The Disaffected

Quotes and half thoughts

[disaffectednotes]

Corona & culture / cultural studies - Scattergun virus thoughts

Putting some scattered thoughts down, largely inspired by a steady diet of high-fibre podcasts in recent weeks. These notes are fragments, really, and hardly add up to more than passing thoughts, given the unfolding situation and the partiality of any knowledge right now. I’ve noticed in myself the will to “master” the situation by consuming as much information as possible – even as I know this will inevitably fail. Perhaps the following can be read in the same spirit of failed mastery, or to sublimate the anxious energy that’s all around...

“We’re all in this together.” The virus as the “great equaliser.” Such appeals to the common good and common ground have been… common. War mobilisation rhetoric is also doing the same work of unifying the disparate population. At the same time, disgruntled jokes are made about celebrities and royals getting tests when frontline medical staff cannot. It’s also clear that this virus will rip through some communities more than others, as reporting this weekend about effects in black communities in the US has made clear. Arundhati Roy also made this clear too in her excellent piece for the FT this weekend. India is only just at the start of this. The economic crisis has reached many poorer countries before the virus itself hits.

On the cultural level, some of this mobilisation of fellow-feeling and resentment has been played out through celebrity culture (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/arts/virus-celebrities.html). There will be people on this list more expert in celebrity culture than me (paging Celebrity Studies scholars), but commentary is engaging in the cyclical argument about how this will be the end of celebrities. As if seeing in 1080p the smooth interiors behind celebrities cocooning at home will rupture the culture industry and the star system. And yet, the hatred is real. “The film Parasite, in which a poor South Korean family cleverly cons its way into the home of a rich one, has been converted into a well-worn social-media retort whenever celebrities offer glimpses inside their own manses; the reference succeeds partly because so many superrich people have such blandly similar minimalist homes.”

More abstractly – how do the universal and the particular interact in this moment? We seem to have the interaction of universalism in the sense of appeals to and mobilisations of public health (with its birth as a discipline in Soviet healthcare, no less) and the particularity of suffering.

Closer to the question of Cultural Studies as an intellectual formation: what reconfiguration of economy, culture, society etc might follow from this. After the financial crisis a decade ago, there was, no doubt, a new opening onto political economy in cultural studies. As Randy Martin put it in 2015, “the very architecture by which knowledge of the social has been made legible – the grand trinity that partitions economy, polity and culture – has come undone, and from these ruins issue all manner of challenge and possibility.” Of course, this pandemic event adds another dimension to the broken trinity – or, put differently, where do quasi-natural factors like novel viruses fit in the trinity? Chuang and Rob Wallace suggest the historic spread of pandemics cannot be untied from urban development, intensive agriculture and capitalist markets. If there’s no unsullied “nature” outside global capitalism, this also suggests the open question of whether this is an exogenous or endogenous shock to an interlocked world system.

Another plank of this concerns the status of the “economy” as an object, and what its abstract claim is on politics (in our really-existing world of market-dependence, obviously). E.g. the increasing attempts to weigh up the economic cost of lockdowns vs care of population. Already as part of a wide-spread legitimacy crisis post-2007-8, there was a growing sense, I think, that people did not see their lives reflected in GDP figures (see Will Davies on this). Sure, the numbers are going up, people seemed to say en masse, but I’m not seeing that in my life. Wellbeing budgets (e.g. NZ and UK) were one attempt to deliver a fix for this gap between lived experience and economic indicators.

What is being asked for here is an unprecedented global demobilisation and isolation, almost concurrently. There’s anxiety about this. It’s unknown territory. Above all, those clamouring for a return to the Service of Goods right now seem to be desperately ensnared by the oikodicy that Joseph Vogl talks about. “A theodicy of the economic universe: the inner consistency of an economic doctrine that—rightly or wrongly, for good or ill—views contradictions, adverse effects, and breakdowns in the system as eminently compatible with its sound institutional arrangement.” Nothing needs to change; just get the people back to their stations and everything can carry on. The hangover from this governmental largesse will surely come in the form of austerity lashings for many.

