Critical Hedonism(s) is an approach to exploring and engaging in the politics of pleasure. It names and codifies something that many people are already feeling and exploring in their work, politics and lives. The starting point of Critical Hedonism(s) is the realization that an essential part of changing the world is changing what we want, aspire for, and take pleasure in. The purpose of Critical Hedonism(s) is to help people find ways of collectively transforming their desires in ways that make the world more kind, bountiful, sustainable, and just. The end goal of Critical Hedonism(s) is to transform how society distributes pleasure and care by remaking the institutions that shape desires and aspirations so that people pursue good lives and pleasures in ways that are less anti-social, competitive and zero sum, and more prosocial, collaborative and mutually-beneficial.
A Critical Hedonist Manifesto
What the 21st century needs is a probing and effective politics of pleasure.
The things we want are often bad. In our society, we are manipulated, controlled and exploited through our desires. Marketing, social media, propaganda, and dysfunctional cultures instill in us pleasures that are often burdensome, anti-social, destructive, unsustainable and exclusionary. As a result, many of the things we want are bad for ourselves and bad for the world. There’s an agony to living in this world, with these desires. In “developed” countries, most of us exist in a perpetual state of simultaneous overindulgence and scarcity—overwhelmed by a rush of desires and little coping pleasures, yet constantly striving for more and always lacking the things that really matter. On the whole, our diets are harmful, our consumption habits are harmful, our relationship models are harmful, our housing typologies are harmful, our methods of transportation are harmful, our sexual desirability standards are harmful, our careers are harmful, our uses of digital platforms are harmful, and our ways of relating to society are harmful. Typically, we pursue these things because they’re part of a larger aspirational vision of the good life. But the brutal logic of the good lives we are encouraged to pursue is that they cost a lot—they require a lot of work to afford, resources, energy and labor to produce and maintain, and effort to keep up. Moreover, these visions of the good life do not make sense in the 21st century. The tides of economic history are turning, and the contradictions of our economy are accumulating and making it harder to attain the lives that most of us still aspire for. Meanwhile, the conditions in our environment are deteriorating, and political and cultural consensus are increasingly dissolving. Yet, in spite of these changes, many of us continue to desire deleterious and obsolete things. And the more we chase these desires (not that alternatives are particularly abundant or clear), the more we are consigned to working, striving, exploiting and being exploited.
We need to start wanting better things. This poses a problem for our politics. Democratic and/or emancipatory politics that simply seek to deliver to us what we want are liable to be corrupted by the deleterious nature of the things we want. (1) If our emancipation is going to mean anything, we are going to have to start wanting better things. We particularly need new visions of the good life that are less wasteful, anti-social, competitive and zero sum, and more prosocial, collaborative and mutually-beneficial. (2) The end result should be a society that is more caring, just, sustainable, interesting, and pleasurable. (3)
Changing our desires requires a framework. Critical Hedonism(s) offers a praxis for getting us there. Critical Hedonism(s) is an approach to exploring and engaging in the politics of pleasure. The starting point of Critical Hedonism(s) is the realization that an essential part of changing the world is changing what we want, aspire for, and take pleasure in. The purpose of Critical Hedonism(s) is to help people find ways of collectively transforming their desires in ways that make the world more kind, bountiful, sustainable, and just. The end goal of Critical Hedonism(s) is to transform how society distributes pleasure and care by remaking the institutions that shape desires and aspirations.
Our thinking improves our actions, and our actions improve our thinking. Critical Hedonism(s) is a praxis. This means that those who engage in it are thinking and doing at the same time: simultaneously exploring, analyzing, and adapting their practices. Critical hedonists analyze and explore in order to inform their actions, and use the new experiences they gain to think further and deeper. Thinking further and deeper allows them to be even more experimental in their doing, which in turn informs still further thinking, etc., etc.
We cannot change our desires alone. Critical Hedonism(s) approaches the transformation of desire as a trans-personal project. (4) Rather than approaching the transformation of desire as a merely individualistic, ethical endeavor, or a completely collective, structural struggle, it considers how the personal and the collective interact and intersect to shape subjective tastes, preferences, and aspirations. The reason for this is that desires are social. They emerge and exist within social, emotional, and sexual ecologies. (5) People mostly desire what their social, cultural, and spatial environments encourage them to desire, and this environmental/ecological dimension makes individualized, personal transformation extremely difficult and costly. At the same time, it can be exceedingly difficult to transform structures in society if individuals cannot see the benefits of doing so. A realistic approach to societal transformation recognizes that shifts in culture and society take place at the communal level, and it is only within communities that shifts in desire and social possibility become realized.
