The Anti-Self-Help Project: Existential Suffering in Neonihilism Patric Plesa a Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of Graduat

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THE ANTI-SELF-HELP PROJECT:

EXISTENTIAL SUFFERING IN NEONIHILISM

PATRIC PLESA

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO

THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS

FOR THE DEGREE OF

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

GRADUATE PROGRAM IN PSYCHOLOGY

YORK UNIVERSITY

TORONTO, ONTARIO

April 2020

ABSTRACT

The Anti-Self-Help Project is foremost a critique of neoliberalism, but more specifically, a reassessment of the neoliberal self-help industry. Relying on a Nietzschean/Foucauldian genealogical reassessment, the focus is on the neoliberal self-help industry and its subjectifying power in shaping identity, particularly through the commodification of existential constructs such as freedom, authenticity, angst, and alienation as sites of meaning-making. These existential constructs are also reassessed with a focus on intersectionality to decolonize, reinterpret, and propose multifarious ways to create meaning, co-construct subjectivity, and consider the conditions for the possibility of liberation from oppression for systemically marginalized groups.

Meaninglessness is also reconceptualized here as a coping-mechanism in response to the pressures of neoliberalism, theorized as the combination of suffering and humour (or tragicomedy) that I have called neonihilism, which I historically situate in a lineage of nihilism in Western consciousness. Solidarity and collective action are then integrated as a descriptive model for re- envisioning the possibilities for existential constructs to become intersectional sites of meaning- making and understanding subjectivity, which deliberately contests the individualized and universalizing approach of the neoliberal self-help industry and further creates the possibility for overcoming neonihilism.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank everyone involved with the History, Theory, and Critical Studies in

Psychology Department, particularly the faculty, adjunct faculty, and my cohort for helping me grow intellectually and more importantly, ethically. I am especially indebted to the kindness and patience of my supervisor, Thomas Teo, and my friend and colleague, Shayna Fox Lee, not nearly as much for what I have learned from them as for what they have helped me unlearn. This project would have been impossible without their support. Thank you!

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………ii

Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………….iii

Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………………iv

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..1

Chapter Sections…………………………………………………………...... 5

Contextualization…………………………...……………………………...... 8

Methodology………………………………………….…………………...... 11

What I mean by Self-Help………………………………………………………...11

The Self-Help Industry at the Neoliberal turn: Inscriptions on Subjectivity…...………...14

Enter Neoliberalism: Exit Liberation……………………….……………...... 19

What of Subjectivity in the Post-neoliberal World?………………………………29

Neoliberalism’s Broken Promises: A Conclusion………………...………………39

Reassessing Existential Constructs and Subjectivity: Old Views on a New World………44

Freedom, Authenticity, Angst, and Alienation: An Origin Story…………………47

Do we still have Freedom, Authenticity, Angst, and Alienation?:

A Reassessment…………………………………………………………………..54

What’s left to Reassess: A Conclusion…………………………..……………….73

Neonihilism: A Neoliberal Tragicomedy…………………………….……...... 78

The Tragicomedy in Neonihilism……………………………………………...... 82

The Meaning of Meaninglessness……..…………………………………………90

Neonihilism………………………………………………………………………102

Post-Neonihilism?: A Conclusion……….……………………………………….117

The Anti-Self-Help Project: A Reassessment of Self, Freedom, Authenticity, Angst, and Alienation…………………………………………………….……...... 122

Identity and the Real Self: Fictions of a Prediscursive You……………...………133

Determinism and the Freedom to Construct a Self in Neoliberalism…...... 148

Authenticity in Intersectional Bodies…………………………………………….154

Angst and Alienation in Intersectional Bodies…………………………………...171

A Reminder about Undecidability: A Conclusion………………………………..179

Conclusion…………………………………………...….....…………………………..…184

References…………………………………………………………………………...……189

INTRODUCTION

The Anti-Self-Help Project is a work of the psychological humanities that include philosophy, art, media, current affairs, autoethnography, and pop culture to understand psychological matters

(see also Teo, 2017). I deliberately focus on understanding1 over knowledge production throughout this work as a Foucauldian-inspired methodology, which aims to interrogate what have historically come to be held as truths rather than an attempt to produce or vindicate truths. Foucault

(1977/1980) is skeptical of Truth2 (and knowledge3) because it is created and sustained in social environments under the influence of power relations that are formed by institutions and then upheld by their authoritative power (e.g., science has long held that biological sex is dichotomous and this is now being challenged, see Montañez, 2017). This makes Truth powerful and dangerous, especially if that Truth is laden with historical errors that maintain oppressive power relations with individuals based on their “race,” class, gender, sex, or sexuality. Part of this work is then a resistance to oppression through understanding.

This project comes about as an exercise in interdisciplinary understanding with the aim of exceeding the confines of a body of knowledge itself by liberating ourselves4 from the power- knowledge relation through understanding (see Foucault, 1982). I follow Foucault (1975/1995) here in conceptualizing power-knowledge relations as fields of knowledge, often institutional, that create, support, and sustain, power relations between and among individuals and groups in delimiting their possibilities through the endorsement of knowledge about identity, gender, bodies,

1 I italicize theoretical constructs throughout to disambiguate them from the general use of the terms. 2 Capital “T” Truth indicates a type of truth sustained by institutional power, which is the aim of Foucault’s (1977/1980) critique. 3 Foucault (1977/1980) treats knowledge as the institutional body of work that sustains Truth. 4 For disambiguation, throughout this project any use of plural terms like “we,” “us,” “ourselves,” “our,” or the like are meant to be taken in the generalized sense. Singular uses of “I,” “me,” “my,” or “myself” and the like refer to the author unless otherwise specified.

2 psychology, and biology, among other things that affect behaviour and subjectivity. What understanding then aims at is a genealogical interrogation of ideas that have gained the authoritative aura of Truth and inscribed themselves in our subjectivity. What genealogical refers to is a Foucauldian method developed from Nietzsche’s (1987/1969) genealogy where ideas are studied as sociocultural practices arising in context and having a historical lineage—as opposed to the assumption that ideas have universal foundations (see Foucault, 1977/1980). For Foucault

(1977/1980) knowledge itself is dangerous, whereas understanding liberates us from the power- knowledge relations through an analysis of the conditions for truth and knowledge and a reassessment of those conditions that segregate, marginalize, and oppress.

My aim is to reassess bodies of knowledge, ideas, politics, and sociohistorical relations as they pertain to subjectification—the process by which people become subject to available discourses or institutional powers, and how these shape their possibilities and identities (see, Foucault, 1982).

Within this reassessment, I focus on neoliberalism as a primary power-knowledge relation as it gives rise to a commodified version of self-help. Neoliberalism here is treated first in its historical context as an economic policy (see Harvey, 2005); however, the focus is particularly on how the imaginary (see Sartre, 1940/2010; Taylor, 2007) of neoliberalism as an ideology becomes embedded in our ways of thinking and doing; in other words, how neoliberalism becomes a subjectifying power with institutional bodies of knowledge stemming from economic policy and branching out into institutional practices in general (see Brown, 2015). Next, I talk about neoliberal ideology as it occupies the self-help industry, by which I mean particular texts (and practices) focused on self-improvement, self-governance, resilience, self-reliance, and other technologies of the self (see McGee, 2005).

Many of the neoliberal technologies of the self, found in self-help literature, were influenced and sustained by a body of knowledge produced by positive psychology. Here I refer to the inception of the field of positive psychology by Martin Seligman (1942-) and Mihaly

Csikszentmihalyi (1934-), and their bodies of work on character strength, resilience, flow, and self-actualization, along with other techniques aimed at self-improvement (see, Seligman, 1999;

Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). With the support of positive psychology, self-help in neoliberalism has become exceedingly popular and influential. I want to interrogate the intersections of neoliberalism, positive psychology, and the self-help industry, as a potential genealogical framework for the subjectifying discourses available to us today. Using a Foucauldian methodology of understanding this power-knowledge relation, I hope to discuss conditions for the possibility of liberation from the constrictions placed by the self-help industry on subjectivity.

Simultaneously, I argue that we are in a period of sociopolitical polarization that is triggering existential crises that have become exploited by self-help technologies (literature, workshops, ideologies, phone applications, etc.). I therefore aim to understand how subjectivity is informed and altered by the neoliberal self-help industry through a reassessment of existential constructs at their intersections with power. I define the neoliberal self-help industry as the technologies of self- help that are informed by the ideology of neoliberal subjectivity (self-reliance, individualization, responsibilization, and resilience) and promoted through a growing body of knowledge (power- knowledge relation) in literature, workshops, and institutional practices, among other things.

To reassess subjectivity, I turn to existential literature with a focus on the Sartrean tradition in tandem with Heidegger’s influences to discuss the origins of specific existential constructs like freedom, authenticity, angst, and alienation (see, Heidegger, 1927/1962; Sartre, 1943/1992). I argue these constructs pertain closely to our understating of the self and often relate to self-help

4 literature but, most importantly, provide a framework to reassess subjectivity with a focus on how freedom, authenticity, angst, and alienation operate and are constrained in our self-understanding in relation to power (i.e., as manifested in neoliberalism).

I also argue that the neoliberal power-knowledge relations have produced conditions and stressors that have created a phenomenon I call neonihilism. I am theorizing neonihilism as a coping mechanism to the systemic stressors and demands of neoliberalism and arguing that it is a justifiable response considering the conditions. Namely, our search for meaning has become an individualized endeavor that is obfuscated by the intervention of self-help literature. I argue that in the desperate process of trying to improve ourselves, neoliberalism has coopted self- improvement as a commodifiable and marketable technology of the self. We improve ourselves in order to be employable while the sense of meaning and authenticity of the process of self- improvement becomes questionable. Added to this is the hyperawareness of the political, social, and environmental conditions in the world, available in the information age that propagates a sense of meaninglessness. Neonihilism is, for instance, the way online communities have begun to process meaninglessness collectively as a tragicomedy. I argue that we attempt to find humour in our ability to share common sentiments about the hopeless conditions we are aware of, and this is evident in internet meme culture—pieces of media satirized or mimicked for humourous purposes

(see, 1.1 Chapter sections paragraph 3).

Finally, I appeal to anti-system philosophies and psychologies to argue for an anti-self-help project and relate it back to neonihilism and existentialism. By anti-system philosophies and psychologies I mean the works of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980),

Simon De Beauvoir (1908-1986), Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), Michel Foucault (1926-1984),

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), and Judith Butler (1956-), among others. The anti-self-help project

5 is critical understanding as method, as opposed to a body of knowledge—the dangers of which reside at its intersections with power (see, Foucault, 1982). Understanding then, as anti-self-help is liberation from the confines of a power-knowledge dynamic. Specifically, anti-self-help is a critical stance toward technologies of self-help, an understanding of the knowledge-power relations between neoliberalism and the self-help industry, and a focus on solidarity and collective action as alternatives to self-improvement. I will argue that the liberating potential of understanding creates avenues for subjectivity to flourish especially when we reassess the existential constructs that intersect with the self and broaden them outward to our relations with others, their needs, and their identities. Anti-self-help then, is a synthesis of ideas (e.g., understanding, performativity, existentialism) focused on liberating the self through our interrelations (e.g., solidarity, collective action).

Chapter sections

Why do we need an anti-self-help project in psychology? The project is meant to counter what

I see as the self-help industry in psychology. The industrial approach to self-help is indeed part of the problem (see chapter 1). The anti-self-help project is a challenge to what I argue are the dangers of the self-help industry. Through a critical account of the neoliberal self-help industry, I argue that it has produced anxious, self-critical, self-lamenting, by-products of a system of beliefs that demands change of hopeless external circumstances, places individual responsibility for those circumstances, and reinforces guilt for the inability to change them. In the first chapter, I argue that the primary dangers of the self-help movement are produced through the neoliberal

“industrialization” of self-help and have profound effects on subjectivity. If positive psychology has validated a growing self-help industry (intentionally or not) that contributes to stress, anxiety,

6 and self-criticism, then I argue it has produced countereffects to its mission to offer agency, self- control, and resilience (see also Bacigalupe, 2001; Binkley, 2014; Held, 2004; Miller, 2008).

In the second chapter, I reassess Sartrean existential constructs at their intersection with neoliberalism and the self-help industry and consider some of their limitations. To clarify, psychology is the primary resource for the self-help industry with its roots in positive psychology, perhaps humanistic psychology to some degree with its holistic focus on human creativity, free will, and self-actualization (see, Maslow, 1962; May, 1960; Rogers, 1957) and ironically, arguably originating in existentialism. Considering that I turn to existentialism, among other things, to critique the self-help industry it may be ironic that self-help relies on many existential constructs, such as freedom, authenticity, angst, and alienation (particularly in the Sartrean tradition).

Nevertheless, this historicity can perhaps highlight how far self-help initiatives have strayed from their origin, especially at the neoliberal turn. In the spirit of Nietzsche, I argue for a genealogical reassessment of existential constructs with a reflexive Foucauldian interrogation of the potential dangers residing at their intersections with power.

In the third chapter, I propose a novel construct: neonihilism. I argue that the human struggle for meaning continues to persist. Hence the scope of this project in assessing and reassessing existentialism, self-help, anti-self-help, and neoliberalism. I argue that a defining human characteristic, at least as a contemporary normative value and interpretive lens when studying historical works, is a search for meaning, hence the origins of philosophy, existentialism, and self- help. However, with that territory also comes the failure to obtain meaning, hopelessness, loss of faith; in other words, meaninglessness. I argue that now, perhaps more than ever, the prevalence of meaninglessness has become more apparent in the information age as the visibility of diverse voices emerge. This visibility I believe has a two-fold effect. On the one hand, it raises awareness

7 that meaninglessness is pervasive. On the other hand, it creates a community of fellow sufferers, if you will. The communal confessions of meaninglessness have begun to formulate a collective coping mechanism against the inherent fatalism by recourse to humour. I argue that the new nihilism—neonihilism—is marked by self-deprecation, hyperawareness, irony, or in a nutshell, a tragicomedy. Neonihilism in the information age is evident in meme culture, films, and television shows (e.g., Rick and Morty, see, Harmon & Roiland, 2013), and music, among other things. At the height of despair, we may find consolation in Nietzsche’s (1975/1891) prediction that some form of nihilism is necessary for change, through a reassessment of values and toward a new meaning discovered in a joy for life—amor fati—when we can accept all things good and bad as indispensable to existence with a sense of joy.

In the fourth and final chapter, I commit to yet another reassessment. The anti-self-help project is that reassessment. As I argued previously, existential constructs, whether dangerous or limited, do in fact have a phenomenological existence and do inform our subjectivity. We borrow and construct our notions of identity through some affiliation with freedom, authenticity, and perhaps angst and alienation as well. I am of the mind that so long as ideas persist in our collective consciousness they will not be retired even with force. Reassessment is then the better option— presumably to dismissal. Through intersectional theoretical lenses, like Foucault (1977/1980;

1982; 1961/1988; 1984/1985; 1975/1995; 1979/2008), Butler (1990), Fanon (1952/1968), and

Beauvoir (1949/1989), among others, I reassess identity, freedom, authenticity, angst, and alienation, as constructs that pertain to our collective search for meaning. Intersectionality as I use it here and throughout refers primarily to the macro-level of analysis of the multiplicity of social identity structures such as race, gender, sex, and class (see Crenshaw, 1989; Gopaldas, 2013;

Rosenthal, 2016; Taylor, 2007). I use the term “intersectional” when I provide various lenses from

Black5, queer, and feminist theorists (among others) to disrupt the universal use of the existential constructs listed above and provide reasons for including multifarious ways of rethinking these constructs from the experiences of diverse identities.

The object of reassessment here is not to provide “traditional” solutions. In fact, it may be to dissuade entirely from solution-focused thinking, which is an analytical process aimed at theorizing problems with a goal to fix them. It is often, or at least in this case, both necessary and sufficient to merely critique with an openness to undecidability. Understanding and knowledge for their own sake are the conditions for liberation from the restrictions and limitations of categorization. When solution-focused thinking is given primacy, it limits knowledge to a utilitarian treatment, depriving it of its liberating potential. Arguably, a project of liberation from oppressive conditions is a type of solution. However, I refrain from this language because it carries with it the notion that a solution is fixed and stable whereas I believe this is work that must be continuous and open ended to avoid any illusions of a new status quo. Essentially, to avoid solution-focused thinking is to understand this as a process, which may indeed be intended to help, but which does not assume a specific end goal after which the work is then considered done.