On the conjuncture in which this virus appeared – it seems important to remember the crisis of legitimacy that has been underway (at least) since the last financial crisis. This has had several effects, I think, on trust in politicians and trust in experts. Lockdowns have played out in rather draconian ways, I think, because flows of trust between citizenry and state are at low levels. (Equally in those countries that English-language media are lumping together as “Asian” or “East Asian”.) The US and the UK have fumbled their management terribly, and lost a lot of time to quell the virus in the process. Aside from the obvious political disaffection and so on surrounding elected officials, there was already an epistemological crisis surrounding the “expert” and expertise, the media and information sources — and now? It seems to be going in two directions. In some ways, epidemiologists and other public health actors seem to be trusted; in part, they seem to be figures of faith for acting in the best interests of the public / society / everyone. Goodwill seems to be carrying their message through, helped by endless news reports of deaths. And yet conspiracy theories continue to be rife – 40% of US Republicans believe the virus is a Chinese concoction from a lab; on the weekend, we’ve seen 5g mobile towers burned in the UK in some sort of anti-tech connection with China. It will also be interesting to watch the anti-vaxxer groups in the wake of this, themselves one of the chief symptoms of a rear-guard response to the epistemological crisis around science.

At the level of everyday life, it will be interesting to experience the new tempos and rhythms of everyday life that will come out the other side of this. Obviously, people are right now being enlisted in a series of new habits around social distance, but time is also being enlisted too. We check the news to see updates on the length of lockdowns, the next meetings, the rise over the past 24hours. Morbid scoreboards measure out days and deaths, for our fascination and horror. We hear that lockdowns will come ago. Six weeks, two weeks, maybe six months, up to two years, maybe five years. Yet the future as a space of projection feels utterly blank. Who can plan anything, other than as a coping mechanism with an asterisk of a disclaimer (to be confirmed)? Epidemiological metaphors, otherwise describing dynamics visualised on graphs, have slid into the language with almost universal recognition. Flatten the curve (even in German they say this, auf Englisch). Now people speak casually about “the hammer and the dance.”

Another cultural question of everyday life – what will survive of neighbourhood businesses, given the economic ruin that is already evident in unemployment statistics and massive companies going on rent strike. In Berlin, neighbourhood places like cinemas, bars, restaurants and cafes, unable to open for weeks, have taken to asking people to support them by buying vouchers and merchandise online. Cancelled gigs and events ask people who can afford to ignore refund, so that music venues and theatres and promoters and artists can come out the other side. I’m sure similar things are happening elsewhere. But there’s a chance this could alter the face of local communities (in places already changed by gentrification, no doubt, and other processes).

Equally – what will cultural policy and support for cultural industries and artists look like? Responses already seem divergent. Germany has trumpeted a huge package of money for operators at all sizes (https://news.artnet.com/art-world/berlin-senate-bailout-process-1820982 & https://news.artnet.com/art-world/german-bailout-50-billion-1815396). In Berlin, bookshops are essential services and remain open. In Australia, the other case I know something about, anxiety was rising before the lockdown that this could decimate those artists already struggling with high costs of living and piecemeal work (https://www.themonthly.com.au/blog/anwen-crawford/2020/19/2020/1584580982/coronavirus-cancelling-culture). I don’t know that any systematic response has emerged to this situation from the Australian government(s). Meanwhile, Jerry Saltz suggests the art world could look different after this – https://www.vulture.com/_pages/ck8ivxorc0000yeyerntsmxxj.html. By that we can also include the mass sackings of culture workers with barely any hope of reinstatement anytime soon – https://hyperallergic.com/551571/moma-educator-contracts/

I wonder if there might be a new “paranoid style” in culture and everyday life. What does life look like after we have been so thoroughly inculcated into logics of the other (and self) as virus vectors? It seems hard to imagine that sociability will not be affected by this sustained mentality. I imagine there could be an ecstatic return of sociability? Matched with paranoid moments? Prevailing at different points? Except, I think we already being prepared for a staged return to normal social mixing. So the ecstatic moment may not come. People wonder out loud too about parallel epidemics of loneliness and mental health from weeks of limited social contacts.

