Quique Autrey on the Paradoxes of the Mark Fisher and David Smail

Unlock a deeper understanding of the interplay between personal struggles and societal pressures as therapist and podcast co-host Kiki Altre joins us to dissect the influential ideas of Mark Fisher and David Smail. Fisher's poignant "Good for Nothing" article serves as a springboard for our conversation, blending personal anecdotes with academic critique. Kiki brings a unique perspective, sharing insights from his specialized therapy work with men on the autism spectrum and his approach to hosting thought-provoking podcast discussions that bridge diverse viewpoints.

Together, we tackle the complexities of mental health, challenging the common narratives around Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and its evolution. The conversation transcends simple class-based explanations for depression, instead highlighting the intricate web of cognitive dissonance and narrative creation within the individual. We traverse David Smail's examination of class and power dynamics in mental health, advocating for a nuanced understanding that acknowledges both personal experiences and broader sociological forces.

As we journey through the ethical gaps in Marxism and the concept of resilience, we explore Christopher Lasch's critique of societal relationships and psychoanalysis. Addressing the balance between personal responsibility and external societal pressures, we dissect the implications of class origins and cultural norms on one's self-worth and actions. The episode closes with an emphasis on the importance of personal growth and active participation in societal change, advocating for ethical solidarity and power egalitarianism in our pursuit of a more just world.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 1:36

Hello, and, depending on how you're listening to this, you're either listening to VarmVlog on one of 85 formats or you're listening to the Psyche Podcast. Today I am talking to Kiki Altre, therapist podcast co-host. You do something with religion. We are talking about the legacy of Mark Fisher and David Smell Particularly. We're going to be framing our discussion today around a 2014 article published in the Occupy Times called Good for Nothing. We will be talking about that pretty in detail to I'll let Kiki explain his background on this.

Speaker 1: 2:33

My background on this is I published Mark Fisher in 2013 and it ended up being his most infamous essay. For those who have followed me, I've spoken about that essay in the past. You can find an episode of the Sectarian Review from about five years ago, at the five-year anniversary of the publication of the essay, where I talk about all that goes on around it. If you want to know more about Mark Fisher, you can read Xenogothiccom or just read Mark's work. You just get the Big K Punk book, which has, I think, all the small writing that.

Speaker 1: 3:31

But before we get into that from my audience, I want to talk to Kiki about what he does. I've been listening to your podcasts for about often on for about a year-ish. I find your show very interesting. You're one of the few shows where I can't quite predict what's going to come on every day, which I find actually kind of fun. You've been working on the legacy of Eric Fromm and I believe around the time that we're recording this your most recent essay was a kind of interesting discussion comparing Fromm to Jordan Peterson. So people who are listening can kind of get a little bit of what Kiki does. But what all does your show cover, kiki?

Speaker 2: 4:21

And that's kind of hard to even put into words because it probably captures the crazy shit that's in my mind. I know there's so many different ways to articulate this, but I am somebody who I think of, actually Carl Jung, who said I thank God I'm not a Jungian. Or those in the Freudian tradition who have said I'm definitely not a Freudian. I just like to think about figures and ideas.

Speaker 2: 4:52

I don't like to be put in a box, I think in terms of your question. I mean, my podcast tries in a very broad way to bring in people from all sorts of different perspectives to try to understand where they're coming from and to kind of build like an interesting conversation. So I think I'm hard to put into a box but I have a variety of different interests and that comes into the work that I do in therapy. That's kind of my primary role. This podcast is just like a fun side project. I'm a very busy like licensed therapist working primarily with guys, but I do see females and trans clients as well. One of my specialties is working with men on the autism spectrum. So yeah, that's a little bit about me in the podcast. But yeah, I'm just excited about connecting with you, man, and, yeah, having these, these interesting ideas and conversations.

Speaker 1: 5:42

It's interesting that you work with people in the spectrum. As an educator, I work with a lot of people in the spectrum, but it's interesting the overlap and distance on when we talk about, like, different kinds of people who need support, the relationship between education and therapy. It's a whole different conversation than where we're going to have today, but it just occurred to me that like, oh yeah, that's, that's an overlap.

Speaker 1: 6:15

So today we talk about Mark Fisher and, for context, I also, for myself, recorded a response to this article which will be coming up pretty much simultaneously to this episode. And this article got me Like I don't want to say that like I was close friends with Mark. We only really exchanged like emails and and and DMs, and I published one of his essays and we, you know, I set up a few interviews with other people and I work in the shadow of his legacy because for a while, I actually worked at one of the two publication in Prince he helped found. So I have a pretty, I have a very strange relationship to Mark and that we were both intimately tied together, and yet I don't feel like I knew him for more than like a year and we never met in person, so and so when I read this essay, it was a lot more haunting than I was expecting it to be, because I mean, we know how this plays out for him. I mean, you know, like you know for people who don't he he succumbs to his depression in 2017, he really kind of draws from the world around the the Trump election, although I don't think they had anything to do with it, because it was in the UK and it just. It just seemed like there was a shift and there's an interesting shift in his thinking that happens around to the.

Speaker 1: 8:13

There's two shifts in his thinking. It happens around 2013 2014. He starts believing that kind of reformist politics is more possible and I think if you read his earlier works, like capitalist realism, he doesn't think that, like, social democracy is a way out, and it makes that pretty clear by the time he writes the vampire castle essay from the North Star. He does think social democracy is a is a way out. That's that's an interesting shift in thought. I think it's beyond the scope of what we're talking about today, but that happens actually about the same time that he starts actually viewing. He starts talking about depression as a almost as a sociological phenomenon.

