Mark Fisher's article on The Occupied Times - Good For Nothing. March 10, 2014.

• I offer up my own experiences of mental distress not because I think there's anything special or unique about them, but in support of the claim that many forms of depression are best understood – and best combatted – through frames that are impersonal and political rather than individual and "psychological".
• Writing about one's own depression is difficult. Depression is partly constituted by a sneering "inner" voice which accuses you of self-indulgence – you aren't depressed, you're just feeling sorry for yourself, pull yourself together – and this voice is liable to be triggered by going public about the condition.

Of course, this voice isn't an "inner" voice at all – it is the internalised expression of actual social forces, some of which have a vested interest in denying any connection between depression and politics.

• [...] The dominant school of thought in psychiatry locates the origins of such "beliefs" (the beliefs of being good for nothing, worthlessness, not being enough, etc) in malfunctioning brain chemistry, which are to be corrected by pharmaceuticals; psychoanalysis and forms of therapy influenced by it famously look for the roots of mental distress in family background, while Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is less interested in locating the source of negative beliefs than it is in simply replacing them with a set of positive stories. It is not that these models are entirely false, it is that they miss – and must miss – the most likely cause of such feelings of inferiority: social power.
• The form of social power that had most effect on me was class power, although of course gender, race and other forms of oppression work by producing the same sense of ontological inferiority, which is best expressed in exactly the thought I articulated above: that one is not the kind of person who can fulfill roles which are earmarked for the dominant group.

Fisher investigates the work of David Smail, a therapist, but one who makes the question of power central to his practice.

• In his crucial book The Origins of Unhappiness, Smail describes how the marks of class are designed to be indelible. For those who from birth are taught to think of themselves as lesser, the acquisition of qualifications or wealth will seldom be sufficient to erase – either in their own minds or in the minds of others – the primordial sense of worthlessness that marks them so early in life. Someone who moves out of the social sphere they are "supposed" to occupy is always in danger of being overcome by feelings of vertigo, panic and horror:

"...isolated, cut off, surrounded by hostile space, you are suddenly without connections, without stability, with nothing to hold you upright or in place; a dizzying, sickening unreality takes possession of you; you are threatened by a complete loss of identity, a sense of utter fraudulence; you have no right to be here, now, inhabiting this body, dressed in this way; you are a nothing, and nothing is quite literally what you feel you are about to become."

• For some time now, one of the most successful tactics of the ruling class has been responsibilisation. Each individual member of the subordinate class is encouraged into feeling that their poverty, lack of opportunities, or unemployment, is their fault and their fault alone.
• Individuals will blame themselves rather than social structures, which in any case they have been induced into believing do not really exist (they are just excuses, called upon by the weak).
• What Smail calls "magical voluntarism" – the belief that it is within every individual's power to make themselves whatever they want to be – is the dominant ideology and unofficial religion of contemporary capitalist society, pushed by reality TV "experts" and business gurus as much as by politicians. Magical voluntarism is both an effect and a cause of the currently historically low level of class consciousness. It is the flipside of depression – whose underlying conviction is that we are all uniquely responsible for our own misery and therefore deserve it.

Collective depression is the result of the ruling class project of resubordination. For some time now, we have increasingly accepted the idea that we are not the kind of people who can act.

• The rebuilding of class consciousness is a formidable task indeed, one that cannot be achieved by calling upon ready-made solutions – but, in spite of what our collective depression tells us, it can be done. Inventing new forms of political involvement, reviving institutions that have become decadent, converting privatised disaffection into politicised anger: all of this can happen, and when it does, who knows what is possible?

Mark Fisher's article on The Visual Artists' News Sheet - No One is Bored, Everything is Boring. July 21, 2014.

• Fisher comments on the We Are All Very Anxious essay by Precarious Consciousness: It argues that the key problematic affect capitalism now faces is anxiety. In an earlier, Fordist era, it was boredom that was the "dominant reactive affect". Repetitive labour on production lines engendered boredom, which was both the central form of subjugation under Fordism and the source of a new oppositional politics.
• It could be argued that the failure of the traditional left is tied up with its inability adequately to engage with this politics of boredom, which wasn't articulated via trade unions or political parties, but via the cultural politics of the Situationists and the punks. It was the neoliberals, not the organised left, who were best able to absorb and instrumentalise this critique of boredom.
• Neoliberals quickly moved to associate Fordist factories and the stability and security of social democracy with tedium, predictability and top-down bureaucracy. In place of this, the neoliberals offered excitement and unpredictability – but the downside of these newly fluid conditions is perpetual anxiety.

Anxiety is the emotional state that correlates with the (economic, social, existential) precariousness which neoliberal governance has normalised.

• Neoliberal culture – which came to dominance as the anti-psychiatry movement was waning – has individualised depression and anxiety. Or rather, many cases of depression and anxiety are the effects of neoliberalism's successful tendency to privatise stress, to convert political antagonisms into medical conditions.
• At the same time, I believe that the argument about boredom has to be somewhat nuanced. It is certainly true that one could feel almost nostalgic for boredom 1.0. [...] In the intensive, 24-7 environment of capitalist cyberspace, the brain is no longer allowed any time to idle; instead, it is inundated with a seamless flow of low-level stimulus.
• For punk, the vacancy of boredom was a challenge, an injunction and an opportunity: if we are bored, then it is for us to produce something that will fill up the space. Yet, it is through this demand for participation that capitalism has neutralised boredom. Now, rather than imposing a pacifying spectacle on us, capitalist corporations go out of their way to invite us to interact, to generate our own content, to join the debate. There is now neither an excuse nor an opportunity to be bored.

But if the contemporary form of capitalism has extirpated boredom, it has not vanquished the boring. On the contrary – you could argue that the boring is ubiquitous.

• It is just that no one is bored – because there is no longer any subject capable of being bored. For boredom is a state of absorption – a state of high absorption, in fact, which is why it is such an oppressive feeling. Boredom consumes our being; we feel we will never escape it. But it is just this capacity for absorption that is now under attack, as a result of the constant dispersal of attention, which is integral to capitalist cyberspace. If boredom is a form of empty absorption, then more positive forms of absorption effectively counter it. But it is these forms of absorption which capitalism cannot deliver. Instead of absorbing us, it distracts from the boring.
  • This greatly ties to Mark Fisher's argument on dyslexia and Lacan's theory on schizophrenia showcased on "Reflexive impotence, immobilization and liberal communism", the 4th chapter of Fisher's book Capitalist Realism.
• Perhaps the feeling most characteristic of our current moment is a mixture of boredom and compulsion. [...] We endlessly move among the boring, but our nervous systems are so overstimulated that we never have the luxury of feeling bored. No one is bored, everything is boring.