In cultural production, it will be interesting to see how this paranoid style might play out in formal and generic novelties, rather than simply the pandemic *content* that will be pushed through the Netflix pipe. The “bottle episode” format might become even more of a mainstay. And the lockdown nostalgia genre (like the “blitz spirit”) is probably already in the making. Will “flatten the curve” become “keep calm and carry on” kitsch?

It’s interesting to watch what Adam Tooze called a clumsy rewiring of globalisation – where Zoom comes to the fore as platform, where relations to flying around the world become more fraught and second-guessed. This ad hoc reconstitution of institutional and individual practices is obviously apparent at universities. It will be fascinating to see what the afterlife of this moment will be in the sector. Again, like the ecstasy of reunion with friends (and strangers), will the metaphysics of presence reassert itself as a thousand and one postponed conferences are launched onto the market for papers and academic attention? Or will the convenient and environmentally sustainable virtual conference finally become more acceptable? For those at a distance from the conference centres of the northern hemisphere, there’s been a certain obliviousness among, e.g., European academics about the many costs involved in travelling from, e.g., Australia for a conference. The Fridays for Future movement and others had already instilled greater awareness about this; so perhaps this accelerated acquaintance with these technologies will make the option viable. I’ve been part of several online reading groups already in the past fortnight, and their decentralisation has been inspiring. For example, one group hosted in Ireland had its largest number of participants in India and Israel. Obviously cultural, symbolic and financial capital will continue to accrue among the big-name academic cities and campuses, but these initiatives have opened onto new constellations of community, discussion and collective endeavour.

What are the subjective effects of all this? Some psychoanalysts co-wrote a letter a couple of weeks ago about their patients with some striking insights.

“And yet, against the predominant narrative of trauma and the dangers of isolation, we find many patients who are doing fine or even doing better, who like externalized chaos, or whose melancholia is abated by the nearness of death and reproach; those who are used to doing their own thing and who find their anxiety and sadness contained and cohered by the pervasive force of a virus that shuts all down. We hear those who have longed for everything to be cancelled, for life as we know it to be paused, hushed and stopped, even to the point of daring to express their own desire to, in fantasy, be one of the affected, which is to say, infected. Many admit that they are feeling strangely fine—no more FOMO—and even a few are looking forward to enjoying the spiteful reality that the virus effects all, rich and poor. Beyond this, there might seem very little worth saying. Some now don’t talk at all in session, while indicating that they are talking all the time, like the run on social media. Symptoms, despite so many breaks in the fabric of reality, persist, sometimes blindly and deafeningly so; it feels crushing. The continued contact can be important, but perhaps only for that—to know the analyst is still there.”

Other things to say… but I’m running out of steam and you’re probably running out of patience… so now in the form of suggestive promissory notes for further thoughts…

These ideas all came from listening to Adam Tooze talk about the current crisis and how it compares to 2008: Incoherent American power — soft power and culture yet literal bankruptcy of American social model, meanwhile Fed is efficiently fighting spotfires and Trump is a clown show; running 2008 playbook but at high speed; public balance sheet taking over from private again; fiscal conservatism as cross to nail progressive politics to cross for years; expansionary fiscal policy nationally vs contractions and austerity locally; emerging markets pressure (South Africa — immunosuppressed HIV population + downgrade of currency); timing of crisis with oil shock and uncertain global supply chains; car-making is dead right now; VW is worried about liquidity; what might bailout conditions be?; German governments talking about mass buying VW electric cars to ensure work when factories can reopen, while aiding in VW’s need to increase electric sales.

Media companies — some experiencing a massive boost in visitors right now, but with drop off in advertising. Who wants to sell stuff next to death charts? Who is in mood for big spending? Media outlets cutting staff or closing.

Mutual aid groups and solidarity networks have sprung up informally – and been mirrored formally by state calls for volunteers. This puts me in mind of the anarchist / horizontalist moment of Occupy a decade ago. Then, since, the return to state by activists for Corbyn and Sanders. What now?