We need to build communities that remap their desires together. For those who want to change how pleasure and care work in their lives, our suggestion is to find and/or build a tribe to think, feel, and transform with, in the spirit of the countercultural consciousness-raising group. (6) But this raises the question: what should these groups do?
We need to go beyond rebellion. Rebellion is not a good enough goal. Many of us have found ways to subvert and reject the norms of our broken society—to critique, reject and resist normativity. This is a fine start, but it is insufficient. We need to build better structures and new ways to organize desire and pleasure. Better norms, not no norms. We cannot just opt out of society; we need to change it. (7)
Some solutions are better than others. If the goal was merely rebellion, then Critical Hedonism(s) would simply seek to aide people in becoming alternative and unique. But the purpose of critical hedonist praxis is not necessarily to become infinitely unique or unrelatable, but to become increasingly kind, sustainable and just. (8) To coordinate our desires so that winning doesn’t depend on losing. The goal is to generate a new social economy of desiring and aspiring, where the things yearned for are not destructive or deleterious—for us, for others, or for our environment. We aim to develop the tools to evaluate these consequences, and to build institutions that bolster and enable better objects of desire and denigrate and disempower worse ones. (9)
Purity and artificial scarcity are bad. Our world is full of constraints on our pleasure, and many of these (though by no means all of them) are unjustifiable. Many different sects of puritans, anxious about moral decay and possessing the belief that the pursuit of pleasure is inherently destructive and anti-social, have sought to thwart or subdue the pursuit of pleasure. In their effort to mitigate the real risks inherent in pursuing pleasure, the puritan creates a reality that is dull, unnecessarily frigid, and exploitative. This repression bolsters power, facilitates exploitation and reinforces hierarchies by perpetuating domination and control. Critical Hedonism(s), informed by the historical uses and abuses of pleasure and its regulation, rejects “surplus repression” (that is: the repression that is in excess of what is required to improve societal wellbeing), maintains a cautious commitment to hedonism, and seeks to remake desires in ways that are pro-social and beneficial to others. (10)
Uncritical hedonism is also bad. Uncritical hedonism is not an acceptable solution to purity and scarcity. (11) There are many valid reasons to constrain one’s pleasure. Addiction, chronic desensitization, the destruction of the environment and the exploitation of others are all clear examples of the ways that the pursuit of pleasure can be deleterious. Personal pleasure cannot be the only thing that matters, and, paradoxically, the unconstrained pursuit of pleasure can often turn into an enslaving, painful spiral—for ourselves and for others.
We must moderate our pleasure without being conservative. It is necessary to moderate our relationship with pleasure. But we don’t think it is a good idea to leave moderation to conservatives. The critical hedonist believes in moderation, but a better form of moderation that is less susceptible to exploitation, and more aware of dynamic shifts in context that allow for more or less laxity in the pleasures. We need a flexible, updatable framework for cultivating better pleasures and for altering worse ones.
Critical thought must guide our hedonism. Alongside fossil fuels and labor power, the pursuit of pleasure churns the industrial machinery of our society. Especially since the early twentieth century, consumerist cultures have shaped and organized desires in order to make people buy more and work harder. All kinds of strategies of “canalization” have sought ways of simultaneously stimulating desire, while keeping the pursuit of that desire productive and profitable, relying on hierarchies, stigma, “good taste” regimes, circumscribed desirability criteria, and norms to control and capture the motivational thrust coming from the pursuit of pleasure. In order for this to work, social goods like sex and care have been made artificially scarce—through laws, ordinances, morals, stigma and taste-making. Much of what we desire is shaped and even produced within this “social factory.” To counteract the manipulation of the prevailing institutions, we must be critical and analytical about the things we want. The form of moderation that we propose is critical self- and social-awareness, informed by scientific and analytical thought. We need to carefully explore and unpack how our desires are implicated in the maintenance of unjust power structures, unsustainable environmental practices, exploitative and extractive social relations, and unkind cultural practices. Then, from there, we can begin to redesign and remap our aspirations and pleasures.