Contextualization

This is not a traditional work, but comes closest to a work of philosophical psychology. In some ways, I’m synthesizing and amalgamating theories, critiques, personal observations, and insights to mobilize a body of knowledge aimed at liberation. At times, this work is a critique where I interrogate the dangers of the neoliberal self-help industry and the limitations of existential

5 References to racial categories such as Black and White have been capitalized throughout (unless I’m quoting someone else where lowercase is used) to highlight a distinction between race and colour, and to emphasize the artificiality of race as a construct and not a natural category (see Appiah, 2020).

9 constructs. At times, it’s a reassessment where I follow a Nietzschean approach to rethink subjectivity in light of self-help and existential constructs while contextualizing the subject at the intersections of the contemporary world. At times, it’s an observation where I rely on insights gained from lived experience and autoethnography to reassess suffering in the modern world and propose neonihilism as a concept that describes this phenomenon.

This unorthodox approach is a product of an interdisciplinary education and a restlessness with the boundaries of ideas that are designated to be incompatible. It’s an attempt to acknowledge the messy overlap of ideas that struggle together to form a picture of being—a picture that is internally presented as holistic to the subject. It’s a struggle between the precision of the reductionistic- analytical, which often abstracts to derive conclusions and then ceases to fit back into the whole, and the phenomenal experience of being, which is itself also abstract and difficult to define without once more relying on reduction. My difficulty and perhaps my limitation stems from my interdisciplinary tradition. Becoming a jack of all trades renders you a master of none. So, my focus, or lack thereof, is dispersed. However, the writing itself is a performance meant to subvert the segregating effects of the ivory tower and demonstrate the embodied effects of academic knowledge with emotionality, political awareness, and resistance.

I want to navigate critical theories (see Butler, 1990; Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/1983), existentialism (see Beauvoir, 1949/1989; Camus, 1988; Fanon, 1952/1968; Heidegger, 1927/1962;

Kaufmann, 1968; Sartre, 1943/1992; Sartre, 1946/2007;), philosophies on suffering (see Cioran,

1970/2012; Nietzsche, 1882/1974; Nietzsche, 1887/1969; Nietzsche, 1885/1975;), theoretical and philosophical psychology (see Frankl, 1963; May, 1960), literature and fiction (see Dostoevsky,

1880/1976; Wright, 1940), some phenomenology and poststructuralism (see Derrida, 1992;

Foucault, 1961/1988; Foucault, 1979/2008; Merleau-Ponty, 1945/1962) to find where the seams of some of these ideas and theories overlap in thinking about being, subjectivity, and suffering.

What drives my interest is an obsession with suffering. How does it affect subjectivity and how does it operate in different bodies with divergent lived experiences? I look to interdisciplinary and intersectional approaches to interrogate suffering, from existential (see Arendt, 1958; Arendt,

1978; Aron, 1969; Barnes, 1967; Buber, 1923/1970; Crowell, 2001; Guignon, 2003; Hagglund,

2019; Jaspers, 1968; Judaken, & Bernasconi, 2012; Lumb, 2013; Poster, 1975; Ratcliffe, 2008), to feminist (see Frost, 2011), to postcolonial, queer, and racial theories (see Bernasconi, 2003;

Collins, 1952; Gordon, 1995; Gordon, 1997; Gordon, 2000; Lemberger-Truelove, 2016; Lugones,

1994; Simons, 2013), to ethics (see Gelven, 1997; Joy 2010), to psychological interventions (see

Loewenthal, 2010), to social media, literature, and politics (see Malone, 2015; Nayar, 2017;

Rutherford 2018; Teo 2018; Werhun & Baziun 2017).

What I often find at these intersections is a focus on meaning and compassion. In other words, ways to cope and ways to heal the self, others, and perhaps the world. Sometimes it’s idealistic; other times, it’s constructive and focused on strategies to solve practical problems. What I want to do here is avoid providing yet another piece of advice or suggesting a solution. I am inspired by

Michel Foucault (1982) and Judith Butler (1990) in believing that the rethinking of the problem may be sufficient to offer a liberating potential through the understanding of that knowledge. It liberates subjectivity by creating the conditions for the possibility of change when we are no longer restrained by the available discourse in a power-knowledge dynamic. I will argue that providing the understanding and knowledge to describe one’s experience can itself be therapeutic, cathartic, and liberating. Does this solve the root of the problems? No. But, I argue the problems are often systematic, comprising power-knowledge relations in institutionalized practices. Perhaps

11 individuals cannot directly change systemic power but shifting the way we think collectively can result in systematic changes (e.g. the #MeToo movement6). This last bit may be my own idealism slipping in.

Methodology

Most philosophical works do not explicitly discuss methodology. However, in psychology, this discussion comes at the forefront. Overall, the work I’m attempting relies heavily on reassessment which would suggest that the project is Nietzschean. I am focused on his method, namely, genealogical reassessment; however, I synthesize this with a Foucauldian lens. In some ways, I also want to reassess Nietzsche’s ideas through this process. Part of the reassessment will include other analytical tools borrowed from thinkers like Sartre, Beauvoir, Fanon, Foucault,

Derrida, and Butler among others, in order to develop multifarious ways to think about subjectivity, suffering, and the world. The aim is to interrogate and reassess suffering through an interdisciplinary and intersectional approach. Taken together, I aim to combine these methods to critique and reassess the self-help industry, existentialism, and subjectivity, and to unpack my notion of neonihilism as it intersects with these ideas.

What I mean by self-help

Self-help is a broad concept that cannot be narrowed to a single definition and in my attempts at criticizing what I’ve called the self-help industry, I must first disambiguate the potential meanings. In the first chapter I give a brief overview of self-help and my approach to criticisms of the self-help industry. However, the first and most important distinction I can make is for whom my criticisms are made. I am not criticizing the individual consumer of self-help by any means.

6 See Hosterman, Johnson, Stouffer, & Herring, 2018

What my critiques are intended to do is provide understanding about the neoliberal commodification of self-help technologies into a marketable self-help industry that is problematic at its core and can potentially be harmful to the individual. That being said, I am fully aware that there are people who benefit from self-help technologies and the self-help industry. My intention is not to disparage or to discount their experiences, as this would be entirely hypocritical given my critiques of self-help. I genuinely believe people are seeking answers to important questions, seeking meaning, and the reduction of suffering in the avenues available to them, whether it is therapy, drugs, alternative medicine, spiritual practices, or self-help. It is the commodification of self-help technologies in the neoliberal self-help industry that can be dangerous in taking advantage of the most vulnerable people that are seeking help (see chapter 1). It is for the people most vulnerable to systematic usury that I hope these critiques make a difference.

The arguments I outline throughout this project regarding neoliberal ideologies pertain to individualization, responsibilization, and oppression that I believe have a continuity in the commodification of self-help as a marketable avenue not only to sell the promise of relief from suffering, but also, potentially exploit the consumers. These promises can also be reframed in the positive sense as marketable strategies for self-improvement, biohacking, or self-care, with similar detrimental effects in creating a relationship of usury with the individual, which is then subjectified internally as a relationship of usury with the self. My criticisms then are specific to the self-help industry as a collection of commodified practices and technologies in the White western world for the (typically) White western consumer. These include but are not limited to self-help books, workshops, interventions, retreats, digital applications, work seminars, and websites. My critiques are not specifically aimed at self-help in general and to self-help or community support groups. As someone who was a former advocate of individualized practices of self-help and firm believer in

13 responsibilization, I can account also for my own experiences in parts of this work. Although my experiences are limited to a perspective that I consider to be privileged, it is that very privilege that forms part of the problematic culture of the self-help industry based on neoliberal ideology. This problematic ideology which I will argue permeates the neoliberal self-help industry is something

I had to unlearn, and with great difficulty. I hope the autoethnographic sections serve both as convincing and cautionary.

Throughout this project, I will attempt to highlight where the self-help industry becomes problematic and why. I will address neoliberalism as a primary driving factor in manufacturing a self-help industry, with the help of positive psychology, which produces at times interventions aimed at the affluent and educated who can already help themselves while ignoring the marginalized, and other times producing countereffects like increasing dependency on market solutions for a faulty sense of self-efficacy. The problematic ideologies that sustain the neoliberal self-help industry reside in colonial mentality, false meritocracy, problematic universal treatment

(e.g., colourblind racial theory), and narcissism, among others. I will instead propose reassessments, intersectionality, solidarity, and collective action not as prescriptive alternatives, but rather, as descriptive accounts that raise awareness of the problematic nature of the neoliberal self-help industry. The aim through understanding is toward liberation from oppressive systemic power and the freedom to create the conditions for the possibility of change.

1. THE SELF-HELP INDUSTRY AT THE NEOLIBERAL TURN: INSCRIPTIONS ON

SUBJECTIVITY

It is difficult to pin down the precise origins of the self-help industry. Depending on what we mean by self-help—a body of work produced to advise individuals on how best to conduct their lives—we can trace self-help philosophies to Plato, the Stoics, Greco-Roman philosophers, and religious texts. For example, Aristotle (ca. 350 B.C.E. /2011) conceived the concept of eudaimonia—flourishing or wellbeing derived from living a morally virtuous life—in contrast to hedonism. The Stoics (see Laertius ca. 1100 A.D./ 2018) amended Aristotle’s ethical wisdom with a particularly strong version of eudaimonia that neglects anything but moral virtue as necessary for the good life (Russell, 1984). While Boethius (525AD/1999) instructed us to overcome the self through consolation provided by philosophy and accept whatever fate bestows with humility and the reconciliation that life owes us nothing. Most religious texts are arguably self-help books replete with commandments, proverbs, instructions, wisdom, and consequences. However, under this definition, self-help becomes confounded with the act of writing, where some have argued that

Ancient Egyptian codes of conduct are the first examples of self-help guides (McGee, 2005).

Contemporary notions of self-help, though indebted to philosophies of the good life and cultural or religious doctrines, are focused on stepwise instructions for coping with or overcoming specific problems, the idea of self-improvement, and perhaps the occasional holistic good life manual or etiquette book. Arguably, self-help seen in this way is the commodification of philosophical doctrines for the lay consumer. The APA Dictionary of Psychology defines self-help as a focus on self-improvement, self-reliance, and the reading of self-help books in lieu of seeking professional help (VandenBos, 2015).

One of the first self-help books to focus on the idea of self-improvement is Samuel Smiles’s

(1859/2002) Self-Help: With Illustrations of Character and Conduct published in 1859. It sold exceptionally well throughout Europe and launched Smiles as a self-help “guru” (Sinnema, 2002).

Napoleon Hill’s (1937/2005) Think and Grow Rich published in 1937, was one of the first self- improvement books to focus on the power of positive thinking to attain wealth and wellbeing outlined in 13 steps. It has since sold over 15 million copies and continues to be a bestseller along with other seminal works like Dale Carnegie’s (1936) How to Win Friends and Influence People, and Vincent Peale’s (1952) The Power of Positive Thinking (Pell, 2005).

Alternatively, we can look at the first self-help groups, such as Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), founded in 1935 in the United States, which stands as the oldest and largest self-help group.

(VandenBos, 2015b). In the 1960s, second-wave feminism and the civil rights movement began as community support groups and were also considered in some form “self-help” (McGee, 2005).

However, the aim of this project is not to outline a history of self-help, self-help groups, or self- help books. There are plenty of books and criticisms on this topic (see Davies, 2015; Dolby, 2008;

Ehrenreich, 2009; McGee, 2005; Salerno, 2005; Starker, 2002; Tiede, 2001).

In this project, I focus specifically on the self-help movement as it transitioned from a self- improvement culture into a self-help industry at the neoliberal turn and its effects on subjectivity.

De Keere (2014) conducted a thematic content analysis of professional advice literature from the

1930s onward, divided into three periods corresponding to transitions in capitalism. From the

1930s to the 1960s, self-help books exemplified the first spirit of capitalism (traditional capitalism) with a focus on utilitarianism, bourgeois morality, and self-discipline, outlining skill competencies and advice on how to best perform specific tasks (De Keere, 2014). From the 1960s to the 1990s a semantic shift in the self-help literature matched the ethos of the second spirit of capitalism.

Psychology began to play a crucial role with much of the self-help literature relying on psychometrics and psychological studies to introduce a self-work ethic, provide advice on seeking work that aligns with personal aspirations, and address wellbeing (De Keere, 2014).

The second spirit of capitalism was the induction of neoliberalism—laissez-faire economic liberalism with free market capitalism—that occurred simultaneously with the culture of postmodernism (Jameson, 1991). Postmodern cultural logic matched the framework of neoliberalism to commodify the self through self-help for the appearance of optimal success

(Tudor, 2012). Postmodern subjectivity emerged as a self-reflexive and transformative self in resistance to the values of modernism. It was a subjectivity that defied a unified identity in favour of heterogenous conceptualizations of self (Lyotard, 1979/1984). Nevertheless, this made postmodern subjectivity ripe for the second spirit of capitalism to commodify those values into self-help ethics.

The emergence of postmodern subjectivity also paved the way for critiques of neoliberalism through an interrogation of the conditions that cause subjectivities to form. Foucault (1961/1988) was one of the early critics of the historical process of constructing subjectivity or what he called subjectification. Seen in this way, subjectivity is not a stable set of facts about the self but a set of ideas that have the possibility to change. Understanding this possibility for change allows us to problematize the conditions that restrict subjectivity. Within postmodern subjectivity, a transformational possibility exists that can be exploited as a self-help commodity in neoliberalism or understood to have a liberating potential if the conditions that restrict subjectivity are investigated.

For Foucault (1984/1985) reason is one of the problematic conditions for subjectivity because reason defines itself in contrast to an Other, simultaneously endowing the truth conditions and

17 limitations for the Other as well as creating the appearance that reason originates from itself. The limitations of reason were also seen as the limitations of modernity—an obsession with truth, scientific method, and competition. Foucault (1977/1980) praises Nietzsche’s genealogy7 for uncovering the historical origin of reason, where the “devotion to truth and the precision of scientific methods arose from the passion of scholars, their reciprocal hatred, their fanatical and unending discussions, and their spirit of competition—the personal conflicts that slowly forged the weapons of reason” (p. 142). Postmodern thought worked as a critical analysis of the conditions that allowed for the emergence and sustainability of reason and its effects on subjectivity, and helping reimagine the self out of the traditional framework of capitalism.

Postmodern subjectivity also challenged conceptions of a unified consciousness in favour of a multiplicity of faculties for subjectivity (Deleuze, 1968/1994). Gergen (1991) argues that the postmodern self is oversaturated with sensory input, constant change, and relationships to the point it breaks down into a relational self, where relations become the nexus of human action. The postmodern self is a multifarious production of knowledge and power with the unique potential to problematize restrictive conditions, thus having a liberating potential for subjectivity. This liberating potential was in opposition to capitalism, which functioned to commodify the subject.

Through abstracting the diverse desires of the subject and recoding them all into money, capitalism became “schizophrenic” and yet repudiated schizophrenia as a limitation to thinking (as opposed to multiple faculties of thinking). Yet, it was precisely through schizophrenic thinking (or multiplicity of faculties) that critiques of capitalism could arise as schizoanalysis8—a study of the

7 Foucault here references Nietzsche’s (1978/1996) Human all too Human. 8 This is not meant to be an exhaustive account of the complexities of schizoanalysis—a method that was revised several times. It is merely an acknowledgement of a powerful critique of capitalism that is here worth mentioning because it continues to inform theories of subjectivity.

18 abstract symbols of desire, their generation, transformations, emergence, and performance

(Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/1983). The power of this kind of subjectivity is to liberate the self from the limitations of reason by seeing schizophrenic thinking as a viable method for critiquing capitalism without romanticizing its pathology. “The schizophrenic deliberately seeks out the very limit of capitalism: he is its inherent tendency brought to fulfillment, its surplus product, its proletariat, and its exterminating angel” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/1983, p. 35). Schizoanalysis aims to challenge the meanings we accept by demonstrating avenues for creating new meanings for ourselves at the peripheries of reason through fragmented thinking.

Despite the promise of liberation from the restrictive norms and power relations that shape subjectivity, the transformative potential of some postmodern thinking was being countered with the conservative turn toward neoliberalism (McGee, 2005). As an economic theory, neoliberalism promised freedom through individualization, privatization, and family. With the seductive and simple narrative of freedom from governmental intervention, neoliberalism achieved a superficial status of liberation while depoliticizing the complex critiques of postmodernism (Brown, 2015).