Speaker 1: 9:06

And when I read this piece, I kept on screaming actually in my head like it's and and both, not either or like. And I wanted your response to that because, because, on one hand, I find that the sociological framing of this piece and we're going to talk about the context of the I mean the content of the piece in a minute and his invocation of the work of David Smell and all that actually highly enlightening. But I kept on thinking like it's not you to, to just view it in terms of the social doesn't seem to be any. It seems to be still on balanced because it still actually kind of accepts the distinction between the individual and the social. It just kind of flips it and I think I'm not going to say that like Norma qualified to say, nor I think anyone's qualified to say actually that that's part of why his depression gets so unbounded. But like it seems to me that when you, when you pause it, that the self and the individual is somehow an antithesis to the social, that you don't entirely understand what the self is and and flipping it on its head and talking about this only in terms of the social, actually still accepts the distinction whereas, like yourself, your self, identity and the way that that can possibly express itself is all socially I don't want to say determined, but delimited. So it's an, it's like it's in a context of, of your society that like, yeah, so Fisher in this piece talks about, like the little nagging voices that tells you you're not good enough because you're not productive enough.

Speaker 1: 11:22

You're never like really who you are particularly from a different class. He also like, interestingly, immediately makes the caveat and I think it's interesting, given his reputation from the vampire castle that, like, race and gender also play into this equally that you get that. It shapes the voices in your head as far as, like, how you understand depression. It's a key and huge insight and kind of freeing.

Speaker 1: 11:55

But the that, what he extrapolates from that, is like that depression is almost a means of class control or oppression and, and I'm like yes and no, the way in which these things sociologically manifest, in the way in which we can explain them to ourselves, seem very much cultural. I mean, it's like you're probably familiar with the studies that indicate, like, if you're, if you have depression or are particularly similar schizophrenia and you're in like a well knit village society, that between having social connections and not being isolated and having narratives for understanding it, even if they're themselves theoretically delusional, that that really changes the, the outcomes usually for the better than a lot of modern situations, absolutely Right. So there's a key insight here that I don't want to dismiss, but it seems like there's still, like there's almost it's like inverting an error. It's like if you, if you, if you take an error and invert it, you fix one part of the problem, but since, since you just flipped it, there's still another part of the problem there.

Speaker 2: 13:16

Yeah and don't, oh, yeah, no, and I mean I want to. I want to kind of go there because I have a lot of the same kind of struggles, as I was wrestling with Mark Fisher's piece and then I kind of did a deep dive into David Smell as well, and I don't want to reduce it to this. But but I sometimes wonder, is it something that just is easy to write about? To create these like polar opposites, or to kind of highlight one side and then almost shit on the other side, is just a way to kind of push the argument and help the reader or the listener get a clear conception of what's actually going on, but in reality it's abstracting these two things that need to be put together.

Speaker 1: 13:58

Yeah, I think that's part of what's going on. I don't in Fisher's case, I don't necessarily think it's just writing.

Speaker 2: 14:06

Okay.

Speaker 1: 14:06

Like there is this tendency that he had and I've been. I've been somewhat hesitant to talk about it in the past because I mean because, frankly, the way he died, and so for me for a long time, for about five years, it shut the book on me criticizing him because one, like it, just seems cold. I remember Timothy Morton, about a year after Fisher died, said something about him taking his medication and the backlash was severe and even I was like dude, like you know, like I think Timothy was another person who I you know, many, many years ago, interviewed by email, not a person that I know, timothy Morton, but like I think he's actually out here in Houston, I think at Rice University, maybe.

Speaker 2: 15:13

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 15:13

I believe, yeah, interesting thinker, smart guy. But yeah, he got a ton of backlash for that and I did think it was uncouth and it kind of pissed me off at the time. But there was a sense in which I was like how much we think about social thinking. Right now there's a tendency to and I want to talk to you about this as much as we can, respecting the rights of like people you work with, right.

Speaker 2: 15:46

Like.

Speaker 1: 15:48

I think a lot of men in particular have this kind of binary framework right now social like sociologically in their head. There's a tendency to like go wildly between extremes almost, and I think, and I think part of it is to advance an argument. But I also think the way that argument is advanced does actually put these narratives in your head, and the way that Fisher is actually talking about and, ironically, like not entirely picking up and I don't know the work of David Smale that well. I read an article you sent me but like and I find and I definitely don't know it very well either.

Speaker 2: 16:30

Sorry to interrupt you. I just read one book and I'm reading a second one and I'm really like it. But yeah, I definitely don't want to say that I'm any kind of expert on him, but I'm intrigued.

Speaker 1: 16:41

Yeah. So I guess I want to get into like kind of the argument here. I mean so this tendency to advance it by like flipping the script. A couple of the things that are mentioned in this piece I actually find fascinating because stuff that's happened since this piece in the broader culture, even in the United States and I suspect in the UK too, have dramatically changed. So, for example, a decade ago Fisher's talking about how we're prescribing tons of medications, and we're still doing that, but that we're downplaying therapy, and we sure as hell aren't doing that anymore.

Speaker 2: 17:32

Right.

Speaker 1: 17:33

He also mentioned cognitive behavior therapy. But the version of cognitive behavioral therapy he mentions as all cognitive behavioral therapy I was actually like that's just, you haven't looked into this enough is like American positive psychology that was popular between 2005 and 2015. And I'm like but that's not like when he was like CBT is all positivity. I'm like have you read early CBT? Because I'm not saying this, I'm not endorsing the paradigm, but I was actually shocked when I was reading 80s forms of CBT and how like direct and blunt and like almost mean that it was.

Speaker 2: 18:18

You're thinking of like rational and motive behavior therapy, which is the type of early CBT?

Speaker 1: 18:22

Yeah, Exactly Like. There is no like. Don't talk about should. Remove should from your mind.

Speaker 2: 18:27

Exactly Stop shooting on yourself, as I tell my clients sometimes.

Speaker 1: 18:30

Right, Exactly, and I actually like later, later, kind of the behavior therapy.

Speaker 2: 18:36

Yeah, I do kind of find to be, like you know, almost replace bad thoughts with good thoughts which is insane, but you know, but again, but, but I think I think one of the things that that people can do is to just reduce it to that. Or again, for the, for the sake of highlighting their argument and their perspective and their point, they just create a straw man, maybe. Maybe that's a way to frame it, is it's so easy in this binary thinking to just create the straw man so that your point looks so much better, right, and I think things are a lot more nuanced and complex.

