Today the official optimism and positivity of culture is overwhelming. Everywhere one turns, one is assaulted by demands to remain positive, to diminish attachment to others and reinforce attachment to the self, to manifest success, to delete negativity, that what is meant for one will come to one eventually, that one is valid as themselves, to accept people as they are and not what they could be, that everything happens with a reason, and thus that it all works out in the end. The circle is squared. This affirmative culture is paradoxically a sign of a deep social sickness and a slipping decline towards a terrible oblivion. It is simultaneously a compulsion motivated by anxiety at the end of it all, and itself part of the slippage into decline. Affirmation of a wrong world is an acceptance of cold death.
To simply affirm is to affirm what’s already given to you. It’s to make peace with what one is thrown into, to accept a situation bestowed upon you by the history of the world up until your emergence into it. The positive one slips into passivity and weakness, or rather turns to positivity out of their weakness and lack of power. The positive junk counsels us to determine what’s within our power, draw a clear boundary there, and to venture no further for fear of disappointment. Disappointment is the twin of aspiration, imagination of something other. To be positive, we must reduce our expectations to contentment with what’s right in front of us. If you’re weighed down by chains, adapt yourself to your chained conditions and make the best of them. To make the best of things is supposed to be a sign of strength.
With this positive junk, instead of seeking to enhance one’s power, one makes peace with powerlessness and identifies with it. From a position of weakness, one makes a virtue of weakness and christens it as ‘self-improvement.’ To positively identify with oneself, to care for the self that’s already given to you by the world, is also to affirm the identity of the world with itself. A world which is identical with itself is one where there is nothing new under the sun, and one where there is nothing left but for ashes to return to ashes and dust to return to dust.
Needs of the Sick
In a world where everything comes to nothing, there is a sense of overwhelming meaninglessness. Why bother with anything? Human subjects make meaning of their existence, and a failure of meaning is also a failure of the subject to make a world. This despair at ephemerality and submission to its course is a symptom of the living organism’s weakness of power. Those who enjoy great vitality live with death as nothing to them. They do not deny death, but they do not fix their sights on it either. For the living, death can only be what life needs or wants it to be. The dead become the raw material of life, as “decay is the laboratory of life.”¹
The need for positivity comes from powerlessness. Instead of affirmation as a creative and negating act, it is affirmation as submission. One no longer acts as if one is the avatar of an Absolute. One acts with despairing consciousness that the world has no meaning, and there is merely relative perspective against relative perspective. There can be no claim to absolute truth between them, insofar as they are fragmented into isolation. One retreats into one’s own perspective, asserting the right of others to do the same. This perspective, however, is already a mere appendage of the world. Instead of extending and proliferating perspectives in a rich experience of life, the positive junk teaches us to consider our perspective as the firmament which we must reinforce. Within one’s “own truth,” one picks up self-care, mindfulness, self-prioritization, and other instruments aimed towards the solidifying of the self. The relativity of each individual’s perspective is supposed to be a new Absolute, self-care is a kind of self-worship which substitutes the Absolutes of ideals which people once aspired towards in their living — such as the appearance of heaven on earth at the end of history.
Some are not satisfied by this Absolutizing of the self. They are aware that this inward turn is in fact a symptom of an empire in its decline. They want a life which extends itself, but for the sake of a Higher Cause beyond the Self. For them, this Higher Cause is an authority which the Self must report to. This can be God, the State, the Family’s Father, Capital, or some other phantom of choice. But this is no vital devotion to a horizon. Instead of encouraging one to live for the extension of life into the new, instead of the one who lives living as the artist creates art, one lives for the sake of dead weight. These are idols which one serves, and they are nothing but mirrors of our-Selves which deaden the proliferation of creative life. They are still limits just as the boundary of the individual self is, only here placed high up above instead of within the contours of one’s individuality.
The idols and their worshippers try to impose a new Absolute by force. In the midst of chaos, an order of meaning. But this idolatrous force itself is merely the extension of the symptom. It is both the effect of decay and a further cause of it. It is not the emergence of new life from the rot. If a principle of life must be hardened into something immobile, then it no longer serves life. All these solid forms can only be made to serve life as something living if they are understood as being relative to it. “The form is of no value if it is not the form of the content.”² A life which needs to serve an idol is a life which is sick, and will not be free until it frees itself of its need for domination.
A life which is split needs something to stand above it, albeit with its feet in both halves of the split life, in order to make it one. The power above is both the cause and effect of this split world’s need for it. It becomes what makes the world ‘the world.’ The person is possessed by their possession. Instead of humans living as multifaceted creatures cultivating many aspects and abilities, humans exist as an aspect of a multifarious form of property — capital. Individuality itself is socially created, but it can just as well be an illusion even on a social level.