Also, what do social movements do to respond to what will be inevitably be an uneven roll out of crisis response? Plus, the draconian enrolment of police and military, with powers for six months to two years? How do groups organise against that? What are the forms of creative protest in times of physical distance? Cementing affected and affective communities somehow – maybe seeding these online to go “live” when restrictions are lifted. Thinking also about ACT UP and other social movements – e.g. How to Survive A Plague. Those movements, internationally, put their bodies on the line, staged die ins during AIDS-HIV crisis. Militant disobedience might be demanded to get better crisis response. (Sidebar: Fauci and Birx, both experts on HIV and AIDS; Fauci was targeted by ACT UP but was sympathetic.) Some small protests in Berlin on the streets in recent weeks, using social distancing. Calling on politicians and population not to forget refugees at EU’s borders. Others occupying empty apartments (& Airbnb) to call for homeless relief. Also, what could cultural protest look like right now? (https://hyperallergic.com/550091/illuminator-covid-19/).

What might the crisis do for an ethics of care – and awareness of social reproduction too. Some public health thinkers have talked about “social immunity,” particularly in the US. And the flipside seems to be the social contagion that Chuang invoke. (No doubt here all the biopolitical debates come up again, e.g. Esposito on immunity)

And there’s been interesting work on geographies of movement and exclusion. Various visualisations of how the virus moves around the world and what this illustrates about travel, business, leisure etc today. But also the unevenly distributed luxury of working from home – the NY Times piece about poorer workers in NY moving around the city much more than the knowledge workers who could “shelter in place”. Five bus drivers have died in the UK. Meanwhile, in Germany, the former socialist eastern part of the country has far fewer cases. This once again underlines a deeply sensed feeling of stasis – both a distance from the cosmopolitan cultural power of an EU-level project but also the literal (comparative) lack of infrastructure for things such as fast-speed rail links between cities from eastern German states into western states and beyond into other parts of Europe.

No doubt these reflections are parochial and limited, drawn from what has most captured my attention – selfishly – in a truly global crisis, and one with many months to run….

For rolling lists of good discussions on these topics:

https://the-syllabus.com/coronavirus-readings/

https://yourpart.eu/p/QuarantineSchool_COVID19

[disaffectednotes]

“People in the world have every reason to be in a state of total rage. What we do with that rage together is important. Rage can be crafted—it’s sort of an art form of politics. The significance of nonviolence is not to be found in our most pacific moments but precisely when revenge makes perfect sense.” Judith Butler

[disaffectednotes]

Attacking older modes of legitimacy works well because the crisis of politics is frequently experienced as an existential crisis. More directly so, for some people, than economic inequality and deprivation. It manifests as a collapse in faith that 'we' even exist as a demos. It is subtended by affects of anxiety, depression and insecurity. The popular yearning for an authoritarian rule-breaker who can 'get things done', whether those things be Brexit or not, is not just a demand for 'protection' and 'control' over one's life. It demands reassurance, which the nationalist project offers, that 'we' exist. That even amid the neoliberal immiseration of social and political life, there is some collective purpose which can't be bargained away - however mythical its primordial origins, however recent its invention may be.

Richard Seymour, “Rupture on the Right”

[disaffectednotes]

“WHY IS POLITICAL HOPE becoming defunct in so many young people today? This is the question Bernard Stiegler poses in his new book, The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism. Early on, he quotes the words of a teenager whose nihilistic outlook, he claims, is representative of the zeitgeist of contemporary youth:

‘When I talk to young people of my generation […] they all say the same thing: we no longer have the dream of starting a family, of having children, or a trade, or ideals. […] All that is over and done with, because we’re sure that we will be the last generation, or one of the last, before the end.’

These despairing words serve as a leitmotif to Stiegler’s fervent deconstruction of economic, political, and spiritual malaise. He dauntingly refers to the present’s “absence of epoch” — i.e., today’s lack of any significant political ethos. This “absence of epoch,” during a time of critical ecological changes, is why so many have been left disaffected, fast becoming (in Stiegler’s heavily italicized prose) “mad with sadness, mad with grief, mad with rage.””

