After Trump’s latest victory, our WhatsApp groups were filled with messages of disbelief. We told ourselves that we could not understand what was happening and we limited the analysis – from a pathologization of mental health – to “the world has gone crazy.” “Madrid insults me, Madrid attacks me,” sing Los Punsetes, and yet, there are many people who remain ‘kidnapped’ in this and other cities with a rent they cannot pay and condemned to traffic jams and pollution. In those same groups we tell each other about the work offenses of our day and we blame ourselves for not being able to get off the couch on a Friday to go to the neighborhood assembly and then have dinner with a friend. The solution? Consume leisure, self-care products, consume drugs to rest, disconnect or gain energy to get back on track. “Tension headache, it can be cured with Orfidal, because it is a mental pain, because you are hysterical,” as they say Miss Spain.
For Alicia Valdés, political scientist and doctor in Humanities, these discomforts are symptoms of conflicts that we must investigate and face. Symptoms that need a critical analysis that allows us to discover them as collective malaise and connect them with issues such as the violation of labor rights, the rise of fascism or the fake news, and imagine alternatives to the culture of effort and self-exploitation. For this critical analysis, in his essay Unrest Policy. Why we don’t want alternatives to the present (Debate, 2024), proposes to recover psychoanalysis and theories about affects.
In Discomfort Policyyou introduce the affects and describe how they are mobilized both on the right and on the left.
The right, for example, is a specialist in mobilizing hatred, which is an affect. But it is important to differentiate between manipulating and mobilizing because if these people lie to mobilize affection, like when VOX carries out campaigns based on lies against unaccompanied migrant minors, what they are doing is using lies to mobilize affection and that is manipulation and there is to be clear.
But emotions are always mobilizing, also from the left. For example, during a moment in history (15M, the Arab springs, Occupy Wall Street…), we saw that there was a great mobilization of emotions, we were angry, which is an affect, but we were also hopeful, which is another affect. Or with Sarah Ahmed’s reading of Handbook of the party pooper feminist We know that women do not have to laugh at a joke and that we can respond and mobilize affects that are not usually considered typical of women, outside the framework of care.
The left sometimes denies affection and, you warn, it is part of the problem that they do not understand the rise of Milei, the re-election of Trump or the phenomenon of workers who vote to the right, what are they missing?
Everything escapes them. Here we have to be a little careful because the thinking of the left and the right can converge in the sense that both seem to reject the logic of affections based on a European tradition that considers that everything that is not reason It corresponds to inferior beings such as women and savages. But if the left are more feminist and if the left are more decolonial and anti-racist, then the first thing we have to ask ourselves is whether the rejection of the affective and the unconscious is not simply that we are inheriting those racist, colonial and androcentric agendas.
The left has moved mainly within a framework of thought of reason, describing it as a material reason, an economic reason. Thus, acting rationally is acting according to your material conditions, but that does not always happen and when it does not happen it is not always irrational. Furthermore, they consider that their forces are made up of those people who are necessarily logical, rational, who are guided only by will, while it seems that the voter on the right is necessarily a person who is going to be led by a series Let’s say, for low passions, affections, everything that is irrational. And from this paradigm, phenomena such as Trump’s victory escape us, because the analysis is incomplete and if the analysis is not correct, neither is the solution.
We have seen a proliferation of exacerbated positivism, to describe it you recover the concept of cruel optimism by Lauren Berland. What is this “cruel optimism”?
“Cruel optimism” is the moment in which being optimistic can lead to your own unhappiness, it is the feeling of thinking that if I continue doing this thing that brings me unhappiness at some point, happiness will come. What happens? If we have this whole idea of the culture of effort and the narrative of meritocracy, what we are saying to everyone is “hey, if you try hard, it will happen,” which is what Mark Fisher called the magical voluntarism. “Make an effort and demonstrate at home with some candles, but do not demonstrate on the street.” It is interesting to consider how the verb manifest has acquired an absolutely different connotation.
‘Cruel optimism’ is the moment in which being optimistic can lead to your own unhappiness, it is the feeling of thinking that if I continue doing this thing that brings me unhappiness at some point, happiness will come.
How is this “cruel optimism” connected to capitalism, especially platform capitalism? Big Tech?