We insist that desire is political. Following a number of recent arguments by political theorists, we insist that desire is political. (11) The things we want are not just a matter of personal preference—they literally shape the world. In the first place, desires tend to manifest in material ways. People’s food preferences and housing preferences shape entire industrial ecologies and land use patterns. But our desires also shape social, cultural and political possibilities. People’s sexual desires, for example, can shape and condition other people’s behavior by creating rewards and sanctions for that behavior. (13) Our desires shape what politicians and companies can say and do. We think that this can and should be deliberately leveraged as part of a transformational politics. (14)
We insist that we can and should alter our desires. Critical hedonists know that desires—like other emotions and feelings—can be altered. (15) There has been a long-running campaign to “educate the senses”—that is, to condition and “refine” what people want. This, fundamentally, is what writers, thinkers, reformers and politicians in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries meant by “civilization.” It was society’s job, in their view, to “civilize” the desires of human beings. In recent decades, most forward-thinking people have rightly criticized the historical project of civilization as being based upon racist, sexist and colonial frameworks and assumptions. In addition to this, most progressive thinkers rejected the overall modernist project of attempting to coordinate and harmonize human behavior. Against these postmodern sensibilities, Critical Hedonism(s) takes up the metamodernist call to find ways to coordinate human culture without overprescribing aesthetic or cultural expression. (16) It seeks to find ways to educate or “civilize” desires without exploiting, extracting, or dominating people; without creating racial taxonomies and producing and maintaining gender roles and stereotypes. (17)
Desires must be configured into superior, coherent aspirational visions of the good life. Our desires rarely stand on their own, but belong to bigger aspirational ecosystems that are conditioned primarily by media and our cultural upbringing. In other words, we tend to desire things that fit into a broader vision of the good life. These visions lend coherence and legibility to our very identities—it is difficult to speak of who we are without describing the kinds of lives we aspire to live. (18) In order to be viable, these visions must combine narratives about historical trends, relationships to economic paradigms, cultural sensibilities, regimes of labor and care and intimacy and principles for personal fulfillment. They offer a holistic roadmap for living a life, including prescriptions about childhood, work, sexuality, kinship, responsibility, the division and occupation of time and space, etc. The overall result is an entire lifestyle that can be sought after and pursued. Corporations and governments take advantage of this by appealing, for example, to suburban lifestyles and “family values,” and advertisers sell products by situating them within “social tableaux”—scenes of social and cultural belonging and success. Critical Hedonism(s), if it is to be successful in shaping desires, must design and put forward new, superior visions of the good life that these desires slot into. There should be multiple (perhaps many) visions, but they must all be oriented toward the fundamental project of creating prosocial, collaborative and mutually-beneficial pleasures. There can no longer be cultures, classes or societies that extract from, exploit, oppress or predate upon other cultures, classes or societies in order to achieve their version of the good life. What we need now is a dense tapestry of cultures that contribute to each other and build off of each other; who value things that are abundant and non-rivalrous; who use creative and sustainable means to cultivate pleasures that do not come at anyone else’s expense.
These visions of the good life must be predicated on a series of principles and strategies. While these strategies and principles are likely to change over time, the following currently make sense:
We should reject artificial scarcity. There are many things and experiences in our society that are kept scarce in order to increase their value or to use them as a motivating prize. (19) Often, these things are placed—symbolically and aspirationally—at the top of a desirability hierarchy. Examples: the supply of diamonds is deliberately limited in order to keep their monetary value high. Similar (though less concentrated) factors constrain the supply of housing in our society. Many people aspire—as the pinnacle of their life’s achievements—for a marriage consummated with a diamond ring and homeownership. The critical hedonist should reject and overturn these kinds of scarcity-producing logics and seek to create abundance wherever it is wise and possible to do so.
We should reject status consumption. Many goods and experiences are primarily desirable because they signal status. Examples: luxury goods and trophy partners. These things are meant to stir envy and admiration in others—to elevate the status of the person possessing them. There is often no inherent pleasure to be had in the thing itself—or if there is, this tends to be eclipsed by the quest for status.
We should reject exploitation. There are many pleasures that come at someone else’s expense, in the form of labor, resource extraction, violence, and/or theft. To the extent that a pleasure requires someone else’s toil, that thing should be devalued and/or replaced. This applies to social relationships too. How often do we see people explliting their gender as an “accumulation strategy,” as Kay Gabriel brilliantly put it? (20) How often do we see people exploiting their positions within class or race hierarchies to get love or sex or work or social status? How often do we see relationships held together by economic necessity, fear, insecurity, and/or implicit threats? These are all forms of exploitation that the critical hedonist should reject. We should refuse to be exploited and refuse to exploit.
We should reject wastefulness. There are many pleasures that use more energy, time and/or resources than they ought to. While there are often tradeoffs between these three axes of efficiency, the critical hedonist should nevertheless seek pleasures that create less waste.
