“How do
you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed?”
This question, formulated by Johanna Hedva in “Sick Woman Theory,” has been
with me for quite some time now. I haven’t been able to get it out of my head.
Why? Because it points to a situation familiar to too many of us (but who is
that “us”?): a situation characterized by despair and depression. A situation
in which you really can’t get out of bed. This situation is also, in most
cases, saturated by politics and by the economy. Contrary to mainstream
psychological and psychiatric discourse the reason why you can’t get out of bed
is not because you have a bad attitude, a negative mindset, or because you have
somehow chosen your own unhappiness. Nor is it merely a matter of chemistry and
biology, an imbalance in the brain, an unlucky genetic disposition, or low
levels of serotonin. More often than not it is a matter of the world you live
in, the work that you hate, or the job that you just lost, the debt that haunts
your present from the future, or the fact that the planet’s future is going
still faster and further down the drain.
This
essay, then, is an attempt, based on a dissertation and some personal
experience — I had a postpartum depression in 2013/2014 — to think about
depression and politics; to think about the political economy and the
psychopathologies of the present. It is animated by a fact, a claim, and a
call. The fact first: as the Danish Mental Health Foundation makes clear, more
and more people in Denmark are diagnosed with depression. At any given time,
four to five percent of the population is depressed, or, more accurately,
diagnosed as such. Indeed, according to the Danish Health Authority more than
450,000 Danes bought antidepressants in 2011, a figure which has almost doubled
over the past decade. This tendency can be observed all over the Western world.
The US National Institute of Mental Health estimates that 7.1 percent of the
adult American population — 17.3 million people — suffers from depression.
Other data suggest that depression affects one in every five Americans. These
numbers have led the World Health Organization to conclude that depression is
the most common mental disorder and the prime cause of disability and suicide,
affecting around 350 million people worldwide. No wonder, then, that the global
consumption of SSRI antidepressants has gone through the roof with sales now
approaching $14 billion annually, according to the market research firm
alliedmarketresearch.com, which also, in some very clumsy prose indeed, points
out that “[t]here are many factors including genes, factors such as stress and
brain chemistry that could lead to depression.”
The
claim: Depression makes manifest the contemporary subject’s alienation, in its
most extreme and pathological form. As such, the psychopathology needs to be
related to a world of capitalist realism, where there really is no alternative,
as Thatcher triumphantly declared, and the future seems frozen once and for
all. The crisis embodied by depression thus becomes a symptom of a historical
and capitalist crisis of futurity. It is a kind of structure of feeling, as
Raymond Williams would say. Consequently, any cure to the problem of depression
must take a collective, political form; instead of individualizing the problem
of mental illness, it is imperative to start problematizing the
individualization of mental illness. The call is for the left, for these
specific reasons, to take seriously the question of illness and mental
disorders. Dealing with depression — and other forms of psychopathology — is
not only part of, but a condition of possibility for an emancipatory project
today. Before we can throw bricks through windows, we need to be able to get
out of bed.
The best
political thinker of depression remains the late Mark Fisher, who suffered from
and in the end took his own life because of depression. His whole oeuvre is an
ongoing meditation on depression as a personal experience and a social and
political experience. In the book Capitalist Realism from 2009, he connected
depression to what I have already referred to as capitalist realism, “the
widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and
economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent
alternative to it.” In this book, depression becomes a paradigm case of how
capitalist realism operates, a symptom of our blocked and bleak historical
situation. In the essay “The Privatisation of Stress” from 2011, later
reprinted in K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher
(2004–2016) from 2018, Fisher wrote that one difference between sadness and
depression is that “while sadness apprehends itself as a contingent and
temporary state of affairs, depression presents itself as necessary and
interminable: the glacial surfaces of the depressive’s world extend to every
conceivable horizon,” and because of that, because of that specific
characteristic of depression, a strange resonance exists between “the seeming
‘realism’ of the depressive, with its radically lowered expectations, and
capitalist realism.” And in the text Good for Nothing from 2014, Fisher stated
that his depression always involved a deep and ineradicable conviction that he
was literally good for nothing. He wrote that he offered up his own experiences
of mental distress not because he thought there was anything special or unique
about them, but “in support of the claim that many forms of depression are best
understood — and best combatted — through frames that are impersonal and
political rather than individual and ‘psychological.’” The importance of
arriving at a political understanding of depression cannot be overstated. If
the reader only takes one thing away from my text let it be this: depression
has a set of causes and a concrete context that transcend any diagnostic
manual, as well as the neoliberal ideology of focusing on subjects, not
structures; personal responsibilities, not collective ones; chemistry, not
capital.
