[This response was given at Goldsmiths on Oct 1st. I've revised it a little bit, and the stuff on Firestone is part of a bigger project, so I kind of skewed it to fit (or not fit, really) the theme of the day. I started by saying that I didn't really understand dysphoria, as I'm just not wired that way, I suppose. I understand drive and anger and boredom, but I don't understand withdrawal or self-isolation. I like Dominic's book a lot, though, and the discussions in there of nature (of natural resources running out, of nature seeming to turn against us) were the bits I felt most affinity with. It should be noted, as it wasn't really enough on the day, that Cold World is extremely good on two things that most people (including those of us who gave responses don't know enough about, namely poetry and Christianity). Alex Williams' response is here; Nick Srnicek's is here. It would be good to see the others online at some point. Ads Without Products has a critique of the idea of 'militant dysphoria' here.]



In Cold World, Dominic states that ‘we will call this frozen constellation the “cold world”: the world voided of both human warmth and metaphysical comfort.’ He talks too, of the ‘unlife’ world in which the resources of nature are exhausted or extinct. It is this dysphoric relation to nature that I want to talk about, and outline a militant response to in the shape of Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex from 1970. But it is important to discern exactly what kind of nature we mean. Perhaps the most obvious thinker to have truly explored the depths of the surging, pulsing horror of the natural world was Schopenhauer. I quote from vol. 2 of The World as Will and Representation:

Yunghalm relates that he saw in Java a plain far as the eye could reach entirely covered with skeletons, and took it for a battlefield; they were, however, merely the skeletons of large turtles, five feet long and three feet broad, and the same height, which come this way out of the sea in order to lay their eggs, and are then attacked by wild dogs (Canis rutilans), who with their united strength lay them on their backs, strip off their lower armour, that is, the small shell of the stomach, and so devour them alive. But often then a tiger pounces upon the dogs. Now all this misery repeats itself thousands and thousands of times, year out, year in. For this, then, these turtles are born. For whose guilt must they suffer this torment ? Wherefore the whole scene of horror? To this the only answer is : it is thus that the will to live objectifies itself.



Our contemporary Schopenhauer is Werner Herzog. Here he is talking about making Fitzcarraldo:

Of course we are challenging nature itself, and it hits back, it just hits back, that’s all. And that’s what’s grandiose about it and we have to accept that it’s much stronger than we are. Kinski always says it’s full of erotic elements. I don’t see it so much as erotic, I see it more full of obscenity … And nature here is vile and base. I wouldn’t see anything erotical here. I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away. Of course there is a lot of misery, but it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don’t think they sing, they just screech in pain …. Taking a close look at what’s around us, there is some sort of a harmony. There is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder …. There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no real harmony as we have conceived it. (see this post on Conjunctural a while back, with useful comments from Ben)



A dysphoric relation to nature may see itself fascinated and reflected in a world of killing and eating but our age is characterised by a dyphoric relation to forms of nature in general much closer to home: human nature, particularly bodily nature. Think of eating disorders, self-harm, particularly prevalent in young women, where any concern for health gets subsumed into a desire for thinness, beauty or desirability. In this sense, then, there exists a common, generalised form of dysphoria in the west, a turning away from 'health', either mental or physical, towards a lessening (if not a worsening) of the world, to exist in a smaller way, to take up less space. To be dysphoric in the shape of body dysmorphia is, particularly though certainly not only for women, to be on board with the idea that our inner nature is to be punished. Just to give you a strange example of these priorities, yesterday I was walking past a pharmacy and saw a sign advertising a cervical cancer vaccine for £379 and beneath it, Botox for just £50: the vaccine that one might hope would be distributed for free by the state is more than seven times more expensive than having a barely-legal poison injected into your face.

In Lars van Trier's recent Antichrist, (in which the line ‘nature is Satan’s church’ appears), He (played by Willem Dafoe) and She (played by Charlotte Gainsbourg) discuss the different meanings of the word 'nature'. Stating that nature is all that which lies outside, He asks her about the nature ‘within’ ‘oh, that kind of nature’ She says. It is to ‘that’ kind of nature that I want to turn briefly, particularly with regard to sexual difference, as it is here, in the work of Shulamith Firestone in particular, that a ‘militancy’ in Dominic’s sense perhaps emerges in her dysphoric response to female embodiment. Out of the anger of an unhappy relationship to one's body comes a form of politics that seeks to transform the entirety of social relations in a way even more radical than that of Marx and Engels.



Firestone seeks to combine a reading of Freud with a radical critique of the nuclear family in terms of the possibilities presented by reproductive and other technology. Among Firestone’s ultimate demands are the freeing of women from the ‘tyranny’ of reproduction and the equal and collective sharing of child-rearing. Coupled with her other major demand, ‘the political autonomy, based on economic independence, of both women and children, this combination of economic, political and biological freedom as a whole Firestone calls ‘cybernetic communism’. The complete ‘integration’ and ‘sexual freedom’ of all women and children would accompany and follow from the political freedom granted by the reorganisation of the family structure in the wake of technological emancipation from childbirth.

Firestone’s approach to the question of sex is refreshingly blunt. Sex difference is real. Men and women exist, and possess asymmetrical physical capacities which have historically made existence for women extremely difficult and frequently unpleasant or even lethal. Her particular strand of materialism is therefore not only historical but also profoundly biological, thus material in an older, more classically philosophical sense. We can compare Firestone’s materialism to the explicitly ‘vulgar’ materialism of La Mettrie for whom ‘[t]he human body is a machine which winds its own springs. It is the living image of perpetual movement.’ Firestone accepts that culture and history have played important roles in shaping the way we conceive of men, women (and children) but that underlying all these interpretations are some basic anatomical continuities – unchangeable until now. It is not therefore economic class that underlies oppression but biological and physical characteristics. As she puts it: ‘Nature produced the fundamental inequality’. This claim about the reality of sex difference and its natural consequences – there are women and there are men and women suffer precisely because of their womanness – puts her at odds with the majority of feminism, past and present. She is interested neither in more subtle analyses of the cultural meaning of sex and gender, nor in reclaiming a positive essence of female physicality (celebrating birth, for example, or the specificities of female sexual experience).



Firestone is unusual in taking the premise so often used by conservative thinkers of one stripe or another – that women and men are recognisably and naturally different both biologically and culturally – but uses this as the background for her projected revolution, by accepting that thus far history has not yet managed to discover a way out of this predicament. For Firestone, it is not the case that anatomy is destiny, but rather that it has been, in fact that for the whole of human history this has been true, but need not be any longer. As Dominic says of the militant: ‘She is someone who has decisively rejected every source of consolation: every hope that tomorrow will of its own accord come bearing some respite, some unanticipated good news.’



In this way, Firestone’s starting point seems to me to be a dysphoric one – a kind of body dysmorphia in which the human female body is simply, profoundly wrongly built and painfully arranged (as evidenced by her claim that: ‘childbirth is barbaric’). Her response to this is a militant one: the final section of The Dialectic of Sex is entitled, ‘The Ultimate Revolution’. Firestone envisions that technology will get rid of nature as we have historically understood it. Can we see Firestone as a militantly dysphoric figure in the way Dominic understands it? What does the relative failure, despite the advances in technology, of her project - the radical transformation of society, family and sex - mean? How can we understand the three kinds of nature at stake here - the 'out there' nature, 'inner' nature and 'natural' sexual difference in a dysphoric way? What if understanding of these things is already dysphoric: how can we capture the misery and anger that comes from this?