We should reject excess. There is a meaningful distinction to be made between excess and abundance. (21) Abundance is about having what you need and want; excess is about compensating for a sense of scarcity in one area by hoarding in another. In our “accelerating social system of organized loneliness” (as the authors of the Care Manifesto put it), most people seek to compensate for social scarcity with material abundance. (22) Lonely people compulsively shop and buy mansions and sports cars. The critical hedonist seeks abundance—particularly in their relationships and aesthetic experiences—and rejects the excesses of hoarding and unwarranted accumulation.
We should reject luxury. Luxury is a genre that tends to combine artificial scarcity, status consumption, exploitation, wastefulness and excess. Its purpose is to skew value and to keep people dissatisfied. Luxury is a trap; it’s anti-social, and it’s zero-sum. It is also predicated on the idea that pleasure should be rare and costly. The critical hedonist should reject this entirely.
We should embrace decadence. Instead of luxury, the critical hedonist should embrace decadence. Decadence is about aesthetic diversity and contrast. It combats desensitization not with deprivation, but with novelty. When done well, decadence finds opportunities for bringing the delightful and unexpected into the everyday. This kind of “neodecadence” rejects the grandiosity and scale of luxury in favor of complexity, density and diversity. Rather than making a singular grand gesture, it weaves a labyrinthine series of vignettes that achieve intensity and variation. When one pleasure begins to wear off, the “neodecadent” critical hedonist shifts to another. This ambulatory approach to pleasure keeps life fresh and exciting without necessarily increasing the material or economic footprint of the experience.
We should take pleasure in abundant things. In order to sell luxury goods and to create artificial scarcity as a means of motivating labor, a lot of effort has gone into convincing people that rare things are better than abundant things. But there are many pleasures that are common and abundant: sunbathing, simple baked goods, sex, social experiences, listening to music, digital adventures, getting warm when you are cold, drinking cold water when you are warm, napping, being kind or helpful to a friend or partner or family member or child, petting an animal, enjoying a tea, getting cozy, doing exercise, potatoes in all forms, soup, etc. These wonderful things (and other abundant pleasures) should be the things that we derive joy from in our lives; not rare, difficult-to-procure luxury goods and experiences. (23)
We should coordinate pleasures. We should strive to make pleasure work in an ecosystemic (rather than linear or hierarchical) way. Rather than everyone competing for the same thing at the same time, we should distribute desirability in many directions at once, and coordinate how to make one pursuit of pleasure support and enhance another. Example: rather than cultivating a universal desire for getting massages, we might cultivate a culture where giving and receiving massages is desirable. We might create cultures where the output of one pursuit of pleasure is the input for another—where many of our pleasures are non-rivalrous and we take joy in each other’s joy.
We should cultivate tastes for things that make sense within our contexts. The world is big and not all places or social contexts are the same. If we find ourselves in particular circumstances, we should cultivate pleasures that make sense for that place. If you live in Dubai, you probably shouldn’t get into alpine hiking or skiing. On the other hand, there might be strategic pleasure practices that could make things better in your particular context. If you live in North America, it might make political sense to agitate for public transportation or to find ways of enjoying non-consumptive activities, for example.
We should remake our sexual economies. A lot of pain, harm and dissatisfaction emanates from the way that our culture practices sexual and amorous relationships, and these practices are oppressive and abusive in their own right. What’s more, they certainly don’t need to be! We need to address, head-on, the problems of sexual scarcity and sexual hierarchy that are so pervasive in our society. As Amia Srinivasan has argued in her writing on incels and the politics of sexual desire, we need to look beyond the consent framework “as the sole constraint on OK sex,” and politicize the very ways in which our sexual desires are both shaped by, and, in turn, shape, the world. We need to acknowledge and rectify, for example, the pervasiveness of sexual racism—the ways that sexual desire often fetishizes certain racialized expressions of gender and stigmatizes others. And we need to take seriously the underlying problems within our sexual economy that lead to loneliness and neglect on a mass scale. The solution is not to call individuals out for being racist or classist in their desires, but to analyze how institutions produced these collectively-held views, and to try to produce new cultural and social institutions that generate a better sexual economy overall.
We should be creative in our exploration of pleasure. One of the main limitations on our pleasure is lack of imagination. We need an efflorescence of exploration and creativity that seeks to create new genres of pleasure. Critical hedonists should lead this charge by getting together and creating novel, interesting, and responsible modes of enjoyment, and doing the nuanced, complicated work of assembling these into larger aspirational models of the good life.