However,
to understand depression through political frames does not mean that the
problem of depression can be immediately solved by political means. There is a
horror to depression that cannot and must not be translated too quickly into
the sphere of politics, regardless of our critical and revolutionary
aspirations. As anyone who has been depressed — or been around someone who has
— knows, it is literally hell on earth. The physical pain is unbearable, your
body is inert and feels too heavy, your mind is not functioning, and you cannot
escape the feeling of being stuck, stagnated, that the race is run and that the
present — which is hell — is all there is and all that can ever be imagined to
be. It would be an offense to say, well, it’s just politics. By the same token
there is absolutely no need to romanticize what has become known as depressive
realism, since that “realism” only runs in tandem with and supports the realism
of capitalism: that there are no alternatives, that there really is nothing to
be done about the current state of affairs. This is another thing to take away
from this. Let’s also not forget that depression is the major contributor to
suicide deaths, which number close to 800,000 per year according to a recent
report from WHO.
A third
and final thing to be considered here is that it is indeed difficult to write
about depression. By this I do not only mean that it is difficult to write
about your own depression; it is also just difficult to write about the immense
suffering while at the same time finding a position in relation to depression
or developing a discourse on depression that is not in itself utterly
depressing. Not less so after Mark Fisher’s tragic death.
We have
a lot of facts about depression, but the facts do not speak for themselves. The
sale of antidepressants does not correspond exactly to occurrences of
depression, as SSRIs are not exclusively used for treating depression, but used
to treat a range of other mental illnesses as well. The frequency of diagnoses
does not necessarily mirror the frequency of depressions, and thus the increase
in diagnoses could testify to a growing number of depressed people or to an
escalating tendency to pathologize common, “normal” affects such as sadness,
translating them into the diagnostic category of depression (the latest example
of this tendency is the inclusion of grief in the new editions of diagnostic
manuals such as the DSM and ICD). We also have to wonder, why does there seem
to be so much comfort in psychiatric diagnoses? Because there is comfort in the
diagnosis of depression. So that’s why I feel so bad! Depression! A chemical
imbalance in the brain! In this way, the diagnosis provides momentary meaning
to meaningless misery. The suffering gets a name and a cause: a lack of
serotonin. But this cause has causes which in the diagnostic system — and in
the capitalist world as a whole — remain undiagnosed and untold.
As Mark
Fisher writes in Capitalist Realism:
It goes
without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated, but
this says nothing about their causation. If it is true, for instance, that
depression is constituted by low serotonin levels, what still needs to be explained
is why particular individuals have low levels of serotonin. This requires a
social and political explanation; and the task of repoliticizing mental illness
is an urgent one if the left wants to challenge capitalist realism.
Before
going into the causality of depression, however, let me first describe the
morality that surrounds depression. Take, as an example, a self-help video,
“Why am I depressed?,” by a man called Leo Gura. He is, according to his
Twitter profile, “a professional self-development junkie, life coach, video
blogger, entrepreneur, and speaker,” who helps “people design awesome lives.”
Gura, a
bald man with a goatee and the founder of actualized.org, starts the video by
saying that he wants to answer the question of the title, “Why am I — you
[raising eyebrows, while forming with his hands a parenthesis in the air as if
around the word] — depressed?” And the answer is simple: you are depressed
because your psychology sucks. It should be noted that this is also the title
of a video work by the artist duo Claire Fontaine, who in their ready-made
video Untitled (Why Your Psychology Sucks) from 2015 has an African-American
actress perform an almost exact verbatim copy of Gura’s talk, unfolding a
pungent and quite comical criticism of the neoliberal self-help industry’s
ideological personalization of depression and generalized responsibilization of
the subject as such. Claire Fontaine is one of the artists who have worked in
the most concentrated and consistent way with the problem of depression. In
their work, depression is always already political and must be understood in
relation to its real basis in social conflicts within a capitalist economy of
debt and financial speculation.
Back to
the original video, where a flashing sequence of catchphrases or keywords
succeeds Gura’s introductory remarks. In the order given, the words read:
“Success, happiness, self-actualization, life purpose, motivation,
productivity, peak performance, creative expression, financial independence,
emotional intelligence, positive psychology, consciousness, peak performance,
personal power, wisdom.” (Apparently, the concept of “peak performance” is so
important that it must be repeated.) Then, Gura delivers his message, his
shocking truth: “Here is the deal. I’m going to blunt with you here, because
the bottom line is that the reason you’re depressed is because your psychology
sucks. Alright, you’ve got shit psychology. I’m not blaming you, I’m telling
you a fact.” He goes on to clarify that he is not talking about people who are
“clinically depressed,” and who thus have “legitimate” depression. He is
talking about the rest of us, the majority who get a diagnosis of depression
and whom he is not blaming, except that he is. The video lasts a little more
than 20 minutes, and at one point Leo Gura boldly and bluntly declares: “You
are causing your depression.” There is something wrong with your mental and
cognitive apparatus, your psychology is “shit.” Stop being a victim and take
ownership of your psychology! Peak performance!