When you tell a person: “make an effort”, “do this because you are going to achieve happiness”, in this “do this” we find a market niche. I can make it easier for you because I can sell you my course so that you learn to get up at 5 in the morning to do burpees and put you in a refrigerator of ice, but I can also sell you my course so that you know how a high-value woman can be, I can sell you my agenda because in my agenda every day you will find a motivational phrase. That is to say, the “cruel optimism” mixed with this stage of platform capitalism what it achieves is that the platforms themselves become shopping centers where they offer you behaviors to achieve success, like a kind of motivational shopping centers.
One of the concepts that you recover from psychoanalysis and that allows us to think about the present and the appearance of public figures such as financial pseudoguru Llados and the supposed followers of stoicismis the idea of the superego, how does it operate?
I advocate the idea presented by Jorge Alemán that power does not permeate us through the unconscious but through the idea of the superego, which is this instance of the psyche that acts as a law, orders us and the more we obey, the more orders it gives us. .
In previous moments in history the “superego” told you “don’t do that”, “don’t do that” and now the capitalist law of “consume more”, “spend more” follows. It has been able to take a new way to achieve obedience, which in this case is not so much through prohibition, but rather through exploitation, for example, consumption. One of these ways has to do precisely with what you point out about that absolutely misunderstood and misread stoicism that can be expressed in certain public figures such as Llados, who construct different narratives about how you can achieve that ability to consume from the logic of meritocracy and the culture of effort. Because if there is something about this “superego”, it is that right now what they tell you is that everything you achieve and everything you do not achieve, is necessarily the result of an effort or lack of effort that you make.
In your book you warn that the path is not to “be our own boss” but to want not to be exploited because “it is not enough to kill the boss, we must kill capitalism.” Why is it difficult for us to desire emancipation? How do we desire alternatives to the present?
The fact that you are exploited is not a sufficient condition for you to want to get out of that exploitation. Because if that were the case, we would have put an end to salaried work a long time ago. We haven’t done away with wage labor because we think there is no alternative system we could want. That is, we think we are in the best possible system. So, since we don’t leave that framework, it is very difficult for us to put our desire elsewhere. In order to desire something different, I believe that the first thing to do is an exercise in political imagination. And I think the type of cultural products we consume plays a lot there. It has been seen, for example, in the case of the genocide of the Palestinian people. He mediafare has been constantly generating the framework of “lecturing the Palestinians is extreme but being anti-Israel is too” and if you do not have communicative alternatives that generate other information frameworks it is difficult to get out of there. The podcasts, some podcasthave played a fundamental role in this sense, they have been able to propose other narratives.
The platforms themselves become shopping centers where they offer you behaviors to achieve success, like a kind of motivation shopping centers
For this emancipation, you also consider it necessary to recover the “subject of bad news” from psychoanalysis. Why do we need negative feelings?
At the level of the subject, I believe that there are many people today who are at home, who will be bad and who will feel bad for being bad, who do not accept that they can be tired, that they cannot be angry. Or this idea that you must necessarily love your fathers and mothers, the family is a space of absolute violence, now we are precisely with the whole case of Juana Rivas, but there are still people who continue to establish relationships with their family even though it generates a lot of discomfort and sadness, because it seems that we cannot have negative affections for these people.
When we talk about the “bad news subject” at the political level, what we are saying is that there are things that are contradictory in us, that there are negative things and if we do not accept it we are not approaching a real political horizon. And if we do not accept that contradiction, if we do not accept that there are many times that the subject has a death puncture, if we do not accept that many times the subject is contradictory and has interests more important than material interests, if we do not accept that we are not so logical, as harmonious as we have been told, we are not going to be able to understand why we do the things we do.
Your bet is a “politics of not everything”, what is this policy and how do we build it?
We have always thought in terms of totalization: we have to end capitalism, we have to end patriarchy. Obviously, your neighborhood assembly is not going to end capitalism and your faculty assembly is not going to end patriarchy either, but the actions you are doing in those spaces are no less valid for that reason. That is a bit of the logic of “not everything” in politics, for me.
Betting on the “not everything” necessarily implies that we move away a little from the hegemonic idea that either we have achieved everything, or we have achieved nothing; to try to understand that what we have to put at the center are the day-to-day improvements, to understand that, although we are not going to defeat capitalism, we are going to have spaces that are parallel to it. That is, we are going to have alternatives in the present.
#era #demobilization #idea #demonstrating #candles #caught #demonstrating #street
