THE AESTHETICS OF DEJECTION AND THE POLITICS OF MILITANT DYSPHORIA

The Cold World

Sadness does something to the way we see the world. In the experience of deeps sadness, the world itself seems altered in

the some way: colored by sadness. or disfigured by it. Rather than living inside us, as our normal passions do, our sadness 

seems to envelope everything: we live inside it, as if were a cocoon or a prison. At such time we seem particularly aware of 

the world as a world, as a place where we have to live. This awareness can became artistic or political: artistic, when the 

world made strange by our own detachment and dissociation presents itself as an object of fascination; political when the

difficulty of going on living in such a world begins to reveal its causes in the impersonal circumstances of our personal 

sorrow.

Both kinds of awareness have their origins in desolation, in the sense that the world is frozen and that nothing new is 

possible. Both can lead to terrible paroxysms of destruction, attempts to shatter the carapace of reality and release the 

authentic self trapped within; but both can also lead away from the self together, towards new worldly commitments that 

recognize the urgent need to develop another logic of existence, another way going on.

Codeine 'The White Birch' (...) deeply mournful music, impressively slowly (...) the physics (the dynamic) of it's world: 

a world in the grip of entropy, in which everything is running down. (...) 'Frigid Stars' glacial brilliance sound (...) intensely 

introverted songs about failed and failing relationships - it's cosmic scope. Codeine's sound was strangely enervated, 

plaintive chiming, in which each struck chord was allowed time to decay. The vocals were delivered in an adenoidal, like 

croon; the lyrical themes were loss, exhaustion, draining anxiety ('I'll throw sand in your eye, / you need a reason to cry') 

helpless spite. (...) builds towards moments of intense beauty and release, culminating in the transcendent final moments.

The lyrics are typically minimal (...).

Still make me burn with shame.

The world is frozen.

Codeine enacts a stark resilience, pointing to the possibility of beauty, hope and love even when the libido is utterly 

depleted, when imaginable material and emotional resource has been stripped away. 'The White Birch' is painful depressing

to listen to, but its final moments are both beautiful and consoling, opening out onto the glimmering 'now' of a cosmos

in suspend animation.

(...) this frozen constellation of the 'cold world': the world voided of both human warmth and metaphysical comfort. This 

cold world is the world made strange, a world that has ceased to be the 'life world' in wich we are usually immersed and 

instead stands before us in a kind of lop-sided objectivity. It is a world between worlds, a disfigured world. We will show 

how the cold world can be both the theme of art and, as experience, one of the conditions under which artistic works may

be composed.

(...) 'aesthetics of dejection'.

Consider the relationship between the world of dejection and that of the political militant, the person who has became 

separated from his or her world and turned against it, under the rubric of a 'militant dysphoria' or politicised unpleasure.

Consider some fictions of adolescent and post adolescent revolt, arguing that such revolt has a counterfactual component,

embodying an intransigent will that the world be other than it is. 

Cold world - modernist productions: 

T.S. Eliot's The West Land - the world of european culture has lost its ability to cohere and has been reducen to fragments.

It is no longer confidently able to know its own 'mind', and is confronted with desolate reality beyond the reach of cultural

matery: the desert of the real, 'fear in a handful of dust'.

Samuel Becket's Endgame.

-Dominic Fox-