It is
easy enough to laugh at the video and make fun of its logic, but the logic is
the dominant one in the world of today — even if it is sometimes articulated in
more moderate ways — and it has real effects. The logic is this: people create
their own reality. Thoughts alone can change things. This means that you weave
the thread of your own fate, there are no external circumstances and no excuses
either.
A Danish
sociologist with a quasi-royal name, Emilia van Hauen, expresses the same logic
when writing on her homepage that “happiness is a choice — your choice,” and
fellow Danish therapist, Eva Christensen, sings along (again in my own
translation):
Happiness
is a personal responsibility. Happiness is not something you can expect to get
from others. Everybody has the key to their own happiness. And hence also the
responsibility to put the key in the right lock. Happiness is created from the
inside, it is not other people’s responsibility to make us happy, it is our own
responsibility. Just as we cannot change other people, only ourselves.
If the
individual is responsible for her own happiness, then she is also responsible
for her own unhappiness. If the keys are in our own hands, each of us is
personally responsible for almost everything. Success or failure, and health or
illness are a matter of subjective willpower, lifestyle, and choice alone.
While we may not be able to change other people, or the world for that matter,
we certainly can work on changing ourselves and our selves. Structural change,
a change of the system, is abandoned in favor of subjective change, a change of
the self. Every problem, however social, political, or economic in nature, is
personalized and even criminalized, the subject is made responsible for its own
unhappiness, and made to suffer alone and to feel guilty, at the same time, for
feeling unhappy, for not being a good and productive citizen, for not coming to
work, for not getting out of bed.
These
processes of personalization and responsibilization that positive psychology
and the imperative of happiness entail, these processes go hand in hand. Mark
Fisher was attuned to this logic, or should we say ideology. Depressed people
are encouraged to feel and believe that their depression is their fault and
their fault only. “Individuals will blame themselves rather than social
structures, which in any case they have been induced into believing do not
really exist,” as he wrote in “Good for Nothing” — implicitly referencing
another of Thatcher’s claims, that society does not exist. This is where the
problem of depression feeds into a more general problem: the model of
subjectivity advocated in the original self-help video by Leo Gura is identical
to the model of the autonomous, self-determining, competitive individual, the fiction
of capitalist subjectivity. In the video “the viewer,” the “you,” is the cause
of his or her own depression, but consequently also the only cure. What the
video wants to do is to teach you how to “master your psychology” and
eventually put you in a state of “total bliss and happiness.” It is a deeply
moral message. Failing to be happy is simply immoral. If you are such an
immoral and bad person that you have become unhappy — or depressed — it is you,
and you alone that is to blame. This is the blaming cult of contemporary
capitalism: you are causing your own depression — even when evidently you are
not.
Capitalism,
in other words, inflicts a double injury on depressed people. First, it causes,
or contributes to, the state of depression. Second, it erases any form of
causality and individualizes the illness, so that it appears as if the
depression in question is a personal problem (or property). In some cases, it
appears to be your own fault. If you had just lived a better and more active
life, made other choices, had a more positive mindset, et cetera, then you
would not be depressed. This is the song sung by psychologists, coaches, and
therapists around the world: happiness is your choice, your responsibility. The
same goes for unhappiness and depression. Capitalism makes us feel bad and
then, to add insult to injury, makes us feel bad about feeling bad.
From my
own experience of depression — except that it is not really “my own” experience
— and from having written a dissertation on the topic, I think it is beyond
doubt that we need another analysis of depression, and, also, another kind of
cure. The personalization of depression must be answered by a politicization of
depression. At the level of analysis and social causation, the phenomenon of
depression should be connected to issues of labor and work — and unemployment,
since stats show that unemployed people are more susceptible to get depressed
than people in jobs, regardless of how much these people hate their job. It
should be connected to our brutal, neoliberal culture of competition (Happy
Hunger Games and may be odd be ever in your favor!) and to the concomitant
ideology of happiness, which forces all of us to smile and be happy nonstop,
even or especially when we are fighting among each other, fighting to make ends
meet and just get by another day. Depression should, moreover, be connected to
the realm of education: it is obvious to me that so many of the students at the
University of Copenhagen, where I work and teach, are struggling with countless
mental illnesses. I cannot even begin to imagine how it must be in the United
Kingdom or United States, where students don’t have the benefit of free
education as is the case Denmark but are driven ever deeper into a spiral of
debt. No matter where we look, students are depressed, anxious, stressed out,
burned out.