We urge people who want to improve the world to find others and use critical thought and practice to transform their desires together. We urge people who are alienated, worried, burnt out, bored, disenchanted, and/or disappointed with this world to find each other and get together to recognize damaging desires and to cultivate better ones together. We urge people to build communities that model the kind of abundance they want to see in the wider culture, and that they find ways to shape institutions that can support this cultural shift. We think the best way to do this is through the creation of “consciousness-raising groups”—a practice introduced in the 1960s to help marginalized groups to collectively transform their worldviews and subjectivities. Consciousness-raising groups should cycle between discussing topics in relation to their values; syncing and coordinating their diverse life experiences and desires; creating “prefigurative” projects that create small pockets of a more interesting, enjoyable and fair world; being creative and imaginative about what the world could be like; and seeking to influence the institutions and cultures that shape our world. (24) These activities should all reinforce each other, and create a community in which the members begin to find pleasure in better and better things.
For those who want to start their own Critical Hedonism(s) groups, here is a resource for doing that.
Notes
1) Ernesto Laclau, writing in the early 90s, argued that the pursuit of emancipation can sometimes lead to new forms of domination and exclusion. This happens when an individual or group pursues a form of liberation that either depends on another individual’s or group’s exploitation or dispossession, or when the pursuit of a particular vision of emancipation forecloses other visions by displacing these. In situations like these, the very process intended to liberate can end up creating new hierarchies and conflicts. This is especially true of nationalist movements, which seek to benefit a particular country or people at the expense of other countries and people, while imposing everyone within the nation to a singular, universal standard for living rightly. Other writers have explored how many of the liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s devolved into individualistic and consumerist cultural tendencies, as members of the counterculture gave up on collective action and instead pursued merely symbolically-rebellious lifestyles that were compatible with consumer capitalism. See Thomas Frank’s The Conquest of Cool and Commodify Your Dissent, and Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism.
2) As Massimo De Angelis puts it in Omnia Sunt Communia: On the Commons and the Transformation to Postcapitalism, in our world “there are winners and losers, those who profit from the crises and those who lose out, and most people, as usual, feel they are going to lose out.” So many of the things we want are oriented around getting security for ourselves, but within the prevailing system of desires, our interests tend to be pitted against other people’s interests. In our world, one person’s good life comes at the expense of, and off the backs of other people. The prevailing models for the good life in developed countries are antiquated, deleterious, and in crisis. The idea of living a big, expensive, materially-intensive lifestyle in an isolated household unit in the suburbs is inappropriate for the twenty-first century. The main aspects of this way of life were conceptualized and standardized in the early twentieth century in order to drive economic growth. This was especially important after the 1930s, when suburban development and nuclear family life were seen as a means of driving the economy and overcoming the Great Depression. What we need now are less wasteful, less isolated urban lifestyles that deemphasize work and consumption and instead emphasize sharing, collaboration, immaterial experiences and non-professional forms of achievement. As Lauren Berlant insists, “It is a time for using the impasse that we’re in to learn something about how to imagine better economies of intimacy and labor.” Stay tuned for future writing on redesigning the good life for the 21st century. Fortunately, many authors have already made great strides toward imagining what this could look like.
3) The idea of creating a more caring society is explored compellingly by the Care Collective in The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence, which critiques the carelessness of neoliberal capitalist society and presents a formula for creating an alternative. The Care Collective argues that we need to center care in our politics and economics; that we should create more robust and caring kinship networks (experimenting, in these circles, with new ways of distributing care); that we need to build infrastructures of care that include, in particular, mutual support groups, more robust public spaces, methods and cultures of resource sharing, and democratic communities; and a global politics that embraces interdependency.
4) This term comes from the writings on metamodern politics penned by Hanzi Freinacht. See his reflections on the transpersonal at: https://metamoderna.org/death-to-the-individual/ . We’ve all heard some version of the saying that “you can’t pour from an empty cup,” meaning that the person who isn’t taken care of will struggle to take care of others. In recent years, in response to both the traumas of living in a world such as ours, and the burnout experienced by many activists, there has been a growing emphasis on self care and healing. Adjacent to, and sometimes sharing space with these are calls for personal growth and transformation, based in therapeutic, spiritual and cultural practices that, at their best, wage a “microrevolution” against the harmful conditioning that our society instills in all of us. Healing, taking care oneself, and transfiguring one’s subjectivity are all indispensable features of any truly transformative project, and without these in place, one cannot expect to get very far in their efforts to remake the world. But on their own these are insufficient, and can even be downright harmful. Against the idea that self-care is always inherently a revolutionary, we agree with the rejoinder that “self care is only revolutionary if you’re a revolutionary.” Like other kinds of care and collectively-produced value, like domestic labor in the household, emotional labor and all kinds of care work, these social resources can just be used to prop up hierarchy, disparity and systems of exploitation by reproducing the labor power, vitality and morale that keep everything operating smoothly. Today, massive industries dedicated to bolstering the physical, social, spiritual and emotional needs of the elite and the high-value cognitive laborers increasingly appropriates the languages of self care, healing, and self-improvement in order to make the system run better and its beneficiaries more effective and secure in their equanimity. All sorts of products and services offer wellbeing-for-a-price to a population weary and overworked, while, on a perhaps even more deleterious level, a variety of drugs offer temporary sanctuary from the stresses of the world. We reject any approach to personal transformation that ignores societal transformation, just as we reject societal transformation that ignores personal transformation. We see these as inherently interlocking processes, which can elevate and empower one another, or, if one or the other is absent, undercut and undermine one another.