Daring to Hope for the Improbable: On Bernard Stiegler’s “The Age of Disruption”

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/daring-to-hope-for-the-improbable-on-bernard-stieglers-the-age-of-disruption/

[disaffectednotes]

money replaces over a period of time all other commodities as the object of practical effort. This is a second distinguishing feature of money as a commodity: people work to make money. As the necessary mediator between man and his wants, money has come to be what he wants. Furthermore, by possessing the power to buy everything, money puts the individual into relations with other commodities and people that he could not enter into on the basis of his own needs and personal characteristics. Money enables him to buy the food which his hunger cannot secure, to occupy the hearth to which his numb limbs give him no right or to possess the woman whom his personal traits cannot win. It is the same alienated labor which makes it impossible for workers to appropriate the world of objects that enables money to do so. The ability of money is man's own, man's potential for entering into relations with nature, including other men, which has been taken from him in labor and incorporated in his products. The power of money to buy is a function of people's necessity to sell what they have (labor-power, products, virtue); this is a function of their inability to acquire what they need as human beings by simply manifesting their needs; and this, in turn, is a function of a situation in which those who control what is needed have interests other than and hostile to the interests of the persons in need. By producing a product which he gives over to the control of another the worker begins a chain reaction that culminates (on this scale at least) in the particular role that money plays in capitalist society. What money is able to buy, therefore, is no more than what people potentially can do but actually cannot. For if they were doing it, then money could not buy it; and if they could never do it, then there would be nothing for money to buy. It is in this sense that Marx declares that 'money is the alienated ability of mankind' (Marx's emphasis). Without alienation there would be no money; people would not offer a sterile metal for what they want and would refuse to accept it for what they have. In describing the dictatorship of the proletariat, where the worker's alienated relations to his activity, product, and other men have already been seriously modified, Marx dispenses with the concept of 'money' and speaks instead of 'labor vouchers'. In communism, of course, even these have disappeared.

Ollman, “Alienation”

[disaffectednotes]

Marx sums up his account of man as a natural being, as an objective and sensuous creature, by referring to him as “suffering, limited, and conditioned.” Man suffers because of what he undergoes. To be sensuous, according to Marx, is necessarily to suffer. Man cannot obtain everything he needs to realize his natural powers, since, in one way or another, it is the whole world that is required. There will always be a woman (or man), food, etc. which is unavailable, if only for a moment, and whatever is denied him causes suffering. It should be clear that the term ‘suffering’ is used here to embrace everything from the slightest discomfort to the most intense pain. Because he feels what he undergoes, because to undergo is to suffer, man is said to be a passionate being. Passion is the quality which animates the individual's effort to obtain his objects. Viewed from the vantage point of the feeling subject, it is this effort itself.

Ollman, “Alienation”

[disaffectednotes]

The attempt to establish values which apply equally to everyone results, to a large extent, from the need to defuse growing class conflict arising from incompatible interests in a class-ridden society. To apply values equally is to abstract from the unequal conditions in which people live and the incompatible interests that result. The main effort of capitalist ideology has always been directed to dismissing or playing down this incompatibility. The abstractions with which such ideology abounds are so many attempts to sever the class-affected 'facts' from the judgements and actions that ordinarily follow upon their comprehension.

Ollman, Alienation

[bjg]

Marx integrated his remarks of approval and disapproval more closely into his system than have most other thinkers, making any surgical division into facts and values so much more destructive of his meaning. For example, Marx claims that when a communist stands in front of 'a crowd of scrofulous, overworked and consumptive starvelings', he sees 'the necessity, and at the same time the condition, of a transformation both of industry and of the social structure'. Marx is asserting that for those who share his outlook these 'facts' contain their own condemnation and a call to do something about them. If an individual chooses otherwise, it is not because he had made a contrary moral judgement, but because the particular relations in which he stands (the class to which he belongs, his personal history, etc.) have led him to a different appreciation of the facts.

Ollman, Alienation

[disaffectednotes]

As Beyond the Pleasure Principle works to become a theory of circuits, of how “the organism wishes to die only in its own fashion,” this concept of indirection enfolds the pleasure principle itself into a more overarching “death drive,” and expands economy from a closed system to an internally riven, spastically driven anti-system (Freud 1953–74, 18:38). The economy of drive is disequilibriate because drive names the excess in the subject beyond its systematicity, beyond its self-interest, beyond its own life. Drive is the enigmatic impulsion out of stasis and into dynamism, but its enigma entails the ineluctable inertia back toward stasis, death, inorganicity. Capitalism endeavors to turn excess to account, whereas the ultimate motion of the drive is ontologically unaccountable.