These
conditions are real, and so are the causal connections. Obviously, the causes
are many, and complex. But the symptoms of depression are also symptoms of
something else. And the fact is that the economy of debt causes deep distress
as indebted people, students and otherwise, are forced to pawn their own
future. Yet the psychiatric and public discourse remain bent on treating
depression as a personal problem devoid of context. Nowhere is this clearer
than in the discourse of the diagnostic manuals — a discourse that increasingly
dominates public opinion — where mental illnesses are addressed solely in terms
of symptoms, without any regard for the historical, social, and economic
context of the person suffering. An important task, then, for a leftist
analysis of the present is not only to insist on the context but also and
perhaps above all to insist, with Hedva, that “it is the world itself that is
making and keeping us sick.” Not the world in any abstract sense, but the
concrete, capitalist world in which we live, or plod our way through. This is
the reason why so many of us lie in bed, and can’t get out of it. Or as queer
theorist Ann Cvetkovich argues in her book Depression: A Public Feeling:
Epidemics
of depression can be related (both as symptom and as obfuscation) to long-term
histories of violence that have ongoing impacts at the level of everyday
emotional experience. […] What gets called depression in the domestic sphere is
one affective register of these social problems and one that often keeps people
silent, weary, and too numb to really notice the sources of their unhappiness
(or in a state of low-level chronic grief — or depression of another kind — if
they do).
The
history of depression is a history of our contemporary capitalist world — and
also, in the words of Cvetkovich, a history of violence: the violence that
people of color, or LGBT people, or asylum seekers, experience on a daily
basis, a violence both physical and psychic. Data are, again, overwhelming on
this point, but suffice it to mention the “38 percent of low-income mothers and
mothers of color who develop postpartum depression,” to quote from Sophie
Lewis’s Full Surrogacy Now; the half of LGBT people who have experienced
depression in the past year; and the 61 percent of all the kids in Sjælsmark Udrejsecenter,
a prison-like camp for rejected asylum seekers in Denmark, who would meet the
criteria for a psychiatric diagnosis. In many instances, depression bears the
mark of such violence and vulnerability, though it is not, sadly, the only
mental health issue at stake.
Up until
this point I have not mentioned the climate crisis, but on the evidence of what
has been said so far, it doesn’t risk exaggeration to say that ecology and
mental health stands in an intimate relation. This is not to neglect the material
reality, only to hint at the profound psychic effects of ecological losses and
a warming globe. Again, the young generation of today, sometimes called the
fucked-up generation, is worth mentioning (Phil Neel writes about this
generation, “the first in a grand parade of the futureless,” in his brilliant
book Hinterland). They are living in a world where tomorrow will most likely be
worse than today, where there really are no alternatives and no future, not
least because of how the climate crisis quite literally annihilates the future
as such. Who can blame them
for being depressed?
All of
this to say that the current — social, political, economic, ecological — crisis
is thus a mental health crisis as well. The perpetuum mobile of capitalism and
its exhaustion of resources also pertains to mental resources. The economic and
the psychological seem to have become indistinguishable from each other, as the
double meaning of depression would also suggest. Naturally, we are not all in
the same boat, or in the same bed. We are not all depressed (and those of us
who are are experiencing it in the same way, or for the same reasons). We are
not equally fucked (up). Some strata of society have access to futurity in ways
that others do not, some bear the burden more than others, and some simply die
sooner than others. People in Greece during the Euro Crisis, or people in the
US higher educational system, are not indebted or depressed in the same way. As
shown above, the violence and social suffering are differentially distributed
along axis of class, gender, and race; so is the climate crisis insofar as
citizens of Copenhagen are not feeling the devastating weight of it as those in
Chittagong.
Insisting
on the politics of illness, mental health, and depression, it is crucial to
keep such local and global differences in mind. This should not, however, lead
to a competition of social suffering. Competition is precisely what capitalism
is all about, and seeks to intensify, so that we are, simultaneously, alone in
our suffering and fighting among each other’s suffering selves. But it should
lead to a recognition that a critique of capitalism will need to take into
account the contextualized psychopathology of depression as well as other
mental illnesses. Furthermore, it gives us an idea of a possible “cure,” of
what needs to be done, of how we get out of bed (or maybe, why we even want to
get out of bed).
The
first thing to note is that an adequate diagnosis of depression — and its
context — is not enough in itself. It is common wisdom, however, that the
diagnosis does not necessarily entail the cure. Just because we know what’s
wrong does not mean that we will be able to deal with it. On the contrary, one
of the primary symptoms of depression is that what you need to do is precisely
what you cannot do, at least not alone and on your own. Or in the plain words
of Ann Cvetkovich: “Saying that capitalism (or colonialism or racism) is the
problem does not help me get up in the morning.” Also, there is no reason to
believe that abolishing private property ownership, or realizing a global and
absolute cancellation of private debt, will relieve the suffering of depressed
people with a single stroke, as if by magic. But, in an act of speculation, I
am tempted to say that revolution is the best antidepressant there is, it makes
for a better world, true happiness. But, alas!, in order to do revolution, we
need to get out of bed. A
real dialectical catch-22 of depression.
Maybe a
good place to start, then, with regards to the politics of depression, is to
collectivize suffering, externalize blame, communize care. At this point, the
question of responsibility returns in all its force. The neoliberal
responsibilization of the depressed subject must be rejected, and, also,
replaced by an idea of collective responsibility. The same goes for any kind of
therapeutic project, and Italian thinker Franco “Bifo” Berardi — who is,
admittedly, a bit loose and careless when it comes to precision in the clinical
vocabulary — may be right when he asserts that “in the days to come, politics
and therapy will be one and the same.” Therapy as resistance, not as
reactionary obedience to the given order. Therapy as a collective project, not
an individual one. Therapy as the overcoming of alienation.