French postmodern thinking was a form of resistance to neoliberalism. However, neoliberalism overshadowed these critiques with its seductive simplicity and continued the schizophrenic production of desires into money under the guise of liberty. The ethos of neoliberal economic policy reterritorialized subjectivity from the potential for multiple faculties of thinking to the former and easily digestible unified consciousness (see Hilgers, 2013; Lugones, 1994). Neoliberal subjectivity reverted to the simple, uniform, and stable self that reinforced the values of individuality, self-responsibility, and the oedipal family. In other words, the self was salvaged from the dangers of schizophrenic thinking and primed once more for the potential for self- improvement, self-reliance, and self-help.

The self-improvement culture continued to grow exponentially as self-help books more than doubled in sales between 1972-2000, going from 1.1 percent to 2.4 percent of total books in print

(Whelan, 2004). De Keere (2014) describes the 1990s and onward as the third spirit of capitalism, which embodies the values of neoliberalism beyond economic policy and into the cultural. The self-help literature in this period began to reflect the neoliberal cultural values with a focus on flexibility, self-actualization, and the reframing of work as a mode of self-expression. The liberating promises of postmodernity were commodified under neoliberalism to ensure the survival of capitalism, much of which relied on technologies of self-help. The self-help industry boomed in the 1990s, with self-help book sales rising by 96 percent between 1991-1996 in America

(McGee, 2005). The self-improvement market had an estimated value of $11 billion in 2019 with a projected annual growth of 11.4 percent (Marketdata LLC, 2019).

Enter Neoliberalism: Exit Liberation

As neoliberalism became orthodoxy in Britain and North America, arguably in the 1980’s, government was replaced with governance (Harvey, 2005). Self-governance meant individualism, family values, privatization, and responsibilization. With neoliberalism the integrated nature of the political became evident in all aspects of life while simultaneously masking power relations, depoliticizing, and promoting competition over solidarity, among other things (Brown, 2015).

Even prior to the neoliberal turn and the establishment of the Mont Pèlerin Society (est. 1947), political economist and social philosopher Karl Polanyi (1886-1964) anticipated the effects of neoliberalism with a critique of the capitalist self-regulating free market. Polanyi saw social dislocation as an inevitability of a market economy separated from social welfare (Harvey, 2005).

Polanyi (1944) criticized capitalist notions of freedom for enabling the freedom to exploit, amass large gains without giving back to the community, and to profit from public calamities.

“Thirty years of neoliberal freedoms, have, after all, not only restored power to a narrowly defined capitalist class. They also produced immense concentration of corporate power in energy, the media, pharmaceuticals, transportation, and even retailing (for example Wal-Mart)” (Harvey,

2005, p. 38). Neoliberal freedom only benefits those who already have financial and social security to further exploit opportunities for growth. On the one hand, the freedom to exploit accelerates through neoliberal policy. On the other hand, the ethos of neoliberalism is embodied in the collective consciousness making subjects ripe for exploitation. You are a private, free, and responsible individual existing in a milieu of endless opportunity to grow, accumulate wealth, and use others to obtain your goals. To sell this illusion, opportunity is coupled with a false meritocracy where competition determines success and where failure defines your own limitations (Davies,

2014).

Reversing this formula highlights the requirement for systematic usury9 of others to achieve the ambitions of the individual. Usury is at the crux of neoliberalism—instrumental relationships between the state and the individual, instrumental relationships with others, and ultimately instrumental relationships with the self. In neoliberalism, Teo (2018) argues, “the pinnacle self is achieved, when “I” not only have an instrumental, entrepreneurial relationship to the “self,” but also, when “myself” is an entrepreneurial entity” (p. 585). It further demonstrates the impossibility of neoliberal freedom for everyone. Clearly, liberation is accessible to the already able, powerful, educated, and privileged class, and not only limited for the other, but also, limiting the other as the former grows10. Either way, liberation is restricted to the few while the opportunity for liberation

9 Usury as I am using it here and throughout refers specifically to exploitation and the taking advantage of other’s misfortunes for personal gain. 10 This is an inverse perspective on Berlin’s (1969) distinction between negative and positive liberties, by looking at the limitations neoliberalism imposes instead.

21 is sold to the masses. The protective caveat comes from the union with meritocracy that justifies the earning of liberation where privatization, individualization, and the absence of governmental intervention in social welfare advertises autonomy for everyone. Ignoring the existing context and power relations in place rigs the system in favour of those with existing financial, social, and cultural capital. When the promise of neoliberal liberation fails the individual, the ethos of neoliberal subjectivity works to internalize failure as a personal shortcoming—a pathology.

Enter positive psychology. After nearly two decades of neoliberalism at work, positive psychology, as a neoliberal project, emerged to challenge the pathologizing, sick, and negative psychology persisting toward the end of the 90s (see Yen, 2014). With a focus on the resilient, self-actualized, and motivated outliers, positive psychology intended to study happy overachievers and determine how to reproduce their success. All the while, the underachievers, maladjusted, and unhappy became synonymous with an inability to act with agency (Binkley, 2011). In other words, the reason you fail to obtain the promise of liberation (economic and/or social) through neoliberalism is that you do not embrace your neoliberal freedom. Neoliberal freedom centers on individualization, responsibilization, and competition for personal growth, which entails freedom from social and economic obstacles. In other words, you cannot have freedom if you do not act with freedom. If you lack the ability to obtain neoliberal freedom, it can be commodified and sold to you so that you can help yourself to liberation.

The task of positive psychology is to grant agency to the individual by means of self-help strategies derived from empirical measures of success and successful individuals (Gable & Haidt,

2005). Positive psychology has naïvely good intentions to help people help themselves as opposed to being treated as dysfunctional. Its aim is to give them the autonomy of self-reliance and activate their potential for self-actualization. Positive psychology has an empirical focus on wellbeing and

22 happiness in response to the lack of empiricism in the Humanistic tradition and the disease model of mainstream psychology (Yen, 2014). The point is to uncover the positive aspects of psychology modeled by successful individuals and construct strategies for others to achieve success by emulating those behaviours. Successful behaviours centered around neoliberal values like individualization and responsibilization could then be operationalized and marketed. Seligman and

Csikszentmihalyi (2000) initiated the field of positive psychology with three principal focuses

(nodes): positive emotions, positive character, and positive communities. Each of these constructs were operationalized for empirical study and transformed into products, such as courses, therapeutic interventions, workshops, military training, and self-help books, among other things

(Linley & Joseph, 2004).

Csikszentmihalyi, tasked by Seligman (1999) with the second node of positive psychology, namely, positive character, forwarded his preexisting construct of “flow” to describe a state of intense focus on an inherently rewarding activity achieved by the autoletic person

(Csikszentmihalyi, 1997). The autoletic person accepts freedom through responsibility for their actions, embraces Nietzsche’s amor fati, is self-sufficient, and masters control over their desires to avoid indulgence, boredom, and entropy (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997). Laziness is a renunciation of life and positive psychology, which poses a bright future achieved by liberating ourselves from our genetic and social limitations, embracing symbolic values (e.g. skill over material possessions), and promoting passion for living (Csikszentmihalyi, 2009).

At the same time, Seligman (1999) focused on wellbeing, building character strengths, and resilience. He marked happiness as the result of good character, determined by virtues (see

Peterson, Ruch, Beermann, Park, & Seligman, 2007) and resilience to trauma (see Peterson, Park,

Pole, D’Andrea, & Seligman, 2008). Resilience was then commodified into an instruction and

23 taught to soldiers to prevent PTSD (see, Seligman & Fowler, 2011) and, should that fail, the soldier could have recourse to positive psychotherapy (PPT) for dealing with the trauma (see, Seligman,

Rashid, & Parks, 2006). The strategies and nodes of positive psychology were promising avenues for achieving happiness and self-improvement.

Happiness, self-actualization, mindfulness, agency, motivation, and resilience were the neoliberal and marketable promises of the self-help industry that positive psychology legitimated with the aura of science. Nevertheless, this presumed “scientific validation” is largely contested on grounds of intellectual dishonesty, pseudoscience, superficial knowledge, false data, errors, and fraudulent results that have been at the core of critiques against positive psychology (see

McDonald & O’Callaghan, 2008; Brown, Sokal, & Friedman, 2013; Frawley, 2015; Fernandez-

Rios & Vilarino, 2016). With empirical claims and the mystique of science, self-help gained validity in the public consciousness.

Within neoliberal self-help culture, the individual is responsible for their happiness and success, independent of sociopolitical context, environment, visible and invisible disabilities, or access to resources (Binkley, 2014). Neoliberalism as an ideology has also moved beyond sociopolitical context, environment, and legislation. It is embodied in human practices and ways of thinking about ourselves in the world. Though some economists may argue that we are in a post- neoliberal political climate (see Macdonald & Ruckert, 2009), we have nevertheless embodied neoliberalism as practice, much of which continues to rely on notions of self-help in terms of self- reliance, self-responsibility, self-work, self-control, competition, marketability, freedom, resilience, reflexivity, and flexibility (Hilgers, 2013). Despite critiques of the economic model, embodied neoliberal values would take considerable time to overcome. The neoliberal subject is a malleable product that can transcend sociopolitical limitations and flourish given the right

24 conditions and instruction, both possibilities became readily available in the self-help industry and backed by the empirical assurances of positive psychology.

There are many existing criticisms of positive psychology and the self-help industry. For example, Walsh (2016) argues that mindfulness has been depoliticized and commodified into self- help with ahistorical and asocial practices, or what has been popularly dubbed as

“McMindfulness.” Meanwhile, advocates of critical mindfulness are attempting to salvage it by acknowledging the importance of situating the practices within various cultural contexts (Fatemi,

2016; Repetti, 2016; Walsh, 2016). Bacigalupe (2001) and Yen (2010) independently point out the absence of cultural context and reflexivity in positive psychology where universalizing solutions are proposed through a White western male bias. Lazarus (2003) criticizes the naïve optimism of positive psychology, its willful neglect of the important formative power of negative experiences, and the inextricability of the negative and positive experiences that inform behaviour. Friedman and Robbins (2012) also argue for inseparable influence of positive and negative experiences especially when it comes to resilience, which cannot be conceived in the absence of adversity and cannot always be considered a virtue (e.g., Hitler was resilient).

Similarly, Held (2004) argues that the dismissal of negative experiences creates a problematic dichotomy where all negative experiences are bad and all positive experiences are good, resulting in tyrannical optimism. Norem and Chang (2002) provide empirical data to contradict the confirmation bias of positive psychology, showing that strategies like defensive pessimism can result in positive outcomes and unrealistic optimism can result in negative outcomes. Furthermore, positive and negative characteristics cannot be understood without context and outcome, especially when considering wellbeing on a continuum (Wood & Tarrier, 2010).

Positive psychology has been heavily criticized for neglecting the negative experiences that are important to human flourishing, especially considering the roots of positive psychology in the humanistic tradition, which was itself heavily informed by existentialism and phenomenology

(Froh, 2004). It also ignores the flourishing potential of adversity and melancholy that is often seen in the arts (Wilson, 2008). This narrow view of human flourishing constricts the culturally bound definition of happiness and thereby limits subjectivity (Frawley, 2015). Furthermore, positive psychology is fixed in a North American context while claiming universality. One notable limitation to this lack of reflexivity is how knowledge and/or wisdom are treated and understood.

Before the inception of positive psychology, Csikszentmihalyi and Rathunde (1990) conceptualized an evolutionary hermeneutics of the origins and nature of wisdom. However, positive psychology maintained an atheoretical stance on its own dispensation of wisdom, which could be limited to an instrumental framework within the cognitive-behavioural paradigm (see

Blanchard-Fields & Norris, 1995) as an expert knowledge system (see Ardelt, 2004), epistemic cognition (see King & Kitchener, 2004), or a practice or problem finding (see Arlin, 1990).

Aside from having an implicit authoritative stance on its own knowledge production as a scientific practice, positive psychology faces many criticisms for the research it continues to produce. Miller (2008) accuses positive psychology of poor scientific practices and equating mental health to a personality type that is defined by a limited view of happiness. In other words, happiness is equated with being psychologically fit to endure stress in the work environment without mental breakdown (Binkley, 2014). Positive psychology is then merely promoting a version of subjectivity revered for success and the measure of success is calculated in the neoliberal context, namely, a mentally fit, self-motivated, goal-driven, status-seeking extravert. The studies in positive psychology are unreflexive toward the neoliberal values it assumes, and the results are

26 sometimes based on poor data that cannot be replicated, contributing to the replicability crisis in psychology (Robbins & Friedman, 2017).

Not only is happiness narrowed to a neoliberal subjectivity defined by mental health and status, but presumably also an implicitly heterosexual subject. Queer happiness does not enter the picture where coming-out narratives could be considered a form of success and resiliency, or how the pressures of happiness confront these narratives as expected results, or better yet how positivity is not an effective strategy for overcoming systemic issues (see Love, 2008; Meyer, 2017). These criticisms relate to broader issues in the White western male lens of positive psychology’s naïve happiness, like its lack of intersectionality, context, and efficacy in solving the systemic problems that prevent marginalized Others from obtaining happiness, even that nostalgic and naïve White happiness. Cultural diversity is blatantly ignored in favour of sweeping prescriptions for happiness, presenting an implicit forced choice to assimilate with the dominant group’s version of happiness or face unhappy segregation from the promised good life. Diversity itself becomes an object of happiness by idealizing a happy common ground of heterogeneity where none exists while the undoing of systemic racism is still pending (Ahmed, 2007).

The naïve and culturally biased notions of happiness endorsed by positive psychology are adopted into the self-help literature with even less context and more universalizing promises for self-improvement. For example, in his own self-help book, Authentic Happiness, Seligman (2004) writes “the positive feeling that arises from the exercise of strengths and virtues, rather than from the shortcuts, is authentic” (p. 8). This type of statement appeals to common sense while taking for granted universal definitions of personal strengths and virtues as markers of a universal notion of authenticity. The reader then understands from their first-person perspective that in order to be

27 authentic they must independently exercise their strengths and virtues, which is diluted and decontextualized philosophical advice forming an obvious conclusion.

In fact, the strategies employed in the self-help literature often rely on evading and denying social relations in order to achieve happiness (Rimke, 2000). Despite your vulnerability to marginalization or awareness of oppressive systems that marginalize others, your best bet is to ignore those factors and focus on the only thing you have in your power to change—yourself. For example, in his bestselling self-help book, Flow, Csikszentmihalyi (1990) argues that “optimal experience is something that we make happen” (p. 3) and “in the long-run optimal experiences add up to a sense of mastery—or perhaps better, a sense of participation in determining the content of life” (p. 4), which constitute his notion of flow, “the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost” (p. 4). Csikszentmihalyi’s (1990) research was based on “artists, athletes, musicians, chess masters, and surgeons; in other words, people who seemed to spend their time in precisely those activities they preferred” (p. 4). Yet, Csikszentmihalyi (1990) claims it is not exclusive to the affluent and elite because “It [flow] was reported in essentially the same words by old women from Korea, by adults in Thailand and India, by teenagers in Tokyo, by Navajo shepherds, by farmers in the Italian Alps, and by workers on the assembly line in Chicago” (p. 4).

This highlights the neoliberal values of individualization and responsibilization in obtaining the freedom of self-governance where we can transform work into meaningful self-expression, which can apparently be marketed cross-culturally in various contexts and across sociopolitical boundaries.

In neoliberal subjectivity, self-control is marketed as a pinnacle strategy for obtaining success.

In another self-help book based in positive psychology, Baumeister and Tierney (2011) argue that

“Research into willpower and self-control is psychology’s best hope for contributing to human welfare” (p. 1). This reasoning reinforces the idea that you are responsible for your condition and

Baumeister and Tierney (2011) offer strategies to control your condition, like maintaining optimal glucose levels in your blood to recharge your willpower, basically amounting to a diet for self- control. Neoliberal agency demands responsibility only for the self and one’s family unit, and the promise of happiness is only achieved when every individual worries only about themselves and allows others to do the same (Teo, 2018). However, the promises of self-help may not even pan out. With poor operational definitions, bad measurement, and shaky results, coupled with a rush- to-market strategy driven by the success of big-business commodification of self-help and happiness, positive psychology is selling exaggerated, uncritical, and unsubstantiated claims

(Rosen, 1993).

