You can feel a similar sense of lethargic, exhausted despair in the writings of Roth and Zweig (and maybe a little bit in Mann also) - but their civilizations had literally collapsed. Neither handled it particularly well. But I also think there's a freedom in acknowledging the old world is dead and that it's been dead for some time. Many, many people are choosing to live in nostalgia. Far less are talking about the future, or how to take the best of the past and fill the vacuum with something ennobling or dare to dream - beautiful.
thanks for this piece, as clear and urgent as ever, and also timely for me. i was having a conversation the other day with someone who, for better and worse, has had a very different relationship with 'trauma' and therapy than i have; but i was struck at how we both had different ways of describing the same process of endlessly circling breakdown, wearing organised defences against it thin but never actually allowing it through to produce actual overwhelm and never getting to see what happens next, what *must* come after. my experiences of coming to understand this and of actually honing a skill at going all the way and continuing to exist after touching the incomprehensible coming through a slightly strange parallel of reading psychoanalysis and practicing not-very-psychoanalytic-at-all exposure therapy.
it does not feel great to think about having to do this with an incomprehensibility on the scale of how fucked the world is, but the thought that it is possible feels like a rare glimpse of hope. it is good to realise when one is wandering in circles.
this one is also a good reminder that i should read some Winnicott. i got put onto similar ideas of overwhelm as vector of psychic change from Avgi Saketopoulou, idk if you've read her at all but i see cool parallels in what you say here and her recent article on austerity logics, exigent sadism and the revolutionary impulse: https://read.dukeupress.edu/social-text/article/44/1%20(166)/25/408866/Exigent-SadismAusterity-Logics-and-the
What a brilliant article - and not just a brilliant one, but a thoughtful and empathetic one as well. I don't think I'm capable of mentioning all the parts of it which resonated in me or made sense to me, so I'll limit myself to a sentence in your last paragraph-- "We, too, are a bunch of dead men walking." Of course, these days, when one mentions dead men walking, one instantly thinks of zombies - and of the many zombie films, TV series, stories and novels which seem to be avidly consumed, in myriad forms, by so many. (Confession: I actually wrote one of those series myself, but the zombies in my world are not living dead, but rather the biologically altered first specimens of a new humanoid race which has a number of things in common with many insect societies, including both a hive mind and multiple heart-like organs - and which comes about due to a scientist's obsession with some of the alternate evolutionary theories posited by Darwin's rival, Jean-Baptiste Lamarque. But that's another, and much longer story.) What I do wonder about both the worldwide obsession with zombies - and the many fears which so many of us are buffeted by - whether or not the "dead men walking" who you mention have the capability to dream? Or to remember happier moments from their previous existences? Questions which, if one examines possible answers, give room for something resembling a positivity, and possibly even a form of hope, among the neurons of all those of us who compose those masses of walking dead.
Enough said. Except for one thing I wish to repeat - this was truly a great post... starting from the wonderful Gustave Doré illustration you appended to the beginning, one I am familiar with from a misspent childhood reading old editions of Dante, among others. Thank you for not just making me 'think'... but leaving room for me and others to 'feel' as well, as we navigate your words.
This made me think of my Berkeley years, when I was running around saying to people that the university system that we were all living inside of a carcass. Some of us just didn't know it yet.. That realization allowed me to move through and out of the university system seeking.. The desire for intellectual community is a reducible and the university system is not that old that we can't remember other ways in which we have produced knowledge and culture. We will invented it again, but know that some staff wants to own cultu counter.. In any case those were saying that our democracy is already not but we have imagined it to be not only is it not but it never was. We have a lot of inventing to do. Get your heads out of AI and computer science, and join the world again. I say this to myself as much as anyone else. Because when I left academia, I joined them since I couldn't beat them and became a developer. Using speech to text because my eyes are recovering, so forgive any garbled sentences.
thank you for this, kate. unprecedented access to information about everything—concurrent or past, painful or joyful—seems like the deepest challenge to psychical health and wholeness of which we're aware. i wonder how the fear of breakdown relates to the choice to narrow one's field of view.
I think this is dead-on and elucidates a critical difference in revolutionary technique between those who are Able To Act and those who are trapped in the tyranny of the present. particularly the commentary around death-already-come-to-pass rings very true with my experience of suicidality - I spent almost of the entirety of my teen years swinging between complete dissociative states to active suicidality as a result of both dysphoria and a PTSD response to childhood sexual assault. I expected that at some point it would become too much and I would finally break and commit suicide (I never expected to make it out of high school) but upon getting to college and escaping those circumstances there was both a great terror and freedom of like, the worst already having come to pass. There's a great freedom in that and transition was in many ways choosing to live when I had already been dead.