What might
such collective and emancipatory “therapy” look like? We have an archive of
feminist and artistic projects of care, self-care, and collective care from
Audre Lorde to Claire Fontaine to, rather recently, Danish artist and activist
Jakob Jakobsen and the Hospital for Self Medication that he initiated after a
severe depression and several months of hospitalization. We need a language
that joins this archive to a movement and separates it from institutional
psychiatry, neoliberal therapies, and the capitalist pursuit of profit. This is
care that transcends the hospital, the clinic, the family, the state, the
insurance company, Capital as such (even if one does not have access to those
institutions in the first place). This is care which, based on a politicized
understanding of mental illness, moves beyond care in its commodified and
capitalist form. When bodies take care of each other, when responsibility is
redistributed, and individual collapses are transformed into collective
intimacies, the future can be (re)built in the name of a communist, shared, and
sustainable one. As poet
Wendy Trevino writes:
We can’t
individually “win” in this world
&
simultaneously create another
Together.
This
would be one way of imagining a “cure” for depression without reinforcing
conformity and the status quo. What is certain is that any left politics worthy
of its name must go beyond saying capitalism is the problem (even if it surely
is) and confront the question of how to get up in the morning. This problem is
as practical as it is revolutionary. Of course, sometimes staying in bed can be
a revolutionary act in itself, a kind of strike, the epitomization of an
exhausted and negative No, I can’t in a world that revolves increasingly around
an emphatic and positive Yes, I can. But there are also people finding new ways
to get out of bed: I’ll just mention in passing, as an encouraging sign, that
there are cracks in the edifice of capitalist realism that Mark Fisher didn’t
live to see.
Regardless,
the point is obviously not to get out of depression so that we can get back to
the work that caused the depression to begin with. The point must be, rather,
to destroy the material conditions that make us sick, the capitalist system
that destroys people’s lives, the inequalities that kill. Thus, creating
another world together. But to do that, to get to where that becomes possible,
what is called for is not competition among the sick, but alliances of care
that will make people feel less alone and less morally responsible for their illness.
In alliance with each other, people might eventually be able to get up and
throw some bricks.
Adapted
from the book Going Nowhere, Slow, out on Zero Books November 29, 2019.
A Future
with No Future: Depression, the Left, and the Politics of Mental Health.
By
Mikkel Krause Frantzen. Los Angeles Review of Books , December 16, 2019.
Going
Nowhere Slow, with Mikkel Krause
Frantzen.
On this
podcast, you will hear a recording of an event to celebrate the release of
Danish literary critic and cultural theorist Mikkel Krase Frantzen’s first book
in English, "Going Nowhere, Slow: The Aesthetics and Politics of
Depression", from Zero Books.
Joining
Frantzen for the discussion were the Artist and activist Jakob Jakobsen and Ida
Bencke from the curatorial collective, The Laboratory for Aesthetics and
Ecology. Hosted by Macon Holt
Ark Audio, December 2019.
Using
examples from art and literature, Frantzen explores the social, political and
economic implications of both real and imagined depression. Is feeling blue a
symptom of the death of progress? Was the suicide of David Foster Wallace a
proverbial canary in a coal mine? Margaret Thatcher once declared that there is
no alternative to the social order that we now reside within. Have we accepted
her slogan as a fact, and is that why so many are on Prozac and other
anti-depressants? Frantzen examines the works of Michel Houellebecq, Claire
Fontaine and David Foster Wallace as he seeks out an answer and a way to
formulate a new future oriented left movement.
Sometimes
even Deutsche Bank tells the truth. Asserting that the financial crisis of
2007–’08 was not a one-off event, the report “The Next Financial Crisis,”
published by the German bank in September 2017, states that crises (plural) are
an unavoidable feature of the current economic system. “It would,” the authors
of the report write, “take a huge leap of faith to say that crises won’t continue
to be a regular feature of the current financial system that has been in place
since the early 1970s. The near exponential growth of finance and its
liberalisation since this point has encouraged this trend.” The authors stress
that while crises caused by unrestrained financial speculation have been known
since the tulip mania in Holland in 1637, the frequency and severity of crises
today are nonetheless unprecedented.
To be
sure, this is not a new story. It has been told many times before in various
forms and with different accents, although more often by critical intellectuals
than by experts from the financial sector. The point is that not only does the
present crisis have a long future; it also has a long past that goes back to
the beginning of the 1970s at least. In 1971, the Bretton Woods system was
abolished, producing the Nixon shock, which canceled the convertibility of the
US dollar into gold. In 1973, the world faced a global oil crisis. In 1979, the
US Federal Reserve Bank got a new chairman, who also had a shock named after
him by the way. Margaret Thatcher was nominated prime minister of England in
the same year. One year after that, in 1980, Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as
US president. The rest is neoliberal history.