Self-help is then an individualized project devoid of context and sociopolitical issues, often based on the scientific authority of positive psychology and powered by the highly profitable self- help industry. The self-help industry fuels a self-help culture resting on bad science that shapes subjectivity in ways that may become difficult even for modern therapies to dissect (Illouz, 2008).

The effects of responsibilization for one’s inadequacies are perpetually reinforced on the neoliberal subject while therapies only possibly can form a small attempt at undoing the damage on an individual level; that is, if one even has access to therapy. Income inequality is a causal factor for poor health and wellbeing that forms part of the systemic issues requiring change (Pickett &

Wilkinson, 2015). Furthermore, it is hardly useful to convince someone that systemic issues are the root cause if they seek therapeutic intervention because the intervention is often only aimed at fixing the self, rather than sociopolitical problems at the core of the problem. Even if successful in treating some of the symptoms, the individual is not removed from the over-saturated environment

29 of self-help nor are possibilities for systemic change evaluated (see McGee, 2005). Neoliberal subjectivity embodies systematic problems as personal failures and therapy may only be equipped to dispel some of the effects of responsibilization but certainly not the systemic root causes.

The pervasive self-help industry profits from the commodification and sales of happiness through a mechanistic framework that intends to pacify users temporarily to increase productivity

(Davies, 2015). The main problem is that at the core, the same systems responsible for the stressors that cause one’s misery are producing the solutions with a focus on responsibility and resiliency as key factors in overcoming the stressors they refuse to change. Davies (2015) suggests that instead of accepting materialistic competition, commodified happiness seminars, life-coaches, self-help books, and responsibility for success or failure in a rigged process, externalizing these feelings critically onto power structures with the aim of revolt may be more therapeutic.

Brinkmann (2017) also argues for resistance to the self-help craze in the ever-accelerating liquid modernity by recourse to Stoicism and accepting our limitations. However, to mobilize resistance and revolt I would add collective action and solidarity to these suggestions as community-focused initiatives to avoid promoting more self-help strategies to combat the self-help industry.

What of subjectivity in the post-neoliberal world?

Without acknowledging the possibility for solidarity, community, and collective action as viable alternatives to neoliberal subjectivity, we continue to perpetuate mental health risks (among other problems) with factory farm treatments. Individual resistance, though sometimes effective, falls back into responsibilization and often back into neoliberal embodiment. The distinction between liberation from neoliberalism and neoliberal liberation is often obscure, especially for the individual. The former is a means to escape the neoliberal model while the latter works within it to produce the freedom to exploit others (see Polanyi, 1944). Neoliberal liberation embraces the

30 free market and puts the onus on the individual to compete for available resources to achieve independent goals. Liberation from neoliberalism is an attempt to subvert the neoliberal model of usury and exploitation in order to find other avenues for sustainability. The problem is both models can have the appearance of empowerment.

Empowerment can present itself as an escape route from the neoliberal rat race until the mode of empowerment itself is coopted and commodified. Even interpersonal relations become coopted toward the self-help narrative. Reciprocity, ethics, compassion, social life, and dating are reconstituted avenues for personal happiness through instrumental relationships with others

(Binkley, 2011). Whether we are in a neoliberal or post-neoliberal economy, the neoliberal model of usury has been inscribed into subjectivity, informing individuals how to use others for personal growth. I argue here that neoliberal subjectivity also forms a relationship of usury with the self.

Neoliberal subjectivity promotes the commodification of the self for marketability. In the entrepreneurial process of selling oneself, soft skills, or identity as a brand, the narrative of empowerment sustains an illusory zeitgeist of liberation from systematic usury (see Rushing,

2016). It spuriously places the individual in an agentic position as though one is using the system to one’s advantage. This advantage is in presumably overcoming systemic usury and sociopolitical problems as well. For example, the girl power movement popularized by the Spice Girls in the

90’s promoted empowerment through individualism, personal responsibility, and overt sexuality not only as liberating, but also as postfeminist (Rutherford, 2018). However, freely chosen confidence and sexual autonomy meant women’s empowerment could not accommodate helplessness or being a victim because that would be shameful in postfeminism (Rutherford, 2018).

Freedom must then be limited only to narratives of success and overcoming adversity under neoliberalism. This way, both neoliberalism and neoliberal subjectivity are shown to be successful

31 in combating usury and oppression. In the case of women’s empowerment, sexuality is defined as freely chosen behaviours so long as they conform to the neoliberal model of sexual agency (Bay-

Cheng, 2015). If women claim to have control over their sexual behaviours, neoliberalism is successful in endorsing liberation and postfeminism simultaneously. Toffoletti and Thorpe (2018) offer examples of female athletes on social media where “…young women are compelled toward performing heterosexy forms of femininity online and celebrating self-display as the freely chosen actions of liberated female subjects” (p. 16). The authors argue that the empowerment that social media affords to renegotiate conflicts of athleticism and femininity ignores how women personally reconcile these demands and undermines solidarity in transforming gender roles as collective action.

Operating within the bounds of neoliberalism seems to increase the risk of incriminating the individual. Whether she is athletic, voluptuous, heterosexy, or countercultural, her image can be commodified to sell empowerment. The love-your-body movement on social media responsibilizes her to demonstrate overcoming prejudicial standards without calling for collective activism or meaningful social change (Toffoletti & Thorpe, 2018). The narrative of success refocuses on her as strong, empowered and, in this case, postfeminist for overcoming unrealistic standards. Success can be obtained with the currency of a confident “free choice” to love your body despite so-called social pressures to look a certain way while ignoring the existing social pressures to enact individualized empowerment. In other words, you too can be successful in the neoliberal model if you freely accept personal responsibility for overcoming systematic issues like sexism, misogyny, racism, ableism, among others, despite your appearance.

Systemic injustices are then reduced to personal problems that you can be empowered to overcome. Neoliberalism reframes “…feminism as an individualized endeavour firmly located in

32 the market” (Toffoletti & Thorpe, 2018, p. 28). Turning systemic issues into personal responsibility creates a relationship of usury with the self in which curated versions of the self are used to sell an ideal of empowerment. Commodifying your identity to fight for social problems initiates boundaries, much like the postfeminist boundaries that renounce helplessness (see

Rutherford, 2018). To sell a holistic image, the unmarketable domains of the self must be fractured away. It is a desperate attempt at purity through the logic of reason that will not accept multiplicity in subjectivity or thinking. “The modern subject must be masked as standing separate from his own multiplicity and what commits him to multiplicity” (Lugonez, 1994, p. 464). Even if we reject purified unity and voice our complaint, the complaint is lost in the shadow of the commodified self.

When the self becomes the product, the message is often lost because it is perceived as a personal problem, not a systemic or social issue. Even if the individual complainant isn’t marketable (doesn’t have a successful commodified self), the decree of personal responsibility remains pervasive. Cooper (2017) argues that the rise of safe spaces, microaggressions, triggers, and personal outrage is a result of a neoliberal refusal to accord social risk protection and services.

Moral outrage and the politics of outrage then disservice the left by obscuring gender and racial violence, caricaturing the left, and alienating the complainants from society; the attention is on the complainant and the issue is forgotten (Cooper, 2017). This phenomenon has even entered popular culture as a dystopian theme, indicating that the idea is prevalent in our lived experiences. I refer here to a television series for an example because I believe popular culture captures valuable social commentary that often has a greater impact and more appeal for people than academic examples.

The study of pop culture is political in breaking down barriers of class, taste, and tradition toward understanding how our norms and values are shaped in context (Hinds, Motz, & Nelson, 2006).

As such, it presents ripe examples of how mass culture interprets the world we exist in and reveals our attitudes, beliefs, and deeply rooted values.

In the television series Black Mirror, the episode Fifteen Million Merits (Brooker, Huq, &

Lyn, 2011) captures a dystopian view of the dilution of social issues in the process of commodifying the self. In a futuristic world where people live indoors surrounded by nonstop video advertisements, cycling on stationary bikes to generate power in exchange for credits

(merits) is the only way to a better life. Bing, the protagonist, earns enough credits to afford his friend Abi an audition on a talent show that promises her a better future. Her singing does not captivate the judges, but they offer her a chance to work in pornography instead. Bing then sees

Abi in a pornographic advertisement and becomes disillusioned with life. He then decides to earn enough credits (a long and arduous process) to audition himself on the show. Once he secures a spot, Bing interrupts his own audition with an impassioned rant against the systemic issues that he and others are forced into, while holding a shard of glass to his neck and threatening to kill himself.

The judges are in awe. After a dramatic pause, they offer Bing his own show where he regularly rants with a shard of glass against his neck from his new luxurious home with a view of the forest

(Brooker, Huq, & Lyn, 2011).

Black Mirror is a pessimistic commentary on potential futures that could arise in the wake of neoliberalism. The episode Fifteen Million Merits not only critiques neoliberal competition and frivolous laboring for superficial success, but also demonstrates the power to commodify even the outcast’s narrative once it becomes threatening to the system. Bing takes center stage and poses a potential threat that is coopted into a marketable product. His outrage becomes entertainment that not only affords him a better life but also ameliorates the viewers’ frustrations, who then experience catharsis through Bing’s rants. The sociopolitical issues covered in his rants also

34 become entertainment. The rants lose their revolutionary potential and instead the spotlight falls on Bing. Resistance is demonstrated to be possible not merely by threatening the system but necessarily also threatening the self. To forfeit his participation in the system Bing had to threaten to sacrifice himself. His failed resistance became his neoliberal success. His rant was the catalyst for the marketability of his subjectivity. In the end, Bing retreats into a relationship of usury with himself because the systemic powers are too strong for him to resist alone, especially when resistance equals complete self-sacrifice.

The relationship of usury with the self is not limited to sociopolitical resistance. It operates in self-reflection when we compete and compare ourselves with others. For example, Silva (2013) argues that financial independence determines one’s worth and value as a potential partner in a romantic relationship, both to others and to the self. The way we stack up to others has an impact on our subjective self-worth and the measures we employ to elevate our status must then be consistent with the neoliberal model where competition and meritocracy deliver the rewards, whether they are financial, romantic, or intrapersonal. The values that we uphold and market about ourselves then also become the standards by which we are rated for our services.

The neoliberal model promotes the use of the self as entrepreneurial, independent, and responsibilized. We are encouraged to sell the marketable self for precarious work, a process that highlights both the relationship of usury between power structures and the self, and the relationship of usury with the self. In what has been called the neoliberal gig economy, or sharing economy, precarious work such as that purveyed by, Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Yelp, and Couchsurfing, is being marketed under the guise of flexibility while altruistic social values are exploited as punitive measures through rating systems (Zwick, 2018). The gig economy effectively reduces stable middle-class employment in favour of “flexible” work without benefits and legal protection

(Cockayne, 2016). Furthermore, the sharing economy purports the values of economic opportunity, ethical consumption, sustainability, decentralized economy, and innovation, while maintaining a neoliberal model that actively negates these possibilities, making work unsustainable, heavily centralized, and promoting hyper-consumption (Martin, 2016).

The neoliberal model exploits social values by integrating them into the sharing economy as rating systems for workers (see Zwick, 2018). I argue these values are simultaneously exploited by the self-help industry as marketable self-improvement strategies. For example, if an individual wants to improve their chances of obtaining a “gig” in the sharing economy, it is in their best interest to proceed first with an investment in the self by developing marketable attributes (e.g., flexibility and self-reliance). Buying into the self-help industry is a start-up cost for your entrepreneurial self to have a chance at precarious work, a type of work that foregoes benefits and can increase stress because of its unstable nature. When the conditions of the neoliberal gig economy amount to stress, anxiety, depression, or burnout, individuals are often forced to resort to self-help in the absence of benefits, labour law, and collective action that are typically available with stable employment (Burns, 2017).

For examples of resistance to the neoliberal model and self-help industry, we can investigate transgressive narratives existing outside the boundaries of legal economy. Communities forged at the margins of society are forced into solidarity and collective action as the only available outlets for support. Where governmentality is nearly absent and the illusion of hyperindividualization dispelled, communities come together organically. An example can be drawn from prostitution. In

North America, prostitution is for the most part illegal. In Canada, Bill C-36 was passed to criminalize prostitution in 2014 (Parliament of Canada, 2014) despite The Library of Parliament’s

2004 review indicating criminalization as an ineffective singular response to reduce harm in the

36 absence of social services to protect sex workers (Cool, 2004). In the United States, prostitution is illegal (with the exception of Nevada) while the SESTA-FOSTA bills were passed in 2018 to criminalize advertising sexual services online in hopes of ending sex trafficking (United States

Congress, 2018).

Despite the criminalization of prostitution in North America, various kinds of sex work continue to exist in legal gray areas. Aside from full-service sex work provided by “street prostitutes” or escort agencies, erotic massage parlours, webcam models, and strippers, there are also sugar dating websites where individuals can negotiate compensation for various types of relationships that may or may not include sex (Nayar, 2017). It is not my intention in this project to dive into the controversies surrounding the legal standings of sex work, the critiques of Bill C-

36 and SESTA-FOSTA, and the complexities of the sex work economy, all of which deserve attention. I simply want to use a robust and relevant example to illustrate how the neoliberal self operates outside legal margins and subverts the relationship of usury with the state and with the self. This example is particularly well suited to also highlight my argument about the importance of solidarity and collective action.

In Andrea Werhun’s Modern Whore, she writes about her experiences escorting while working on her university degree. She challenges the notions of exploitation often associated with sex work and the stigma of being a “whore,” and provides a parallel between sex work and market labour.

“We’re all hoes. When you do something for money when you’d rather be doing anything else, you’re a hoe” (Werhun & Bazuin, 2017, p. 67). Her justification for sex work can be understood as the neoliberal self being subjected to prostitution in a power relation to the state, exchanging labour for money, and self-interest for self-sustenance. In commodifying the self either willingly

(with agency) or unwillingly (without agency or awareness) we are all “whores.” The stigma

37 surrounding sex work is that one is selling their body. The body in this context is associated with the private and the personal (the self), a domain that reserves some sense of the sacred that when sold becomes profane (the whore trope). To sell sex as work is often stigmatized as selling some unrecoverable part of the self unwillingly and in desperation for money and survival. However, this stigma is not applied to the neoliberal model when the commodified self is sold for precarious work in similar desperation for money and survival.

The stigmatic distinction disappears when we exclude normative evaluations of labour.

However, in the case of sex work, the empowerment maintained in existing outside the legal bounds of the market economy does not succumb to the neoliberal model. The empowerment obtained through sex work cannot be commodified in the neoliberal economy because it cannot be legally sold. Furthermore, it is a form of empowerment achieved through resistance to oppression.

Most often, the resistance is a matriarchal solidarity effort exercised by communities of sex workers through collective action (see Sex Professionals of Canada, n.d.; Maggie’s Toronto Sex

Worker Action Project, n.d.; HIPS, n.d.; Sex Worker’s Outreach Project USA, n.d.; Scarlett

Alliance, n.d.; Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee, n.d.; Zi Teng, n.d.).

In this way, sex work also foregoes the self-help industry as a predicate to marketable labour, or solution to work stress. In the former case, sex work is generally uncommodifiable in the self- help industry because of its illegality. In the latter case, sex work often relies on solidarity and collective action for support in the absence of legal benefits, protections afforded by labour law, and government intervention. Sex work does not rely on the self-help industry because it often cannot due to the taboo nature of the work, yet it can fulfil the need for support through collective action and solidarity. It is because it has no legal standing that sex work can have subversive effects on the self-help industry and the neoliberal model.

The possible subversion of the neoliberal model though sex work not only demonstrates a transgressive form of empowerment but reevaluates the relationship of usury with the self. “We all gotta make a living, right? Make a couple sacrifices, huh? We’re all hoes. And you can either find a way to love the fuckin’ or you can keep on hating that you’re getting fucked” (Werhun &

Bazuin, 2017, p. 67). Unlike the fragmented commodified self advertised on social media, the brutal honesty of the sex worker’s labour exposes the unmarketable, dirty, and counternormative aspects of the self. In sex work, usury is fetishized and brought to the forefront of the transactional exchange—money for sex. The sex worker’s body is intentionally objectified, often consensually, and for a price that is explicit in the interaction. Self-help constructs like resilience, flexibility, self-reliance, and self-governance are intrinsic to sex work without being commodifiable in their practice. In other words, the opportunity to sell a sex work self-help guide, workshop, or retreat does not exist in the legal market. However, communities of sex workers can, and do provide these services for each other (see Maggie’s Toronto Sex Worker Action Project).

