As promised, a response to questions about “militant dysphoria”. I’m going to respond very broadly rather than going point by point, and inevitably there will be some (good) points I won’t have addressed here; the purpose of this is to get some general orientation on a couple of areas that commentors highlighted as problematic.

A common thread seems to concerns the relationship between dysphoria as illness and dysphoria as sensibility. Obviously my interest is much more in the latter: Cold World is all about the “aesthetics of dejection”, and the kind of “unlife-world” towards which the dysphoric body comports itself. But the title of the last chapter is, nevertheless, “The Brain of Ulrike Meinhof”, and the question of whether a dysphoric sensibility might have some neurological* correlate is never far away.

I’m loathe to naturalise dysphoria - to say, for example, that some people just have certain sorts of brains - but at the same time it feels icky, at best, to culturalise it, to turn “the dysphoric” into a sort of modern equivalent of “the consumptive” (it would be useful at this point if I still had my copy of Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor to refer to). Part of the point of talking about the cold “world” is to emphasise that “the dysphoric” is always dysphoric relative to some situation of which s/he is an inhabitant. There is some virtue, here, in purposeful equivocation between the “natural” and the “cultural” - the term “sensibility” is itself difficult to locate precisely with respect to this opposition.

This plays a little like the impairment/disability distinction in the “social model” of disability, and there’s a useful parallel between the politics of “militant dysphoria” and that of disabled rights. One goal of disabled activists is to make the social world less practically disabling of people with various sorts of common impairments, less exclusively organized around the requirements and capacities of the “temporarily able-bodied”. Another, arguably more radical, is to critically dismantle the model of health, physical normality, performativity and so on that underpins the identification of the deaf or wheelchair-using person as “impaired” rather than simply different (difference being “what there is”). There is an oft-remarked tension between the broadly identitarian (or strategically essentialist) demand for rights, inclusion, recognition and so on, and the de-essentialising move towards a “generic” politics of suspending norms: the latter tends to undermine precisely the categories (“the deaf”, “the blind”, and so on) that the former uses as a basis for identification.

With respect to dysphoria, we might focus critical attention on both the notion of neurotypicality and the social formatting of sensibility, its normative standardization (an operation not broadly incompatible with “diversity”, so long as the latter can be cleanly segmented into discrete demographics). A key difference here, poignantly evoked in Naomi Klein’s No Logo, is that between the individuation of subcultures, which is a function of human creativity responding to the particularity of its circumstances, and the “branded” reification of subcultural identities for marketing purposes. I’m not willing to give up on individuation, “shared communities of practice” and other figures of emergent collectivity just because there’s a rapaciously efficient axiomatic machine waiting to reterritorialise them as soon as they achieve any visible consistency, but clearly this is a problem.

Part of the solution, it seems to me, is to try to derive the generic consequences (to grasp the trans-worldly truths) of any particular individuation: what, for example, did the practical experimentation of militant lesbian separatists in the 1970s have to teach everyone about the construction and defence of spaces of physical and psychological autonomy, or the political dimension of sexual orientation? (At present, the dominant subjectivation of this moment is reactive, identifying it only with the catalogue of its failures and pathologies, declaring its only “truth” to lie in its eventual, inevitable-with-hindsight exhaustion. The fact is that these women accomplished something, and that we have all but lost the ability to say what it was). What have goths, as a subculture, to show in the way of the creative reconfiguration of dysphoria and social negativity? Can we demonstrate the compossibility of these truths?

* An earlier version of this post had “neuropathic” here - which sounded right but wasn’t (or at least I’d have a hard time defending the usage against the standard sense the word has in medical terminology - not an argument I want to be having…)