So here
we are. As for the economy of today, it is more than ever characterized by what
Marx called fiktives Kapital in the third volume of Das Kapital: fictitious
capital in the form of options, futures, collateralized debt obligations — all
those terms with which most of us have become familiar in the wake of the
crisis even if their opaque logic of operation escapes us somewhat. Without
fetishizing the gold standard — as if money, gold or no gold, was not always
virtual, as if credit was not always fictitious, as if capital was not always
speculative — it is safe to say that the derivatives market has exploded after
the cancellation of the Bretton Woods system, due to the subsequent state of
deregulation, not to mention the technological advances made in mathematics and
computational power. The site Investopedia informs that the derivatives market
is estimated at “more than $1.2 quadrillion on the high end,” and that some
market analysts “place the size of the market at more than 10 times that of the
total world gross domestic product (GDP).” In short: It is in the sphere of
speculation rather than production that capital is accumulated, value created,
and profit made. As is the case in law (precrime) and medicine (predictive
medicine), everything in finance is about predicting the future by using
machines of stunning sophistication in order to profit from it. Prediction has
taken the place of production as the buzzword of our time.
This is
not just about structures, it is about subjects too. It is about how the
finance economy produces a certain form of subjectivity, a certain form of
affective atmosphere, a certain form of pathological structure. Human beings
are increasingly fabricated as human capital, and perceived and judged in terms
of their risk profile and creditworthiness. This also means, from the point of
view of capital, that you are less useful when you go to your place of
employment to work than when you go into a bank to obtain a loan. The credit
relation rather than the wage, Ivan Ascher thus reasons in Portfolio Society,
defines the contemporary economy. Debt, not work, is the condition of social
reproduction.
The
tentacles of finance or financialization thus reach far beyond stock exchanges
and affect the lives of ordinary citizens and other areas of society
profoundly. The sphere of culture, for instance. No wonder, then, that the last
couple of decades have seen the advent of what is becoming recognizable as a
new genre: finance fiction. Novels, films, and TV series, whether fictional or
documentary, have tried to describe and understand the working of present-day
financial activity and its influence on the way we live now. As Fredric Jameson
already pointed out in his groundbreaking essay “Culture and Finance Capital”
from 1997, any “comprehensive new theory of finance capitalism will need to
reach out into the expanded realm of cultural production to map its effects.”
And that
is precisely what a lot of important works from the humanities and cultural and
literary studies have recently done. Leigh Claire La Berge’s Scandals and
Abstraction (2014), Max Haiven’s Cultures of Financialization (2014), and
Alison Shonkwiler’s The Financial Imaginary (2017) are worth mentioning. And
now also Arne De Boever’s Finance Fictions: Realism and Psychosis in a Time of
Economic Crisis, which engages with and expands on much of the already existing
work in the field. In the book, De Boever maps the effects of financialization
on contemporary literature, plotting to what extent and in what ways the genre
of finance fiction is “attuned to today’s sci-fi-like economic reality.” He is
interested in novels that have engaged with this economic reality: Tom Wolfe’s
satirical The Bonfire of the Vanities from 1987, Bret Easton Ellis’s classic
American Psycho from 1991, Michel Houellebecq’s quasi-detective novel The Map
and the Territory from 2010, Robert Harris’s sci-fi thriller The Fear Index
from 2011, and Ben Lerner’s acclaimed metafictional novel 10:04 from 2014.
At the
forefront of De Boever’s work is the old question of literary realism, hence
the first part of the subtitle. It is the question of how literature — and in
this case, contemporary finance fiction — is able to give a realistic
description of the workings of financial capitalism today. Some would perhaps
claim — and De Boever acknowledges this — that the novel is not particularly
well suited for such an account, and that one would better off considering
contemporary art (Melanie Gilligan, Hito Steyerl, Claire Fontaine, et cetera),
films and TV series (Too Big to Fail, Margin Call, The Wolf of Wall Street, The
Big Short, Billions, et cetera), or poetry for adequate and non-outdated modes
of representations of the abstracted world of capital (Joshua Clover’s Red
Epic, Mathew Timmons’s Credit, et cetera).
However,
De Boever insists on the relevance of the novel. The question he ponders is:
“[H]ow can the novel contribute to the adequate description of today’s
digitized economy?” How can the novel, and in particular the realist novel,
confront an event such as the flash crash of 2010, or deal with something like
high-frequency trading, that is, acts of selling and buying carried out by
algorithmic agents — those ghosts in the machines, as they have been called —
with a speed literally close to the speed of light and which often surpasses
the understanding of both quants (the math whizzes working at today’s hedge
funds) and mere mortals? Blink your eye, and an algorithm may have made 400
orders, while you were casually sipping your coffee and checking Facebook. How
can the novel — traditionally a rather slow medium, the substance of which
unfolds in and through time — possibly keep up with that?