Sex work then emulates the strategies of self-help and the neoliberal model without exploiting the sex worker. Centralized power cannot engage in a legal relationship of usury with sex workers by commodifying their labour or identities, but they can impose laws to prevent sex workers from having access to resources and legal protection. The relationship of usury with the self in sex work is a deliberate practice that is not mediated by an external authority and thereby grants the opportunity for agency. This type of agency is less apparent, if it even exists, in the neoliberal market model and the legal gig economy.

Sex workers use the tools of neoliberalism—entrepreneurialism, investment, return, value, self-interest, cost-benefit analysis—to undermine the economic model. While emulating the neoliberal model, sex work reveals rather than hides the usury of the self and others for gain. It

39 opens the opportunity to critically analyze neoliberalism by highlighting its systemic usury. Sex work is then one example of a politicized practice to reassess normative values and neoliberal subjectivity while acknowledging the power of solidarity and collective action as viable alternatives to the neoliberal model. It presents an alternative account of liberation, one that is achieved through decriminalization of sex work but undermined if sex work is legalized (Comte,

2014). Decriminalization serves to protect sex workers from exploitation, human trafficking, forced sex work, sexual assault, and rape, while legalization threatens to commodify the labour of sex workers and impose sanctions on their bodily autonomy but not that of their clients (e.g., mandatory sexual health testing for sex workers but not for clients). Consensual sex work is an important model for subverting neoliberal commodification, and it is threatened by legalization but can be emancipatory through decriminalization.

Neoliberalism’s broken promises: A conclusion

Though the promise of the self-help industry is certainly appealing, the effects are often counterproductive. Despite the focus on freedom, individual choice is severely limited when the aim of neoliberal embodiment is marketability and competition. Success under the neoliberal ethos demands that we opt into certifications, continuing education, credit cards, computer technology, and often even social media. As entrepreneurial, self-branded, and commodified products, we sell our skills and abilities as investment opportunities for corporations and we create economic activity but are easily replaceable, especially if we cannot absorb marketable skills and maintain networking, self-surveillance, and resilience to anxieties caused by the stress and pressure to be marketable in the first place (Sugarman, 2015).

The rise of anxiety and depression, their diagnoses, their pharmaceutical treatment or short- term cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT), are treated instrumentally rather than existentially (see

Shumaker, 2012; Kelley, Bickman, & Norwood, 2010). The root source of the problem, which I would argue is systemic, is largely ignored, and instead the onus falls back on the individual who is expected to be responsible for both the illness and the treatment. Neoliberal subjects are expected to be proactive, to train their brains to build neuronal fitness, and to avoid risk. Neuroscience discourse and the self-help industry encourage learning, memory, and mindfulness tasks (Pitts-

Taylor, 2010). Failure results in victim-blaming for not having avoided the risk with due-diligent training and self-care and, in turn, also increases the individual’s reliance on experts and market solutions (Galvin, 2002).

Neoliberal subjects who fail to compete with their normative counterparts are viewed as lazy, inattentive, unmotivated, and unwilling to learn (Davies, 2014). Even socially, “woke” culture has adopted neoliberal responsibilization for agentic self-education, moral policing, and self-regulated speech and behaviours. Social media sites are ripe with examples of this phenomenon at work. The systematic implications in the rise in stress, anxiety, and depression are overshadowed by the focus on individual responsibility. With a decrease in labour unions, bulk job cuts, downsizing, outsourcing, and downward mobility, the upward redistribution of wealth and downward redistribution of risk has forced responsibilization on the most financially vulnerable class

(Schrecker & Bambra, 2015).

Meanwhile, bullshit jobs are on the increase, where there are people “who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc.)—and particularly its financial avatars—but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value” (Graeber, 2013, p. 6). Neoliberalism, instead of delivering the promise of more free time from work has instead created an increased work ethic linked to personal worth and wellbeing

41 that is psychologically violent (Graeber, 2018). Graeber argues that being in a useless job that we know is useless and allows us no efficacy may be similar to the cause of a “trauma of failed influence” (psychoanalytic theory), hence the upsurge in mental health issues like anxiety and depression: “A human being unable to have a meaningful impact on the world ceases to exist” (p.

99). The notion that we must be perpetually busy with work is the same rationality as imprisonment and slavery—the absence of freedom. In the work economy, idleness is equated to theft. Thus, we are constantly supervised and threatened if we fail to look busy. The notion of selling one’s freedom for sustenance is what Graeber refers to as spiritual violence, “make-believe work imposed by others is the purest expression of lack of freedom” (p. 100). Neoliberal economic insecurity (i.e., gig economy) and the advent of bullshit jobs has created a rise in mental health- related issues and simultaneously increased wealth for the pharmaceutical, therapeutic, and self- help industries.

Neoliberalism paradoxically relies on individuals believing they are in a world beyond their control in order to reinforce the need for adaptation to unchangeable circumstances. In lieu of community, collective action, solidarity, and unions, among other possibilities, neoliberal subjects are conditioned to adopt resilience through responsibilization for themselves in unchangeable circumstances (Joseph, 2013). Neoliberal freedom works through corporate individualization to eliminate differences between individuals and simultaneously commodify diversity (Gershon,

2011). We are free, resilient, and diverse. We can design marketable campaigns to raise awareness and money, but we cannot hope to change the conditions that produce those same social issues.

We must retreat to our privatized family units that overshadow civil and social responsibility (see

Brecher, 2012), work on our sellable soft-skills (see Urciuoli, 2008), meet the demands of our internalized perfectionism (see Curran & Hill, 2017), pay for our institutionalized education, and

42 compete with those struggling for the same opportunities while managing our mental health and avoiding the risk of failure (see Davies, 2014).

Without collective resistance, politicizing mental health, engaging in sociopolitical activism

(e.g., environmentalism, human rights), and solidarity, the effects of neoliberalism continue to obscure the possibility for freedom. In a diverse society with complex problems like climate change, wealth inequality, and pandemics, we cannot solve these problems individually. We become subject to usury by the state, others, and even ourselves. We are discouraged from acknowledging the multiplicities of our subjectivity and thinking. Accepting multiplicity is often equated with anti-reason. However, we must resort to the peripheries of reason and the margins of society to find liberation. These are the places where communities are forced into solidarity and collective action. It’s where we learn the fight and cost of liberation. The aim of this type of liberation does not come from a replacement of neoliberalism but an effective resistance through transgression of its values. It’s activism like that which calls for decriminalization of sex work instead of legalization because the latter means being coopted into neoliberalism (see Comte,

2014).

The first line of resistance toward liberation is, in my view, a reassessment, part of which I hope to have started here. The aim of reassessment is not happiness, as positive psychology and self-help might have it. Happiness is too vague to measure universally and is mostly reduced to a subjective report of wellbeing (see Stewart, 2014). Measures of happiness are unreliable and do not necessarily account for financial security, job stability, effective labour laws, work benefits, and mental health (see Davies, 2015). I suggest we strive instead to simply avoid unhappiness by reducing suffering. If the conditions for suffering (financially or in mental health) have been demonstrated to be related to the conditions of neoliberalism, namely the insecure gig economy,

43 reduction of social services and welfare, and wealth inequality, then a reassessment of the neoliberal model is necessary. This reassessment can pave the way to liberate us from the constraints of neoliberalism toward ethical and sustainable economic and social wellbeing.

2. REASSESSING EXISTENTIAL CONSTRUCTS AND SUBJECTIVITY: OLD VIEWS

ON A NEW WORLD

The central existential constructs—authenticity, freedom, angst, and alienation require reassessment. The invitation for reassessment was made by Beauvoir (1949/1989) and Fanon

(1952/1968) at the time Sartre was still working with these concepts. These critiques calling for reassessment were based on divergent existential experiences that couldn’t be accounted for with the existing existential framework. In other words, Sartre’s lens was limited to his perspective, which only accounted for the existential experiences of affluent White men, yet he proposed a framework around these constructs meant to universalize existentialism. Sartre had indicated an intention to reassess, however, he may have gotten caught up with activism, socialism, and politics in general to do this reassessment himself. Regardless, reassessment was certainly called for. Here

I explore the critiques, Sartre’s admissions, and my theoretical suggestions for reassessing authenticity, freedom, angst, and alienation. First, however, I begin with a discussion of the historical background to contextualize existentialism.

I begin with Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) because existentialism is largely attributed to his legacy despite being coined by Gabriel Marcel (1889-1969) (see Marcel, 1949/1965). Arguably existentialism has a longer intellectual history rooted in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-

1900), Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881), Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) (see Flynn, 2006). I might even argue Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), if not the Stoics and Cynics (see, Russell

1984; Russell 1984b) should also be included. Aho (2014) suggests that despite the far-reaching history of the human obsession with mortality and meaning, existentialism, as it has developed in the Western context, is largely attributed to Sartre (and also Heidegger). The central existential constructs that have come out of Sartre’s philosophy and continued a theoretical legacy through

45 the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), Albert

Camus (1913-1960), and Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), among others, are authenticity, freedom, angst, and alienation (Earnshaw, 2006).

Simultaneously, it is worth mentioning other notable but less known existentialists and their contributions such as Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936), Lev Shestov (1866-1938), Nikolai

Berdyaev (1874-1948), Martin Buber (1878-1965), Karl Jaspers (1883-1969), José Ortega y

Gasset (1883-1955), Jean Wahl (1888-1974), and Emanuel Levinas (1906-1995).11 Although I will touch on some of their philosophical contributions, my focus will be on the Sartrean legacy along with Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). Their themes appear not only in existentialism but have entered popular consciousness via literature, film, psychology, and have notably been coopted into the self-help industry at the neoliberal turn with the success of positive psychology12. These cultural inscriptions have and continue to shape subjectivity in ways that not only will become apparent through reassessment, but also, may offer a liberating potential.

I propose here the reassessment of these central existential constructs with the aim of broadening our understanding of human existence in multifarious ways. Existentialism itself was a cultural, literary, artistic, and philosophical movement that attempted to account for aspects of human existence untouched by scientific rationalism and moral philosophy (Cooper, 1999). It was and perhaps continues to be an anti-system philosophy and a protest against the myopic academic philosophies that reduce human existence to subject-object relations. Sartre wanted existentialism

11 For more see, Arendt (1958); Arendt (1978); Aron (1969); Barrett (1958); Buber (1923/1970); Buber (1947/1978); Camus (1942/1955); Collins (1952); Jaspers (1968); Levinas (1961/1969); Merleau-Ponty (1945/1962); Ortega y Gasset (1929/1985); Shestov (1936/1969); Unamuno (1912/1954); Wahl (1949/1972).

12 See self-help titles like Seligman’s (2004) Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment, Micheletti and Cottrell’s (2019) The Inner Work: An Invitation to True Freedom and Lasting Happiness, Clark and Beck’s (2011) The Anxiety and Worry Workbook: The Cognitive Behavioral Solution.

46 to be a political expression and a form of liberation from the rigid boundaries of academic philosophy. Kaufmann (1968) writes, “Oddly, it is widely urged against him [Sartre] that he is in some ways strikingly unacademic, as if academic existentialism were not a contradiction in terms”

(p. 40).

In the spirit of existentialism resides the ability and arguably the duty to reassess our conceptions of existence in ways that help us understand not only the universals that bind us together but the nuances between us that diversify our experiences of freedom, authenticity, angst, and alienation. So, in the anti-system tradition, I propose a Nietzschean genealogical reassessment with a Foucauldian interrogation of these specific existential constructs to reevaluate their meanings in the contemporary world while acknowledging their power relations and potential dangers. Specifically, how does existentialism account for the experiences of Black, indigenous, and people of colour (BIPOC), women, and queer folx, among others, and how do neoliberalism and self-help modify the conditions for the possibility of those existential experiences.

I want to reassess existential constructs in light of the effects of neoliberalism on subjectivity and discuss how existentialism can operate within intersectionality, context, and history. In this way, I hope to avoid a problem-solution dichotomy. To be clear, I do not propose a solution to suffering through the reassessment of existential ideas. I propose the reassessment because the constructs themselves pertain to valuable insights about subjectivity and we ought to accommodate these insights to diverse perspectives rather than attempting to universalize experiences. I assess several existential perspectives on women in the works of Beauvoir, the experience of Black masculinity from Fanon’s works, and works on queer folx from Butler, among others, who offer diverse approaches to subjectivity and ontology, which have nuanced ways of interacting with the

47 existential themes outlines here. These seminal works on race, class, gender, and sexuality are then supplemented with contemporary revisions, literature, and authors.

Freedom, authenticity, angst, and alienation: An origin story

Two core assumptions of existentialism are that we all experience freedom and struggle with authenticity (McBride, 1997). Freedom has a long and undecided history in philosophy and science. Assumed to exist at the core of our actions, freedom enables moral responsibility and the opportunity for change. Historically, freedom has been argued for and against in philosophy (see

Leibniz, 1686/1991, Reid, 1788), paving the way for theories of free will (see Schopenhauer,

1819/1966; van Inwagen, 1983), causal determinism (see Earman, 1986), and compatibilism or incompatibilism (see, Lewis, 1973; Pereboom, 2001).

To highlight a relevant example from a predecessor to existentialism, at least in my view, we can look at Schopenhauer, whose uniquely staunch position is that we have no free will. He holds a pessimistic worldview where we are driven by a blind, unconscious, and striving force he calls the will, which motivates and causes all of our actions (Schopenhauer, 1819/1966). In fact, the will and overt action are one and the same thing viewed from two perspectives, the metaphysical or internal experience of the striving of the will, and the epistemological or external representation of the action seen from the third-person (Atwell, 1990). For Schopenhauer (1840/2010), consciousness is our unique experience of witnessing the force of the will become individuated in the world. This version of a deterministic will influenced Freud’s drive reduction model (see

Freud, 1905/1989) of motivation from two basic instincts for life and death, a similarly pessimistic and deterministic theory (Cartwright, 2010).

Nietzsche (1874/2014) was initially influenced by Schopenhauer and wrote in praise of his works until realizing the limitations of his pessimistic determinism. For Nietzsche (1887/1969), the focus shifts away from the will and to the restrictive moral norms derived from Christianity, thereby liberating the will. Nietzsche steers away from notions of hard determinism and proposes a version of freedom intended to break with tradition, to subvert and reassess, to create and find joy, and to be able to live a life that we can finally say yes a thousand times to—amor fati—the love of fate (Nietzsche, 1885/1975). Nietzsche’s philosophy eventually advocates for a restricted sense of agency that one must fight to obtain through reassessment. He endorses a form of compatibilism in contrast to the causal determinism of his intellectual predecessor Schopenhauer

(Gemes & Janaway, 2006). Nevertheless, causal determinism continued in philosophy and found even stronger proponents in the sciences from physics to behaviourism (Honderich, 1996).

Emerging out of the debate between free will and causal determinism are several theories of compatibilism intended to accommodate the philosophies and sciences showing causal determinism to be prevalent in the natural world (see Earman, 1986; Leibniz, 1686/1991; Lewis,

1973; Spinoza, 1677/2008) and philosophers insisting that free will is a necessary human condition

(see Plato, 380BC/2000; Descartes, 1649/1989; Kant, 1781/1929; Reid, 1788; van Inwagen, 1983).

Compatibilism accords a limited range of human freedom in an otherwise deterministic world, whereas incompatibilism is the argument that free will and determinism are logically incompatible.

Some theories of compatibilism forego metaphysical arguments and instead try to demonstrate a psychological agency that allows us to choose between our various causally determined motives in consciousness (see Hegel 1812/2014; Pippin, 1999)

Sartre implicitly relies on a form of compatibilism in Being and Nothingness by theorizing an ontology of being, therefore a descriptive account, rather than a metaphysical account of the origin

49 of being (Barnes, 1967). Sartre writes in response to Heidegger’s (1927/1962) Being and Time, where the latter theorizes the ontological as the question into the nature of being (also descriptive); being (Dasein) to be ontic, as a real being that exists; and ontic-ontological as the possibility for all ontologies. In this way, both Heidegger’s and Sartre’s notions of freedom can then accommodate for a deterministic world without being logically inconsistent—in other words, a form of compatibilism conceptualized as facticity and freedom.