Anna Kornbluh, ‘“One of the Most Obscure Regions of Psychoanalysis”: Defamiliarizing Psychic Economy’

[disaffectednotes]

Analyzing the ways that Rusians talked during the turbulent years 1989–1990, Ries identified the “litany” as the key genre of everyday discourse, from narratives of poverty and suffering to tales of heroic shopping and the absurd Russian world, memorably described by one Muscovite as an “Anti-Disneyland.” If these litanies served to create social bonds in times of crisis, a “community of shared suffering,” they also, through the very sense of belonging and moral worth they fostered, “may have helped to sustain relative powerlessness and alienation from the political process at the same time as [they] lamented them.” Far from being a merely private affair, complaining is an ideological factor. For my purposes I wish to highlight just one of the more subtle uses of the litany that Ries identifies, which illustrates well its intersubjective dynamic: to mask one’s relative successes from the other. One of her informants explains: “The lament also fulfills a veiling function, it has a camouflaging side, because if, living among people, you have managed to pile up three dollars more than someone else, you can’t disclose the fact that you live better, not because the Russian person is sly, but because someone else will be ashamed, if he knows you have more than he.” Here we have the opposite of Veblen, an inconspicuous consumption: enjoy, but discreetly. The problem is not simply the pragmatic one of guarding one’s surplus enjoyment, one’s little extra prosperity, against possible loss or theft, but something at once more refined and more extravagant. Beyond whatever is being griped about, fake or exaggerated complaining sends a message to the other which serves to reinforce the social bond: Don’t worry, my life is miserable too. The basic ethical stance of the complainer is to avoid shaming or embarrassing the other by revealing his or her lack; what’s important is not the value of the item per se, some money, extra groceries, vacation days, whatever, but that its lack can take on a loaded sign value; sometimes a couple of missing eggs is enough to evoke one’s existential nullity. But there is also something else at stake: to ward off evil forces that might be tempted to sabotage one’s small success. Even, and especially, if there is little or no empirical danger, complaint serves to ritually exorcize the envious gaze of the Other. Do we not see here one of the basic foundations of communal life? To be properly socialized means to learn to treat one’s enjoyment delicately; complaining is a mixture of reservation and superstition, good manners and magical incantation, a regulating of affairs both with one’s neighbors and with the big Other. This typically Slavic attitude finds its opposite in American ostentation and compulsive positivity, the profane tendency to overperform enjoyment (jouissance). If litanizing serves to veil surplus enjoyment, what excessive enthusiasm dissimulates is the lack-of-being (manque-à-être), an inner emptiness and despair; its anxious message is: Don’t worry, life is wonderful, amazing, fantastic, etc. It is ironic that relatively poor Eastern societies are confronted more with the problem of surplus, while the affluent West must deal with lack; the title of Larry David’s comedy series “Curb Your Enthusiasm” aims precisely at deflating this overperformed enjoyment in favor of real negativity. What is to be rejected is the obvious solution of some kind of middle road, a harmonious agreement between one’s public self-presentation and the level of enjoyment—don’t be too excited, don’t complain too much, or rather, act excitedly only when you really are excited, complain only when things really are bad.

Aaron Schuster, “The Trouble with Pleasure”

[disaffectednotes]

The existential crisis posed by boredom in the Seventies — when you really could be bored, when there wasn’t a seamless stimulus-matrix available — I think there’s a big relation between that — the availability of a certain kind of boredom — and phenomena like punk. The availability of constant low-level stim in twenty-first-century culture precludes that kind of boredom, precludes alienation in a certain way, but produces this kind of general feeling of unacknowledged disaffection I think. These forms of stimulation are not really capable of engaging people in a way that takes them out and beyond themselves. People are sort of trapped in themselves in this form of kind of functional misery, in a sense that they’re just miserable enough,as it were, miserable enough to carry on — not too miserable that they would either reach a point of subjective destitution or just have to question — pushed to the point where they have to question the general social causes for why they’re like this. So I think it’s just enough pleasure to keep them depressed as it were. That’s one way of looking at depressive hedonia.