Speaker 1: 19:19

Yeah, well, here's. Here's the thing that I was confused about, about the like like I, like I under no way claim to be like a my my relationship to psychology is my mother was a psych nurse in a prison for like okay, a few years, but that's, that's like endearing a bad period of psychology. I think too so, and so, like I, I sometimes I don't talk about this much. I know a little bit more than than the average person, but I don't actually feel like I know that much. What I find interesting right now and what I, what I found, what I found interesting in this piece versus what I was thinking about, the vampire castle essay is one of the things Fisher kind of complained about is the weaponization of certain like conditions, mental states, etc. Sure, but when I was reading this and this understanding of depression, I actually found it kind of wildly inconsistent, because he does frame depression basically as a class based political project and not. You know, in fact I'll read the the bit, and then he talks about volunteerism and and then I'll get it over you, because this, this was the form of social power that most affects me, on me, is class power, although of course, gender, race and other forms of oppression work by producing the same ontological in inferiority which is best expressed exactly the thought that I articulated above, that one is not the kind of person who can fulfill the roles which are earmarked for the dominant group.

Speaker 1: 21:22

Discussion of David Smell, which we'll get to in a minute. Each individual member of the subordinate class is encouraged into feeling their poverty, lack of opportunities or unemployment is their fault and their fault alone. Individuals will blame themselves rather than social structures which in any case, they have been induced into believing do not really exist. What smell calls a magical volunteerism? We must understand the fatalistic submission of the UK's population to austerity as a consequences of a deliberately cultivated oppression. I mean depression, and I'm like the end, you know, for people who reading along I skimmed like four paragraphs, but this is also only like nine paragraphs long. So there's a leap in logic there, one that it's deliberate, to that it's so solely imposed. I think there's there I want to talk to you about, about smell, because I did find what little bit of smell I read actually quite interesting. But the the idea that this is just imposed upon you by the upper classes to me seems wrong.

Speaker 2: 22:49

Yeah, why do you think from your perspective?

Speaker 1: 22:56

Because it ignores cognitive dissonance, because I think I think that there's a way in which people actually, in trying to reconcile their cognitive dissonance, will will create stories of blame.

Speaker 1: 23:14

And the reason why I say this is it's identical on like a cute PTSD where people think that, like their response to whatever trauma and and and by this I'm using trauma in the in like the severe sense, like their sexual assault, their whatever happened to them in war, etc. Is primarily their fault. Therefore, they don't recognize all the things that you know, they don't realize how, how bad they're fucked up because they actually think it's some kind of guilty conscience. And that's similar to what Fisher's saying here. So to me, like I think there's a key insight into from Fisher here that like this helps people rule over you, like absolutely true, and people weaponize this all the time. But I don't think it's just imposed upon you, I think it's actually mutually created in the relationship between the the oppressed and the oppressor. And I also think that interestingly this was a critique, I've had a Fisher for many years that he flattens out different kinds of oppression and exploitation into one thing, Okay, and I don't, and we're going to.

Speaker 1: 24:37

Since this piece is so short, it's hard for me to say if he's doing this and thinking about depression, but but I do think, and where I do think he's right is this class relationship, this antagonism actually, you know, helps create these psychological voices. That but it's interesting to me because my, my response to him is like I don't see this in the same way in every capitalist society.

Speaker 2: 25:09

Like.

Speaker 1: 25:10

I don't like I lived in. I was talking you off air. I've lived in different places, all of which would be theoretically capitalist, the in all of which, some of which have some very brutal class relations. I mean, the Republic of Korea has some very brutal class relations, but the way people understand this is radically different because of prior religious, cultural assumptions that go into their class narratives to yeah, so when you say the way they understand it, you like the way they experience it and make sense of it.

Speaker 1: 25:47

Right, yeah, so like one, I definitely think, for example, you know, people in Asian culture sphere clinical, have clinical depression. I mean like absolutely. But the way that they were to articulate it to themselves is nothing like the way we do. And the way they articulate like class antagonism to themselves is also very, very different. And there's outlets for it, like there's these weird drinking parties that you go to with your boss and all the Confucian norms are suspended during the drinking party. So like you can eventually, once you're both drunk, like yell at your boss and it's okay, and then the next day you go back to, like you know, silently compliant not just capitalist but outright Confucian relations. So like you know and I just read this and I was like I and none of these cases do, I think also the ruling class entirely knows what it's doing when this stuff is built Right, like it's not that conscious.

Speaker 2: 26:59

So agreed, agreed. I think that's important, and David smell gets into that too.

Speaker 1: 27:04

So I wanted to kind of pull in the strings. How do you think I was going to ask you? Because he, fisher, seems to use smell, but I'm not sure Fisher totally, like, actually agrees with smell, about what's going on. What do you think of Fisher's interpretation of smell?

Speaker 2: 27:27

I, you know, I don't know that I can speak that clearly about it, but because I don't know either one of them that well, but my sense is that he kind of comes to smell a little bit later. And what I've read from smell is it's pretty consistent, it's it's just it's foregrounding the social, economic, the, these powers outside the self, outside, like the family, as the primary sort of cause of mental illness or depression and not, yeah, I think, highlighting enough kind of the other side, but which, which I want to get into, but I don't know. From my perspective it seemed like, at least, though, the piece we read from Fisher actually connects to a lot of what smell is talking about.

Speaker 1: 28:17

Okay.

Speaker 2: 28:19

I think it's pretty consistent. How did you see it differently?

Speaker 1: 28:27

I was. I haven't read a smell that. No, I know that. Like I know when I looked up smell that he was one of these borderline cases of people who was almost considered part of the anti psychiatry movement. Yeah, he didn't go as far as Thomas saws are already lying. I know that, like his, that that there's an interesting bit and power, responsibility and freedom that that I thought was kind of interesting. I think smell stuff on like happiness and relationships and social normativities actually very interesting and insightful. But I feel like I'd have to really read like seven or eight of his books together but actually understood how far he takes this. And you know what's interesting about I, when I was looking stuff up for this discussion, I learned that like smell died the year that Fisher wrote about it. So I wonder if that prompted this. Actually there's a lot of like. There's a lot of stuff I'd really like to know about, like when Fisher's plant, like how he's exposed to these ideas, when like is he reading smell and it's changing his thought?