For Sartre (1943/1992), our past constitutes an immutable facticity of being in-itself. When we look to our past there is nothing we can change save our perspective on it. In this way, the past is clearly determined and continues to determine our possibilities into the future, something

Nietzsche’s compatibilism also holds (see, Gemes & Janaway, 2006). The possibilities we have accessible to us in consciousness in the present constitute the for-itself of being, namely a striving to become. “The project of the for-itself toward the future which it is is a project toward the in- itself” (Sartre, 1943/1992, p. 104). We strive to become what we are. Our fixed being in facticity outlines the possibilities and limitations for what we can become and our exercise of them solidifies those possibilities into actualities of what we are. Freedom operates in the being for- itself to become in-itself. This awareness of our possibilities for becoming in consciousness is our transcendence, a first-person perspective on our facticity that can reinterpret the third-person facts about us (Sartre, 1936/1991). For Sartre, our freedom is revealed in the reinterpretation of the facts about ourselves whereas for Nietzsche our freedom is actualized in the reassessment of our values.

Existentialism, beyond all else, requires freedom, which entails the freedom to experience as well as deny, doubt, and self-deceive. In the complex tussle between transcendence and facticity, the freedom of the individual is revealed as the project of embodied self-making. Unlike inanimate objects in the world, our facticity—or third-person observable facts about ourselves—does not

50 exist for us in an entirely determining way, but rather, always through a first-person interpretive lens (Sartre, 1943/1992). This first-person stance about the kind of being one is, or is becoming, is called transcendence. Transcendence is our unique ability to go beyond our facticity with agency to redefine those facts or properties of our being, a freedom seemingly limited to human existence.

Similarly, for Heidegger (1927/1962) the study of being is only possible as a conscious experience of the real, in other words, “ontology is only possible as phenomenology” (p. 33). A phenomenological understanding of the existential experience in consciousness cannot be reduced to ontic objects and their relations. Freedom is then possible through conscious experience

(projection) but limited by the determined and culturally conditioned circumstances that being is thrown into (thrownness) (Heidegger, 1956/1958).

Determinism would argue that the origins of our conscious experiences are causally linked to external factors that are not always apparent or readily available to us. However, the point of existential freedom is to demonstrate that facticity (or thrownness) alone cannot suffice to determine a being who can experience transcendence (or projection) or, put another way, there is no reason to believe that the third-person facts are any more authoritative in describing one’s being than one’s first-person perspective (Sartre, 1936/1991). In this way, the freedom to create meaning is endowed by being in the world, where facticity interacts with transcendence to simultaneously discover and create one’s identity. This self-creating process happens in context and is human existence itself (Fackenheim, 1961). It is what Sartre (1946/2007) means by “existence precedes essence” (p. 20).

It is this same freedom, however, that gives rise to nothingness, existential angst, and meaninglessness. Nothingness is the idea of non-being, which is only a possibility that exists in consciousness through human understanding. Sartre (1943/1992) argues that nothingness can only

51 be conceived as a negation of being, in fact for it to be conceived at all presupposes a mind, which is a something. Then, if being disappears so does nothingness, for its existence is its conceivability in the negation of being, hence, “man is the being through whom nothingness comes into the world” (Sartre, 1943/1992, p. 24). The bringing of nothingness into the world is human freedom.

“Human freedom precedes essence in man and makes it possible; the essence of the human being is suspended in his freedom” (Sartre, 1943/1992, p. 25).

For Sartre (1943/1992), consciousness of freedom is established as anguish, for it presents the possibility of future nihilation and the impossibility of past resolutions. Coming face to face with the possibility of nothingness is the ground of anguish—existential angst. For Heidegger

(1927/1962) also, anxiety is a fear that springs merely from being-in-the-world. Angst is not only manifested at the idea of the possibility of the nihilation of being in the future, our awareness of mortality, but also at the impossibility of negating our being in the past. Angst is experienced in the present. The present is what Sartre calls being for-itself, which is a negation of being, a flight from being so that one is present. The future is the flight toward being that presence lacks but aims toward. In this way, presence lacks complete identity and is constantly in flight toward being

(becoming) and away from its past. The for-itself or presence is not yet and always striving to be.

Sartre (1943/1992) argues,

I am my future in the constant perspective of the possibility of not being it. Hence that anguish

which we have described above springs from the fact that I am not sufficiently that future

which I have to be and which gives its meaning to my present: It is because I am a being whose

meaning is always problematic (p. 105).

The feeling of being incomplete, insufficient, always lacking, constantly striving, is the source of anxiety. We can thus never achieve complete being and complete consciousness of being

52 simultaneously. To further complicate matters, the presence of the being for-itself is so fleeting in consciousness that we can never capture it as it falls permanently into being in-itself. Sartre

(1943/1992) compares being to a donkey chasing a carrot on a stick while dragging a cart behind it—always chasing that which it will never obtain while dragging its past behind it. This, in essence, is the notion of meaninglessness. Being is a pointless struggle to become what we can never accomplish. However, the carrot is the possibility for meaning that we are striving toward, which in order to negate must also stand as possible to obtain. Paradoxically, becoming is simultaneously meaningful and meaningless.

To remove our solipsistic blinders from the project of becoming we must also consider being and becoming in context. Not only do we face angst at the awareness of our mortality and immutable past, and struggle with the possibilities for becoming, but we are becoming in a world with others. The other’s look, as Sartre (1943/1992) calls it, or the gaze, brings anxiety into self- consciousness because we are suddenly at the mercy of another’s judgement. Transcendence is not only freedom in self-consciousness for the self but also in judgement toward others. In the gaze of the other, we are defenseless against their freedom to judge us in the same way they are subjected to our free judgement of them. Our becoming is then an attempt to learn the facticity of our being through the eyes of the other. The other’s gaze sees my being “…as I shall never see it. The other holds a secret—the secret of what I am” (Sartre, 1943/1992, p. 340). Sartre (1943/1992) says that

I am responsible for my being but I do not found it; the other creates the foundation of my being, which I try to recover, “Thus my project of recovering myself is fundamentally a project of absorbing the other” (p. 340).

We define ourselves through the gaze of the other and attempt to engage with the other’s notion of our being, both affirming and adopting said notions in our identification with it. Hence the

53 problem of authenticity entailed in the anxiety of never being ourselves in light of social expectations. For Heidegger (1927/1962) this problem is called fallenness or falling prey to the world; that is, a sense of inauthenticity derived from being-with-others only for idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity. It manifests from living publicly among people, doing what they do, and adopting the social constructs around us as a façade to our own being. Inauthenticity, or falling prey to the world, is being (Dasein) turning away from itself out of anxiety, a fear without reason. “That about which anxiety is anxious is being-in the-world itself” (Heidegger, 1927/1962, p. 181). Being itself is anxious because it is aware it exists, aware of its mortality, and this functions to alienate being to a point of solipsism. Hence, our recourse to fallenness to avoid anxiety. Heidegger’s three temporal dimensions: thrownness (past), projection (future), and fallenness (present), find analogs in Sartre’s facticity or being in-itself (past), transcendence (future), and being for-itself (presence).

Inauthenticity and angst (or anxiety) then operate in similar ways in both philosophies, as given conditions of freedom experienced by a conscious being existing in a world with other conscious beings.

The problem of alienation arises out of the experiences of freedom, angst, and authenticity. We are alienated in two ways from our own experience of being. The first way we experience alienation is in fallenness where inauthenticity emerges as we adopt the social norms around us to fit into the normal ways people do things, thereby confounding our possibility to do authentically otherwise (see, Heidegger, 1927/1962). The second way we experience alienation is in recognizing that our project of becoming in a world with others is necessarily also determined by others, whose gaze upon us brings forth the discomfort of being seen in the third-person as an object with facticity and thereby limiting or at least partially determining our subjectivity (see, Sartre, 1943/1992). In

54 this way, I13 am alienated from a dimension of my being that is subject to the freedom of others to judge me based on my facticity, while I attempt to accommodate my behaviour to fit the normative standards of public life and lose sight of who I may be in the process. This creates the feeling that the world is foreign to me, or what Heidegger (1927/1962) calls alien or uncanny (unheimlich) while I also feel foreign to myself. Essentially, I am alienated from the world with others and from myself in the process of being in the world.

Being absorbed in the world with others runs the risk of parroting the meanings available to us while engaging mindlessly and inauthentically in everyday life. Standing apart from the world in otherness reduces normative meanings and creates angst and alienation (see, Sartre, 1938/1959).

In the indeterminateness between normative meaning and our attempt to create meaning is the feeling of absurdity—the paradox that returns to the notion that the world must both have and not have meaning at the same time. This sense of absurdity is not merely theoretical but also, experiential. Sartre’s and Heidegger’s points are that we experience the world phenomenologically and thus we must also attempt to understand being through those experiences. Those experiences and our ability to assess them is evidence of our freedom that owes to choosing how to perceive the world when it presents to us the absurd possibility of being indeterminate.

Do we still have freedom, authenticity, angst, and alienation? A reassessment

In calling for a reassessment of existential constructs, I am not suggesting that existentialism is incongruent with the contemporary world. Despite Sartre (1957/1968) abandoning existentialism as a mere ideology in what he considered an unsurpassable philosophy—Marxism— much work has continued in existential thought and found a resurgence in various authors and

13 I have italicized “I” to indicate that I am using it in the generalized sense here, along with “me,” “my,” and “myself.”

55 theories. Following Fanon’s (1952/1968) critique of Sartre’s universalizing ontology that fails to capture the experiences of the Black man, other scholars have continued to write on existentialism and race (see, Bernasconi, 2003; Coulthard, 2014; Gordon, 1995; Gordon, 1997, Gordon, 2000;

Lemberger-Truelove, 2016; Malone, 2015; Sharpley-Whiting, 1997). Following Beauvoir’s

(1949/1989) analysis of the woman’s existential role in patriarchy that perpetually objectifies her facticity through an institutional gaze, others scholars have continued work on existentialism and sex and gender (see, Butler, 1990; Larrabee, 2000; Murphy, 1999; Simons, 2013).

In fact, much of existentialism has found its way through various philosophical lenses to accommodate alternative perspectives on being, subjectivity, epistemology, and ethics. Some philosophers have focused on the legacy of existentialism (see Guignon, 2003; Joseph, Reynolds,

& Woodward, 2011; Reynolds, 2004; Reynolds, 2006), while others attempted to continue the discourse (see Baring, 2014; Busch, 1999; Carr, 1986; Crowell, 2001; Crowell, 2004; Dreyfus &

Haugeland, 1978; Fell, 1979; Flynn, 1997; Gelven, 1990; Grene, 1948; Haugeland, 1998; Olafson,

1968; Poster, 1975; Schrift, 1995; Stewart, 1998; Warnock, 1967), and some have turned their attention to at existentialism and contemporary subjectivity (see de Sousa, 2010; Dreyfus, 1979;

Hills, 2010; Moran, 2001; Ricoeur, 1992; Taylor, 1985; Taylor, 1989).

Outside of philosophy, existential theories have influenced psychology (see Arbuckle, 1965;

Carveth, 2017; Fromm, 1941; Fuchs & Herpertz, 2013; Guignon, 1993; Hersch, 2015; Jones, 2001;

Loewenthal, 2010; Maslow, 1962; May, 1960; Ratcliffe, 2008; Rogers, 1957; Shahar & Schiller,

2013; Yalom, 1980), theology (see Bultmann, 1966/1987; Tillich, 1952), politics (see Caranfa,

1990; Judt, 1992; Kruks, 1990), and the self-help industry via positive psychology (see Friedman

& Robbins, 2012; Froh, 2004; Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). The existential-humanistic

56 tradition continues to develop by incorporating multiculturalism and intersectionality in their approaches (see Hoffman, Cleare-Hoffman, Granger, & John, 2019; Schneider, 2013).

The reassessment I propose here intends to look at the transition of existential constructs from philosophy into popular consciousness through the self-help industry. Concepts like freedom, authenticity, angst, and alienation have been coopted, first by the Human Potential Movement of the 1960s and 70s (see Friedman, 1976; Spence, 2007), then under neoliberalism and repackaged as do-it-at-home self-improvement strategies. Not only has this poor neoliberal translation of existentialism caricatured the concepts, but it has also made them problematic. In essence, the existential constructs initially aimed at liberation through self-reflection have become antithetical to their original aim by advocating for an inauthentic (to borrow Heidegger’s and Sartre’s term) subjectivity, despite being marketed as fully autonomous and authentic. The project of self- creating and meaning-making has gained renewed (first in the Human Potential Movement) popularity under neoliberalism and become commodifiable (McGee, 2005).

The contemporary world continues to be a place where meaning-making is an important aspect of subjectivity. If we continue to rely on existential ideas about the self in relation to others and the world, those existential constructs require reassessment to distinguish the philosophical from the commodified forms of freedom, authenticity, angst, and alienation. In this way, we can assess and reassess the conditions for the possibility for self-help, meaning-making, and change. In this reassessment, I also explore how these concepts fit into the contemporary world with issues that were not addressed completely (e.g., ethnicity, intersectionality, queerness, gender, sexuality) or even existed during the existential cultural movement (circa 1940s-1970s). Moreover, I address potential limitations to existentialism and consider alternatives to the problems presented here, problems which the existentialists could not have anticipated.

To begin at the crux of existentialism is to engage with the idea of freedom. A perpetually contested notion, as I’ve mentioned earlier, the evidence for which relies on an intuition pump

(see, Dennett, 2013) aimed at conviction though appeals to your intuitions about freedom. Do you intuitively believe in freedom or not? That is the leverage point upon which the notion of freedom can be convincing. I think it is less relevant whether human freedom is real, but more so how it is sold. In existentialism, the argument for freedom is based on human consciousness. The subjective first-person stance, or transcendence, is irreducible to the third-person objective facts about the individual, or facticity, and there is no reason to give one primacy over the other (see, Sartre,

1943/1992). Furthermore, there seems to be something powerful about our ability to subjectively analyze our own behaviours, and the thought process governing that analysis makes it hard not to acquiesce to some form of compatibilism between free will and determinism. Put in another way, it is also difficult for the hard determinist to explain all human phenomena without turning consciousness into a trite and passive process that goes against all our intuitions.

Freedom in existentialism is not passively granted in consciousness, but rather, earned through self-analysis. The exercise of freedom takes precedence over its mere possibility and places the onus on the individual to make meaning of the world and their place within it. Under neoliberalism, freedom is subsumed as a political category that is either restricted or liberated via economic policy, privatization, responsibilization, and self-governance (Harvey, 2005). Freedom is then a possibility made available to individuals as a political right, privilege, and a form of personal responsibility. In his influential work, Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman (1962) explicitly argued that political freedom was irrevocably dependent on economic freedom. Prima facie this proposition is not at direct odds with existential freedom as neoliberal freedom seems to be about accessibility (freedom to do) and existential freedom is about engagement (commitment to

58 embrace freedom). However, as neoliberal freedom transitions from economic policy into the public consciousness and is inscribed in subjectivity, the freedom to do becomes freedom to exploit

(see, Polanyi, 1944). Neoliberal freedom enables a relationship of usury between the state and the subject (see, Harvey, 2005), and with subjects-in-themselves. I call the latter a relationship of usury with the self (I return to it later).

The relationship of usury also undercuts authenticity. In facticity, the third-person facts about the individual do not exist in a vacuum outside an interpretive lens but are always collective meaning-making processes with others in the world (see, Heidegger, 1927/1962). In the neoliberal world, facticity is intimately interwoven with power relations. One’s race is not a stand-alone fact, but rather, an indication of privilege or a site of marginalization in relation to systemic and institutional powers (see, Taylor, 2016; Weber, 2001). One’s gender has a similar dynamic with additional intersections of prejudice, especially when gender subverts the binary (see, Frable,

1997; Matsuno & Budge, 2017). One’s sexuality also conditions access to resources and opportunities that are further complicated by the intersections race, sex, and gender (see, Moraga

& Anzaldua, 1981; Crenshaw, 1989). Even one’s age is a sociopolitical determinant of accessibility to independence, voting, sexual consent, work, and credibility, among other things.

To reiterate the argument made earlier: when facticity is interpreted through the existential freedom in transcendence it enables authenticity in subjectivity, however, the gaze of the other disrupts this process by alienating one from oneself (see, Sartre, 1943/1992). Revealed through the eyes of the other, is not only our experience of angst at the other’s freedom to judge and determine our facticity, but also their judgement in relation to the appeals they make to the power structures that sustain their beliefs.

