In today’s age of neo-fascism and neoliberal capitalism, there is a rising pressure to conform to social norms. The decimation of state welfare, the rise of precarious employment, violent xenophobia, right-wing hysteria against sexual self-determination etc. have created a society in which the individual is left powerless to decide their own fate.
Instead of figuring out how we can collectively annihilate an unjust order, contemporary psychology has sought to justify individual quiescence. Mark Manson, for instance, says that it is impractical to hate society and completely disengage from it. That only leads to “indifference” – people hide in an “emotionless pit of their own making, self-absorbed and self-pitied, perpetually distracting themselves from this unfortunate thing demanding their time and energy called life.”
Since there will always exist a society that sets up norms for us to follow, Manson asks us to accept that
“everything sucks, some of the time.” There will always be people who will “laugh you off the stage over and over again”. We will never “feel comfortable and happy at all times”. That’s why Manson says that we have to be concerned only with “the big things, the important things”.
Human beings are mortal creatures who have to think carefully about how they want to use their limited time. They can’t be everywhere at all times, resolving every single problem. They are characterized by the “unfortunate tendency…to inhabit only one place in space and time”. From the individual’s perspective, the inability to change the entirety of society means that we have to “recognize our life’s inevitable limitations and then prioritize what we care about based on those limitations”.
So, it is the fact of mortality that allows us to focus on what really matters to us. Thinking about death foregrounds questions that possess urgency: “What is your legacy going to be? What are the stories people are going to tell when you’re gone? What is your obituary going to say? Is there anything to say at all? If not, what would you like it to say? How can you start working towards that today?”
In the end, the mental health discourse of the present conjuncture boils down to an ideology of death: the fact that individuals cease to exist becomes an excuse for accepting hardships. Manson thinks that becoming a “hotshot court lawyer” means tolerating “80-hour workweeks”. He obviously doesn’t stop to reflect if this personal “sacrifice” doesn’t reflect historical norms of capitalist productivity. For him, it is just a trans-historical necessity: “Everything involves sacrifice. Everything includes some sort of cost. Nothing is pleasurable or uplifting all of the time.”
Manson’s ideology leads to the assertion of a strong self that can weather the inevitable imperfections of life and thus doggedly pursue its goals. But from where does Manson derive this strong self? Are we always capable of confronting difficulties and creating a new future for ourselves? Manson thinks so. For him, “uncomfortable emotions” can’t be considered as an independent entity. They exist only as a “source of motivation” for us, spurring “positive change in our lives”. Thus, mainstream psychology converts negative affects into mere inputs for the machine of optimism.
An alternative to the machine of optimism can be found in the poetry of Jaun Elia, where pessimism silently and aggressively voices the necessity for a radical change. Consider these lines: “dād-o-tahsīn kā ye shor hai kyuuñ/ham to ḳhud se kalām kar rahe haiñ” (Why is there such a commotion of praise and applause? / We are merely conversing with ourselves.) One can find here an attitude of indifference to society. While Manson wants us to carefully focus on things that we are capable of pursuing and exclude those that are out of our control, Elia is absolutely ignorant of such distinctions. He converses with himself without assessing how it would be received by others. He doesn’t care if his inner conversation has succeeded in overcoming difficulties and earning applause from society. Rather, he is confused as to why does a society even exist, why are there people who are applauding him.
So, does Elia basically deny the existence of society? If so, how do we even make sense of his monologue? Even a monologue relies upon the social infrastructure of language. One is never alone while thinking, as thoughts arise from a history of interaction. How, then, do we understand Elia’s incredulity towards applause? The word dād has a variety of meanings: praise, justice, help and the fungal skin infection called “ringworm”. Here, a curious equivalence occurs between the domain of social conventions and the domain of morbidity. Is social recognition and mutuality like a skin infection that itches, inflames, and swells? In this graphic imagery, the act of applause becomes an irritant to the human body. Appreciation from others no longer validates the goals that we pursue or the values that we hold. It becomes an infection that demands treatment. In this morbid sociality, there exists no secure selfhood that can convert negative affects into a determined struggle for personal goals. On the contrary, Elia presents us with brute negativity, an affect of inflammation that doesn’t provide any comfort.
