Since the phrase appears prominently on the cover of my book (Cold World, which I hope will see the light of day around September of this year), I feel I ought to give some account of what I mean by “militant dysphoria”.

The key notion is that taking pleasure in things requires a synthesis of experience. “Unbound” stimuli are often not immediately assignable as pleasurable or painful. An aspect of socialization is learning to enjoy certain things, to find the pleasure in them. It is probably quite spontaneously pleasurable to suck on a mother’s teat while simultaneously filling one’s nappy, but enjoying things like picnics (where the pleasures of the afternoon have to be separated out from a good deal of troublesome nuisance - wasps and suchlike) or classical music is another matter. The naturalization of social forms, like going on picnics or attending classical music concerts, goes hand in hand with the naturalization of pleasures. It is antisocial not to enjoy the things one’s peers enjoy.

This certainly applies to sexual pleasure, and the social pleasures of courtship. Not liking or wanting sex is pathologised; sexual release is characterized as a natural urge, a biological need. People for whom the urge is weak or the need uncompelling are commonly regarded, and even tend to regard themselves, as defective in some way, although less monstrous than those who deliberately suppress and deny their appetites. Sexual frigidity is something you try to get yourself cured of (but for whom?). W. H. Auden’s memorable phrase “the distortions of ingrown virginity”, and his poem “Miss Gee” about a buttoned-up spinster who dies of a cancer presumed to have been somehow brought on by thwarted libido, typify the vulgar Freudianism (and later Reichianism) that correlated sexual expression with creative vitality. The healthy organism is one that enjoys intercourse - and, it goes without saying, the social dance of sexual negotiation. Don’t be shy.

The hallmarks of goth subculture are a disdain for “natural”, “healthy” pleasures and an inclination towards “unnatural”, “unhealthy” ones, an embrace of “morbidity” in place of “vitality”, and a valorization of “deep” - reserved but meaningful - social interaction over “shallow” gregariousness. These predilections are typically understood as ways of engineering and emphasizing social “difference”, affirming a subcultural identity based on nonconformity, with all the usual pitfalls (snobbery, in-group conformism, bad faith) that entails. But I think this misses the point: the fundamental motivation for goths is not wanting to be different (a banal ambition that they share with everybody else) but an inability to accomplish the syntheses of experience that make up the consensual pleasures of teenage (and “adultescent”) life. Goth is a dysphoric subculture: if its adherents describe themselves as “outcasts”, this is not mere posturing (for all that their social position may in fact be quite comfortably secure) but reflects an acute apprehension of being on the outside of what others promote as “life”.

Dysphoria, then, is not merely discomfort or unease, but specifically non-pleasure in what is “normally” pleasurable. This may take the form of a chimerical jumble of sensation, a feeling of unpleasant “wrongness” (such as that recorded by the lesbian crime writer Patricia Highsmith on attempting heterosexual intercourse with a male partner), or it may come out as a numb confusion, a feeling of dissociation in which nothing connects (the disaffection felt at one time or another by most adolescents). We tend now to interpret such dysphoria as a symptom of mistaken identity: the person who expresses an aversion towards heterosexual intercourse is assumed to be a closet homosexual, the person who finds that his or her male or female body “feels wrong” is understood to be in need of gender reassignment, and so on. Eventually we hope that the disaffected adolescent will “find himself”, and will begin to feel comfortable in his own skin. But there is something superstitious about the assumption that problems of identity formation are always caused by the secret, disrupting presence of another identity, either a “true” identity that has yet to be revealed or a “false”, demonic identity that has to be exorcised. There is something about the body that cannot fit itself into its environment, that is painfully at odds with its world, that cannot be explained or resolved in this way.

Where this joins up with a political perspective is that the stance or predicament of dysphoria often finds itself confronted by mandatory pleasures: compulsory (hetero-)sexuality, the comforts of domesticity, the various amusements and distractions offered by consumerism. There are certainly worse problems to have, of course; the point here is not to plead for the special awfulness of privileged Western middle class existence. Only where the management of society takes place through the management of enjoyment, where marketing and public relations are among the dominant forms of public discourse, does the dysphoric body achieve any kind of visibility (as the conspicuous absence of pleasure, where it is decreed that pleasure should be) or public significance. Nevertheless, in such contexts, the dysphoric body is a problem, and a political problem to boot. Because its imaginary is incompatible with the imaginary projected by the dominant ideology, it can become the support of an imaginary negation, what I call the “counterfactual” will that the world be other than it is.

“Militant dysphoria”, or “politicised unpleasure”, is a name for the shift from experiencing dysphoria as a personal pathology (depression, anhedonia, guilt) to recognizing that the syntheses of experience that bind together all but the most rudimentary pleasures are part of a larger cybernetic network: personal “dysfunction” must be understood in the context of this system and its (naturalised) functions. The aim is not to reform the world so that one will at last be comfortable in it (what suits me wouldn’t suit you, just as what suits you doesn’t suit me), but to be able to suspend the verdict of pleasure where it serves reactionary political ends.