A Dialectal Pessimism Part I
Complex Praxis for 11/17/19
Hello, from the American Midwest.
Still crazy busy here, so not much of an introduction to today’s newsletter. What I will say is that the words below grew out of a recent re-reading of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, which I’m doing with a group of graduate students.
My initial plan was just to post a few notes that I had taken as I read the text. However, this week I started to edit my notes, but at some point editing what I had written turned into writing something totally new. Before I knew it I had something that was much more than what my notes were, and that’s what is below. I hope you enjoy it.
SOMETHING THING TO KNOW
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Having said all that…
THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE (to Capitalism)
What does this mean? Does it mean that there is no alternative, that we are now stuck with capitalism as it is? Or does it mean that there is no alternative unless we somehow manage to create an alternative?
One of the things that makes Fisher’s work so appealing to me is that it is a good fit with my outlook, which I call Dialectical Pessimism.
I’ve never really written out what Dialectical Pessimism is, and at some point, in the future, I should craft something that is a well thought out description or explanation of what Dialectical Pessimism is.
However, for now, I’m going to give you a super-short-version that is an outline of my more abundant thinking in regards to Dialectical Pessimism.
Dialectical Pessimism 101:
There are lots of things going on in the material world today that are double-plus-ungood. Things like…
Mass alienation of human beings from (a) the environment that sustains them and (b) one another.
Leaders with such castration anxiety they are willing to do crazy things which help them libidinally reinvest in the fantasy of their non-castration.
Out of control debt.
Climate crisis
The above is just the stuff I came up with, right off the top of my head, without really thinking about it for more than a second. So, yeah. Things are bad.
Often the way many people who are subjects of this current set of conditions respond to them by trying to foreclose, repress, and disavow, just how bad things have become. That’s the thing many people need to do so that they can “get on with living their lives” because to see the Real that is the sum of these conditions would be too traumatic to their psyche.
Be that as it may, Dialectical Pessimism insists that we all subject ourselves to as much of the psychological trauma as we can handle. It asks us to…
Look at the world as it is
Open our hearts and minds to just how adverse these conditions are.
That we don’t look away as what we are subject to breaks our hearts.
Why do this? Because doing so might result in us becoming pessimistic. Why be pessimistic? Because, if we assume the dialectical reversal is possible and we go deeply enough into pessimism, we will discover ourselves on the other side of the Mobius strip. The only way to optimism that a better world is possible is THROUGH the darkness of pessimism! Avoiding pessimism (through foreclosure, repression, and disavowal) will keep us anesthetized as we ride the Capitalist-Realism-Death-drive-expresses into a world that future generations will have as their reality.
In effect: Pessimism is the new optimism.
The Poetic Position:
The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein had a way of looking at people that put them into one of two different positions in relation to the conditions they were in. Here is my concise way of describing those positions.
The Paranoid- Schizoid position — Everything is all good or all bad. Rather than seeing one’s self, others, or the world as a combination of good and bad attributes, the person in this position tries to make themselves and whoever/whatever is important to them into “all good objects.” This person is scared that things want to be all good might not be all good, and as a result, they need to find ways to “focus on the positive.” This propensity to “focus on the positive” then leads forclose, repress, and disavow the negative.
The Depressive position — This person realizes that their self, others, and the world are all very complex. Good folks don’t always win. Bad people don’t always lose. The extent to which someone gratifies you directly correlates to how much they can (and will!) frustrate you. If you fall in love with someone, you will feel great until you realize that the idealized version of this person and your relationship to them is more fantasy than it is a reality. Ourselves, others who matter to us, and our world will eventually age, diminish, and die. The person in this position is sad, but even though they are sad, they are more in touch with reality of positive and negative and less invested in a fantasy of all positive.
The way I see it, the person in the Paranoid-Schizoid position is too scared to look at things as they are, so they adopt a sort of desperate (but fundamentally false) optimism, which prevents them from feeling frustrated (pessimistic!) enough to make changes to their conditions.
The person in the Depressive position (the Dialectical Pessimist) looks at how bad things are, gets their heartbroken, but things don’t end with that broken heart. Rather, the Depressive decides that they have failed and their heart is broken, but that broken heart opens up new possibilities to fail better.
The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips explains the value of the depressive position nicely here.
I hear what Phillips as saying as the poetic position, which is perhaps a variation on what Klein means by the Depressive Position and what I mean by Dialectical Pessimism.
Accelerated Pessimism:
Yet another way to explain what I believe is the value in a Dialectical Pessimism would be by combining it with the concept of accelerationism (which I’ve written about in prior editions of CP).
The way I see things, people are very good at adapting to all sorts of different situations. People are so good at adapting to conditions that they can, and often do, adjust to double-plus-ultra-bad situations.
However, despite how good we currently are at adapting, there is a point when the conditions we are contained within will become so bad that no matter how good we are at adapting, we will still be screwed.
Rather than some accelerationists who are in favor of just accelerating the “end of the world as we know it” (queue REM)…
…I’d much rather accelerate our awareness of just how bad things are getting and take organized actions that are motivated by our knowledge of how bad things are getting.
IN OTHER NEWS:
The from78 podcast has new episodes up. Last week I released the second part of an interview I did with French Horn Hero, and the first part of an interview I did with Comrade Adam from Red Library. The second part of the interview with Comrade Adam got released today.
I’ll be being interviewed by Comrade Adam on a future episode of Red Library, where I talk about the novel The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin. The interview will be at the end of November, but I’m not sure when it will be out for consumption. Regardless, I’m looking forward to the interview a lot.
WRAP:
Tha’s it for this week. This one was thrown together fast. I hope it made sense outside of my brain.