, and is certainly not adequate to the task of re-envisioning politics in the large. But I would suspect any vision of politics in the large that assumed that the problems posed from a dysphoric standpoint would simply go away once we had sorted everything else out. There is no finally adequate life-world.
With regard to the reform of necrophiliacs, I think I agree that the ultimate question is probably “what made you like that, and can you make yourself otherwise?”. I don’t consider any particular dysphoric predicament to be intrinsically non-resolvable, although some resist amelioration with an almost demonic ingenuity. Perhaps the question one should be asking is: to what other uses might that ingenuity be put?
October 13th, 2009 at 9:55 pm
Here’s a possible example of an intuitive dysphorian approach: link