Let’s take the increasingly ubiquitous image of the dominatrix, in fashion, film, buisness, pop culture. “She”, a new archetypal vision out of a fantasy past is clearly an experssion of the real (eventless) increased economic and political power of women in society, re-sexualized in the register which is over-determined by the role of the feminine gender. This dark image could be considered merely immersed capitalism simply reappropriating and limiting freedoms, but this does not negate the very real powers that come to women as agents of their own sexual demand in the figure of the dominatrix itself. Female economic and political freedoms may be conditioned (and be made less polyvalent) to the sexual register, with women once again forced to articulate themselves (and conceive of themselves) in modes once used more to dominate them (what if I don’t want to demand an orgasm, and I simply want heath insurance), but the forces involved in the sexualization are greater than sexualization alone.

Goth rebellion becomes “The Crow” and “Twilight” but this does not negate the actual and affective experimentations that altererd personal capacities and ultimately the very forms that freedom can take or be grafted onto. Alternate forms of dysphoria, attempts to move passed generic pleasures (which follow generic truth procedures), to risk the pleasure of discomfort is a primary means of the “mutation” of society (a Renaissance word which precedes that of mere “revolution”)

Ok I’m completely ignoring this “militant dysphoria” thing and reading Goth as the opposite, as a symbolic restoration of the self as a hero on a quest as opposed to an ordinary kid immersed in late-capitalist modernity … no there’s a bigger connection I want to make here but I can’t articulate it…

go easy on the old auto-CBT, Ads

http://bit.ly/ZfvOE

“CBT, which is by far the dominant practice in the UK, aims at just that. (Though I will say that I’ve seen some serious and undeniable success stories with CBT and CBTesque therapy, and often practice a bit of auto-CBT on myself, as do we all, I’m sure… Still…)”

…in a context of Goths, perversity, dysphoria and fetishization, has more than one meaning. If of course you mean it with double meaning, I applaud your duplicitous commentary.

I would say that the answer is yes. With \’The aim is not to reform the world so that one will at last be comfortable in it\’ the point Dominic is making is that you don\’t let dysphoria set the terms of the debate. Remember Marx\’s formulation: the abnegation of the working class. Just as the valorisation of the working class leads to the defects of state socialism, there are problems inherent in promoting personal satisfaction. But I see your point in asking where this is going. Happiness would have to come into the answer — so there is a paradox in that, which makes your comparison with Christianity apt.
Esp. \”both Christianity and militiant dysphoria are far more invested in the pathologization of pleasure in the present than the arrival of some sort of misty reward after the redemption\”.

And if Goths are externalizing, performing their unhappiness even, rather than shutting up and hiding it, then that refusal, or militant dysphoria, has some potentiality for progressive action, no?

Again, if the aim is simply making room for asexuality and anhediona, that’s fine. But that would be in contradiction of the announced aim, which “is not to reform the world so that one will at last be comfortable in it.” I just can’t see how any of this works without leaving the door open to the resolution of the problems that led to the anhedonia in the first place.

Siegel has a nice chapter contextualizing the big flowering of Goth in the US in terms of the abstinence-only, don’t-even-look-at-someone-sexually-or-you’ll-get-AIDS-and-die, and claims that Goth kids embrace both sex and death, reveling in what their elders admonish against.

Now I ran some of her other claims about class status and the gender rules of Goth by some friends who actually were Goth back in the 90s and they said she was full of crap (basically she seems to only have interviewed college kids and not the working-class Goths who were more central to the movement and the drug scene). But other parts of her argument I liked.

And if Goths are externalizing, performing their unhappiness even, rather than shutting up and hiding it, then that refusal, or militant dysphoria, has some potentiality for progressive action, no? Unfortunately it gets paired in Goth with a Byronic individualism and obsession with past aristocratic cultures, which makes them less likely to help with the socialist revolution. Ah well.