Speaker 1: 30:02

or is he already have this thought and smells now his like? He finds a theoretical apparatus.

Speaker 2: 30:08

I think it was more that. Yeah, you know I don't know for sure, but but yeah, that's kind of my hunch because he was already leaning this way and ghosted my life.

Speaker 1: 30:18

So that's Fisher's book, which is writings on depression, and that book came out. Oh, I should know because I worked for, yeah, that book came out in 2014. Like I said, I know it wasn't out when the vampire castle piece came out, but so let me ask you this.

Speaker 2: 30:43

I mean, one of the things that came up for me when I was reading smell and I'm just since you know a lot more about Fisher, I wonder if he would like align with this is I don't think this is unique to smell, but but he really foregrounds it in a lot of his, his books is. Even the whole discourse around psychology is a way to get people to believe that there's this thing going on internally and that all we need to do is just kind of work on our thoughts and, you know, process our emotions, keep it private, keep it individual, keep it internal, and that's the work of what it means to be human and it doesn't get into the larger social realities that are really kind of fucking up people and that the whole therapeutic industry is actually a way to not actually inspire people to do something about, you know, their actual conditions.

Speaker 1: 31:47

Yeah, I think this is. This has been tough for me because on one hand, for example, I yeah another overlap and this is not overlap with Fisher, the Fisher's often compared to lash and I thinking in some ways incorrectly. I'm a, I'm, I've become an auto didact. Christopher lash scholar.

Speaker 2: 32:17

Okay and smell quotes him a lot.

Speaker 1: 32:20

Right, yeah, I know, and and I find that this interesting, the thing is lash, lash was like a a soft Marxist social historian for most of his life. After some events in them in the early 70s, he, he decides that his understanding of class and frameworks, kind of inherited from Marxism as interpreted through like Paul Sweeney and whatnot, aren't sufficient to explain what he's seeing in the new left. And he he goes about in two books one is his most famous book with. The other one is an under read book called the minimal self, constructing an understanding of the relationship of individuals to society and their politics by their understanding of psychoanalysis. So he like, has like the kind of antinomian left, what he calls.

Speaker 1: 33:20

You know there are the, he sees them and like Markuza, norman Brown, and then you have the, the sort of like liberal, the two ends of the liberal understanding of society which he sees as technocratic, and he sees that as both the classical behaviorist and the human instincts. And then he sees a kind of conservative, ish classical Freudianism. And then he has his own version of classical Freudism which he gets from like Cassie I can never say this name, cassie smirkel and the in the French school that isn't Lecombe. So like there's this and in fact, what's fascinating and all of lashes work is like he never mentions Lecombe at all, but he mentions people who are like arguing with him.

Speaker 1: 34:17

So you know, he knows about him and it's okay. So so that's to frame that, though one of the things that's crucial for Fisher is Fisher thinks these psychological states are like in relation to the biological realities of the family, and so he does think that the therapeutic is abused as a way that politically manipulate people by liberals, and also is abused by a way to get around the hard questions of politics by the kind of by the new left, but he what is interesting is, he would not buy this idea that depression was, was imposed upon people to get them not to revolt. That is not something that the lash would accept, and so I find that interesting that that smell uses him, and it's like, it's like a echo in Fisher, because I think what, what, what lashes point is is that your psychological conception of society is also going to play into how you, like you, sociologically process it. In turning so much of the stuff back on, the self avoids all the political and historical relations implied by that, and also for and this is where he radically would depart from Fisher and also your own personal responsibility in the relationship. So that's, that's the difference, like you're not a passive agent just being acted upon and lash. And somehow by the time this gets through Fisher, through, like the you know the, the echo game, this becomes like the capitalist are imposing depression on us and I think that would be just as far into lash as anything else. Now I also think like what I find interesting about about lash is, while I agree with lash about some of this stuff, he actually has like a very literalistic reading of voice of early Freud, like he really does seem to believe in the apple palm plex etc.

Speaker 1: 36:29

And then sometime when he when he his late books, he drops the psychoanalysis entirely. Just not part of his thinking in the late 80s, right before he dies, and it was not part of his thinking Before this seeming crisis he had in the 70s. He was like a pretty bog standard, like soft Marxist. So it's, it's in for I'm. It's interesting.

Speaker 1: 36:56

This comes up when I was reading a smell because because I'm literally, I'm literally writing a paper like right now on the relationship of of lash to Freud, because it's awesome, it's only in two of his books where it's really important, but it happens that one of those books is his most famous book, so it's a culture of narcissism, which is a thing everybody reads. So I am in. The culture of narcissism is interesting because it kind of reads like one of those social commentary books of the 70s, like a Tom Wolf book, but it's really not that. But it was picked up like it was, so it's so one of the things that that lash thinks is that the change in political economy changes the likelihood of various kinds of pathologies that are going to show up.

Speaker 1: 37:53

So, like he thinks for example, in classical Freudianism, that the narcissistic culture of the 60s and 70s is like secondary narcissism of the end of Fordism, like so. So he thinks like your identification with your employer, with the, with the social system of Fordist relations and all that actually encourage you to have secondary narcissism in the, in minimal self. He makes it pretty clear that, as Fordism is like having a crisis, it's becoming clear that actually what's happening is that's morphing socially and the primary narcissism. And one of the things when I talk to people about this today is I have to tell people, though, but he's not using our definitions of narcissism. His definitions are from early Freud, they're not from the DSM. So you like he's not talking about the same thing you are when you're like talking about like toxic narcissistic right.

Speaker 1: 38:48

Right, fisher does seem to be talking to the type of spec that Fisher. Fisher does seem to be talking about normal depression, but then seeing austerity as imposed upon people by depression. So he also think like this is one of his obsessions in his late writing and maybe I want to see if this makes sense to small he becomes obsessed with with like joy, but not to not to psychoanalyze him too much, but it's clearly that he thinks there's a political joy, because he doesn't have joy but he himself does not seem to have it, and so this ontology for him and all this stuff is actually like a political project. And he interestingly and this is what I want to talk to you about, the magical volunteerism that smell talks about. I think he actually, I think Fisher just thinks like you, can you through eventually, through reformist politics, like Corbinism. He thinks that you can like, will yourself, back to joy, and I, frankly, I think that's a fucking dangerous idea.

