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The Sadness of Theresa May

Yesterday, Theresa May, despite holding on by her fingertips for months, finally let go of her position as Prime Minister, delivering a resignation speech in front of number 10 that picked apart was a truly offensive display, at every turn giving an opposite account to the political consequences of her government. In what was an interesting and jarring echo of history May, like Thatcher, broke into tears on her way out, giving credence to those who hold that these times stand in parallel with the 80s, with the hopeful Corbyn Labour party representing here the failure of Michael Foot and the wider, bitter failure of the left during that decade. Of course, the comparison holds about as much water as a sieve, falling apart as soon as one bares in mind the stark contrast between what both Thatcher and May were leaving behind.

Thatcher, despite her eventual fall, had succeeded. Unlike May’s government in the very first instance, she had set out to wage ideological warfare with an uncompromising goal, and over the course of the decade, had fought tooth and nail to achieve the complete demoralisation of the left, the dominance of neoliberal economic doctrine. Her iron-clad war-machine had run rough-shod over all opposition. Amid the bodies, the spoils of war, she had been victorious, and as such her tearful exit holds an air of the army general ousted before his time. She had more war to wage … if only she’d been given the chance to wage it. She didn’t have to, however. Her victory proved total, to the extent where in the following decade the Labour party rode in through acquiescing to the war machine, surrendering to the neoliberal terminator and ultimately turning it onto us, leading into a time dominated by the underlying assumptions of Capitalist Realism. We now enacted our own domination, the march of post-fordism ensured our inability to see past it, in time dividing not only resources but time, time to act, time to think, time to change.

May came in, the result of a sudden leadership contest in the aftermath of the EU membership referendum, amidst the dying embers of the established order. The total ideological victory of Thatcher, neoliberalism, had grown lazy, arrogant, and decadent. During the 2000s the assumption was that it would last forever, Francis Fukuyama’s proclamation of the “End of History” was all too real, an endless limbo from which we could not escape. First the financial crash of 2008, then years later the surprise result of the EU referendum and the election of Donald Trump in the US, alongside a number of sudden resurgent fascist interests and imitators, were ugly impositions on the assumed comfortable reality of Post-Fordist capital, of course representing the repressed knowledge that it was never that comfortable at all.

The time of Theresa May’s PMship can be recognised as the desperate scrambling attempts of the conservative party to restore some semblance of order, against the backdrop of a gradually more apparent descent into squabbles and infighting. The Tories, having put into practice their idea of being the natural party of government for so long now, can’t now reconcile their insistence on maintaining the limbo of yesterday with the collapse of today. May exits on a pile of unspoken misery, of the onward march of a ruined respectability. Increasingly she struck the figure of the aristocrat holing themselves up in castle Gormenghast, away from the destitution below and amidst the crumbling, overgrown parapets of a dead or dying order.

It is against all this that her sadness must be measured. In a blustering, sputtering response to Owen Jones yesterday upon his statement that he felt “less than no sympathy” for May, we heard a plea for a “human response”. What is a human response if not to point out the absurdity of presenting a “woe is me” narrative in relation to someone who in tandem with their allies furthered a wave of misery and destitution, who refused to acknowledge their part in the deaths of hundreds of working class people in fear of weakening their ideological hegemony. There should be no more sympathy here than she and her government ever displayed to the people they plunged into precarity, poverty and homelessness, the people they have systematically shamed for finding themselves at the bottom of society.

Theresa May’s sadness cannot be seen as a mere individual reaction, it is a sadness undeniably loaded with the delusions of the ruling classes. The fact that so many right wing politicians and commentators will jump onto this to moralise at the left … show some empathy … demonstrates precisely how rich her tears are with symbolic leverage. For years we’ve seen the unspoken insistence reign that more empathy is to be shown for the respectable bourgeoisie than the feckless scroungers at the bottom, and this is why; so that when it comes to facing up to the human consequences of their actions the leverage of sympathy lies with them, so that we all feel sorry for the fallen politician who was dealt a rough hand and was only trying to do their best, rather than tackle the real violence they perpetrated in the role and the ideological underpinnings of their policies. So by all means, show some sympathy, but not for May, for all the people who’s lives she and her government helped ruin and take. Indeed is it sympathy as much as anger that should be driving us in this moment, an anger that can be effectively channelled into something to replace this crumbling edifice for good.

