Hey there, welcome to That Dang Dad, my name is Phil and tonight, let’s talk about hedonism… alternative hedonism that is!
A couple days ago, a book I don’t remember ordering from Haymarket showed up on my doorstep. It’s called The Politics of Pleasure and it’s an interesting concept. Philosopher Kate Soper begins the book with an essay called Alternative Hedonism (which we’ll get into in a sec) and this is followed by several essays written directly in response to her, all varying degrees of critical. Afterwards, there are several more standalone essays from other academics looking at the topic of pleasure from angles such as Black motherhood, queer sex, and COVID 19. I think it’s a cool way to construct a book!
I’m only a few essays into the book but one of them introduced me to an interesting idea and I wanted to take a detour to think more about it.
To set the stage, let me start with a quick rundown of Soper’s thoughts in Alternative Hedonism. She starts from the point of view that human-caused climate change is real, is dangerous, and that it is imperative humankind work together to prevent climate disaster. One of the big drivers of climate change, in her opinion, is the capitalist consumerist culture those of us in the imperial core currently participate in. Thus, any climate intervention is going to require big changes to the ways we work and consume.
The real nug of her essay is her frustration that so often, discussions about a post-climate catastrophe world paint a picture of people living with less, making do with less, having less access to treats, to variety, to fun.
She writes: “Climate scientists and many economists now accept the importance of moving away from fossil fuel dependence over time. Some even agree that affluent societies cannot continue in their current ways. But they do so with regret—with a sense that more austere consumption, though necessary, will be to our disadvantage. Even those who are skeptical about the whole project of “green growth,” and who quarrel with the cost–benefit calculations used in support of it, too often go along with the consumerist definition of the “benefits” in question. They don’t question whether consumption actually benefits us, nor whether, if we consumed differently, the beneficiaries might not only be future generations but we ourselves. Most politicians and business leaders seem likewise incapable of thinking of the “good life” other than in terms of consumerist gratification.” (Soper, p. 12)
Her essay argues that instead of imagining a rejection of extractive capitalism as grim, austere work that we must stoically endure, we should instead see all the ways that we would be happier outside of a capitalist framework, such as being liberated from the status symbol acquisition treadmill always trying to keep up with others, or spending less time in the office working a bullshit job, or spending less time in traffic. For Soper, a low-carbon world is a world of more time to write music or paint pictures, of children playing in the streets, of ornate foot and bike paths flanked by colonnades, of lending libraries and train rides through nature’s grandeur.
She believes that rejecting capitalism doesn’t mean rejecting “the good life” but rather embracing an actual good life with new forms of enjoyment accessible to all. I thought it was pretty interesting and I’m always attracted to left-wing alternatives to the black pill. I like when people articulate a positive vision.
Anyway, one of the responses to Soper’s essay is called The Fullness of Desire by Lida Maxwell, a professor of political science, gender, sexuality, and women’s studes over at Boston University.
In her response, Maxwell starts from the following position: “THE DOMINANT CONCEPTION of happiness in the United States is unabashedly acquisitive. It involves marriage (or at least being coupled), probably children, probably homeownership, and definitely easy and ongoing consumption. This idea of bourgeois happiness is powerfully connected, as Kate Soper argues, to capitalism. Yet it is also connected to patriarchy and to white supremacy.” (Maxwell, pg. 37).
Then she gets into the meat of her critique: “I am less convinced than Soper, though, that focusing on changing habits and infrastructures of consumption offers a robust enough idea of either pleasure or political action to address climate change. Part of capitalism’s magic, after all, is inculcating a particular experience of desire in us—teaching us that we have an inherent void or lack that must be filled for us to be happy, to experience pleasure...
While capitalism tells us that we should try to fill our void with bourgeois marriage, work, virtuous sympathy, and endless consumption, Soper tells us we should try to fill our void with crafts, localism, and sharing economies. I agree that we might arrange our lives differently, but her call to simply change our habits of consumption does not go far enough. If we don’t challenge the very idea of desire as a void to be filled, we risk advocating a politics that remains principally white, non-feminist, and heteronormative. Only a different vision of desire—desire as fullness—can ground a politics up to the task of dismantling the drivers of climate change, patriarchy, and white supremacy….
