Some housekeeping ~
I get asked this a lot, so I thought I’d clarify: you can purchase a subscription without a credit card using PayPal or e-transfer; e-mail me! I’m aware of Substack’s dumbass cc-only payment, but fuck that; we can get around it.
Anyway, this is sort of a continuation of the piece I published back in May, #10 on love & class, as well as some reflections on Byung-Chul Han’s book The Palliative Society, which I highly recommend. A quote from the book:
What has been forgotten is that pain purifies. It has a cathartic effect. The culture of the likeable and the agreeable lacks any opportunities for catharsis. We are thus suffocated by the residues of positivity which accumulate beneath the surface of the culture of likes.
Without pain, we are therefore blind, incapable of establishing truth and knowledge.
It worries me you think this is good.
He means conflict.
He’s worried I think conflict is good.
Here’s the thing:
I think conflict is neutral.
I think conflict is a fact of life.
I think conflict is just another thing to deal with.
Like securing rent every month.
Like deciding between paying my phone bill or one of my credit cards.
Unavoidable.
Not necessarily pleasant, but nothing about life has ever been that pleasant or easy, at least not consistently. And this isn’t my truth; it’s The Truth, the resonating reality of every working person: the tolerance for pain, the calloused reality of everyone not born into wealth and security or paid hyperinflated entertainment wages. Pain is a part of the deal.
Where there is a struggle, there is shame and, inevitably, anger. To struggle within capitalism is to be intimate with anger, rage, despair, hopelessness, cathartic emotion, persistent discomfort, and the pursuit of relief, however brief. The circumstances of our lives dictate our capacity for conflict, anger, and pain, as well as resilience, growth, and empathy. It is impossible to talk about pain without talking about class.
Pain is now a scandal, writes Byung-Chul Han. I’d argue pain has always been a scandal for the bourgeois — the long and heavily medicated history of moneyed families, the over-prescribed children of nepotism and trust funds, we know these truths and these tropes, know the bourgeois cope par excellence is a pill.
Only now, this outrage and intolerance at and for, well, Life, has reached the masses. We are all now as sickly as the bourgeois has been and will always be; just as disconnected from the fullness of life and entitled to the agreeable, the smooth, the easy.
In bourgeois myth-making, trauma is exceptional and individualized, a pain that stands out in an otherwise sanitized world. For the bourgeois seeking fame and public sympathy, trauma is transformed under what Chul Han calls the neoliberal idealogy of resilience, which I’ve written about here: a veneer of cultural credibility.
For the working poor, pain is necessarily present regarding capitalism’s required state of lack.
We’ve lost the definition of pain, severed it from its roots to the truth. The commodification of pain and trauma has flattened them into one-dimensional enemies to be defeated. We too, have become flattened, with some understanding of the violence of the system we live in but no willpower to fight it, we have surrendered and now require something to dull the complexities of self-awareness and for the people around us to match the muted conditions of our comfortable lives.
The dispositif of happiness isolates us. It leads to the depoliticization of society and the disappearance of solidarity. Each person has to look after his or her own happiness. Happiness becomes a private matter.
The bubble in which the rich and powerful live has been reinforced over time, preventing too much dissonance from seeping in. A monochrome world of invariables, and now everyone wants in, clinging to our individualized trauma narratives as if this were some class unifier, some sort of great equalizer, some justification for our growing impotence and weaning interest in fighting for or fighting back. If happiness is a private matter, the greater good has been effectively killed.
I hate it when you compare our jobs.
He said this to me after telling me that all jobs are degrading.
He makes around two hundred thousand dollars a year.
He’s a podcaster.
The most money I’ve ever made in my life was thirty thousand a year.
I’m not a podcaster.
Maybe I should be.
I’ve written about the dizzying and often alienating gap between us before.
I probably will again. I mean, how do you not compare?
He Hates it, though.
Oops.
I agree — it is not very sexy baby of me!
No, I’m a nasty reminder of the unforgiving nature of capitalism. I’m making him uncomfortable. He, the so-called communist; me, the so-called antagonist proposing the most outrageous thing of all: a frank discussion about money, about the different realities in which we live, and how those realities affect our capacity for conflict.
What a brat.
Hyper-aware of the unsightliness of my caste, I know I’m pushing it every time I make him aware of something he’d rather not know.
I know I’m ruining my appeal by telling the truth, revealing some inconvenient multitude of myself.
Pain is difference; it articulates life.
Unfortunately, there is little room for difference or pain anymore. There is room for desire or some shrunken and starved version of desire, but it wilts at nothing and requires the careful handling of an orchid.
Such tragic impotence.
No direct sunlight and no direct comments.
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Incredible piece, Sara. I think that we have come to believe that being happy means we're a Good Person—when really, there is no correlation between being happy and being good. Searching to feel happy all the time is just addiction, and in the search for constant happiness, we bury memories, histories, truths, complications and contradictions which invariably upset our happiness, our heartless mania.