The gaze, which invariably has the effect of enabling inauthenticity, whether individual or institutional, can also be necessary for confirmation and validation. For Foucault (1975/1995), the gaze, like power, is a phenomenon requiring interrogation, “In fact, power produces, it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production” (p. 194). I would not know who I am independent of another's gaze. I am inhibited in who I am by another's gaze. The gaze both shapes and constricts me. The institutions and bodies of knowledge that enact factic relations to my body sustain available possibilities for my subjectivity, my interpretation of it, and conditions the possibilities for judgements others can make about me. If it is a necessary evil, the only possible change is in reshaping the power-knowledge relation of the gaze. For marginalized folks, a validating gaze can be empowering. Thus, reassessing in the tradition of Foucault, the gaze isn't simply a unidimensional construct, but a form of power with indeterminate effects, the basis for which knowledge and understanding can alter.

For Foucault (1977/1980), knowledge is not an end in itself or, what he calls the will to knowledge. The will to knowledge is intimately tied to truth and becomes as dangerous as truth itself: “For to knowledge, no sacrifice is too great” (p. 164). Knowledge is itself subject to interrogation, along with truth, in the historicizing of concepts. For disambiguation, we do obtain knowledge in a critical analysis of concepts and their histories, but knowledge here is not the aim.

The aim is understanding, which creates possibilities for change. When the aim becomes knowledge, we become dangerous because we sacrifice all else to this aim.

We should admit, rather, that power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging

it because it serves power or by applying it because it is useful); that power and knowledge

directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative

constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and

constitute at the same time power relations (Foucault, 1975/1995, p. 27).

These power-knowledge relations subjugate individuals and turn them into objects of knowledge. As objects of knowledge, they became scientifically and politically observable and classifiable. Furthermore, in the power-knowledge relationship, the formulation of knowledge through power instills a body of knowledge that then stands to reinforce that power, the effects of which are inscribed in subjectivity either on the physical body or the soul (as Foucault, 1975/1995, calls it); I'd likely call it consciousness.

Through understanding, we make concepts visible, see their lineages, discover their discontinuities, and exploit them. The purpose of understanding concepts is to unravel their powerful hold on us and enable our freedom to change. Foucault (1982) argues that his method of criticism alters the subject’s mode of thinking and enables the freedom to change how we are, what we do, how we think, and what we think we are. I keep this notion of freedom in mind as I begin here to discuss the intersections of neoliberalism on existential constructs. Freedom here is the condition for the possibility of change. However, this possibility may be limited by neoliberalism if freedom is redefined under its totalizing gaze.

In the neoliberal ethos, power dynamics are veiled and simultaneously reinforced (see Joseph,

2013). The illusion of freedom is that one is unimpeded by systemic power while commodifying their subjectivity to be sustainable and economically viable. Neoliberalism does not operate to oppress subjectivity based on race, gender, or sexuality, but rather, enables the insidious exploitation of the already marginalized to commodify their experiences and identities, thereby erasing their resistance to exploitation (see Gershon, 2011; Toffoletti & Thorpe, 2018). What is authentic in Black, queer, or feminine subjectivity is confounded with what is marketable about it.

Much like the women’s empowerment movement, authentic resistance is obscured when the criteria for authentic expression becomes fashionable and profitable (Bay-Cheng, 2015;

Rutherford, 2018). Authenticity is then sold as an identity with specified parameters that persuade marginalized individuals to opt-in via conformity to the new standards or to be further marginalized by being unable to fit within their own standardized niche—precisely an existentially inauthentic existence.

Freedom and authenticity become realizable in neoliberalism as sets of behaviours in conformity with niche subjectivities, marketable for their empowerment and cultural capital, and resolved of their resistance potential to threaten the power structures. In this way, neoliberalism emulates the basis of colonial mentality; that is, to occupy, assimilate, and replicate the valuable aspects of the indigenous, and then erase the indigenous to ameliorate the threat to the dominant class (see, Smith, 2006). For example, sponsorship from a powerful corporation for a social cause supporting a fight against some form of oppression is simultaneously lucrative and counterproductive. On the one hand, without the support the fight lacks sustainability, and on the other hand, with the support it erases the resistance. This process occurs within the imaginary of neoliberalism, which also manufactures the condition that neoliberalism is the only possible form of government and/or self-governance when resistance is so easily absorbed and commodified, while the uncommodifable become invisible or erased. A further obfuscation occurs on the individual level in the self-assessment of authenticity when authentic and inauthentic lines are blurred under the neoliberal ethos. How then, does one live authentically under neoliberalism?

Authenticity is the distinction between my success or failure to act as I would, with an awareness of my own context and limitations, in contrast to acting as they (anyone) do. In a simplified form, to do as I do is authentic, and to do as they do is inauthentic (see, Heidegger,

1927/1962). What exactly is it to do as I do authentically outside the influence of others? I do not act outside the world with others, but among them, because of them, and partially conditioned by them. Both Sartre (1943/1992) and Heidegger (1927/1962) agree that we do act in context (see,

Fell, 1979), and the delimitation of authenticity rests in the freedom to choose a deliberate action in commitment with the self, in contrast to an unreflexive action in conformity with available social constructs. Understanding, awareness, and reflexivity then determine authenticity. For Sartre

(1938/1959), to act in bad faith14 is to pretend a choice doesn’t exist. For Heidegger (1956/1958), being inauthentic means losing your subjectivity among others in conformity with standards you did not assess for yourself—again theorized as a dismissal of freedom of choice. The question of choice, however, remains open to scrutiny. Choice is at least partially socially influenced, biologically determined, and socio-politically restricted through power relations based on class, race, sex, gender, and sexuality, among other things.

Furthermore, authenticity itself is a norm. It is especially privileged in the Western world where uniqueness and individuality are praised while conformity is reprehended. When authenticity is coopted under neoliberalism and sold as a self-help technique, it creates a way for us to be ironically inauthentic, namely, accepting a commodified and authoritative prescription for how to behave in alignment with our “best” selves from books (and other resources) marketed to the masses for profit. To reiterate, authenticity necessitates freedom in committing to a self-making project. However, freedom of choice occurs within a context that submits subjectivity to power relations, which determine access to possibilities. I return to Sartre’s donkey to illustrate the point.

14 Nietzsche (1887/1969) predates Sartre here with what he called bad conscience, which is a consequence of repressing internal freedom: “This instinct for freedom pushed back and repressed, incarcerated within and finally able to discharge and vent itself only on itself: that, and that alone, is what bad conscience is in its beginnings” (p. 87).

The carrot represents an abstract possibility for becoming, which we run toward but can never reach, yet this possibility must be realizable for it to be real despite our inability to obtain it (see,

Sartre, 1943/1992). However, when our freedom of choice is limited by our sociopolitical status it obscures possibility and realizability. For example, “Jean-Paul Sartre had forgotten that the Negro suffers in his body quite differently from the white man” (Fanon, 1952/1968, p. 106). For Fanon

(1952/1968), becoming is rendered impossible because he’s factically tied to his Blackness while expected to transcend it. It’s something he can never accomplish authentically in a White world.

Living within the boundaries of a White world, he can never transcend his Blackness because he’s always Black in the gaze of the other, and he can never authentically accept his Blackness because it is deviant from the White male ontology assumed as the universal standard of being.

Fanon’s critique is that the Black man does not experience the same existential freedom as the

White man when it comes to his identity. This critique, in Black Skin White Masks (see, Fanon,

1952/1968), came six years after Sartre’s (1946/2007) Existentialism as a Humanism was published. Nearly a decade later, in Fanon’s (1961/2004) The Wretched of the Earth, Sartre

(1961/2004) writes the preface imploring White Europeans to read the book and experience the shame of what I’ll here call White privilege. It appears Sartre understood the limitations of existentialism in accounting for diverse embodied experiences. Race is one among many confounding factors in conditioning possibilities for freedom and change.

Similarly, Beauvoir (1949/1989) examines the facticity of being a woman as a restriction from access to complete being, “her wings are cut, and then she is blamed for not knowing how to fly.

Let a future be open to her and she will no longer be obliged to settle in the present” (p. 731). In

Sartre’s (1943/1992) terms, her facticity (both past and present) limits her transcendence (future).

Her ontology is limited by her sex because she is seen as inferior and, unlike Fanon’s Blackness

64 that he is expected to transcend despite the impossibility, she is outright denied that transcendent possibility altogether because of her sex. Gender and sexuality are other sites where power relations challenge the possibility for freedom and authenticity. Queer subjectivities are at conflict with the power-knowledge relations that define queerness in gender and sexuality even within academic institutions where theorizing queerness mediates subjectification. Butler (1990) defines gender as performative. Some studies look at queerness as embodied resistance to institutional power (see, Vasilovsky, & Gurevich, 2017). Some trans studies employ a “wrong body model” or a “Transgender Model” (see, Elliot, 2009), while others counter these transgender models with a

“multiple meanings position” to accommodate for the possibility of both binary and non-binary identities within transgender and queer studies (see, Bettcher, 2013; Vasilovsky, 2019).

These arguments are not novel. However, they linger with a discomforting reality that permeates into the neoliberal forms of subjectivity (see Teo, 2018) and authenticity. The facts of

Blackness, sex, gender, and sexuality, among others, have not been resolved with equity, but have been offered instead an equal opportunity for commodification under niche categories. Blackness has become marketable as an authentic subjectivity for Black folks, provided they fit the niche, and also as cultural capital (e.g., music, colloquialisms, art) in which non-Black folks can invest

(see Collins, 2006). Sex, gender, and sexuality undergo similar commodification and become profitable through investment and sponsorship of empowerment narratives, transition narratives, and coming-out narratives (see Chow-White, 2006; Love, 2008).

Neoliberal subjectivities are presented with the illusion of authenticity and freedom. What is misleadingly branded as “authentic” is what is marketable. The choice to commit to an alternative is reduced when subversive narratives fail to obtain visibility. Visibility is granted through investment and sponsorship, which then creates a new niche that dissolves authenticity when the

65 individual lacks the intent to act as they would in the absence of the influence of the other. In this case, the other takes the form of a power-knowledge dynamic that determines their facticity. In other words, the freedom to be authentic is mediated by power, and access to that power is conditioned by marketability which, in turn, influences how authenticity is presented and performed thereby ironically producing inauthenticity. Authenticity then becomes subjected to a relationship of usury.

Returning to my earlier point, the neoliberal relationship of usury between the state and subject is embodied in subjectivity as a relationship of usury with the self (see also Teo, 2018). The relationship of usury with the self invokes a colonial mentality to assimilate to the dominant power or the culturally valuable domains of the self while erasing the rest. The culturally valuable is appraised by its profitability and investment potential (or sponsorship), then commodified and marketed. Neoliberal subjectification absorbs the social constructs of neoliberalism into an inauthentic subjectivity that relies on bad faith (see Sartre, 1938/1959) for sustainability.

Individuals are encouraged to perform neoliberal forms of “authenticity” (like the girl power movement) that return social or financial capital at the expense of losing one’s existential freedom and authenticity. Even if you realize you’re being subjected to inauthenticity you must deny your freedom to choose alternatives in order to protect your identity. If your only practical alternative is to accept marginalization, the reliance on bad faith seems justifiable. However, this is why both

Fanon (1952/1968) and Beauvoir (1949/1989) propose forms of resistance that transcend the self through collective action (e.g., Black power movement) and solidarity (e.g. feminism).

If your only options are selling out or marginalization, and you have an authentic commitment to freedom, you rely on others who share your suffering to band together to fight against the systemic powers marginalizing you. The choice then seems to boil down to a fight with yourself

66 or a fight with the state. Resistance is a reaction to oppression and limits freedom when choice boils down to survival. Huey P. Newton (1942-1989), the founder of the Black Panther Party, argued that marginalized people are forced to resist in order to bring awareness to the masses at their own expense. “A true revolutionary realizes that if he is sincere death is imminent. The things he is saying and doing are extremely dangerous. Without this realization it is pointless to proceed as a revolutionary” (Newton, 1972/1995, p. 17).

In the introduction to Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women's

Liberation Movement, Morgan (1970) writes, “This book is an action” (p. xiii), and outlines the many sacrifices the contributing women endured in the process of compiling the anthology, including divorce, losing friends, having articles withdrawn because of spouses or rewritten by them, picketing, arrests, and imprisonment, many while rearing new-born children. In the same anthology, Beale (1970) writes about the intersections of womanhood and Blackness in capitalist

America, where Black men were denied employment forcing Black women to be the family breadwinners and simultaneously degraded for not obtaining the standard of White femininity, which meant staying home and raising children. These narratives create authentic sites of meaning for marginalized people, yet it is easy to see with Beale’s example how the trope of the strong

Black woman was born out of necessity and yet can be easily commodified under neoliberalism as an “authentic” personality to market products (e.g., television shows, ads).

There may be another category for those who won’t fight themselves or the state (or are unaware of this power relation). For the nonconformists who seek authenticity outside of neoliberalism, the answers are often sold through the self-help industry. The self-help industry can benefit from revolutionary discourse and repackage it to the dominant class consisting of a primarily White audience while simultaneously, and perhaps inadvertently, defusing the

67 revolutionary power. As an independent source of collective wisdom and empirically backed techniques, self-help seemingly offers the opportunity for introspection and self-making that resides outside of the capitalist framework. The self-help industry not only provides ready-made solutions based on the meaning-making constructs developed in existential thought, but also, I argue that self-help also piggybacks on the aura of anti-system philosophy that defines existentialism.

By providing the wisdom and techniques to succeed as “hacks” or shortcuts to success, the implication is that one can be outside the capitalist rat race and find alternative avenues to success or beat the system. For example, books like Confidence Hacks (Davenport, 2014), Hacking

Growth (Ellis & Brown, 2017), Hack your Motivation (Hoffman, 2017), Mind Hacking (Hargrave,

2016), and The Secret (Byrne, 2000) sell these shortcuts to success. In this way, the guise of anti- system philosophy is implicitly draped over the self-help industry and targeted to the nonconformist sentiment. Simultaneously self-help often presents itself as a rational and powerful tool for the business-oriented and entrepreneurial. For example, books like Awaken the Giant

Within (Robbins, 1992) Dare to Lead (Brown, 2018), and Good to Great (Collins, 2001). In the most ironic instances, the self-help industry sells an entrepreneurial nonconformists subjectivity in the narratives of successful “self-made” public figures like Steve Jobs (1955-2011), Bill Gates

(1955-), and Elon Musk (1971-) with books like Steve Jobs (Isaacson, 2011), Bill Gates: The Man

Behind Microsoft, A Look at the Man Who Changed the World We Live In (MacGregor, 2018), and Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (Vance, 2015). These figures are idolized for their authenticity, self-actualization, autonomy, self-reliance, and resilience. Most of all they are praised for their anti-system approach to success. Their names are a brand, and the self-help industry says yours can be also.

The brief genealogy outlined here highlights the accidents and errors that give rise to false notions of truth and being that continue to persist in consciousness under the authoritative titles of freedom and authenticity. The misuse of these existential constructs becomes dangerous under neoliberal subjectivity by surreptitiously reviving a colonialist mentality toward others and the self. These dangers become inscribed in the embodied subjectivity carried over generations and accepted as truths, which perpetuate the errors. As Foucault (1977/1980) put it, “the body manifests the stigma of the past experience and also gives rise to desires, failings, and errors” (p.

148). The body then becomes the archive of conflicting errors. In the struggle between what it is to be free and authentic rises the germ of angst and alienation—two concepts that also require reassessment.

In my experience, I’ve observed the ways social media mirrors the neoliberal self-help industry and presents possibilities to autocommodify subjectivity online. You can be an influencer on social media provided your identity can become a followable brand. The more authentic you appear the more appealing. Followers want to see the “real you” and tend to criticize accounts that are too manicured for being pretentious and staged. There seems to be a visceral draw to the imperfections that make popular users seem more approachable and human. This often means sharing (or oversharing) personal information as part of one’s platform to obtain a marketable level of vulnerability. Authenticity is then framed as honesty, vulnerability, and approachability on social media, which can include sharing mental health issues, asking for comfort from followers, emotional purging (sometimes crying), and personal struggle narratives, among others. When the most common contemporary afflictions, anxiety and depression, become commodifiable for users on social media platforms, the intersections of freedom and authenticity resurface in problematic ways.

For example, the documentary The American Meme (Marcus, 2018) examines the lives of social media influencers; how the pressures to present their authentic selves online for entertainment (and surveillance) commodifies their authenticity and produces angst and alienation.