Mark Fisher, https://archive.org/details/CapitalistRealismAnInterviewWithMarkFisher_736

[disaffectednotes]

So if one is alienated from what is already alien (unconscious thoughts), which can easily make claims on one’s attention, well, then you are in very deep water, psychoanalytically speaking. This is the problem with ADD, or compulsion neurosis: it is the purest form of alienation from internal life, which is why everything is turned into some external problem of avoidance, distraction, and procrastination. Work draws on one’s unconscious, on one’s emotional life, and on the reserves of self-esteem that help with one’s inevitable anxieties. For those with ADD, you will easily see that the unconscious is what cannot be tolerated—not the Excel spreadsheet, but you yourself. Stimulants help you jump the hurdle, but the drugs cannot completely erase your internal life, which will always be there waiting for you on the other side of the come-down, at some point when you find yourself in a speed-free moment of stillness. Don’t you want to know what’s in there before you chemically dampen it? To conclude on a rather depressing note—one that follows on the heels of the uncanny fact that these very same ADD stimulants were used by the Third Reich to aid soldiers in performing acts of extermination—the sociologist Theodor Adorno in his article “Freudian Theory and Fascist Propaganda” noted the irony of the Nazi slogan, “Germany Awake!”—when what Germany was engaging in was mass hypnotism by a fascist leader. What the Nazis meant, he said, was the exact opposite—“Germany Asleep!” Might the same hold true here with our mass medicating of collective distraction?

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/11/19/the-psychopharmacology-of-everyday-life/

[disaffectednotes]

If the goal of Lacanian analysis is to enable the analysand to dissociate herself from the desire of the Other, or from the desire of those who, in her life, embody this desire, it is because this is the only way for her to destroy her (cruelly) optimistic allegiance to power structures that oppress her. There may still be an enormous distance between such tiny acts of individual defiance and radical politics, yet there is arguably also a conceptual link between the analysand who is able to utter her Enough! with a degree of conviction and the politicized subject who utters the same Enough! in the context of collective social mobilization. That is, collective social mobilization relies on subjects who have the ability to stick to their desire in the face of the demand that they capitulate to the desire of the Other.

Mari Ruti, “Opting Out”

[disaffectednotes]

Butler’s anxiety about the subject’s possessive and aggressive tendencies is so excessive that it threatens to exclude the possibility of benign relationships altogether. On the one hand, she elevates relationality to the ultimate good. On the other, she implies that nonviolent relationality is more or less impossible because of the subject’s narcissistic and colonizing inclinations. The result of this contradiction is that the only way to be an acceptable subject, in Butler’s vision, is to adopt a stance of unmitigated masochism; the good subject, in Butlerian terms, accepts its violation by the other while meticulously safeguarding against its own violent tendencies. In other words, the subject is always already guilty whereas the other—even the brutally violent other—can never be so. Again, Levinasian phenomenology—which castigates the self and worships the other—hovers in the background of this line of thought. But it also represents the culmination of the kind of poststructuralist reasoning that deems the very notion of “subjectivity” to be ethically corrupt.

Mari Ruti, “Opting Out”

[disaffectednotes]

One version of psychoanalysis will say that the definition of mental health would be the capacity to tell a coherent narrative. From another psychoanalytic point of view, that would be precisely the problem. I think both things are true. People who have suffered ruptured, violated lives need and want some narrative coherence, but narrative coherence quickly can be a problem when it becomes a refuge from thinking. I agree that the idealization of narrative coherence is a bizarre cultural development. The problem is finding forms of incoherence that are listenable to. Psychoanalysis has tried this with the idea of free association—it can create a context in which incoherence is potentially the best way of talking to somebody. This is very difficult to do socially, because either it sounds incredibly pretentious, or boring. This is, in a way, why experimental fiction hasn’t worked, though it should and maybe it can in the future. People who were brought up on traditional narratives either can’t read it or have so many ways of dismissing it that they can’t get to it. It’s a shame, because some of it is very interesting. Somebody’s got to find a way of making a form of incoherence extremely revealing and alluring. It’s a really interesting cultural task—not that we should become better storytellers, because that’s the most boring thing on earth, but let’s become better antistorytellers. There is more to life than the stories we can tell about it. The interesting question is: what’s a culturally sharable form of free association, outside the psychoanalytic setting?