For Manson, difficulties have to be faced if people wish to fulfill their goals. The fact of mortality continually reminds us that humans can’t have it all, that they have limited time to execute their plans in a harmonious manner. Thus, the negativity of difficulties becomes a principle that has to remembered, constantly reminding us to invest our energies in a judicious manner. Elia, on the other hand, presents us with a negativity that is enacted in a fit of confident forgetfulness, instead of being remembered as a principle that can help us in navigating society. Nothing, not even death, can guide us in the creation and maintenance of social relations. Sociality is always a form of morbid astonishment: people start applauding and assisting when one least expects it. Words spoken to oneself somehow invite the irritant gaze of the other. Society can’t be neatly categorized into a set of necessary imperfections that the individual has to rationally manage to fulfill their own goals. Our goals are overridden by an intense monologue wherein praise and appreciation lose their normative force, just as infection disturbs the integrity of the body that till now had seemed as if it completely belonged to me.
Insofar as there is no stable selfhood that can rationally pursue its goals, who is the subject that confusedly looks at the applause that it is receiving from others? Here, one can replace the smooth language of social recognition with the rasping abrasion of resistant materials. In the former, there is a psychologically motivated individual who is discriminating between what they should care about and what they should accept as an inevitable imperfection. In this totalized individuality, the other doesn’t need to disseminate itself. It is always concentrated in the mind of the rational individual, who knows how to deal with society. Even difficulties are accepted by the individual as an inevitable aspect of life, motivating them to try harder.
But in the ontology of infection, no difficulty can be legitimized as a trans-historic principle of life. Difficulties are not inevitabilities that are smoothly integrated into the worldview of the individual. Rather, there has to be a dissemination, a passage of social signs: the infection of sociality has to spread from the portal of entry to the wider body. Infection doesn’t involve the entirety of the body. It initially operates upon specific structures or molecules that the pathogen can exploit, such as receptors on cell membranes, open wounds or mucosal surfaces that allow entry etc. It is only later that pathogens may spread beyond the initial entry site through the bloodstream, lymphatic system, or nerves.
The dissemination of the infection of sociality may or may not take place. Life’s difficulties may or may not be accepted as inevitabilities. In other words, the necessity of dissemination attests to the possibility of changing the world. There is no reason why the world should be fatalistically legitimized as an inherent aspect of life. Just like an infection, the world, too, can be diagnosed and treated. Thus, there is a space where the reasonableness of things is not yet guaranteed. Whereas Manson begins with the rigid individual whose selfhood has already internalized the trans-historic inevitability of suffering, Elia asserts the presence of a singularity that is not convinced of the reasonableness of anything.
A singularity keeps conversing with itself, without attempting to participate in the social verification of beliefs. Instead of possessing social coordinates that would allow it to face outwards and map the exterior, the singularity mutters its way through society. It is as if the ears of the singularity are blocked by the loudness of its own internal conservation. And from where does it get so much sonic power? The explanation is to be sought in its positioning at the infectious niche, the point at which the body of the singularity possesses the capacity to function as a microhabitat for pathogens. Located at this meeting-point, the singularity keeps receiving social signals from the machine of history. This endows it with a vastness of material. But at the same time, the material is subject to the pressures of dissemination: the pathogenic substance has to cover a distance in order to spread itself.
The indetermination of the passage means that the material of history can be recklessly deformed into a rambling monologue that pays no heed to the normal rules of functioning. Dād, we saw, also means justice. Elia can be said to inaugurate a new notion of notion: justice as infection, an order in which everything becomes dry, flaky and crusty, as it is detached from the nurturing atmosphere of the status quo. Before anything can be changed, it needs to be subjected to the withering gaze of ruthless critique. According to Manson, “Meaning is like the water of our psychological health. Without it, our hearts and minds will shrivel and die. And like water, meaning flows through us”. For Elia, on the other hand, meaning is like ringworm: it is the infectious dryness that subsists beneath the surface of water. This dryness keeps irritating us, foregrounding the flakiness of all that exists. From this cauldron of inflammation, there arises the monstrosity of the singularity, annihilating injustice in the flames of monologue, absolutely indifferent to social norms.