5) People’s desires and ideals are often shaped by what surrounds them in their spatial and social milieux. We tend to desire what we are encouraged to desire by the people around us and the cues and incentives we are given by legal, educational, economic and cultural institutions. Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler and Steven Tipton write about what they call “social” or “moral ecologies,” which is the term they use to describe the cultural and institutional contexts that shape people’s social and ethical beliefs and practices. As they argue, many people—especially Americans—like to think of themselves as individuals who form and make it on their own, but we are, instead, products of our cultures and institutions.
6) Consciousness raising, in the Gay and Women’s Liberation movements, began with the assumption that the personal is political. For the participants in these movements, if the personal is political, then the terrain of political struggle extends into oneself. “For many feminists,” Sandra Lee Bartky reports, “this involves the experience of a profound personal transformation, an experience which goes far beyond that sphere of human activity we regard ordinarily as ‘political.’” Such a struggle sometimes involved total transformation. According to Bartky, “the feminist changes her behavior: She makes new friends; she responds differently to people and events; her habits of consumption change; sometimes she alters her living arrangements or, more dramatically, her whole style of life.” Consciousness-raising groups resemble what Michel Foucault referred to as “local centers of power-knowledge,” in which “different forms of discourse—self-examination, questionings, admissions, interpretations, interviews” operate as a “vehicle of a kind of incessant back-and-forth movement” that produces both knowledge and subjectivity. In the Preface to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, Foucault emphasized the importance, in any political struggle, of forensically locating and excising the “inner fascist” that one develops in their engagement with power, and a major theme in Anti-Oedipus is the “micropolitical” struggle with internalized political and economic regimes at the psychological level. Often, we hear commentary about the malleability of human beings, but what we hear less often is the extent to which human plasticity is most apparent in social and collective settings. Consciousness-raising was highly effective because it sought, through “self-examination, questionings, admissions, interpretations, interviews,” etc. to produce new subjects in communal rather than individual ways. As the gay liberation activist Aubrey Walter explained of the Gay Liberation Front, consciousness-raising groups in that movement would invite “each individual [to talk] about his or her individual experience of oppression, growing up, coming out, etc.,” and in doing so, “a general pattern could be discerned, and so a cognitive leap could take place in the minds of the group. They would then come to see the oppression of gay people as part of the general gender system of our society, with common features despite individual idiosyncracies.” Drawing from the experiences and desires of individuals, the consciousness-raising group would attempt to produce a new intellectual, emotional, social, and sexual ecology whose imperatives would then become internalized by the individuals. The group would seek to generate radical solidarity and new kinds of interrelation and, ultimately, desiring, based on the aggregate experiences and desires of those present. Within these settings, imbalances, scarcities, power dynamics, surpluses and deficits could be identified and reworked. In Critical Hedonism(s), the consciousness-raising group can similarly analyze the ways that structural forces are impacting the desires of the individual members, work out how these desires cause clashes, hierarchies, artificial scarcities or divergent interests, and then work out how to encourage new configurations of desire.
7) A framework to think about this is Albert O. Hirschman’s "voice / exit" dichotomy. When living or operating within a flawed system or organization, people have the choice to change that system/organization (voice) or to leave it (exit). Often, it is privileged/resourced people who are able to exit a system, and they tend to leave behind many people who do not have that opportunity. According to the countercultural historian Simon Sadler, in the late 1960s, a group of rural, commune-dwelling White hippies invited members of the urban Black Panthers to leave Oakland and join the commune. The Black Panthers rejected this invitation to drop out of society because they had never even been accepted into society. While the hippies were struggling to liberate themselves from the shackles of civilization, the Panthers were seeking a seat at the table. Critical Hedonism(s) charts a path that takes cues from the political theorist Paolo Virno, whose theory of exodus offers a strategy that takes elements of both exit and voice. Rather than exiting entirely, or remaining entirely within dysfunctional institutions, he argues, we should take a stance of “engaged withdrawal.” Engaged withdrawal involves exiting a system enough to produce new culture and new norms, but remaining in close enough proximity to the system that the newly-pioneered culture and norms can, in turn, influence how the system operates.