Speaker 2: 40:06

So I think I would agree with that.

Speaker 1: 40:09

Well it's, it's one. I mean, fisher doesn't survive long enough to see the collapse of Corbinism, but oh my God, I can't imagine what it would have done to him To like. Interestingly, there's a shift in Fisher's life and in his most famous book he sees social democracy as a closing of the horizons, as a kind of limiting to the best you can do around 2013. And this is explicit in the vampire castle piece, and I know this because I criticized him for it when he wrote it. But I pop, you know I thought the piece was provocative, so I published it with, you know. But anyway, he talks about like the killjoy nature of the, of the naysaying on reforms of like both the Marxist and the like Identitarian far left, and mostly he's focused on the Identitarian far left. But there is a way in which Fisher seems to be arguing with him when his earlier form of himself about like saying that that these kind of like, something like a social democratic process isn't good enough. And now it's like well, I'm tired of that, maybe we really should back this up. And that plays into his defensive.

Speaker 1: 41:33

Russell Borrand, which is another article, and his in stuff like democracy is joy, which is another short piece by him that I reread recently. For another reason. He seems to think that, like this deliberative reformist project will bring back like a political project that can help people feel happiness again, and I just one. That's a super fragile conception of self, because when that doesn't happen it's going to be self collapsing like it's just just going to be dead. It's psychically devastating If you've invested that much into power. You know a political expression like that, but but to it just, you know you were talking about the. You know simplifying the argument is simplifying arguments to push forward like this. I also think it's weirdly a kind of magical volunteerism, it's way in which it's actually inverting the thing he's critiquing, but it's still kind of the same thing, like, like.

Speaker 2: 42:46

Yes, say a little bit more. I think I'm with you on that, but maybe you could help me understand that.

Speaker 1: 42:50

So, so by not making it just total individual responsibility as an individual fault, like you kind of start seeing politics as like something that you do and then you're elected into the. You know, you get elected in the position and then we don't have a stare at anymore. We introduce some kind of MMT program or whatever, and and then it's almost like like a singular event can undo the entire thing. Yeah, and that's going to inevitably lead to failure. And it also leads you projecting onto individuals, be it Corbin or Bernie Sanders, or even historical figures you know, like oh, that figure, stalin, trotsky, whatever, like they start playing a role of projection for you, of which, like, if we just can do this one thing or embody this one ideology correctly, not only will we get our social goals met, but our emotional needs will start to be modified. And I think there is a sense in which, yes, a better political situation, better political economic situation.

Speaker 1: 44:12

I do think that for most of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, we did not look at psychology socially nearly enough, right, and that's absolutely true. We saw this as individual pathologies, even individual brain chemistry. We saw it as Unilaterally determined by genetics, are unilaterally determined by behaviorist stuff. So if you just changed your behaviors, your mental states would change. You know, it took kind of the cognitive as rebellion to get rid of that.

Speaker 2: 44:49

I've even seen today and I can fall prey to this, but I'm not careful my own therapeutic approach or just emphasizing, like power in immediate relationships, or the quality of you know, the people that are close to you, whether that's family or friends, as being kind of the source of pathology, or even how you'll experience healing, without acknowledging as smell. Does these larger levels of power that that you know really impact a person? Psychology?

Speaker 1: 45:19

Yeah, well, I mean, one of the one of the things that I always find interesting and I find this frustrating about, like classical psychoanalysis, for example and this is like something that I get frustrated with with lash, okay, so it's good. So it's on my mind a lot, there is a, there is a normalization of a particular form of the family as somehow biologically instantiated and constant, which, as a person who comes out of my background is literary studies and anthropology and philosophy will, having studied anthropology, that's just not true. It's bullshit, right, right, it's just bullshit. Like there's.

Speaker 1: 45:59

And one of the one of the one of the most shocking realizations you have when you study anthropology and like political economy together is when you go like my ways of loving people are actually rooted and instantiated in economic relationships, whether I like it or not, and particularly in how we structure the family as a primary unit of social reproduction, of how we survive as a species under certain economic relations, and it is radically different from time to time. You know, I'm I'm one of those people who believes like, yeah, I think that, like humans, forming kinds of pair bonds is universal, but how we express that is absolutely not. And and once you realize that, yeah, you're like OK, well then it can't be. Just my relationship to my father is is you know what's doing this? Because my relationship to my father, regardless of his pathologies and whatever they do to me, still comes out of a social context of the way I understand what fathers are and why I understand them that way Exactly.

Speaker 2: 47:12

See again. Maybe I'm using different language, but but I think what you just said is like a both, and I mean and smelled, I mean in the art. In the chapter I just read he talked about the importance of the primary experience with, like mothers and fathers and how their power over what he called the little people or children can kind of really fuck them up. But then if you just reduce it to that, you're not acknowledging the larger social powers that fuck up the father or the mother that didn't have influence on the child. So I think it's a both and I don't like production isms.

Speaker 1: 47:47

Me neither, and and so I just think that you know, this idea that Fisher's prompting is like as a corrected to the psychological milieu of 10 years ago Kind of makes sense, but it's almost an overcorrection and it's it's really hard not to be tempted to read what happens to him and his succumbing to depression and eventually ending his own life as like somehow related to this, and I'm trying to resist it when we're talking about it, but it's just like. Can we go?

Speaker 2: 48:28

there a little bit. I mean maybe we don't. I mean just because I don't know if this is exactly where you're going. But even as I read his piece and then got into smell this week, I found myself losing a little bit more hope, feeling like things were more fatalistic than I'd like them to be. Saying there, I mean even in, and I'm conflicted because I do make my living from doing psychotherapy with individuals. So much of smells. Work is like basically this does nothing and it's a sham. And he still, like, did psychotherapy. So that's a bit of a contradiction for me. But it's hard not to get into some of these things and not think there's nothing we can fucking do. And yeah, that's to me. That's pretty fucking depressing. So I can, I can see where someone would fall into a trap.