We think of our-Selves as our personal property, something which we own as a possession of our lives. They are inseparable from us, except by crimes which come from outside and contaminate the sacred bond between property and owner. Yet this character of personal property is an illusion, albeit a socially necessary one. Every characteristic and power of ourselves is a possibility particular to our society. We are not necessarily created by society like products on an assembly line — though such a motion does occur through the standardization of living experience and the homogenization of life-courses — but the possibilities for who we can be are the possibilities of a given arrangement of social relations and our laboring metabolism with the natural world. Individuality in this world is a means for the commodity society to function like clockwork, society exists as society through the apparently private and unique exchanges of individuals.
The contract is the embodiment of this dialectic. Two unique individuals appear as undefined legal persons who are interchangeable in the equality of their rights, and ‘freely’ agree to a contract which solidifies their arrangements into a principle of society. This empty and equal individuality is not a product of nature, but of a society which makes it possible for people to appear as such. The real differences of the individuals and their relationship with each other is obscured. They are emptied out into what is interchangeable, they are abstracted into Persons. That very abstraction itself is both the means for a regime of exchange and a technique of domination. For interchangeability obscures differences of domination, and creates a homogenous population which serves as a solid foundation for governance from above.
The ethics of the contract appear in interpersonal relationships as the power of the anti-social society to remake people according to its needs. Two interchangeably equal persons agree freely to a friendship, and they uphold this contract insofar as it’s mutually beneficial. In other words, insofar as they’re useful to each other as instruments. Personal responsibility for each, and between, reciprocated exploitation. The old bourgeois political economists used to insist that the pursuit of self-interest would serve the greater good. The positive junk of today does not even bother making such a grand claim. Its vision does not extend to the construction of a social order. It is basically fatalistic on that question — some forms of it declare it a lost cause, something which can’t be changed, saying that the real possibilities for life lie in “escaping the Matrix.”
With this solipsistic perspective, friendship is not defined by aspiration to ideals, by free association, or by the dynamics of intersubjectivity. Friendship is flatly affirmative. Friends declare each other valid and shrink away in horror at any signs of invalidation. Friendship is finding the perfect Yes-Men, who are so affirmative as to be practically interchangeable with one’s selfhood. The ideal friend is invisible. To need someone in their otherness is to be sick, to be beholden to toxic people, to be in need of healing from a humiliating contamination.
In spite of what the positive junk says, it’s not weak to need others. The need of others is inherent to life, and it is the very means for the enhancement of our collective powers through cooperation. It is instead weak to need a constant and paranoid affirmation of selfhood. This obsessive Self-affirmation is also an Other-negation. The foreign needs of others are contaminations. Those that make the best friends are those who have few or no needs, but are always at one’s beck and call to serve one’s self-needs. The contract remains the stated norm, but each seeks to get the better of the other within that relationship. Friendship has become masturbatory in its positivity, in its becoming an affirmation of the already existing self instead of a vibrant and engaging challenge to the drab same old same old. This artifact of life called selfhood is a husk which impedes the living creature from growing unless it sheds it. The character armor we put on to shield ourselves from others is also a prison which we may wither and die inside of.
Repetition Compulsion
Affirmation from every angle merely makes up so many spokes of a wheel, which rolls on forever as a perpetual motion machine powering the prevailing order of things. The positivity of each self is the positivism of a wrong world.
Positivity in this form is repetition of the same, forever. It is an endless accumulation of copies, accumulated for the sake of accumulation. It’s a life lived as an accumulation of things which one has, which are left behind at death. The hoards left behind by the dead may give the illusion of a full life, but they are really signs of wasted lives. If the knight were to reflect on the dragon’s hoard after slaying it, he might think to himself: “All of this for nothing in the end?”
To live a lively life, it’s not enough to cushion oneself with positive things. The elimination of risk and unpredictability in favor of positive affirmations is becoming bound to things — in this case, thing-like affirmations. To live, one must both give oneself over to the objects of one’s activity, externalizing oneself into them in order to know them as something other than oneself, and think and work against it in order to realize its own immanent possibilities. We need negativity in order to realize the totally other which is possible out of this world, the concrete utopia which lies hidden as a potential within the positive state of things.
Freedom is a struggle, not a thing which one has securely as a possession and must protect from negativity. Positivity cannot bring any freedom, it instead demands happiness in slavery — a repetitive reflection of the real condition of unfreedom, but painted as a complete and perfect picture which brings serenity to the consciousness of the bound. That is mediocrity and weakness, it is a flight from freedom. Freedom has no guarantees, because to be free is to refuse what has already been guaranteed. To struggle for freedom, one must be a pessimist of the intellect, and an optimist of the will.
