1Niceism-Imperium.docVIP

Психология масс и страдание - The Mass Psychology of Misery Quite a while ago, just before the upheavals of the 60s-shifts that have not ceased, but have been forced in less direct, less public directions - Marcuse in his One-Dimensional Man, described a populace characterized by flattened personality, satisfied and content. With the pervasive anguish of today, who could be so described? Therein lies a deep, if inchoate critique. Much theorizing has announced the erosion of individualitys last remnants; but if this were so, if society now consists of the thoroughly homogenized and domesticated, how can there remain the enduring tension which must account for such levels of pain and loss? More and more people I have known have cracked up. Its going on to a staggering degree, in a context of generalized, severe emotional dis-ease. Marx predicted, erroneously, that a deepening material immiseration would lead to revolt and to capitals downfall. Might it not be that an increasing psychic suffering is itself leading to the reopening of revolt – indeed, that this may even be the last hope of resistance? And yet it is obvious that mere suffering is no guarantee of anything. Desire does not want revolution, it is revolutionary in its own right, as Deleuze and Guattari pointed out, while further on in Anti-Oedipus, remembering fascism, noting that people have desired against their own interests, and that tolerance of humiliation and enslavement remains widespread. We know that behind psychic repression and avoidance stands social repression, even as massive denial shows at least some signs of giving way to a necessary confrontation with reality in all of its dimensions. Awareness of the social must not mean ignoring the personal, for that would only repeat, in its own terms, the main error of psychology. If in the nightmare of today each of us has his or her fears and limitations, there is no liberating route that forgets the primacy of the whole, including how that whole ex