Speaker 1: 49:17

Well, yeah, and this, this is a I'm going to take off my my talking about psychotherapy hat and I'm going to put on my talking about a political economy hat and a real sense. Rendering individual subjects passive is, in classical Marxism, a form of of alienation, and it's one of the most pernicious forms. It's, you know, the alienation of self from self, no longer recognizing your own part of the reproduction of your own life, both in in your own life, and so it's not just your labor, but also in like just everything around you. And Marx isn't.

Speaker 1: 50:12

Marx isn't the systemic in his early writings about alienation, and he doesn't. He uses alienation throughout his career, despite what the auto serians will try to convince you, but he's not. He doesn't write about at this, this directly again, but like he sees, he sees communal isolation coming from the first. There's a nation from your labor. But that alienates you from the understanding of your actual positive contribution to the relationships that keep you alive, because when you're directly contributing, it's very clear that you and this other person have a relationship of mutual interdependence he doesn't use that language, but that's what he's describing and that you are valued. But when you are removed from the product of your labor your. It also removes you from the relations of there's a mediator bit of the relations of interdependence that keep people alive, and so you lose your sense of self worth. And but there's other things going on there. You also lose your sense of understanding other people in the same position as you because you have to compete with them to try to get the scraps from the table. And then there's this sorting relationship where you start to believe that the class instantiations are somehow natural and all this stuff, I think, is kind of what Fisher is dealing with, although one of the things that he's really focusing on, this different from Mark's Mark's, mark's isn't give a shit about your class origins, so so, for example, like whether or not you're raising a working class family is not important to Mark's is what you're currently doing, and Fisher, it's vitally important.

Speaker 1: 52:08

And the reason why I know this is I argued with them about like Russell Brand. He was like Russell Brand is working class and I'm like, well, he was born working class, but like he is not working class. And then we had the thing and he was like well, I reject this Mark's insistence on on what you're currently doing is who you are, and I was like well, I don't reject this idea that your cultural habitats is super important into your understanding of yourself and, like, your class origins absolutely play into that. But also your social roles are different and you should really be aware of that. And so, like you, just because you were born into a working class family does not remotely make you working class, and we would go back and forth. This was the debate between us for like a year.

Speaker 1: 53:00

What I think is interesting about this is, in Fisher's mindset, this your class origins are so important because they said all these voices for you, they said all these cultural norms and for him it seems like that's actually the most important thing, like, and I to me that actually doesn't entirely make sense. Now I'm going to caveat this because people are going to find stuff in Fisher's writing where he doesn't sound like this. Sure, nobody is that consistent. There are times when he actually sounds like an Orthodox Marxist and there are times where he really doesn't so like.

Speaker 1: 53:39

I think you know particularly somebody with the output of Fisher who was writing like these little essays all the time like sure, I keep on booking. It's like this For those of you who are listening, that's me making like a two inch thick thing with my fingers. That book is huge and you realize that like he's kind of spit balling it trying to work stuff out in real time, and you know we have to. I think one of the disservices we do to thinkers is, you know, like try to automatically come in with this idea that they have a work out system that they had worked out through their entire life, like that's almost never true.

Speaker 2: 54:20

That's fucking never true. Just look at Freud.

Speaker 1: 54:25

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 54:26

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 54:26

I've been looking at Freud a lot lately and it's I'm like what's Freud am I dealing with here?

Speaker 2: 54:33

Yeah, yeah, it's very confusing.

Speaker 1: 54:37

Because this word doesn't agree with this Freud.

Speaker 2: 54:42

But so can I ask you a question? So here's I mean, hopefully this is in line with everything, but you meant when you were talking about lash, who I don't know very well. You mentioned the concept personal responsibility. I wonder, building on on what you know of him, but then bringing in Fisher and what we've been talking about in terms of depression, smell gets into this a little bit like like what do you think that concept means in light of your thinking?

Speaker 1: 55:13

So because, yeah, yeah, for me it's probably a little different than for last, but for last it's like realizing your social roles, realizing your, realizing you know what we would today probably call your primary traumas. But for him it would be like realizing that, like there's always going to be a tension between authority and freedom and that goes back all the way to you know, like your edible relationships with your mother and the over identification, and that the best you're going to do is integrate that, but that a social project that made that easier and validated working life and personal and personal responsibility within working life Would really help you lash out a crisis. Actually, after the, after the Freud period, he couldn't really figure out whether or not he was a populist, marxist or a communitarian. He got very fed up with the Marxist because he thought they all betrayed the working class and blame the working class for everything that happened to them. But I think he rejected the communitarians as too conservative and too circular.

Speaker 1: 56:29

But he almost like in a kind of famous series of essays, is really like by the post left. He wrote in Toquun magazine in 1987. He kind of he calls it he he's attacking the right and the right sense of understanding of society. But then he like then then he gets critiqued on something he turns off on the left and he he writes a bunch of stuff about the last views of the family that actually just don't take. It's true. I think he's true about the left view. I think he's defending as a traditional nuclear family back in time in a way that's not defensible.

Speaker 1: 57:00

But he also says that, like the left does not give working class people any kind of hope for fixing their own lives. In fact it both blames them in the 80s and I think it's kind of right about this in the time he's running about in the 80s. You know a lot of the Marxists left is blaming them as having false consciousness, but then also saying that like they're the problems that they see in institutions such as the beginnings, that the inability of public schooling to deliver what was promised, the way in which working class family life, which he sees as a very thin and then you know he sees as barely supported in the good times with the family rage and out of the family wage system, is gone, that now both parties have to work all the time and that it was sold to people as a as a means of empowerment, but what it actually did was to hide the fact that, like, pay went dramatically down through inflation. And if you look at the stats, there actually is a truth to that too, that, like, like, it is very convenient that pro entering the workforce feminism happens in a time period where you needed to incomes to support a family, and, and so lash does see all this, but he says the left doesn't. The left just turns these people into victims and makes them dependent, dependent on the state. And and I actually think lash would be somewhat Taking it back by by a Fisher's politics, because Fisher's politics is primarily a monetary politics is, you know? It's just fighting against austerity. Lash would also fight against austerity. He would think that was bad, but he would just see that the goal is not to make the working class people completely dependent on the state, it's also to just enable them to have fully functioning, self articulated lives where they don't need to turn the stuff like drugs and other things to numb it. So it's not just, you know, like, like, it's almost like for someone like lash, it's like and and even actually it's true for marks to believe it or not the state supposed to provide people with the means socially to have their own self instantiation, self independence and and any relationship to the state that does. That is about like ensuring that everyone has work, ensuring that everyone has equal pay, ensuring that power you know class dynamics don't emerge but that Beyond that, it's not the state supposed to provide everything for you. Like it's posted. It's posted the ideas it's supposed to enable you to be able to have a way to provide for yourself and and the state will help with the people who can't do that. Like marks does talk about that, not a lot, but it does come up but Can't work. But you know that's kind of their view by the time you get to someone like Fisher, it's just fighting against austerity. That's the only. And it makes sense if you think about the context of like 2007 to 2014.

