What is political engagement for those under the enchantment of the state? In thought, it is the browsing of newspapers; in deed, the conduct of “high-profile” media campaigns. What the papers say, and what one says about it in one’s turn, constitutes the fabric of “political” discourse, the world of current affairs. What “The Concept of the Urban Guerrilla” metonymises as “the Springer press” is this manufactured un-world, a simulacrum which absorbs and sublimates political discontent, refashioning it as opinion. For Meinhof, herself a successful journalist prior to her conversion to the cause of armed struggle, the entire world of political discussion, from the bully-pulpit oration of newspaper columnists to the obscure and earnest analyses of leftist groups, is simply a means by which potentially revolutionary displeasure is cathected, dissipated, drawn off and recirculated. The passage from concerned leftist political discourse to concerted militant activism is a passage from that which soothes, placates and mollifies to that which concentrates displeasure and directs it towards its source: a militant dysphoria.

Cold World, forthcoming

As I’ve already suggested in the comments to previous posts on this subject, if “militant dysphoria” seemed like a good idea to Ulrike Meinhof then one ought to be exceedingly careful with it. My gut feeling about Meinhof is that she was smart, angry and committed, and worth listening to even if only to understand the ways in which smart, angry and committed people can get things dreadfully wrong (in a word, or two: “bourgeois adventurism”).

Anyway, above you have what Cold World presents as (a) militant dysphoria: “that which concentrates displeasure and directs it towards its source”. The oppositions in play in this passage are concentration/dissipation, direction/recirculation and potential/actual (“potentially revolutionary displeasure” versus displeasure actualized through “militant activism”). There’s a sort of folk-physics of anger at work here; the Freudian terminology (“cathected”) should give some sort of clue as to its genealogy. These are roughly the terms I think Meinhof was thinking in; and one can certainly see in a project like Capitalism and Schizophrenia an attempt to think somewhat beyond those terms, to move beyond the impasses they seem to commit one to.

In what I’ve been saying about dysphoria as “predicament” and militancy as “stance”, there’s the implication that what matters politically is not how dysphoric you are, or whether your dysphoria is authentic enough, but whether your “subjective position” (to borrow a phrase) with respect to that dysphoria is one of helpless, self-blaming inarticulacy or whether it can find some symbolic articulation through a collective political project.

A subtlety here is that the fantasy-omnipotent, other-blaming stridency of a personal vendetta against the world remains, at its core, fundamentally inarticulate: it reverses the polarity of the “abject” subject position, but does not dissolve it. That is partly why I want to reject the notion that “militant dysphoria” should aim at making the world conform to what suits me personally (you wouldn’t like such a world; but, crucially, neither would I: a world conformed to my organic pleasures would not display, in others, the lineaments of gratified desire). By “symbolic articulation” I mean speech that links with other speech, acts that link with other acts, such that the linkages form a chain which extends beyond the limited breadth and scope of the personal. The point, if you like, is to raise up the private burden within the common weal.