8) There is an important place within Critical Hedonism(s) for critique and negativity (whether in the form of critique, or the anti-social behaviors associated with so-called “queer negativity”), but that negativity is only a starting point. Critique is only a good thing when it can become part of a broader project of remaking and improving. We don’t tear things down just for the sake of it; we tear things down because we have something better to replace them with. Queer negativity only makes sense to us as part of an “accelerationist” politics that seeks to reveal and deepen the inherent contradictions of the systemic processes we live within. And accelerationism, in turn, is only worthwhile if it is intended to accelerate the journey towards building a better world.
9) We don’t want to debate issues; we want to change the aspirational climate in which issues are debated.
10) The concept of surplus repression is of great value to Critical Hedonism(s). Surplus repression is the term that Herbert Marcuse uses to refer to the amount of repression of gratification that is in excess of that needed to maintain social cohesion given a specific level of technological advancement. This was part of Marcuse’s response to Freud, who argued in Civilization and Its Discontents that without repression of instinctual gratification, society would collapse because desires would conflict with one another and lead to chaos and social strife. In this sense, the so-called ‘pleasure principle’—that is: the human’s inherent drive to seek pleasure and to avoid pain—is constantly put in check by the ‘reality principle’ that arises out of the need for social cohesion. But Marcuse rightly pointed out that the degree to which gratification needs to be repressed varies according to the level of technological advancement and the degree of hierarchy and exploitation in society. In particular, the desires of poor and working class populations must be repressed so that the upper classes can disproportionally prosper from their labor and deprivation. While some sacrifices may always be necessary in order to live in human community, puritan ideologies have been fed to the lower classes as a means of compelling them to work hard and not expect too much in return for their efforts. The idea of “surplus repression” is useful for distinguishing between socially-necessary and exploitative forms of repression.
11) Uncritical hedonism is worse than moralizing puritanism—the latter of which at least attempts to be socially responsible. One can think of stages of development in both the individual’s and society’s relationships to pleasure. The most basic way to relate to desire is a base hedonism. Here, one’s behavior is irresponsible, undisciplined, anti-social, and selfish. The base hedonist’s desires are uncultivated, and unguided by morality. The next basic stage is the moralistic one, which favors discipline, hard work, conformity and self-denial. Uncritical hedonism may seem like an appropriate reaction to moralistic society—especially for someone who sees these as being opposite poles of a dichotomy. But uncritical hedonism is a regression, not an advancement, from moralistic society. The solution to moralistic society is a cautious reconciling of desires with the political, economic and ecological and social limitations of a particular moment in history—a remaking of both duties and pleasures into configurations that are suitable for a given time and place. This is not to say that pleasures should conform to the demands that a hegemonic political or economic order makes upon them, but instead to the historically-contingent constraints that are necessary for creating justice, kindness, and sustainability.
12) A major contribution to the discourse around this is the Oxford philosopher and feminist political theorist Amia Srinivasan, whose book The Right to Sex analyzes the cultural logic of contemporary gendered sexual antagonism. Srinivasan critiques the ethical permissiveness of much of “sex-positive” liberal feminism, which has shied away from criticizing the kinds of sexual preferences people have on the grounds that these are a matter of personal preference. Against this view, Srinivasan argues that our desires are very much shaped by patriarchal, White supremacist, classist and ableist institutions, and therefore should not be considered beyond political scrutiny.
13) If you’re the “only gay in the village” (as one politically-incorrect Little Britain skit jokes)—in other words, if you are the only person in a particular place who is openly homosexual—this is going to hamper your prospects for living your ideals, since you will have nobody to enact your desires with. Perhaps even more importantly, if you’re only one of two “gays in the village,” the preferences, ideals, and expectations of the other person will likely influence (if not altogether define) the way you think about and express your desires. Scaling up and out, if all of the people you’re potentially interested in sexually express some preference about partners—that they drive big trucks and go to the gym, say—then the attainment of these attributes will likely influence how you behave. You may even begin to internalize going to the gym and driving a truck as being your own ideal. This is how social ecology tends to structure emotional ecology, since desires—especially about relationships—are generally relational.
14) Most political movements appeal to pre-formed interests and aspirations. Critical Hedonism(s) is about shifting those aspirations and redefining those interests, so that political movements can be built around better demands.