Speaker 1: 1:00:41

There's a way when I read these things and I always ask myself this too like am I doing this myself?

Speaker 1: 1:00:50

Where you look at your current situation and you try to extrapolate from it and then you like aha, I've come up to a key and what you're doing as the key to the problem is actually just dealing with the immediate problem.

Speaker 1: 1:01:04

And you're like in the 1950s it was like monopoly capital, because the business cycle changed and Keynesianism happened, and yet people were like, oh, capitalism is over. You know like we're now in this new phase of monopoly capital. It means that there really isn't a difference between capitalism and socialism. We just need to change you how this is run and allocated, and then neoliberalism happens. It's like, oh, we're back to like laissez-faire capital, which, by the way, was never true under neoliberalism anyway, and this is the end. We're fighting this. And if we just defeat neoliberalism and even go back to fortism and I think there's a sense on which Fisher is like contextualizing everything and fighting the immediate battle Like his narrative about psychology is like psychology tells us this, but it's like that's what psychology was saying in 2014. In some quarters, there was other quarters that were saying different things, and otherwise people like David Smell would not exist, like you know.

Speaker 2: 1:02:10

So true, that's a great point.

Speaker 1: 1:02:13

You know. So it's just. It just seems like he's reacting to like I mean, it's interesting to me because when I was reading his piece I was put back in like oh yeah, psychology was really different. Like what people were saying about psychology was dramatically different just eight years ago.

Speaker 2: 1:02:34

That's quite right.

Speaker 1: 1:02:36

Like to think about like oh, cbt was everywhere and like we were still obsessed with drug therapies. And then I was like, oh yeah, but the replication crisis had just really started when Fisher wrote this piece, like I mean, I guess it like in the sciences it had started around 2012, but like it was just being understood in the public. You know what it kind of meant. I still don't think we understand what it all means. But, and so this idea of like both positive psychology and a lot of the drug therapies being unless firm scientific grounds and we thought, was just leaking out into the general public and it wasn't a massive change in social consciousness that brought that about. I was just studying how the replication crisis happened and it's kind of crazy. It actually started in parapsychology and people tightening up the rules for study in parapsychology and somebody started applying that to general psychological studies and realizing there was a huge problem.

Speaker 1: 1:03:45

But I don't think that gets you like I think a lot of people realize it doesn't really get you as far as you think it does because, like a lot of these therapeutic paradigms still seem to show efficacy yet none of us understand how they work, and even the people who do them, like maybe Kika do you agree with me?

Speaker 2: 1:04:06

about that.

Speaker 1: 1:04:07

Do you think about how therapy?

Speaker 2: 1:04:08

works. Yeah, no, no, no, totally I think. And, man, I know that in like a minute I have to hop off, but one of the I guess that there was kind of a big question. I wanted to ask you what you might say, maybe what Fisher might say. I don't know him well enough, but one of the things Smale gets into is, in order to really make some big changes around these forces that he thinks really shape our psychology, we have to have what he calls either an ethics or a morality that doesn't devolve into moralism, or I mean he's very critical of, like organized religion, which I am as well, and how that can just be something imposed on people. But what are some of your reflections? What might Fisher say to? In order to change some of these big forces, to alter the conditions, we have to have some type of ethics or morality that will push us in the right direction. Do you have any reflections on that?

Speaker 1: 1:05:11

I think for Fisher it was a politics of possibility and joy which I don't think he could ever actually fully inhabit himself. That's what his democracy and joy piece really, and that piece is also haunting. I'm gonna re-read it. It's an even later piece in this and like in light of like the political losses that happen a year later and then the collapse of court-marism in 2019, but Fisher's on death in 2017, it's like a kind of devastating piece. It's like, even though it doesn't read that way, when you read it, when you read it at the time, it seems helpful. When you read it now, it's like a gut punch.

Speaker 1: 1:05:51

My own response to that is a little. I think, marxism as a general rule and trying to conflate the normative and descriptive and Marxism does do this, it has and to avoid moralism, it actually ends up throwing morality out for the most part, there are people who try to correct it. I mean there's even Soviet thinkers who try to correct it, to talk about proletarian morality, proletarian virtue ethics, et cetera. I tend to think that we actually do need to go back to classical virtue orientations in a pluralistic sense. One of the things I like about virtue ethics is it admits that people can have legitimate, contradictory, like orientations and still be living in a moral framework. So like which virtues you're going to need for yourself? And we have to remember what virtues are. In classical thought, they're just strengths that you find models for and, yes, aristotle thought particular ones were valuable and different religions thought particular ones were valuable and they would. That's why, like holy and early philosophy as well as an early religion and, let's be honest, you really can't separate early philosophy and early religion.

Speaker 2: 1:07:18

No, you cannot.

Speaker 1: 1:07:21

But like there's a reason why saints had hagiographies, and like the stories of the philosophers, lives and like Jakarta tells in Buddhism and all that are super important, it is because it's supposed to give you models of how to actually apply a praxis from your theory and live it out. The Marxist problem is Marx has a particular goal. Marx has a particular goal which is kind of a, you know, revolutionary change of society and that requires a bunch of orientations. But he doesn't really tell you any, like Marx himself, doesn't give you any guidance on how you should live building that and what kind of person you need to be to build that. And so I do think that's been a failure of the left in general to have this ethic. One thing I think that, because of that lack, what a lot of people put in its place is often a very conservative psychological framework that I kind of think why does this? You know, for example, even though I agree with his thing about like collective responsibility and personal responsibility aren't really that separate, like if you actually-.