The perspective that gives me now is that of living on bonus time; every moment of seized happiness is a gift to be stolen and redistributed. The future is at once foreclosed and open. To be granted the opportunity and duty to strike from within the belly of the beast - to rip ourselves free from history - is a gift unlike any other. There are a great more horrors to come, but at least now I am not alone; I am lucky have surrounded myself with people who I can trust, people who will be able to follow the path being carved into the New.
The revolutionary psychology of the modern day requires, I think, a healthy relation to the dissociative technique. To be able to distance oneself from the horrors already occurred and occuring and yet to come is critical, without looking away from them or being paralyzed by the fear. This way of living is already dead. The eschaton is already in motion. But there is a world after, one you can just barely begin to see. To look at the world with both eyes open is critical.
The old world is dead, and the new one chokes on its afterbirth; now is the time of monsters.
this is a nice piece but at the same time a classic example of what Baudrillard called the Americans' "frantic self-referentiality" and their psychic and certainly spiritual emptiness. Spend a few years in Asia. Read civilisational history. If you want a Western frame look at the seventeenth century, engulfed in what today would be called a global crisis – rebellion and the collapse of political authority throughout Continental Europe not to mention what would eventually become Great Britain. There was a profound crisis in state-society relations. There were religious conflicts, economic difficulties, and demographic declines from wars and outbreaks of disease which killed millions. There was turmoil in Japan, China, and the Ottoman and Mughal empires. We have iPhones, nuclear weapons, and ChatGPT and the bizarre Western liberal view that mass death and killing are somehow unusual. Now that the civilisational axis has shifted from West to East in the largest transfer of power in human history we can perhaps leave the Americans' grand moral insights in the background.
I’m sorry but I think mass televised genocide and climate change are existential novelties specific to our time. My essay is about the kind of emotional repression that comes from the all-at-onceness of contemporary life something about which Baudrillard had plenty to say, not about western moralism. You are simply arguing against a different piece than the one I wrote.
You can feel a similar sense of lethargic, exhausted despair in the writings of Roth and Zweig (and maybe a little bit in Mann also) - but their civilizations had literally collapsed. Neither handled it particularly well. But I also think there's a freedom in acknowledging the old world is dead and that it's been dead for some time. Many, many people are choosing to live in nostalgia. Far less are talking about the future, or how to take the best of the past and fill the vacuum with something ennobling or dare to dream - beautiful.
thanks for this piece, as clear and urgent as ever, and also timely for me. i was having a conversation the other day with someone who, for better and worse, has had a very different relationship with 'trauma' and therapy than i have; but i was struck at how we both had different ways of describing the same process of endlessly circling breakdown, wearing organised defences against it thin but never actually allowing it through to produce actual overwhelm and never getting to see what happens next, what *must* come after. my experiences of coming to understand this and of actually honing a skill at going all the way and continuing to exist after touching the incomprehensible coming through a slightly strange parallel of reading psychoanalysis and practicing not-very-psychoanalytic-at-all exposure therapy.
it does not feel great to think about having to do this with an incomprehensibility on the scale of how fucked the world is, but the thought that it is possible feels like a rare glimpse of hope. it is good to realise when one is wandering in circles.
this one is also a good reminder that i should read some Winnicott. i got put onto similar ideas of overwhelm as vector of psychic change from Avgi Saketopoulou, idk if you've read her at all but i see cool parallels in what you say here and her recent article on austerity logics, exigent sadism and the revolutionary impulse: https://read.dukeupress.edu/social-text/article/44/1%20(166)/25/408866/Exigent-SadismAusterity-Logics-and-the
What a brilliant article - and not just a brilliant one, but a thoughtful and empathetic one as well. I don't think I'm capable of mentioning all the parts of it which resonated in me or made sense to me, so I'll limit myself to a sentence in your last paragraph-- "We, too, are a bunch of dead men walking." Of course, these days, when one mentions dead men walking, one instantly thinks of zombies - and of the many zombie films, TV series, stories and novels which seem to be avidly consumed, in myriad forms, by so many. (Confession: I actually wrote one of those series myself, but the zombies in my world are not living dead, but rather the biologically altered first specimens of a new humanoid race which has a number of things in common with many insect societies, including both a hive mind and multiple heart-like organs - and which comes about due to a scientist's obsession with some of the alternate evolutionary theories posited by Darwin's rival, Jean-Baptiste Lamarque. But that's another, and much longer story.) What I do wonder about both the worldwide obsession with zombies - and the many fears which so many of us are buffeted by - whether or not the "dead men walking" who you mention have the capability to dream? Or to remember happier moments from their previous existences? Questions which, if one examines possible answers, give room for something resembling a positivity, and possibly even a form of hope, among the neurons of all those of us who compose those masses of walking dead.
