I’ve been doing a series of events for A Primer on Utopian Philosophy (available now, order it here etc etc). What has been perhaps somewhat surprising is the extent to which Bloch’s philosophical project seems to resonate with people. In the midst of the bleak nightmare of modernity, Bloch’s unabashed philosophy of hope could easily come off as glib or naive or somehow pre-philosophical and yet, what has been so moving, is the seriousness with which people have taken Bloch and the discussions these events have catalyzed. (I should credit here Mattie Colquhoun and Billie Cashmore who have both been profoundly kind, rigorous and insightful interlocutors). I’ve been thinking about one of the questions that came up in the last event — from the audience someone asked about despair. Is despair a necessary counterpart for Utopianism — to have a philosophy of hope, does one have to go through the stage of despair? Having thought about it, I don’t know if the relationship between despair and hope is best thought of as progressive or conceptualized in terms of stages, but might be better thought of as a discursive and affective knot.
For Bloch, our needs, desires and wants push us to act. We recognise a lack, and so even in the midst of the darkness of the lived moment, we go out of ourselves. For Bloch’s Utopianism it is vital to give attention to this sense of lack, and to recognise that this feeling has a political valence. After all, a desire or a recognition of a lack is a claim upon the future — even if expressed in the grammar of negation. “Why can’t it always be like this?” is a Utopian question. At the same time, “I don’t want this,” is also an expression of desire for something else — even if we don’t know what that something else might be. Desire is not an end after all, but something which is created in the process of pursuing it’s first, inchoate beginnings.
To be in despair, to be lost, to be burned out is not antithetical to Blochian conceptions of hope but rather, in some senses, the ground at which hope comes to better understand the latencies and possibilities of a given moment and to estimate the tendencies against which it struggles with more precision. Yet there is another dimension to this I think that’s worth teasing out. To be in despair is to recognise a lack — something missing from the world, whether that be peace, justice, freedom or the possible manifestations of the world which could be free. But the problem is twofold: those things are not just missing but they were taken away from us and two: we still see the traces of their presence. To put it another way, we are haunted by the ghost of a better world — Utopia is a specter from the future, both impossibly distant and yet, somehow, also unbearably and painfully close to us.
I’ve been thinking about this thanks to the discussions at various events and reading Hannah Proctor’s excellent new book, Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat. The book is structured around its open discursive and affective knots, melancholia, nostalgia, depression, burnout, exhaustion, bitterness, mourning and trauma. Sweeping across left history from the communards who survived the bloody weeks of Paris to Che and the Black Panthers, the book takes seriously the problem of these knots and the ways in which too often a left politics is willing to abstract the messy details of subjectivity away from the fight for a better world. The chapter on mourning was the one that caught me the most — inevitable given my own background in Gothic and Horror studies. “Don’t mourn, organize” is almost a left shibboleth it seems – the imperative is always to be moving on, and yet mourning leaves its marks upon us. As Proctor puts it, “Militancy cannot function as a substitute for mourning but instead results from the socially enforced disavowal of grief; poison tears remain unwept. In this sense, militancy represses mourning.” The absence of loss lingers.
Perhaps, Proctor suggests, we need ways of mourning and organizing. To mourn is, in essence, to be in communion with the dead — it is to be haunted by that which we have lost. This is a constant of ghost stories for at least the last three centuries. Ghosts are icons of loss, the past being present to us again, if only for a moment. But even in their momentary reappearance they represent a rupture in the smooth totality of capitalist history and whisper to us, things can be otherwise. Again, to quote Proctor: “Mournful militancy is not just about vengeance but about justice; it is not just about honoring the past but about transforming the present for the sake of the future. The dead will be safe from the enemy only when it is defeated.” To be in despair at what we have lost is to acknowledge the actuality of our haunting, and the scale of our demands — not just a utopian future for ourselves but one which redeems all that which has been taken from us.
Hannah Proctor’s Burnout is out now from Verso Books
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