Speaker 2: 1:08:41

Yeah, that's a good point.

Speaker 1: 1:08:42

Yeah, if you actually believe that, like you are a part of a social totality and you have, like class obligations and familiar obligations, et cetera, and you really follow that through, then it's also really important to like, think that, like I have positive roles that I have to play and they don't need be repressive, they don't need to be authoritarian, they don't need to be. You know, like I always find a lot of these debates on sexuality not just on, like you know, queerness, but also on, like, polyamory versus monogamy I'm just like none of that is actually super important, but like how you express this, yes, is limited by your society in a lot of ways, how you're gonna immediately understand that this tied in the social reproduction and reproduction of family, of human life, but so you can't ignore it. But it's also like there's a billion ways you could probably organize it and leave a perfectly fruitful, non-harmful life, and so trying to impose one model on that is usually a disaster, and so that in that sense, I'm still I'm like a pluralist. You know, there's a bunch of ways you could be a moral person, yes, but you need to commit to like how do you treat people, how do you navigate gender relations.

Speaker 1: 1:10:13

How do you like one of the things that I've always been confused about for lack of a better term, I didn't hear it in thought. It's not, you know, like racial and gender oppressions aren't real, they absolutely are, and it's not that they can be reduced even to just a class antagonism expressed another way. I don't think that's true, Right, but I do think like that a lot of times. There's a confusion, almost deliberately, in people like Abraham X Kendi, of what a social responsibility is and what a personal responsibility is and like, and basically some of you know in my mind, some of them have a shitty personal response and actually end up performing their social role somewhat well, and vice versa. Someone could be very good on interpersonal relations and so absolutely perpetuate, you know, social harms and racism, sexism, et cetera, and I don't see the point in like flattening those things out.

Speaker 1: 1:11:33

I know that someone like Kendi's argument is that they're all racism basically, and it's confusing to have these different categories. But my response is like but how they operate and what you can do about them is very different. So to bring it back to your question about how we should, the ethics we should incorporate here is like we should incorporate, like you should try to be as best as you can, a power egalitarian in your personal relationships and you should try to model positive traits, and that includes self-care I often talk about. Like this idea that self-care is somehow taking a break from personal responsibility doesn't make any sense to me because it is a personal responsibility. Like you know, you have to be like you're saying, to do your job, just like you have to cultivate your intelligence to have principles.

Speaker 1: 1:12:31

Like. You have to listen to people and incorporate what they say, to build solidarity. These all require actions that require you to change. You cannot just passively be a victim. You can't just passively be a victim of capitalism, even if you are Like it's not like, because I think this is another people to understand you. You love capitalism. You love capitalism and you know all once a long procedure to you just have to be yourself.

Speaker 2: 1:13:00

So putting yourself in such a position and being yourself is another way to make up when you have an idea. You don't want to ask me. Nature that's happening to you all is probably becoming different, and so you have such an a dynasty experience that brings you talk a lot about yourself.

Speaker 1: 1:13:21

Yeah, it's almost. It's almost a classical, absurdist position where you acknowledge yes, I live in this dude, totally, I'm glad you're bringing up the absurdism.

Speaker 2: 1:13:29

Yeah, I resonate with that.

Speaker 1: 1:13:31

Yeah, I live in this society where my individuality is totally constrained and determined and I acknowledge that and I'm aware of that and I don't take full responsibility For everything that's ever happened to me by someone else or by society, but I do take full responsibility for my cultivation of what what that has meant and you know, and that's if anything. I'm not saying fish, I'm not saying that. I know that Fisher would disagree with this. I mean, I've spoken a lot from what I've read and and like private debates I had with him, but I Don't think he says that explicitly anywhere. Maybe he does, maybe there's a piece. You know, somebody will find a piece where he doesn't, we can talk about it one day, but but I haven't read it and so or I don't remember reading it and that's. I think that's what's missing from this conception and that may be in smell, but smell doesn't like from what? From what you're got, what you're saying. Smell doesn't entirely give you a way to like.

Speaker 2: 1:14:36

I Would actually do it. No, he doesn't and no, and I mean there's, there's hints of it, but this is a cynical reading of smell. I don't think it's in there very clearly, because I think it would actually work against his Overall position, which he's trying to convince his readers of. I think if you, if you, if you, if you nuance it the way you just did, so powerfully and beautifully, I think you'd be like Where's this guy's punch? What, what, what makes him distinctive? Because he's definitely emphasizing one side over the other.

Speaker 2: 1:15:08

I Mean I leave his, I leave his books, feeling like I should be a victim, and I don't like that.

Speaker 1: 1:15:17

Yeah, and that doesn't. What's interesting is that, from what I've read of him, that doesn't seem to be his ultimate goal either, been yet that does feel like what it actually ends up. Yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:15:25

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:15:29

Because you know, yeah, that's, that's a. This is a great place to end it, but that that's my. My call to people is like a reject Victimology even if you are victimized, it's not gonna help you to just embrace that.

Speaker 2: 1:15:46

No, no, and maybe we need more people. You know I'm in a place of tremendous privilege on a lot of different fronts, I think it. I'm the first to say I want to be able to not deny others experience and and you know shit on them, for you know calling themselves victims, because I think they are. But at the same time and maybe this is how I approach therapy I want to create spaces where we're acknowledging that and then encouraging them to, yeah, work within that framework, to not, almost, like, give into the victimization to the point where they destroy themselves, as you've been talking about.

Speaker 1: 1:16:30

Yeah, I Think that's a great thought to end on, and thank you so much, kk for having time and for the invitation.

Speaker 2: 1:16:38

I really appreciate it.

Speaker 1: 1:16:40

Yeah, this is one of these weird times where I actually talk more than the interviewee, but I guess it's going on both our channel. So for KK's audience you can pretend he interviewed me. For my audience you could just like barn, shut the fuck up All right. All right, and on that note,