15) Too often, we rely on rigid biological explanations for our desires and emotional responses to things, when, as the burgeoning field of emotional history brings into the foreground, though, our emotions are historically variable, and contingent on changes in culture, politics, economics, and other factors. While there may be some immutable instincts, the actual expression of instincts changes across time and space. The field of affect theory explores this distinction when it investigates how affects and emotions are not the same thing. As some affect theorists posit (though there’s still some debate about this), while affects may be “pre-discursive” (or, unshaped by culture), emotions certainly are shaped by cultural narratives and forces. In other words, I might immediately feel a lurch of feeling when I see my brother for the first time in over a year, but the emotion I have around that feeling is shaped by the meaning I give to my brother, to our relationship, to his status as a man in our culture, to social norms and conventions around masculine affection, etc. The history of emotions traces the way that feelings have been given meaning and expression in different cultures, in different places, at different times.
16) Political metamodernism aspires to create a “trans-culturalism” that enhances societal development and wellbeing while avoiding totalizing and stifling cultural homogeneity. A crucial part of this is establishing a minimum set of standards, rights and duties for all cultures—particularly the demand that they not prevent individuals or other cultures from enjoying full access to the diverse offerings of trans-cultural, metamodern life itself. And what makes this possible is that the underlying political, economic, and cultural infrastructure of metamodernism acts as a kind of enabling/empowering substrate that guarantees material and psychological wellbeing.
17) This has parallels with what the queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz saw as the political role of queerness—not merely a rejection of the normative, but a way forward: “Queerness,” Muñoz explains, “is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present.” (Cruising Utopia, 1) Perhaps another reference to political metamodernism is warranted here: one of the main objectives of political metamodernism is to find new, better ways to rate institutions and cultural impulses—to be able to say “this is better than that” and to use this to build a foundation for progress without losing the critical and analytical insights that postmodern deconstructivism has contributed to social science and the humanities. If postmodern deconstruction is excellent for its ability to critique false universals and arbitrary logics of power and conformity, it lacks the tools and frameworks for actually building better pathways for society. Critical Hedonism(s) considers itself to be part of this project—it seeks to contribute to the development of human civilization without overdetermining the cultural and aesthetic ways that people live their lives. It seeks to provide the tools and frameworks to rate, as better or worse, configurations of aspirations and pleasures, but also recognizes that there are many excellent ways to configure these.
18) Lauren Berlant’s work—particularly in Cruel Optimism—explicates the ways that people’s identities form around their aspirations, and how their attachments bring coherence and and legibility to their understandings of themselves and their places within the world.
19) According to Mari Ruti, “neoliberal capitalism is psychically appealing, and hence economically lucrative, because it plays into the basic structure of human desire by promising that it can replace a state of scarcity by a state of satiated abundance. . . . [However,] the system produces the very scarcity that it proffers to help us transcend. Indeed, without this production of lack—without this ability to make us feel like something is missing from our lives (yet surely attainable in the future)—the system would quickly collapse, for if we ever reached a state of complete contentment, our desire would come to an end, and with it, our conviction that the new products we see advertised might add something to the quality of our lives; we would stop consuming beyond what we actually need. This is why, despite appearances, neoliberal capitalism thrives on the perpetuation of lack—more than on the generation of excess even as its excesses threaten to drown us in waste.”
20) Kay Gabriel, “Gender as Accumulation Strategy,” https://www.are.na/block/7106265 .
21) An excellent exploration of this distinction can be found in adrienne marie brown’s Pleasure Activism, where brown explains that “[p]leasure activism is not about generating or indulging in excess,” which comes from the urge to compensate for living in scarcity for most of one’s life. Instead, brown insists, “[p]leasure activism is about learning what it means to be satisfiable, to generate, from within and from between us, an abundance from which we can all have enough.” Similarly, Critical Hedonism(s) seeks a form of abundance that is not wasteful or overwhelming, but life-enhancing and responsible.
22) See the Care Collective’s The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence, 45.
23) See the Critical Hedonism(s) blog post on “Desiring the Plentiful.”
24) This is a strategy that the Beyond Return group formulated as a means for escaping the limitations of imagination that the political philosopher Mark Fisher dubbed “capitalist realism”: create communities that get stuck in the iterative loop of building concrete alternatives in the ways you can; use these as inspiration for imagining utopian futures; politically engage with existing institutions so that they enable more experimentation; and return to building concrete alternatives that are inspired by the utopian thinking and empowered by the engagement with existing institutions. The result should allow a community to escape what José Esteban Muñoz calls the “rigid conceptualization” of “the here and now,” in favor of becoming “future bound in our desires and designs.” (Cruising Utopia, 185.)