Desire as lack teaches people that they need particular things (endless consumption) or structures (bourgeois marriage) or feelings (heteronormative love), which may never fully arrive, to be happy. In contrast, desire as fullness teaches people that they already have the capacity for pleasure in themselves and in this world and thus gives critical distance from capitalist, heteronormative institutions that had once seemed necessary to happiness.” (Maxwell, pg. 38-39)
Sorry for the long quote but… do you ever read something and someone phrases it just the right way and you suddenly have like a philosophy stroke and just lay back like “gahhhh i never thought about that before…”.
I found Maxwell’s essay very provocative because if you had asked me prior to reading it, “what makes you want something?” I would’ve probably answered “Not having something I need or like.” Like what else COULD you want other than something you didn’t have. To hear that given a name like Desire as Lack and implied to be only one of multiple ways to desire was like… what do you mean, how does that work?
Maxwell makes reference to the concept of Desire as Fullness several times as an alternative to Desire as Lack and I’ll confess, while I sort of grasped the overall point she was making, I was having a really hard time understanding what, specifically, Desire as Fullness meant. Her essay alludes to things it can Do and Enable, but I wasn’t really able to wrap my head around it.
So, I started googling that term: “desire as fullness”, just to see who else was talking about it and what they had to say.
The earliest reference I found was from an author named James Hans in his book The Fate of Desire, published in 1990. I was able to skim a bunch of it on the Internet Archive and while some of it is over my head, as near as I can tell, the book is Hans grappling with what he called the decentering of humans, meaning the ways that we were being forced to recognize that human individuality and human supremacy were not the main drivers of activity in the universe, that we were just slightly more complex animals that are, as he puts it, “tossed about on a sea of unknown forces.” (Hans, p. 9)
His introduction grapples with the fact that modern humans were learning that not only were individual character and hard work no guarantee of financial security or even basic employment, but that it was a myth to believe human beings had full autonomy over their decisions and thought processes in the first place. Race and class determined much of our fate socially and economically and our conscious mind made far fewer decisions than we would like to think. And perhaps most disturbing of all, modern humans were forced to confront the fact we would never arrive at some final grand truth here on Earth, we would never Solve Life, we would be tossed about on the sea of uncertainty until the day we died, as would our children, and their children, and so on.
What I’m saying is that James Hans is a fuckin’ party animal.
Anyway, Hans defines Desire as Fullness like this: “Desire as fullness is nothing more than a delight in what is, in what one can do, in the fact that one is at all.” (Hans, pg. 177). One of the examples he gives is of a small child just pointlessly twirling around. Grown-ups like to talk about how this twirling is actually accomplishing something important, exercising muscles or practicing coordination, but really, the child just twirls around because it feels good to twirl, because they can. I think those of us who enjoy writing or drawing or playing music or hiking or playing sports can understand that too; sometimes it feels good to create just because you can, sometimes it feels good to just move your body around the world, because it feels good to make use of your talents.
As the book goes on, Hans talks about Desire as Fullness within a variety of contexts, but one that I found very interesting was how he tied the emergence and dominance of private property to the dominance of desire as lack. He says:
“Unfortunately, the invention of private property also provided the means whereby mimetic desire [desiring something because someone else does] could infect everything on the planet. Once everything becomes a potential commodity, once ownership is the chief means through which human relationships are mediated in one way or another, desire truly becomes unlimited.
Everything is a potential object of acquisition, and when one feeds that unlimited expanse of objects into the reality that mimetic desire is not based on the object in any case but on the fact that someone else values the object, any other mode of valuation fades into the distance and everything becomes a question of property…
…all the clearly demarcated zones of private property feed the desire for more of what the other has and thereby contribute to the frenzy of acquisition. If there is indeed something to be named "desire as fullness," it is as difficult to discern today as it is precisely because private property has so thoroughly saturated our world with objects of desire — the value of which is always only defined in terms of the other through whose eyes we construe their value — that any other possibility for human desire seems out of the question.” (Hans, pg. 198-199)
This thought is disturbing to Hans because think about it: if our dominant mode of thinking is that I have to have something I don’t already have and thus snatch things up and enclose them for myself, and everyone else around me is also snatching things up, then eventually we’re going to run out of unclaimed things, and suddenly, in order to have something I don’t have, I need to take it from you.