Enough said. Except for one thing I wish to repeat - this was truly a great post... starting from the wonderful Gustave Doré illustration you appended to the beginning, one I am familiar with from a misspent childhood reading old editions of Dante, among others. Thank you for not just making me 'think'... but leaving room for me and others to 'feel' as well, as we navigate your words.
I can't explain how or why, but I think your compassion and tenderness is palpable in this article. Wonderful. Thank you.
This made me think of my Berkeley years, when I was running around saying to people that the university system that we were all living inside of a carcass. Some of us just didn't know it yet.. That realization allowed me to move through and out of the university system seeking.. The desire for intellectual community is a reducible and the university system is not that old that we can't remember other ways in which we have produced knowledge and culture. We will invented it again, but know that some staff wants to own cultu counter.. In any case those were saying that our democracy is already not but we have imagined it to be not only is it not but it never was. We have a lot of inventing to do. Get your heads out of AI and computer science, and join the world again. I say this to myself as much as anyone else. Because when I left academia, I joined them since I couldn't beat them and became a developer. Using speech to text because my eyes are recovering, so forgive any garbled sentences.
thank you for this, kate. unprecedented access to information about everything—concurrent or past, painful or joyful—seems like the deepest challenge to psychical health and wholeness of which we're aware. i wonder how the fear of breakdown relates to the choice to narrow one's field of view.
Every word of this. Yes. Thanks for writing this.
I think this is dead-on and elucidates a critical difference in revolutionary technique between those who are Able To Act and those who are trapped in the tyranny of the present. particularly the commentary around death-already-come-to-pass rings very true with my experience of suicidality - I spent almost of the entirety of my teen years swinging between complete dissociative states to active suicidality as a result of both dysphoria and a PTSD response to childhood sexual assault. I expected that at some point it would become too much and I would finally break and commit suicide (I never expected to make it out of high school) but upon getting to college and escaping those circumstances there was both a great terror and freedom of like, the worst already having come to pass. There's a great freedom in that and transition was in many ways choosing to live when I had already been dead.
The perspective that gives me now is that of living on bonus time; every moment of seized happiness is a gift to be stolen and redistributed. The future is at once foreclosed and open. To be granted the opportunity and duty to strike from within the belly of the beast - to rip ourselves free from history - is a gift unlike any other. There are a great more horrors to come, but at least now I am not alone; I am lucky have surrounded myself with people who I can trust, people who will be able to follow the path being carved into the New.
The revolutionary psychology of the modern day requires, I think, a healthy relation to the dissociative technique. To be able to distance oneself from the horrors already occurred and occuring and yet to come is critical, without looking away from them or being paralyzed by the fear. This way of living is already dead. The eschaton is already in motion. But there is a world after, one you can just barely begin to see. To look at the world with both eyes open is critical.
The old world is dead, and the new one chokes on its afterbirth; now is the time of monsters.
Our role is as midwives.
this is a nice piece but at the same time a classic example of what Baudrillard called the Americans' "frantic self-referentiality" and their psychic and certainly spiritual emptiness. Spend a few years in Asia. Read civilisational history. If you want a Western frame look at the seventeenth century, engulfed in what today would be called a global crisis – rebellion and the collapse of political authority throughout Continental Europe not to mention what would eventually become Great Britain. There was a profound crisis in state-society relations. There were religious conflicts, economic difficulties, and demographic declines from wars and outbreaks of disease which killed millions. There was turmoil in Japan, China, and the Ottoman and Mughal empires. We have iPhones, nuclear weapons, and ChatGPT and the bizarre Western liberal view that mass death and killing are somehow unusual. Now that the civilisational axis has shifted from West to East in the largest transfer of power in human history we can perhaps leave the Americans' grand moral insights in the background.
I’m sorry but I think mass televised genocide and climate change are existential novelties specific to our time. My essay is about the kind of emotional repression that comes from the all-at-onceness of contemporary life something about which Baudrillard had plenty to say, not about western moralism. You are simply arguing against a different piece than the one I wrote.
Thank you for writing this, it resonates with -- and clarifies! -- my psychic experience of the last years.
Thank you for writing this, it resonates with -- and clarifies! -- my psychic experience of the last years.
i feel like Noelle McCaffee's fear of breakdown should be referenced here!
Brutal and on point. thank you for this
speculation culture