#miserablism

[ilovehole]

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[arinewman7]

Kabuki: Ren Jishi

by Bernard Buffet

oil on canvas, 1987

[stinger839]

This should've been The Smiths pick for the Miserablism episode of the Boys' Artist in Residence shows. Perfect at nearly 4AM tonight with a thunderstorm going. program link https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0024nxy Some other candidates: I Know It's Over Never Had No One Ever Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me Shoutout to Miserable Lie being the OG overt miserablism song but it would've been too punk and on the nose for the show.

[geometricfrequency]

'Out Of Time' -- Pete Fij / Terry Bickers

[deliriumbubbles]

I'm already coming up with StarKurt characterizations from the two scenes we have from Elliot, and if I write them out, they'll be true for an episode and then Elliot will probably shave Kurt's head in his sleep and take over the band, and then Kurt will be shamed for wanting a solo in his own band.

[plebeianpopinjay-blog]

In Praise of Miserablism

"The personal is political," as a slogan, has reached the apex of banality. It means everything to everyone, and is the best example of a 'floating signifier' if there ever was one. The conditions of its emergence barely visible amid the torrent of misguided posturing.

But on a completely different register, the personal and the political have intersected for me recently at the temple of miserablism. 

My first reaction - in 2010 - to Sarah Ahmed's book The Promise of Happiness was largely dismissive. I respected immensely what it was attempting to do, and was sympathetic to its stated aims, but it wasn't a text that resonated with my personal priorities and aspirations at that time. Having wrestled with depression and chronic unhappiness for most of my teens (ok, who didn't?), and now standing on the threshold of this thing called "adulthood" with, remarkably, some semblance of what Ahmed would call a happiness orientation, I scoffed at any attempt to render that miserable experience desirable.

But as Adorno once snidely asked Marcuse: "you are a dialectician, aren’t you?"

Which is to say that it was a mistake to judge the work on the basis of a particular personal conjuncture. My happiness orientation was sustained by a series of unresolved contradictions, which were ultimately resolved by a drastic change in circumstances which brought the primary contradictions to a breaking point. Quantity breaks through into quality, and we reach a new configuration - a new 'knot' - of contradictions.

This is my way of not actually talking about anything specific. I will forever hide behind a shallow dance of dialectics. My own dialectical dandyism.

In any case, a number of points Ahmed makes in the introduction to The Promise of Happiness have stood out to me as I re-read it in my current context. Ahmed brings out the mobius strip-like quality of happiness, noting that "happiness becomes a means to an end, as well as the end of the means." That "happiness is looked for where it is expected to be found, even when happiness is reported as missing." And, ultimately, shows how happiness is mobilized by neoliberalism as a form of govermentality. "We make ourselves happy, as an acquisition of capital that allows us to be or to do this or that, or even to get this or that"; "claims to happiness make certain forms of personhood valuable." We hold out happiness as the end, and are reminded that the only way to become-happy is, redundantly, to be-happy, because being-happy gives you a certain type of personal capital that can aid you in that final act of happiness-consumption. If we want to be-happy, you've got to do happy things (objects that serve as happiness indicators), which are not intrinsically happiness-producing, but are presupposed as always-already imbued with happiness (Ahmed cites marriage as a frequently used indicator).

Those unhappy consciousnesses, to misuse and bastardize one of Hegel's famous terms, are bad persons because they are neither producing nor consuming happiness. They're undisciplined, ungoverned, and at odds with norms that become crucial to gendered, racialized, etc., forms of embodiment.

Barbara Ehrenreich, in her fantastic book Bright-Sided, shows us that "positivity is not so much our condition or our mood as it is part of our ideology," and that the "practice of positive thinking is an effort to pump up this belief [that things will get better on their own] in the face of much contradictory evidence."

"In other words," she writes, "it requires deliberate self-deception, including a constant effort to repress or block out unpleasant possibilities and 'negative' thoughts."

What I appreciate in Ehrenreich's formulation is the labour time involved in the production of happiness. Adorno and Horkheimer once described leisure as an extension of work, and I think what Ahmed and Ehrenreich bring out in their own way is precisely the way happiness (or positivity), too, is not only an extension of work, but is deeply entwined with processes of social reproduction.

All of which is an obtuse and roundabout way of saying that, perhaps a few months ago, I reached a breaking point with that labour of happiness. Like the version of himself that Louis C.K. plays on Louie, I've experienced an oddly comforting acceptance with that non-productive, non-happiness.

At the same time that my politics are veering more towards the need for greater miserablism with respect to the current state of the ongoing economic crisis and the prospects for the Left, my personal life has become more and more at ease with such a miserablist ontology. It has nothing to do with pessimism or fatalism, to be sure. I think of it rather as a personal form of refusal that, in its own modest way, helps to turn down the volume of that infinitely demanding lapdog of positive-thinking: the neoliberal superego. Cue rhapsody in blue.

[stolensongs-blog]

Just for the sake of it make sure you're always frowning. It shows the world that you've got substance and depth.

Pet Shop Boys, "Miserablism"

[illllllllllllli]

one way bacchus-d functions is by being so gross that you instantly throw up and then you feel better