This is doubly dangerous when our entire sense of self is wrapped up in acquisition and consumption. Because to not have things is to feel diminished as a human being. Hans writes:
“If our mode is lack, then we are protective, almost paranoid in a way, about that which we meet in the world. We seek to defend our fragile sense of self and are determined to interpret everything in that context. If our mode is fullness, then we in effect repeatedly discern affirmations of ourself in the world about us, not writing ourselves into the world so much as finding our locations to be fitting to our sense of what we are. Not only are we thus open to experience, but we are also inclined to interpret it in a favorable light simply because it is not construed as threatening to us but rather as affirming.” (Hans, pg. 228)
I don’t know much about James Hans as a person (I tried to google him and found this Web 1.0-ass university profile page), so if he sucks, I apologize, but the excerpts I read from the Fate of Desire did help kind of calibrate me towards what Lida Maxwell was getting at in her essay and I think it’s a really interesting way to think about the world.
It’s probably not controversial to say it would be better for our mental health and for the environment if we focused less on craving the newest model car or a new outfit to show off at every social gathering or a perfectly manicured lawn or whatever. And it’s probably not controversial to say that we’d be happier if we focused on desires that spring forth from the joy of being alive, the art that lives inside us, relationships with others, exploring nature, and so on.
Like, in my own life, I desire to have a happy, loving relationship with my daughter, not because I don’t already have it but in fact because I DO love her and cultivating that love and building that rapport day by day feels good and rewarding in and of itself. And it’s something I can desire that adds to the world instead of takes away something from someone else. Desire as Lack invites us to see life as a zero sum game with a finite number of slices of pie whereas this Desire as Fullness means we can all add in and grow that pie bigger and bigger.
However, that having been said, I have to admit I’m not entirely clear how to actually live out the call to “challenge the very idea of desire as a void to be filled” as Maxwell puts it (pg. 38). For one thing, in Fate of Desire, Hans seems to accept as a given that we’ll always have Desire as Lack floating around and that we should just be trying to cultivate Desire as Fullness when and where possible even knowing it will never fully “win” against the alternative.
Secondly, as I cast my eye to and fro about my own nation, I see more and more people experiencing greater and greater degrees of lack. Despite what liberal Charts & Graphs pundits on Twitter keep saying, millions of people aren’t doing so hot right now. Housing is expensive whether you rent or buy, food is expensive, kids are expensive, college is expensive, medical care is expensive, wages aren’t keeping up, many “new jobs” are precarious gig jobs with few protections, cars and parking are swallowing up our cities, corporations and racist busybodies have destroyed Third Places for people to hang out without spending money, for-profit healthcare has caused a shortage of numerous medicines, a shit ton of people got disabled by the COVID 19 pandemic and a shit-ton of other people can barely leave the house if they want to avoid it, climate catastrophe is causing apocalyptic storms and deadly flooding, Republican fascists are targeting trans children and driving them out of state to distract from policy failures, the Democrats fumbled abortion with a supermajority because they don’t actually care, and even if you managed to avoid the floods, the Republican power grabs, the mass shooters, and medical bankruptcy, a ton of people are just really fuckin’ lonely and depressed.
Maxwell is absolutely correct that capitalism instills in us a pernicious “indoctrination of lack” but it’s also the source of literally a whole metric buttload of actual Lack.
Now, in her defense, Maxwell’s essay does not dispute this nor do I think it actually glosses over it. I think she would say that that laundry list of horrors I just articulated is absolutely real and that capitalism’s ideology of lack falsely teaches us to blame ourselves for struggling under it. She literally says: “In desire as lack, people are taught that they and their private lives are the reason for their unhappiness, which helps shore up the status quo. In desire as fullness, social and political structures appear as the reason that happiness and pleasure are under threat.” (Maxwell, pg. 40)
So, it’s not that Maxwell has failed to acknowledge the actual lack in the world, rather it’s a failure on the part of my himbo brain to square the circle on how a desire arising within this lack can come from fullness rather than deprivation.
