smile, it's time for optimism

Is the condition of the intellectual always to be cynical? Or, to put it another way, can an intellectual ever be, as it were, happy? I begin by seeing off all the usual complaints from students and some colleagues – 'why can't you just enjoy life?', they ask, 'why does everything have to be so black?', 'why can't you just listen to music without all this thinking, all this questioning?'. Well, if you don't know the answer to that, then I don't want to talk to you – go away and stop wasting my time. Or perhaps a better response might be to say – look, your happiness, such as it is, is not all of you. There is something in you that is unhappy, something restless, something that reaches beyond this small and grey present and seeks out a better place, another place, a happiness that might better encompass who it is you are and who it is you might become. This restlessness, call it unhappiness, can be both devastating and productive. It all depends on your mental state, on the resources you have to hand and you ideological investment in your happiness or unhappiness.

So, if you want to know how we continue to live with the demand we make of ourselves, if you want to know how to survive the ego-crunching self-loathing that comes from being a critically-minded academic, then I'm with you. I promise no answers, but just a kind of sharing of some of my thoughts on the impossibility of a happiness that captures all, but also a rumination on what it might mean to be both happy and critical, optimistic and sharp-edged, hopeful and productively cynical.

In a sense, to be happy is not to be whole. Or, to put it the way I prefer to put it – happiness is, in and of itself, a non-all. To be fully content, is to be absent, free from all desire, to be empty, to be dead. Happiness, then, operates as a kind of ideal field which can never fully colonise the symbolic order. We are, and always will be, in some sense unhappy, since happiness comes at the end, when all is done an we have finished.

How then, is it possible to live the burden of this unhappiness which threatens, contrary to happiness, to embrace everything and tun the world into a place we cannot bear? Its is here that the distinction between reality and the Real, key terms that most theory bloggers will know back-to-front, between that which cannot be taken up by, made sense of o encapsulated by/in/of the symbolic order and hat minimum of symbolisation that make he Real bearable. In other words, the  place at which the line between happiness and unhappiness is drawn comes into focus where we start to try to distinguish between the bearable and unbearable, between what we can make sense of and what we need to leave unuttered, unassimilated as in some sense without sense.

Yesterday and today have been good days.  I Cite and many other are wisely optimistic, wisely hopeful that this, at last, might bring the change we have all desired for so long. And the anxiety of daring to hope too much that these two days will make a difference is part of the problematic I want to sketch out here – to put it as simply as I can, the need for the performative in rhetoric is clear, and public statements about the nature of hope, of optimism must always remain true to a certain concept that lies at the heart of rhetoric (making sure the personality that has been put in place before that moment of rhetorical activity is also held in place, not undone by it): rhetoric, as Laclau reminds us, is always about displacing a literal term for a figural one:

Cicero, reflecting on the origin of rhetorical devices, imagined a primitive stage of society in which there were more things to be named ha the words available in language, so that it was necessary to use words in more than one sense, deviating hem from their literal, primordial meaning. For him, of course, this shortage of words represented a purely empirical lack. Let us imagine, however, that this lack is not empirical, hat it is linked to a constitutive blockage in language which requires naming something which is essentially unnamable as a condition of language functioning.

In this sense, whenever we declare our happiness or our unhappiness, we engage a rhetorical movement hat requires a certain displacement of the original moment to the extent that it disappears, or to put it more radically, perhaps, that moment is constituted as a constant deferral of the originary, its continual effacement, its eternal recasting as non-literal, forever figurative. Happiness, or our declaration of it through hope, optimism, and other markers of it, always fall under the sway of the impossibility of that not-all. To 'be' happy is thus to be something other than alive. A state of being undead, ghostly, blissed-out on closures.

So, is happiness a state of absolute closure where the drives, the needs, the wants are all answered and the place where we once named ourselves and understood our being as somehow constituted which has slipped away back into he fullness of the Real.

Happy, me? Not likely.... Optimistic? Sort of . Now if only we could do something about country music...

Comments

[pinocchio]

Now, as much as you know I agree with you on the country music issue, is there not something else to be said about it here? Like, the abjection you feel in its presence (and I mean you, not 'one', and of course I)... the coded misery and nostalgia of it all... perhaps, for as long as we have to deal with country music we cannot experience that closure; perhaps that is the difference between people who like it and people who don't - that those of us who are sensible are optimistically seeking that closure, and that the rest of them are living permanently without it. Just a thought.

[ian]

a few years ago i might have agreed with this essay. i certainly feel that i can see where you are coming from.

but basically, in my own reality, happiness is an emotional state which has as strong a coloring of real reality as do anger or discomfort, and is as "obvious", much as a human being can usually tell if they are angry or hungry or whatever without involving any thought process or language or those words themselves whatsoever. it cannot simply be equated with a lack, or with death. to do so is merely a rhetorical tactic. nice try though :)

i can say this only having experienced happiness to a significant degree at this point, however. and if that experience could have existed without years of suffering, i doubt. so id say thats the potential pay-off for the suckiness of being smart and aware in this world, if you are lucky and smart enough you can manipulate the world itself so that your own situation is tailored to your desires. getting a lot of money is one way to do this but far from necessary, if your bliss takes you away from high income banking career...

[blahfeme]

Ian. thanks for this. I can see you happy - good for you. My point was not to denegrate happiness as such, but to ty to contextualise our happiness-fixated culture and to understand the terms on which we valorise, use and abuse the notion of happiness. My problem with your response in particular is that it seeks to place happoiness in some kind of naturalised place beyond rhetoric, beyond culture. It ismprecisiely this kind of thing my essay wa s trying to displodge. Cheers for you comments