Positivity is Negative
The positive junk has, as its underside, negativity. Every affirmation is necessarily a negation. The question is the particular relation of affirmation and negation. With the positivity of today, negation is instrumentalized as a means to harden the Is. Nothingness merely defines the contours and limits of the world, where the firmament lies. It is merely the Is clarified by the Is-Not. The fuzzy peripheries are sheared in favor of hard property-lines. The predilection for therapy reflects this principle, where positivity enthusiasts pay to have a specialist-confessor help them shave off their fuzz and leave only the hard core of their True Selves. This is a closed, opaque circle of the world, where nothing new ever really happens.
But this closed circle has its underside, which ensures that it keeps rotating smoothly. To operate as a closed system, it must exploit. The revenues of society — profit and interest, rent and taxes — are forms of living by dispossession. The dispossession is veiled as legitimate by the wage, or appears as private interpersonal arrangements. The whole of society is built on the exploitation of surplus labor, even if it is exploited by ‘free’ and ‘equal’ contract and agreement. Capitalist society is one through its division, the general capital manifests as a social logic by repeating itself across the sectors of society. Capital is many made out of one, it’s an indirectly social society portioned out into freely circulating individual persons. But its oneness is borrowed from the human labor that it aggregates into a substance suitable to make up its body. Its oneness which it repeats across the world cannot escape its mortal basis. And this mortal basis contains the hint of a new relationship with negativity.
Instead of negativity as an instrument for positivity’s self-affirmation, there might be an ever-vital negativity which expresses itself in positive forms. A negativity which never settles with the given but constantly works through it. This would be a living fire. This would be a world constantly in motion, where flourishing can be imagined by the active motion of nothingness through the positively given, a world where creative freedom is possible. Negation opens up the other and the different, the new. But freedom is a determinate negation, it is a creative nothingness which necessarily acts through the logic of form. By being nothing, one can be anything. Those dispossessed by the positive junk of capital must make themselves one out of their many dispossessions. We naysayers can’t expect absolute negativity from people, we should instead expect relative negativity — negativity relative to what is in front of each person, negativity which is a ‘no’ to their own distinctly dispossessed lives. The negation of the whole relies on making a whole negativity out of these many relative negativities. This whole negativity must liberate life from its positive givenness, negating the present world out of a dispossessed position as the negativity of its positivity. Their oneness must be a pluralistic one, “a universal enriched by all that is particular, a universal enriched by every particular: the deepening and coexistence of all particulars.”³
Determinate Negation
The world which we are supposed to make peace with is riven in irresolvable contradictions. The wealthy countries produce food in excess, tossing out and destroying what isn’t sold while millions go hungry. Real estate capitalists speculate on new properties with rents far beyond what the majority can afford, while people die homeless in the gutters. Nations build up their militaries into world-destroying forces, while they become more intertwined in interdependency than ever before in history. The value of life and comfort are affirmed, while inconvenient populations like the Palestinians are eliminated in 21st century Holocausts. This world is wrong. Any affirmation of a life within it is an affirmation of wrongness. The only reason to be found in this world is a reason which refuses its positive existence. This reason demands that no one goes hungry, that no one goes without shelter, that no one wages war, that no one is victimized.
The wealth of life is impeded by its form as capital. Capital is an irrational force, an engine of waste. The positive junk demands that we affirm this waste as unavoidable, and streamline ourselves into good commodity-individuals. It tells us that there is no alternative. But critical reason says otherwise. The underside of the world screams out, not always articulated in words, that we must transform “social reason into social force.”⁴ To say yes to life, one must be able to say no to this entire world and clear away the positive junk.
References
[1] Karl Marx, quoted in Georges Bataille, “The ‘Old Mole’ and the Prefix Sur in the Words Surhomme [Superman] and Surrealist,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, by Georges Bataille, ed. Alan Stoekl, trans. Alan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt, and Donald M. Leslie, Jr., Theory and History of Literature 14 (Minneapolis, Minnesota; London, United Kingdom: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 32.
[2] Karl Marx, “Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood,” October 1842, Wikirouge, https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1842/10/25.htm.
[3] Aimé Césaire, “Letter to Maurice Thorez,” trans. Chike Jeffers, Social Text 28, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 145–52.
[4] Karl Marx, “Instructions for the Delegates of the Provisional General Council — The Different Questions,” August 1866, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1866/08/instructions.htm.