Maybe it’s something like, we know there is a superabundance of food in the world. We have enough food to feed every hungry belly many times over. Capitalism is what causes that food to be overallocated to people that hoard and then waste it and underallocated everywhere else that needs it. Thus, the desire to feed the hungry (whether that’s someone else or ourselves) is a natural part of being human and we only lack food because social and political structures are locking it away, not because we don’t actually have it. And thus, by focusing on the abundance we (ought to) have access to, we’d know that we shouldn’t be fighting our neighbor over a loaf of bread but rather the giant corporations that are withholding enough bread for everyone.
Like, there’s not a void of food that we need to fill with hyper production, there’s an abundance of food we need to liberate from capitalists.
Maybe? Does that sound right? I guess for me, that still feels like Desire as Lack, just with the added understanding that the Lack is a political choice being imposed from above us rather than a personal situation we’re solely responsible for. But then again, maybe that IS the difference and that is what Maxwell meanss. Maybe it’s just that Desire as Lack is focused on taking and making whereas Desire as Fullness is focused on giving and community.
Anyway, I wanted to talk about this tonight because for one, it introduced thoughts to me that I hadn’t thunk before and I thought maybe some of you would also find some new thoughts to think in here. But I also wanted to talk about it because this feels like the rare leftist debate that is, in wrestling parlance, Face vs Face, a positive vision versus another positive vision.
Kate Soper looks at the fruits of extractive racial capitalism and says “Not only can we fix this, we won’t be giving up half as many comforts as we’ll be gaining. The revolution will be joyful.” That is such a refreshing alternative to the doomerist hang-dog leftism that I find myself wallowing around in sometimes.
Then, Lida Maxwell fires back with a critique that doesn’t argue, no actually we have to be bummed out to fix the planet, but rather, suggests Soper doesn’t go far enough in unlocking this model of desire that is additive, that is generous, that is optimistic, that is open and loving.
If I may be ruthlessly reductive, for me this debate boiled down to “We can have lives we want” vs “We can want better lives”. And it’s such an interesting possibility space that Soper, Maxwell, and others in the book are playing in. Capitalist Realism really constrains our imagination a lot of the time and we can only picture slight variations on the world as it is today: healthcare could be subsidized, food prices could go down, housing vouchers could be provided, a basic income could be distributed.
Soper and Maxwell are operating in a space beyond that, articulating a vision of a new way of living where people get the things they need to survive and thrive completely outside of some hacked and hotwired commodity market. Like, it’s not a world of cheap food, it’s a world that simply would not gatekeep delicious meals from hungry mouths.
And while I might not fully understand the mechanics and intricacies of this system and how to challenge my own indoctrination of lack,I’m really attracted to the confidence in this debate that a better world IS possible and is maybe more within our grasp than we realize.
And I should be clear, neither author downplays the hard work and struggle that it’s going to take to wrest that future away from possibility and into actuality. The vision may be utopian but the strategies are in no way naive. For me, this possibility space is the one I want to occupy in 2024 as I go out and try to live in solidarity with my community. Because the alternative possibility space that I’m being seduced by is one of violence and revenge against the people imposing this rotten world on us. I spend more time than I’d like to admit picturing certain powerful figures getting the ol’ Mussolini Surprise, you know what I mean?
Maybe that’s my own Desire struggle I need to worry about, Desire not motivated by the lack of dead billionaires but Desire motivated by the fullness of human joy I know is possible for myself, my family, my community, and billions around the world.
What do you think about all this? Do you have a reaction to these competing forms of desire? Come, fill your voids in the comments.
Thanks for joining me tonight! If you found this video interesting, please do all the things, my last few videos haven’t exactly set the world on fire so I’m trying to figure out what people like and what gets people excited around here. And, honestly, regardless of numbers and analytics, I’m just really happy you’re here.
I hope you had a fabulous December, happy holidays if you celebrate them, fuck your asshole family members if holiday season is tough for you, I hope you find things to bring you joy and I can’t wait to see you again in 2024. Have a good night and a happy new year!