Stuart Hall writes a lot about how Thatcherism is so successful because it manages to touch the real experience of people’s lives, and articulate something of that truth in a rightward direction, or maybe more precisely to articulate something of it as rightist ideology. Hall’s accounting of “authoritarian populism” feels especially, uh, relevant right now, but there’s something to this more tangible than the construction of historical categories. There is an emotive experience of everything that is “going on,” and that necessarily happens in a personal register.
Or rather, maybe, there’s a weird double emotional register of events like what we’re living through right now. First, there’s the register of public performance. This is the register of the brave face, the sweeping statement, the performance of courage. It’s also the register of comparison and ranking. It’s where you have to rank your experience of your problem according to the miserly moral calculus of progressive discourse so often presented, dishonestly, as progressive values. I catch myself doing this all the time. I’ve caught myself doing it this week, in the middle of the abject panic about my future and my stability that is finally catching up to me. Of course my fear is nothing compared to the suffering of Gazans, or the terror inflicted on trans youth in our own country, and so on. I would never try to pretend that it is. However, it is there. It exists in the second register, the personal one, where catastrophe takes on a specific and personal shape.
In my experience it is considered a progressive virtue to conduct our affective performances of politics entirely in the first register (the register of Posting). I do think this has drawbacks in and of itself, but I think it also has a secondary effect which is insidious and which few recognize. It ensures that personal catastrophes remain personal, never crossing the threshold into politicization. This is a particular problem for scientists, who struggle to politicize their experiences in the first place. (Don DeLillo in Libra: “The purpose of history is to crawl out of your own skin.”)
I think this helps to explain some of the intense ambivalence and psychic paralysis I’m feeling lately. I am terrified for my job (the threat of losing my job is very much experienced, by me, as personal catastrophe, in ways that I can’t/won’t go into) and at the same time I can’t believe that we’re really going to the fucking barricades for NIH indirects. But of course, we’re not going to the barricades at all, which furthers my indifference. Rather than a broad-spectrum assault on civil society, rather than an illegal attack that will fuck up thousands of people’s livelihoods, for no reason, at a single keystroke, scientists are articulating their opposition to this in terms of the particular merit of their own research. To put it bluntly: a lot of research is simply not good. Universities are not good. The system of funding is not good, it’s certainly not meritocratic, it’s a source of endless frustration and wasted time and administrative burden to everyone, it’s actually a principal reason I left academia (was this smart or dumb? I don’t know).
None of it is very good but here we are, forced into defending it because if we don’t we’re gonna lose our jobs – we might lose our jobs anyway, and no one will sympathize – and we have no language to articulate the fear in except the abstract language of doing harm to the “jewel” of American research, or stifling innovation, or whatever. I, for one, feel completely fucking stuck, have felt stuck for the last few years. It manifests as a leaden feeling of pointlessness. What is the point of all this talking, all this analysis that goes nowhere? What is the point of the tweet threads, the gentle reminders and bland exhortations to no one? I don’t know why I think this, but I believe that if we could articulate our personal catastrophes as political ones (in a more left-wing direction, obviously) we would feel less completely immobilized and demobilized. At least, that’s how I feel. For a million reasons, personal ones intercalated with professional and political ones, my attention feels shattered like a glass vase. Overwhelm, endless information, endless forking and endless snowballing of Thoughts. Well, what to make of this: an interesting dream I had about two years ago involved trying, endlessly, to pick an endless number of tiny shards of glass out of the palms of my hands.
I don’t know the answer and don’t know what to do. And the thing is: no one does, and anyone who claims they do is a fucking grifter trying to sell you a subscription to some bullshit. Or a nonprofit staffer. I wrote several more paragraphs here, about an article that I read about the problem with left-liberal philanthropy (I agreed with it about halfway) and how the structure of professionalized activism reinforces this decommissioning of the personal and emotive aspect of politics. I’m not gonna publish them because who cares? Because I have developed a serious psychological block around writing or sharing any of my thoughts over the last year or two, who knows why, and because of the immediate necessity of attending to my real life. And I think because doing this very thing – trying to come up with a nice digestible summary – is actually effecting the process of abstraction from real experience that is so poisonous. It feels important for me to keep writing, but it feels even more imperative that the writing exercise some kind of creative or exploratory impulse, because the feeling that any intellectual expenditure or effort of mine has got to solve a huge (and, at the individual level, insoluble) societal problem in order to be worthwhile makes me want to walk straight into the ice-slushy river. There’s going to be (even more) instability and chaos and, contra so much leftist bravado, there’s absolutely no guarantee any generalized social disturbance is gonna break our way, and a lot of reason to suspect it might actually break the other way. Hold on tight, I guess.