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Moving Around

It feels like it’s been a while since I posted anything here, much to my discontent… this has largely coincided with my moving into a new flat, an event that has been surreal and stressful not just because of the usual reasons but also because it was involuntary. Indeed the whole process has put somewhat into perspective just how the private rental system, something that vast amounts of young people now find themselves interminably caught within, stacks the benefits in favour of Landlords, tenants being forced to live under the constant threat of eviction, not necessarily any fault of their own and something that while a minor inconvenience for the Landlord, requires their tenants to effectively turn their life upside down on a whim.

There’s something else about moving, beyond the flagrant power dynamics at play… I have found myself in past few years moving around this city incessantly, and this has a strong relationship with my state of mind during this time. As, for about a year, I found myself sinking into a slow depression and despondency, I have realised on reflection that it was largely due to my surroundings, that my mental distress was inexorably connected to place and influence; it became a matter of necessity to extricate myself from that position or rapidly unravel to the point of no return.

Gradually, since then, I have been thinking through and coming to terms with this period of my life, as much connected to feelings of guilt as to a lot of emotions that at the time I could not explain, but since I have been able to effectively hold under a microscope and analyse. It’s not that I have entirely “healed” or anything so total, but that I have come to understand my position within the outside world and the things that led me towards certain points. The central mistake, one made all too often, is simply to attribute these dark episodes and struggles with identity throughout ones life with some pure inner cause, as if there is some mental interiority that drives our actions disconnected from outside influence. The effect of this is ultimately to cloud an understanding of these actions and the network that influences and/or controls them.

I’ve lately followed up on the work of radical therapist David Smail, a practitioner who really focussed on the social and political contexts of mental health, the way that our inner psychologies are effected by outside power dynamics. Reading through some of his work I found set forward clearly the ways in which our individual psychology is placed within a wider socio-political framework, of power and economic necessity, that we should resist the attempts to individualise these issues that emerged largely in tandem with Thatcherite, Neoliberal attitudes wherein the individual takes precedent over his or her place in society, where the entrepreneurial ideal of the intrepid individual making a name for themselves in a competitive world covers over a systematic and extensive dismantling of systems of solidarity, consciousness and social security, nothing less than a war on collectivity, and one that led to a revolution in capitalism, not just in economic organisation, but the very way we think about and approach the world. Competition, we are led to believe, is now in our very DNA.

There’s quote from Margaret Thatcher Franco Berardi uses in his book Futurability that sets out quite how extensive this war was intended to be;


“What’s irritated me about the whole direction of politics in the last 30 years is that it’s always been towards the collectivist society. People have forgotten about the personal society. And they say: do I count, do I matter? To which the short answer is, yes. And therefore, it isn’t that I set out on economic policies; it’s that I set out really to change the approach, and changing the economics is the means of changing that approach. If you change the approach you really are after the heart and soul of the nation. Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul. ”

“Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul“. Berardi rightly points out that this places Neoliberalism not as merely economic, but practically spiritual doctrine. The aim here was not simply material reform, but a rewiring of the social brain towards the valorization of individual economic concerns, and to this end we saw the consolidation of the ruling classes and the pacification of their subordinates via the promise of greatness, the assurance that “if you put in the hard work you can get here too”.

In terms of issues such as mental distress, this sees its effect in what Mark Fisher termed the “privatization of stress”. What becomes important then in this scenario where we have all become separated into our little cocoons, medicated to the eyeballs, plied with promises that we can all make it better through force of will, is solidarity. The simple act of understanding, offering support, as vapid and simple as it may sound, is hugely important to counter the loneliness of the connected world. It is precisely when we have been shorn off from the social, when we have succumbed to the illusion of autonomous individuality decoupled from mechanisms of power, that we are deprived of the ability to shape our surroundings. Something that I find is repeatedly missed by those who place great emphasis on self-improvement is the simple realisation that any semblance of hard work improving ones own well-being is only truly possible or meaningful given the autonomy that arises from power, a comfortable position in society. It is not, in fact, our own willpower that drives our ability to improve, but overwhelmingly socio-economic conditions.

In my own case it is certainly true that I’ve managed to extricate myself from an awful situation and now find myself in a better state of mind than I have ever been, but it’s been notable that at every turn the structures of society have provided obstacles, hurdles and fences to this progress, and indeed that this improvement was in reality not down to some sheer willpower on my part as much as it was the people around me and coming to understand my position in relation to the other within the neural network. It is in this sense mistaken to argue that a politicization of mental distress is some kind of undermining of autonomy, taking it out of the equation entirely; indeed it is more accurate to argue that, in taking into account the outside world and our place within it we salvage the idea of autonomy from individualist theology, placing the emphasis, instead of on some mythical will-power, on our connection to and influence from the outside.

It is worth mentioning now, as we stand on particularly shaky ground, as the flaring up of a new fascism and the hope of a new socialism pull in opposing directions, that our mental distress, our inner commentary, our social voice is not some magical wellspring that emerges from the subconscious, and that just as the earth beneath our feet cracks and shudders, so does our state of mind. It is not through what Smail terms “magical voluntarism” the faith that, through some magical force of will, through “positive thinking” or personal strength, through a number of incantations found in self-help texts, that we will build a future that works, and find our way out of the labyrinthine horrors of our psychological impasses, but through the building of a new sociability, a collective subject to invert the theological reliance upon the transcendental individual.

All this aside, I’m excited to be back to blogging. Writing here really is quite valuable and whenever I cease to do so regularly I admit I fall mildly into a vague despondency. While blogging networks now are somewhat buried and difficult to excavate in certain regards, being present within a wider conversation at all, and creating/adding to an ever-shifting entity is something I’m immensely thankful to have at my disposal; again it’s not through some magical willpower that I have dragged myself out of the murk, but through connecting to something larger, becoming part of a purpose. While blogging isn’t the be all end all, and I would dearly love to set in motion some projects that I’ve had kicking around my brain for some time now, it provides me with a much needed outlet and a sense that what I’m writing will actually reach someone. After what feels like much too great of an absence, I look forward to sinking my teeth into some upcoming posts, especially given the most interesting and changeable political landscape we’ve seen in decades playing out as I speak. More on that later.

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Into the Nerve Cluster

mezzscape

 

[THE CAPITAL]

It is a centre, but not the centre, a heart, but not the heart.We find it as a pulsating spike of intensity in the interlocking diagrammatical mesh of organisms, a glistening mass of tentacular flows, a nervous system spliced into the white hot rock of matter. The city is the hyperspace where we most easily tune into the Deleuzo-Guattarian schizoid imaginings of information driven capitalism, where we find the oscillating gradients and intensification of current through the veins of organic machinations. London is a bubble, but it is not suspended in a membraneous isolation from neighbouring assemblages and affects, but part of a gigantic metastatizing organism of fleshy tendrils stretching across and into fibrous surfaces.

The city never really ends… it is an intensification, a nerve cluster, one that simultaneously attracts and repels its surroundings, keeping them attached to its surface membrane enough to subsume its outside gradually, expand until expansion reaches its inevitable limit. It may be that, as Fisher illustrated in Capitalist Realism the kafkaesque bureaucratic structures of the call centre are the closest we come to accessing capital-in-itself, but the city-at-large is the point where one can most immediately experience its flux, its libidinal excess and screaming contradictions. It is on Oxford street, in the throng of consumers, that one can see in a true sense what one elsewhere experiences as a poetic description, a fiction materialised. Thousands of organisms coexist yet blur into a current, producing endlessly shifting patterns corralled and machinised through the canals and wires transporting current through the cerebral interface.

In many ways, walking through this milieu, the copy of anti-oedipus sitting at the bottom of my bag seems to elucidate itself, make itself clearer, manifesting itself in my surroundings, an encounter with theory more beautiful than anything one might accomplish in the academy, simply going through pages, references, dusty old interpretations. It is here in the outside world that the implications of theory lie, in much the same way as Deleuze and Guattari evoke the “schizophrenic out for a walk” over the “neurotic lying on the analysts couch”. Here, wandering the streets of this organ of intensities, the dusty old corridors of academia break and give way to the active swirling melange of discourse, of nomadic enquiry.

It strikes me that the brute fact of the matter is that I’m reading, and more to the point getting value from more theory now than I ever did when I was a student. Part of this is indeed my own personal shift out of the inky blackness of resignation and cynical capitulation, but on another level it is simply freeing to study outside the reigns of academic writing. It might sound somewhat contradictory, but this unshackled hunger that has emerged from the rigid formulae of the academy is leading me to finally consolidate my desire to move on with academia and to engage with it again on my own terms in the future. This time I would not enter those halls simply because I feel like I have to, or because I have nothing else to do, but out of a genuine wish to grasp the subject matter and pull something out of its chest, a beating heart of something as yet undefined and unformed.

thevoid.jpg

[AGENTS OF THE BLACK HOLE]

Flee from all those rigid monomaniacal tyrannies who would trap you in the fluffy and worthless safety of ignorance, those who wish to prove themselves, the charlatans of nihilist hedonia pushing you to an early grave, playing to your anxious desires. These are the agents of virulent malaise with nothing to give, intent on ruining all about them, latching to the underside of power and riding the wave, those who to spite themselves spite you. There is more outside than the protestations of these insular power-hungry parasites would ever admit, tangled as they are with the monstrous hatred of their own being, the existential terror they face upon the realisation that they may not be the copernican axis of cosmic power.

This is something that might not be self evident about the seemingly sudden wave of angry reactionary sentiment in recent years, and the mindset of those who lie caught in its web, the deep void that lies somewhere behind their veil of belief, the sheer terror that underpins the clusters of grotesquely regressive online communities of ex-new-atheists tooting incessantly on the rusty horn of pop-rationality, a shrill and annoying sound that barely makes it out of the pits they’ve dug for themselves, but occasionally can be heard, an echo of panic in its dissonant tone.

The existential black hole lying somewhere beneath the far right isn’t something that has been addressed nearly enough in discussions around its nature, as its something I feel strikes at its weak spot, the philosophical emptiness of pure negation and the complete shallowness of everything they stand for; not for nothing do many online communities IDing as anti-progressive, anti-feminist, conservative, any number of right wing reactionary positions, couch almost everything they do in an imperceptible construction of irony, the irony of fools that belies the real implications of the ironic action, the lack of conviction in the validity of ones own position, so much that one tries to negate it by reducing it to a “joke”. The reason becomes evident as to why this is no laughing matter however when one realises that ironic action spreads itself entirely unironically, the effect belies the intention even if, and here I’m being very generous, the intention was ironic, not some kind of misguided flailing at the wind, an attempt to mask their own insecurities through a pretence of privileged knowledge.

The appearance of these huddled groups of rage-driven misanthropes is in many ways driven by the same vapid emptiness underpinning the neoliberal enterprise. The conjuring of problems for them presents itself as a scapegoat yes, but for what? Many who tackle this subject fall back on their libidinal capitalist tendencies and stop short of pointing at the entire rotten corpse before them, but in this regard they too wilfully disregard the fetid stench and grotesque appearance of the issue and simply repeat the same tired dogma of reform, a little bit here and there and this will all be better, there’s no need for anything drastic folks, just tweak the settings and your experience will be back to normal.

From the same existential nullity come two different forms of blindness. That of the ego-driven pseudo-rationalist and those of the comfortable centre-liberal inculcated into the libidinal infrastructure. Both do their utmost to ignore the stench of death in the air but both are its very symptom, attempting to ignore for as long as they can this distant memory of anything outside this cosmic PR campaign.

[THE HEART IS EMPTY]

 

 

 

 

 

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The Weirdening

After a week of yet further political disarray in this somewhat cursed little island, I attempt to arrange my own thoughts into some uncharacteristically ordered fashion against my better judgement. The nature of these snippets and connections doesn’t really lend itself to clarity of purpose, my instinct is to just sprawl them over a page and mask them in metaphor or some other obfuscation. 

The ludicrous display of Brexit continues, each time it threatens to flatten into a normal state of affairs poking its putrid, rotten head above the parapet and giving us a wave, one of its fingers falling off in the process straight into a previously tempting bowl of porridge. There’s something interesting that’s been manifesting itself for me about our political predicament, and it might just be a symptom of my current concerns, but there’s a heavy dose of weirdness that defines it all. We are now seeing something intruding on a long period of widely perceived safety, where everything seemed to be running on autopilot.

Underneath this of course the forces underpinning the suffering, paranoia and anxiety of the late twentieth century simmered ominously and increased in pressure, and the obvious shortcomings of capitalism continued to broaden themselves as we conned ourselves into apathy. Even the left as a political force had effectively de-fanged and disarmed itself, forgetting its past days of spirited political ideals and eventually settling into an incredibly unexciting and ineffective role of somewhat beige opposition to a blindingly beige Conservative government. This point, arguably, may have been our most Jameson-esque moment, where his vision of a capitalism sliding into a rhythm of banal repetition really hit its peak, as everything mushed itself together into some vague blob of sociopolitical nothingness.

To use a worn out proverb, however, pride comes before a fall, and so it has proved, with the rather rapid collapse of the dangerously perched liberal edifice we happily resided within for a decade or more, faces locked in grins redolent of the assumption that we were headed towards enlightenment. Enlightenment eh? Fat lot of good that turned out to be when the chips were down, indeed the enlightenment itself providing a great deal of succour for those misguided souls who ramble on and on about “free speech” and “classical liberalism”, warping “enlightenment” itself something of a questionable concept, into some strange process of self-deluded ultra-rationality, manifesting itself as a group of people who unlike the rest of us had never passed their new atheist phase, simply transferring the rather shallow contrarianism of that “movement” into the political sphere.

Point is, the crumbling walls of the neoliberal fortress provide glimpses to the outside, and it’s scary out there. It comes leaking in through the cracks and we get a sense of the fragility of everything we have existed within for so long. Soon we get a sense that we will be falling straight into that shifting and uncertain current, and it’s a prospect so different from what we know that many of us are frantically trying to plug the gaps, keep this whole thing afloat despite the best efforts of gravity to pull us under. Let me be clear, the failure of neoliberalism isn’t a cause to crack out the champagne and celebrate, it isn’t some glorious victory and indeed allows just as much horror to creep in as joy, as we witness in the increasing boldness of the far right in recent years. It opens the playing field so wide that anyone can suddenly have a pop, something that america’s current president very much embodies, this sense that now anything can happen, so opportunists will jump at the chance to grab hold of the puppet strings. 

This all contributes to the weirdening of society, of politics, of modernity. There is a very distinct quality to both Trump and Brexit, that a great deal of us assumed they couldn’t happen. They were crossed from our minds as viable events, and so when they happened they were more than just a political or social shift, they represented this distinctly weird challenging of reality. Fixed axioms were blasted out, rules were shattered and a mist of uncertainty descended. A way to describe this would be as a kind of society-wide existential confrontation. We had to suddenly come to terms with the demon we thought a work of fiction standing in the fireplace grinning at us.

And while over time it is true that we almost started to settle, to become desensitised, it is notable that weeks like the last one, where the fragility of our government becomes so glaringly obvious, can even happen. It is terrifying in many ways, simply as we have to come to terms with the fact that our point in history is no more or less secure, important, fixed, comfortable, than any other. We stare into the infinitely complex possibilities beyond our carefully constructed horizons and, like a character in one of Lovecraft’s tales, we can’t comprehend what lies therein.