The
novel keeps up because of its imaginary character — by its fictional and
speculative nature, by not being realist. Speculative genres for speculative
times (for a similar argument regarding literature, realism, and the current
climate crisis, see here). Realism is, of course, to a certain extent always an
impossible project, and any literary realism worthy of the name must go to the
very limit of realism, if not leave realism behind altogether. At an important
tipping point in the book, De Boever contemplates if “in order to write the
reality of finance today, one may have to turn to experimental rather than
realist writing.” This is the very problem, as he sees it, with Robert Harris’s
financial thriller The Fear Index: it is not experimental enough, and thus,
paradoxically, not realistic enough. As a finance novel, it fails, De Boever
argues, in its representation of finance. Why? Because the finance economy
“demands another realism, one that would push the novel to the limits of the genre”
— which is where the alliance with the philosophical trajectory of speculative
realism is most discernible (a whole chapter is devoted to its “founding
father” Quentin Meillassoux and his overlooked discussion of science fiction).
The perspective and realism of The Fear Index remains all too human in a
financial world where the ones calling the shots are machines rather than men.
With all the digital developments — information, speed, artificial intelligence
— other literary measures are required to account for the complex entanglements
of the agent and the algorithm, the human and the nonhuman, the real and the
imaginary. And yet, De Boever also sees value to holding on to a realist
component in these transformations, if only because finance all too often
disappears into an “abstraction” and “complexity” that tend to escape realism.
The
final two novels that De Boever analyzes are treated less critically in this
context. In his readings of The Map and the Territory and 10:04, De Boever
changes tracks and dwells on the financialization of art (in Houellebecq’s
case) and the financialization of the novel itself (in Lerner’s case).
Unfolding in a society of simulation and speculation, the protagonist and
nameless narrator of 10:04 is a writer who receives a “strong six-figure sum”
in advance for his next novel and soon finds himself monetizing and betting on
the future of his fiction: “I loved this idea: my virtual novel was worth more
than my actual novel. But if they rejected it, I’d have to give the money back.
And yet I planned to spend my advance in advance.” Yet, De Boever cautions the
reader not to take this statement at face value: “While the novelist states —
with some discomfort — that he loves the fact that his virtual Novel is worth
more than his actual novel, I would argue that his novel in fact teaches us the
opposite, and less than the opposite even: to love our actual, irreparable
novels more than our virtual ones.”
Here we
see how the novel is still aligned with postmodernism. Occasionally, De Boever
speaks of finance fiction’s continued tie to postmodernism, that is to say,
literary postmodernism, which marked and still marks “the end of empathy,
external referentiality, meaning and closure, readable plot, and recognizable
character.” The irony, of course, as De Boever emphasizes (as did Jameson
before him with his definition of postmodernism as the cultural logic of late
capitalism), is that those key features of postmodernism are precisely what
characterizes financial capitalism as well. One might add, though, that a
similar, strange correspondence is at work between the philosophy of
speculative realism and the contemporary finance economy.
In a new
book titled Reified Life: Speculative Capital and the Ahuman Condition, J. Paul
Narkunas foregrounds how the philosophers grouped under the heading of
speculative realism may have offered a timely critique of anthropocentrism, but
at the same time heralded and celebrated a posthuman condition that capital
ushered in ages ago. The world that these thinkers sing about, is that not the
world of the finance economy proper? Are the weird, withdrawn objects of
derivatives and securities anything but the perfect example of a so-called
object-oriented ontology? Is the dream of the speculative realists not the
nightmare, our nightmare, of contemporary capitalism? Might De Boever’s
discussion of these issues in fact lead to a consideration of the complicity
between speculative realism and speculative finance?
What
about the second part of De Boever’s subtitle, psychosis? It is the psychosis
at work in Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities and the psychosis of Patrick
Bateman in American Psycho. It is the psychosis of Tyler Durden of Fight Club,
the psychosis of Eric Parker in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis. Defined by De Boever
as a disavowal of existing reality and, consequently, a desperate search for
the real, psychosis is in his view “the key affliction of our particular
economic moment.” The underlying premise is that psychosis has intensified in
the last four decades or so (which is less to be taken as a clinical than a
cultural argument). Obviously, it is not a matter of indulging in fancy
metaphors from the clinical and psychiatric field, producing statements about
the psychosis of the stock market itself. Nor is it a question of replacing a
structural critique of finance with psychologism, of abandoning an “objective”
perspective in favor a “subjective” one. Rather, it is about unearthing and
critiquing the point of resonance between structure and agent, between economy
and psychology, between the material and the mental, objectivity and
subjectivity. Every historical age has its own pathologies, its own set of
symptoms. These symptoms are related to and derive from the economy in
complicated ways. To schematize rather crudely: neurasthenia and hysteria
around 1900, those very Freudian illnesses; anxiety and schizophrenia in the
1950s and 1960s (just look at this totally tasteless 1967 commercial directed
at anxious housewives). And finally, in the third millennium, depression,
stress, and, according to De Boever, also psychosis — the paradigmatic
psychopathology in the world of finance.
Franco
“Bifo” Berardi, Bernard Stiegler, and the late Mark Fisher (all present in
Finance Fictions) have written extensively on this topic too, questioning the
ways in which the political economy affects our very innermost being, our
neuronal network, our desires, our soul as it were, and the different
pathologies that flourish given such socially constructed roots. De Boever
substantiates his claims with nuanced readings of literary works. In the
analysis of American Psycho he draws interesting parallels to both Robert
Bloch’s 1959 novel Psycho and Hitchcock’s 1960 movie Psycho, highlighting both
works’ overlooked economic perspectives and their relation to psychosis. He
discusses not only the psychosis of Norman Bates but also of Marion Crane, when
she steals $40,000 from her boss. Riffing off a statement made by Norman, De
Boever writes: “[A]ll of us can turn a little psycho when we are dealing with
money.” This could be a catchphrase for De Boever’s book.
De
Boever’s speculative suggestion is, one, that the finance economy renders
“human beings psychotic” in the sense that they “disavow existing reality,”
and, two, that the only literary form capable of indexing finance and its
psychotic structure is a literary realism, which itself in turn borders on
psychosis. With regards to the former, one may want to make clear which human
beings we are talking about here. “All of us” — really? It’s worth pointing out
that De Boever’s book mostly focuses on the Patrick Batemans of the world, the
Jordan Belforts, the white male masters of the universe. He is mostly focused —
and of course with good reason — on the madness of bankers and investors (in
her excellent historical work on finance and psychic economies in the Victorian
period, which De Boever quotes, Anna Kornbluh recounts how the asylums in the
1850s were filled with people who worked in finance, second only to people who
worked in the military). But I wonder about the lives of so-called ordinary
people, the “proletariat” even: Is psychosis a proper term to capture their
economic and psychological misery? What about class, inequality, and what David
Harvey aptly deems “accumulation by dispossession”? Are the ones at the bottom
of society, the lower classes, not more likely to experience the (effects of
the) finance economy as a painful conjunction of debt and depression? In a
review of De Boever’s book, Annie McClanahan — whose own book on credit, debt,
and 21st-century culture De Boever reviewed — concluded that “we might find
that the ‘proletarianized’ subjects who ‘have lost their homes’ know at least
as much as the novelists or the characters of finance fictions.”
Along
similar lines, I also wonder about the issue of masculinity in relation to De
Boever’s book. While he almost exclusively works with male novelists (Cristina
Alger is the main exception here), he seeks to distinguish the approach to the
finance novel that he advocates from what Michelle Chihara, with a certain
Schwung, has called “big swinging dick realism.” Wolfe is De Boever’s main
target for this. But his book — which also deals with Ellis, Houellebecq, and
Lerner, all of whom deal with masculinity in their work — says too little
rather than too much about this complex and immensely interesting relation
between psychosis, finance, and masculinity. I am thinking also of Fight Club —
which receives a brief discussion in the book’s introduction — where Tyler Durden
addresses a group of impotent young men as “the middle children of history” who
are “very, very pissed off” and who, perhaps in a state of collective,
masculine psychosis, entertain a passion for something violently real.
Still,
the question of what is real and what is imaginary is what is centrally at
stake here — at the intersection of aesthetics and politics, art and capital,
literary and financial realism. The finance in fiction, the fiction in finance.
Several thinkers have pointed out that literary realism has historically always
been chummy with capitalism; today, capitalism may even have confiscated
realism to the extent that capital simply is realism itself, the only realism.
Yet Finance Fictions impresses upon its readers that this is not the whole
story about literary realism. If the economy is, partly, the stuff of fictions,
then it is only as fiction that literature will be equal to the task of not
only capturing but of challenging the logic of financial capitalism and its
psychotic consequences. This kind of finance fiction will be based on a realism
that refuses to be realistic in the naïve sense of the term, which is why De
Boever (after Antonio Scurati) speaks of a “psychotic realism.” A realism, in
any case, that will not remain satisfied with describing the world as it is,
but will insist on attending to what could be, the what-if and the not-yet.
Despite what one might be led to believe in an age of fake news and with the
fictional world of finance, we don’t need less fiction, we need more. We need
more pieces of literary fiction to counter those other fictions, which destroy
the world and our lives. As Reza Negarestani recently wrote: “Only a
naive-realist fool wants to make literature that conforms to how things
actually are.”
Mikkel
Krause Frantzen holds a PhD from the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies,
University of Copenhagen, and is currently postdoctoral fellow at University of
Aalborg, Denmark.
Economic
and Literary Speculations. By Mikkel
Krause Frantzen. Los Angeles Review of Books , November 20, 2018.
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