https://bombmagazine.org/articles/adam-phillips/

[disaffectednotes]

Defeating the Left, that is to say keeping continuously open the channel of social disaffection, is not only necessary but also possible today. We witness, while the imperial structures become stronger at an unprecedented rate, the transition from the old Labour left, gravedigger of the Labour movement and born from it, to a new global, cultural left, of which it can be said that Negriism is at the head. This new left has not yet fully established itself on the recently neutralised 'anti-globalisation movement.'

The Invisible Committee, The Call (2004).

Interesting comment on opposing the official left as “the necessary steam-valve to the unbearable pace of capitalism.”

[disaffectednotes]

I wonder whether it might not help to revisit a concept that you have used and that has been around for a while with respect to the diagnosis of our time: the concept of ressentiment. It seems as though it’s more than a façon de parler; it’s another tool for understanding the inner structure of those dynamics that misdirect social suffering and indignation toward reactionary, authoritarian, and proto-fascist impulses instead of emancipatory movements. I think that this cannot be explained by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest alone, notwithstanding the exclusionary nationalistic tendencies, since people have chosen a politics that openly betrays their interests (Trump, after all, made no secret of his plans to eliminate Obamacare). Even to the extent that you have convincingly sketched out reasons for the hatred of the so-called left-liberal cultural elite, this still doesn’t turn it into a rational decision. And you didn’t mean to suggest that these political affects were legitimate (after all, to understand doesn’t mean to excuse). So, I would say that, even though their real interests are not satisfied, their ressentiment is. This is what makes the concept interesting for an analysis of our situation. Provided that we conceive it not merely as a sociopsychological concept, but as a form of “affect” that is genuinely social, we can examine the deeper structural causes for ressentiment as part of a more comprehensive analysis of crisis and regression. Ressentiment is what I would call a second-order affect: the starting material of ressentiment is not a certain social situation per se, the absence of certain desired social gratifications or goods, but rather a situation normatively judged as bad, undeserved, and unjustified – a situation of indignation and outrage. But there is another element that Max Scheler has pointed to in his brilliant analysis: ressentiment always occurs in combination with a feeling of impotence, the feeling of powerlessness. And, again, this powerlessness is not merely the impotence against a first-order problem – for example, that I cannot change being unemployed or that I have no health insurance. Rather, the powerlessness which triggers ressentiment is the impotence or inability even to express one’s feeling of indignation or outrage. Within a neoliberal culture of “taking responsibility,” one can easily see how people see themselves in a situation in which even their indignation is banned. But this powerlessness is also ascribed to and projected onto the “left-elite.” The supposed “thought ban” – the fact that political correctness prevents them from expressing their vindictive and envious feelings toward those whom they believe “don’t deserve” their respective resources, attention, and public recognition – then becomes (as it must) one of the main fronts. This is why we might expect ressentiment to be felt even by those who are neither objectively deprived nor objectively powerless, and why it can be directed against those who, objectively speaking, do not have much power at all.... But it is also clear that ressentiment is a defense mechanism. When the limits of order begin to break down (e.g., the dissolution of gender identities or national borders), the precarious work and life situation, as well as the more generalized experience of impotence and precarious social orientation, brings forth the need to be “master in one’s own house” (“Build the wall!”). This can only be satisfied in the imagination. Authoritarian ressentiment is urgently directed against those who are blamed for having violated and dissolved “the sanctity of the home” and turned “our homeland” into a strange place. But then, to feel “alienated” by this kind of “Heimatverlust” (“loss of home”) is itself an instance of an ideological blockage of reality and a denial of the real causes of being alienated. This is what makes it into a moment of regression. Talking about ressentiment as a mode of regression here seems to be helpful in order to understand how these emotions are “real” but still illusory.

Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi, Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory