* This is an English translation of our initial post on this site.
Red alert! Red alert! It’s a catastrophe
But don’t worry
Don’t panic
Ain’t nothin’ goin’ on but history, yeah
But it’s alright
Don’t panic
And the music keeps on playin’ on and on
And the music keeps on playin’ on and on
On and on!
On and on!
– Basement Jaxx, ‘Red Alert’ (1999)
Ab und zu erfährt man ‘Beruhigendes’,
wie die Erfindung eines empfindlichen Fernhörers,
der das Surren der Propeller auf große Entfernungen hin registriert.
Und einige Monate später dann die Erfindung eines lautlosen Flugzeugs
– Walter Benjamin, ‘Theorien des deutschen Faschismus’ (1930)
First things first: why pessimism?
The simple answer is: things are not looking good. And that, precisely, is the problem. That for us the future can be worse. That there can be a we for which decline is possible, a we that, up to now, had been to a certain (always uncertain) degree immune to the violence going around. A we that is the product of a privilege about to be, or in the process of being, withdrawn, hence the pessimism. The liberal carrot and the fascist stick. The liberal stick and the fascist carrot. So let’s be clear: pessimism should not exist. But that would require abolishing the hierarchization of life, as well as the expression of life in and as ‘value’ that is inextricably bound up with that hierarchization. As long as value and hierarchy govern us, we are susceptible to promises, to privileges, to optimism.
Yes, the weapons factories are running at full speed. The experts agree, they spin their consensus as if it were a cosmic mandate. All around we see guys with ties getting horny with the potential of the general mobilization, of the accumulation, and of the enlistment of young bodies They dress in uniforms in order to get access to the flesh underneath. What They call ‘geopolitics’ is our collective captivity in the spittle on the suit of the chattering expert. Yes, all that is the case, that is the world. But this, we think, is not why we should be pessimistic, it’s not why we should organize our pessimism. All of this still presupposes that pessimism is useful as an anticipation of a general decline. It is still premised on a holding-on-to-what-we’ve-got, on a salvage operation, on hope for an ‘opposition leader’ [and wait, the opposition leader speaks, and he says: Nothing!]. Such a pessimism is an optimism in disguise. It’s still open for business, still willing to engage in a trade-off in order to postpone something worse. It is still susceptible to the liberal bribe and blackmail – if we surrender a few percentage points here, if we allow a little less migrants in, accept a little more violence across the board, then we can keep this show on the road for a little while longer. At least until the next budget round. Buying some time for another round in the corral that is the biopolitical enclosure in which we run, that runs us, runs on us. This pessimism that secretly seeks salvation is a suture that keeps the wound open, it’s what Lauren Berlant called a cruel optimism: an attachment to and a hope for something that gets in the way of our flourishing.[1] Politics, here, appears as one huge disinfection machine, and endless hygiene neurosis. And in this vein, alas, politics on the left comes down to the seduction of the office – if we could just push the buttons, we could soften the blows, ease the pain, or at the very least distribute slightly more equitably – or at the very very least have the numbers to prove this. All politics is a scandal, but leftist politics is a bribery scandal.
And so our pessimism, the pessimism we’d like to organize, is not this kind of pessimism. It’s not the moral dilettantism of ‘What motivates the rightwing voter?’ that at the same time arms itself with the paternalistic realism that there could really be war again, and with the realism that there has to be government, only in more fair, more decent ways. What we want is a pessimism that is no longer secretly seeking its own end within the liberal order, a pessimism that no longer hopes that, without changing the relations of production, it could ever be obsolete. In order for a truly organized we to escape its Euro-white, patriarchal identification and confinement to the corral, pessimism must be practiced and must wage a war against all modalities (covert and overt) of optimism, in particular also on the left. As Isabelle Stengers writes: beware of your enemies, but also of your friends, forever ready to be disappointed.[2]
It is, of course, hard to truly practice pessimism. Every time we open our kitchen cupboard we are, in that very act, optimistic about what we think we’ll find there. We drift amidst a sea of optimism, wave after wave. In every instant a thousand questions are answered, a thousand promises fulfilled. And there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s just that that’s not the exit we seek. It keeps us caught within the corral, it keeps us running another round, that’s what cruel optimism does. It’s not that it would be possible for anyone to venture outside simply by way of some individuated, heroic decisionism, but as long as we need to run we’ll have to learn to practice pessimism, to suspend our affective affirmation in spite of the daily demand to acknowledge that it’s all really superior to any conceivable alternative.
The degree zero of our organized pessimism is therefore the break with the demand to, at all times, affectively remain within the enclosure of the scandal, the scandal of enclosure. Minimally, it’s the break with the demand to, when push comes to shove, defend the infrastructure from which that demand arises, and within which it can be considered meaningful at all. How optimistic of us to claim a ‘theory’ in our Theory of the corral![3] But is not every theory a trick? An opportunity spotted and an attempt to survive? We survive for as long as we live. But while we survive, we can/want/must/will seek an exit. And only pessimism is adequate to that task. “That things ‘go on like this,’ is the catastrophe,”[4] writes Walter Benjamin. And so, like it’s thumping in another room: the music keeps on playin’ on and on. On and on!
Over against our running in the corral stands the pessimism of going on foot (Lat. Ped, ‘foot’, root of ‘pessimism’). Of limping instead of running. Benjamin learns from Pierre Naville that an organized pessimism is possible, as neither the simplistic bourgeois optimism of progress, nor as unorganized kind of anarchism.[5] This is the proposition that arises: no one can claim to move wholly outside the corral of capital, but we can try to resist running where we can, and to limp instead. The earliest factory workers deployed foot dragging as a mode of organized pessimism. Pessimism is a delaying tactic, but delay and refusal cannot be individuated – Bartleby is a multiple. Organized pessimism starts with the breathing space that opens up in suspending the compulsion to experience and ratify anything at all about the order of the corral as defensible, let alone superior. That breathing space, too, only emerges once we come together. We thereby free ourselves from the possibility of blackmail, the possibility of being lured with some kind of promise, of being seduced by the illusion of buying time with the reasonable compromise, of the aesthetic seduction of the next upstart in morally weighty matters. From the moment life is expressed in and as value, even insofar as it is said to be ‘valuable and worth it’, we are blackmailable, susceptible to the temptation to let the corporate chimneys smoke over here, and the corpses over there.
In no way is this pessimism and ‘ideological’ ism, and this gives it an ecumenical openness that does justice to the fact that nearly everyone is expected to run. And we wallow in inconsistency. We are pessimistic, but we keep issuing demands, possible and impossible ones. We’ll take any incremental reduction of violence, we grab onto and enact every reform with both hands in the total pessimism that, by doing so, nothing is won and nothing comes within reach. We further organize our pessimism by modifying and sabotaging our running. By preferring egress over progress. By planning our slowdowns, our frictions and our interruptions, so that we begin to see that, in an order defined by running, we only truly (e)merge into orderless forms-of-life once we become our frictions and interruptions. This is why ‘accelerationism’ is such a hideously narcissistic option, the false hope that the corral would succumb to an excess of itself, and that, if that were to happen, the Earth would still be able to receive us. No. The revolution is the emergency brake.[6]
Yet there is, beyond this acute issue, another, more affirmative inducement to want to be pessimistic. One that would also exist if it would turn out that – as the liberals contend – there is no exit. That the music doesn’t emanate from another room, that it is and will always be the same old song. The articulation of pessimism is not only a much more profound aspect of political life than the leftist optimism of critique and opposition allows for, pessimism also names another inhabitation of the Earth. Another mode of existing on and with the Earth. So it might be that pessimism is a good ‘political’ strategy, first because it gives expression to anger, to affective truth, because it reorganizes our affective attachments, and beyond that because we might then at least start to concern ourselves with who and what really is our enemy, with why this enemy has so much power over us and with how we can make life as difficult as possible for that enemy in its exercise of that power. How might we, from within the belly of the beast, turn ourselves into poison by way of our embodiment and enactment of slowdowns, frictions, interruptions? But all of that, all those political moves are still reactive, oriented towards an adversary. It doesn’t yet touch on who and what we ourselves want to become, it still partakes in the general mobilization. Such a pessimism is still that of an angry child that’s finally able to realize that parental authority is without foundation, and that the always already implausible promise of protection and affirmation will never be fulfilled. Beyond patriarchy and politics, on the other side of authority and resistance, an organized pessimism is a practice of dedication, care, devotion, sacrifice and love. We are pessimistic when we do not expect something in return for our efforts and when we don’t feel cheated when, indeed, nothing comes our way. When we don’t work for a reward, for a pay-out, for a prize, for satisfaction or even justice. Even peace is, perhaps, still a cruel optimism for an existence that may at most achieve an armistice.
Once we organize our pessimism, we no longer exist on Earth for a reason or with some kind of purpose, but we live with dedication to the suspension of hostilities for which a form-of-life is a name, not a formula. On and on! The more such autopoietic practices we are capable of inventing the better – and these are fundamentally religious practices. The more pessimistic we are, the less disappointed we will be. In ourselves, in each other, in the Earth, in God. Not because we live in order not to be or not to become disappointed, but because only then will we not have to accuse those with whom we are in coalition for having allowed the violence to take place, for not having been able to protect us.
These two faces of our pessimism – internally as orientation in the search for an exit and as a brake on progress, externally as always already existing practice of religious dedication – ultimately mean we are faced with a terrible, unimaginable prospect: we will win. Pessimism, a well-organized pessimism in the current world is the greatest possible enthusiasm in the world to come. That we know this, that we know we will win, that order and domination can go up in smoke at any moment, that they are wholly unfounded, means we also know what we will still have to endure, it means we know that the peace of defeat will not be given to us. And this runs counter to what we, the emancipated, were promised. This isn’t the dialectical tendency of a history in which we could imagine a future. But then again, everything ends. So will we, fortunately. But with all of that, and with the end of the optimism of the Euro-white phantasmagoria, our pessimism hasn’t even begun. What it comes down to is to organize our pessimism until the very end.
[1] Berlant, L. 2011. Cruel Optimism, Durham: Duke University Press.
[2] Stengers, I. 2009. Au temps des catastrophes. Résister à la barbarie qui vient, Paris: Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond/La Découverte, p. 172: “Dans le monde qui est le nôtre, il faut se méfier de ses ennemis, bien sûr, mais aussi de ses amis, toujours prêts à être ‘déçus’.”
[3] Schinkel, W. & R. van Reekum 2019. Theorie van de kraal. Kapitaal – ras – fascism [Theory of the corral. Capital – race – fascism], Amsterdam: Boom.
[4] Benjamin, W. 1982. Das Passagen-Werk. Gesammelte Schriften, Band V – I & II. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, p. 592.
[5] Benjamin, W. 2015. ‘Der Surrealismus. Die letzte Momentaufnahme der europäischen Intelligenz,’ in: Aufsätze, Essays, Vorträge. Gesammelte Schriften, Band II.1, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, pp. 295-310 (p. 308).
[6] Benjamin, W. 1974. Gesammelte Schriften. Band I.3, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, p. 1232.