The New Yorker published an article titled “The American Meme,” a New Netflix Documentary,

Records the Angst of Social-Media Influencers (Fry, 2018), which covers themes of angst, alienation, and commodification presented in the film. The influencers in the documentary describe mixed feelings of alienation from their audience and in-themselves, the pressure to constantly perform, and the fear of losing their followers and ultimately their revenue stream, which depends solely on their popularity. Fry (2018) compares The American Meme to Sydney

Pollack’s (1969) They Shoot Horses, Don’t They, stating, “The destitute competitors, drawing on their increasingly deteriorating physical and psychological resilience, are desperate to win…”

(para. 7).

The social media influencer is an extreme example of neoliberal subjectivity where the

(presumably) authentic self is conditioned by its marketability, and personal experiences become commodifiable. The pressure to maintain one’s volatile status in the online economy depends on diversifying by absorbing soft skills and adapting to new technologies, new platforms, social standards, norms, and politics. The strain to remain in the limelight and maintain an income creates angst, and alienation from the self and others (much like other precarious work), which is maintained under the disciplinary power of self-surveillance (see Zuboff, 2019).

This combination of self-surveillance, neoliberalism, and existentialism requires some backpedaling. First, I want to bring the notion of surveillance into context, along with existentialism to understand the genealogy and reshaping of anxiety and depression. Tracing the origins of hierarchical surveillance to the 18th century, Foucault (1975/1995) examines the

70 mechanisms of power behind the physical structures for surveillance and their effect on subjectivity: “By means of such surveillance, disciplinary power became an ‘integrated’ system, linked from the inside to the economy and to the aims of the mechanism in which it was practiced.

It was also organized as a multiple, automatic, and anonymous power; for although surveillance rests on individuals, its functioning is that of a network of relations from top to bottom, but also to a certain extent from bottom to top and laterally” (p. 176).

The effect of this mode of surveillance on subjectivity is a type of control, training, or discipline in Foucault's theorizing. Similarly, I would argue the effects of surveillance power has the side effects of developing a sense of angst. Compared to Sartre’s notion of the gaze, which creates angst and alienation (as well as the negation of our freedom); contemporary forms of surveillance are magnified through collective gazes with recorded memory. Your actions are not only surveilled and judged by the internal gaze of the other, but also recorded and reanalyzed over time. With the advent of social media, camera phones, and an increasing collective doxing of misbehavior on and offline, our subjectivity becomes monitored and reshaped continually. The majority of our communication on the daily is digital, and the preservation of these records is continual. Even offline, the individual is faced with the angst of composing a private message that they know has the possibility of being posted online for public scrutiny, thereby effectively censoring whatever the original message could have been, at least to some conscious if not unconscious degree. This extends Foucault’s (1975/1995) notion of discipline through the power of surveillance and what he calls “the uninterrupted play of calculated gazes” (p. 177) to modify not only public but also private behaviours and subjectivity.

The surveillance power and collective online gazes we experience now have a permanence that neither Foucault nor Sartre could have anticipated. Digitally recorded surveillance creates the

71 possibility for ongoing reinterpretations of facticity that does not have the fallibility of organic memory and is furthermore extended to the virtual gazes of thousands and sometimes millions of people. The disciplinary power of this surveillance is then also magnified exponentially and becomes particularly effective in policing the already powerless. If one’s primary source of social and financial capital depends on an online economy and that economy is compromised by doxing, that individual lacks other avenues of power to defend themselves or ignore the virtual charges.

Those with access to power can effectively withstand an online blowback with access to wealth, public relations agents, media outlet support, platforms to make amends, acts of goodwill

(e.g., donations, apologies), and marketable reformation narratives. Powerful people such as politicians and celebrities accused of misbehaviour have a greater chance of reclaiming their status because of their existing offline power and are furthermore not entirely dependent on their online power for sustenance. For example, Donald Trump was elected president despite the recording exposing his sexist and vulgar comments about women (Victor, 2017), and Graves (2018) states that several celebrities accused during the #MeToo allegations are looking to make a comeback,

“For the accused, there are people who can help them to rehabilitate their reputations – for a price”

(para. 5). The power of collective surveillance and gazes then demonstrably intersects with neoliberalism and perpetuates a disproportionate favour to those already in power to help themselves.

What is also interesting is both how freedom and authenticity can be retheorized under these new parameters, and whether the effects of collective moral surveillance produce existential angst or a form of normative discipline and training. Simultaneously the disciplinary power of surveillance becomes self-surveillance and intersects with neoliberalism when one faces the possibility of reshaping their facticity in the virtual public sphere, especially when they face online

72 criticism. Subjectification operates under the power of the collective gaze as the individual demonstrates reflexive behavioural self-analysis and change in the face of moral scrutiny.

Existential freedom is positioned at the intersection between doing as one would do in accordance with their self-perception versus doing as they do (see Heidegger, 1927/1962). The intent is measured as authentic or inauthentic both internally in self-surveillance and externally under the collective moral surveillance.

I have theorized four potential responses to a public outcry against (mis)behaviour to highlight the conflicts between freedom and authenticity under the gaze of surveillance and self- surveillance. The first response I will call ignorant humility: accepting collective criticism and modifying behaviour to ward off disapproval but risking self-surveyed inauthenticity and loss of existential freedom. The second response is ignorant resistance: resisting change in behaviour to obstinately force an image of a free and authentic self while risking public condemnation. The third response is informed humility: personal reassessment and reflexive understanding of behaviour in context and the effects it has on others in order to come to an authentic and existentially free adaptation of modified behaviours in light of new information. The fourth response is informed resistance: challenging the public criticisms with justificatory arguments that change the public’s perception and demonstrates authenticity and freedom both in self-surveillance and external surveillance. These responses are not exhaustive but do demonstrate the interplay between freedom and authenticity at the intersection with surveillance power.

The conflicts raised here, which I argue produce existential angst and alienation, are between liberating authenticity against existing societal norms. Once more, I return to the idea that the individual is at a loss to seek refuge within the self in existential contemplation and often requires community support and validation in order to obtain authenticity. What I mean is that authenticity

73 as a self-surveyed existential construct together with the freedom to choose that certifies it, are not easily separable from the external surveillance that creates the conditions for their possibility.

Authenticity and freedom then become indeterminate when the power-knowledge relations that condition their possibility reside in normative moral constructions. Social norms are the very target of existential reassessment in both Heidegger and Sartre as they form the basis for negating freedom and authenticity. Yet their liberation is not impossible if we shift the focus from the knowledge production process itself to understanding, as Foucault (1982) suggests. Understanding creates the conditions for the possibility for liberation from the pressure to decide on authenticity, and thereby reduces its angst and alienating potential. Resorting to undecidability on authenticity through understanding paradoxically frees one from a forced choice, between authentic and inauthentic (according to whom?), which is arguably free and authentic-in-itself. Part of this work here is to facilitate that understanding through the reassessment of existential constructs at the intersection with neoliberalism.

What’s left to reassess: A conclusion

Foucault’s methodology allows for interrogation of existential constructs as they originate, operate, and change in context. It’s his way of approaching the interrogation of a subject or body of knowledge without a problem/solution binary that is both refreshing and robust. Understanding the historicity and power of a concept is far more honest than having the hubris to propose a solitary solution—as though I’d be the first to think it—or that it would be convincing and immediately push others to make changes. Changes churn slowly and I am convinced by Foucault’s argument that understanding and knowledge are powerful in-themselves to produce change over time. The change is not determined, and it may not work out. The process of understanding is invariably an experiment that has the possibility to fail us, at least when it comes to changes in the self. I think,

74 however, that understanding the process and that it can fail, is yet another part of the body of knowledge that empowers changes in the self.

This reassessment was intended to highlight the complexities of existentialism in the contemporary world. Having said that, the task remains open and incomplete with many other questions still unanswered, some of which I will only briefly outline here. The matters of existentialism and subjectivity are more complicated now at the intersections of race, sex, gender, and sexuality; however, I have not addressed politics and environmental degradation. These circumstances have created novel ways for us to experience the world and ourselves within it.

Postwar politics heavily influenced existentialism but may have limited its view solely to the potential for human error. Hence Sartre’s strong focus on responsibility (Gordon, 1999). It makes sense that in the aftermath of two world wars, the focus of existentialism would be on making meaning out of senseless suffering (Crowell, 2012). In our current milieu, we not only have the collective insights of philosophers commenting on their experiences with war, revolution, chaos, and the power of human evil but a new landscape yet untouched by the existential urge to make meaning. How do we make meaning of a dying world?—A world running out of resources, facing global climate change, and environmental degradation (IPCC, 2014).

The world we live in is no longer sustainable. Environmental degradation through human error has resulted in conditions that the existentialists could not have conceptualized. The concern had once been about individuals dealing with freedom and mortality. Now we are aware of the mortality of the world as well. How does the state of the world and the politics surrounding it inform existentialism or vice-versa (see, Green, Hale, & Colgan, 2019)? How is angst produced in this context? What sort of coping mechanisms do we use to combat these contemporary problems?

Does the state of the world enable more empathy and outward thinking, or do we still focus on the

75 self—our individual survival? How do we go about in a world that is no longer just absurd but dying? Does this make us more likely to lose hope?

Other questions: Is authenticity now measured by the degree to which one uses their identity as a platform for activism? The political right accuses the left of moral signaling. The discourse indicates a heightened moral awareness and responsibility, more informed lay public, and a willingness to act on principles. Does this actually translate to activism, communal action, and support, or mere lip service? Does lip service get turned into action through social pressures (the disciplinary power of surveillance)? Where then does the freedom to act fit into the picture? How is subjectivity shaped by the social demands to act on one’s self-announced beliefs? Social media has become the stage on which heroes are publicly exalted above the crowd and where villains are executed (if I may be poetically hyperbolic for a moment). The #MeToo movement (see

Hosterman, Johnson, Stouffer, & Herring, 2018) has altered the shape of masculinity and identified toxicity in sexual and non-sexual relationships. Subjectivity no longer seems to be a mainly solitary practice. It has become a communal experience. One must be validated for their identity to be

“authentic” in the neoliberal world. On Instagram and Twitter, a validation tag next to your profile indicates to the public that you are a noteworthy social figure. Social media influencers sell identity. Capitalism has snuck into the game to make marketable what is desirable to become.

Freedom and authenticity have, more than ever, transparently succumbed to usury.

Angst and alienation are now produced under somewhat collective circumstances. The existential concepts of angst and alienation are not, however, often marketed under these labels.

They are repackaged through mental health pathology and confounded with anxiety and depression, which are much more relatable, diagnosable, medicable, and biological than their existential counterparts. Sugarman (2015) argues that psychology enabled the growth and spread

76 of social anxiety disorder, which has become an epidemic only since its inclusion in the DSM in

1987. Previously, very few people claimed to suffer social phobia (3%), a precursor to social anxiety disorder. Its growth was fostered by drug advertising for Paxil to resolve all types of symptoms of shyness as social anxiety, while the neoliberal turn to self-marketing reinforced confidence, networking, and self-surveillance as key to competitive success (Sugarman, 2015).

Self-surveillance is both a cause of anxiety and a virtue of neoliberalism. Psychologists unreflexively reinforce the pathologizing of anxiety with therapeutic interventions and drugs, treating the phenomenon instrumentally. Furthermore, the inability to cope results in victim- blaming where people suffering from anxiety and/or depression are seen as having a moral failure for being unable to prevent their condition (Fullagar, 2009). Anxiety and depression are often viewed as causally determined psychological problems that require institutional intervention, leaving individuals feeling helpless and simultaneously responsible for their inability to cope, prevent their condition, or heal.

Some folks have resorted to online communities for catharsis. The proliferation of memes about anxiety, mental health, and loneliness on social media indicate a need for recognition and validation (see Burton, 2019). We suffer together and suffer alike. Abstaining from airing dirty laundry in public, a relic of the boomers, no longer applies to millennials (Hennenfent, 2015).

Personal problems, frustrations, health, hygiene, emotions, existential plights have become popular sharable content that makes one more likable, human, and approachable. However, it becomes suspect that the more one can milk this thread the more they can gain social capital, at least online. Instagram offers incentives to gain followers by monetizing content or offering sponsored advertising through individuals that have become influencers. If your platform is to raise awareness about anxiety and depression, you better have relatable content. What happens if

77 or when you heal? Hopefully, your recovery narrative is marketable. These are some of the questions and potential interrogations that remain to be explored (a task I will attempt in the following chapters).

What I have attempted is a reassessment of central existential constructs with certain contemporary intersections to highlight the difficulties in understanding how they continue to operate. Once again, the reassessment itself interrogates the power-knowledge dynamic through a genealogy to produce understanding, the aim of which is liberation. Transcendence is going beyond one’s facticity and highlighting that there is more to human existence than brute facts about us. This self-interpretation happens in context where social norms are absorbed into our meaning- making process, reassessing our facticity, reframing it through the imaginary of a contemporary world. Understanding this process creates the conditions for the possibility of liberation and change. The purpose of change, especially in a volatile world—politically, economically, and sustainably—is not only to produce conditions for a better life but in essence to give life meaning.

What is the common thread? It consists in the search for meaning. However, I believe there are some additional considerations to this problem when our online lives produce part of our identity and inform our behaviours. Nevertheless, in the information age, we are more visible, to our benefit and detriment. Essentially our subjectivity is under constant surveillance and peer review. Meaning-making becomes a collective enterprise that enters a review process as well.

Angst and alienation become shared experiences. Meaninglessness becomes a popular sentiment.

It is then satirized. Ironically, it produces its own tragicomedy. I call it neonihilism.

3. NEONIHILISM: A NEOLIBERAL TRAGICOMEDY

“The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live—moreover, the only one” (Cioran,

1970/2012, p. 89).

In this chapter, I discuss in a brief overview, the origins of nihilism, particularly in 19th century

Europe where the Russian nihilist movement flourished. I then explore some philosophical conceptions of nihilism and suffering, with a particular focus on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and

Viktor Frankl (1905-1997). Afterward, I distinguish the term I have coined, namely neonihilism, from other types of nihilism, consider some possible objections to the idea of neonihilism, and look at possibilities for overcoming it. Throughout, I analyze literature, television, and social media in order to reconcile the philosophical with the popular sentiments of nihilism and consider where they intersect. After all, nihilism is not only a theory but also a social and existential phenomenon.

The search for meaning appears to be prevalent in much of philosophy, literature, and self- help. Either it is explicitly stated by the author in their arguments or the scope of the text is to inquire about meaning. I explore the persistent search for meaning humans have had historically

(hence existentialism) and some of the ways they continue to do so (e.g., self-help). I argue that we often experience meaninglessness when we’re bogged down by external conditions (e.g., neoliberalism and politics) and this has produced a feeling of nihilism (see, Teo, 2018b, for new nihilism). Neonihilism is then demarcated by the ways in which we perform our understandings of meaninglessness, futility, dismay, and hopelessness with an emphasis on humour as a coping mechanism. The parodying of meaning and ironic reverence of nihilism is one of the ways we cope, which distinguishes neonihilism from other forms of nihilism.

My discussions of neonihilism depend on observations I have made, particularly in social media and meme culture, and are theorized in contrast to other conceptions of nihilism, absurdism, and existential suffering. Parallels are drawn to Nietzsche’s (1885/1975) refusal to surrender to nihilism with his notion of eternal recurrence, Frankl’s (1946/1984) attempts to find meaning amidst the horrors of concentration camps, Sartre’s (1943/1992) despair with the gaze of the other, and Camus’s (1942/1955) surrender to joy in the face of absurdity.

I also discuss examples of fashionable nihilism from the podcast Radiolab (see Abumrad,

2014) and the animated series Rick and Morty (see Harmon & Roiland, 2013), and attempts to make meaning of meaningless with ironic success. Fashionable nihilism extols apocalyptic fetishism to produce meaning out of meaninglessness. However, the meaning made of the meaninglessness does little to dispel its effects. Experientially it feels like a placeholder that allows us to engage with pragmatic tasks. For some people, it is simply a cork to hold them together so they can perform their jobs. However, questions arise like: How do you continue to go to work if it contradicts your ethics? How do you reconcile that your phone, your car, and even your food are products of exploitation? (see Arnold & Hartman, 2006; Miller, 2003). Being self-aware of the choices you make and the impacts they have in the information age reinforces anxiety, guilt, and shame. The recourse is often a heuristic shortcut to meaninglessness. After all, we all suffer, right?—a sentiment of having given up in the face of overwhelming meaninglessness.

I argue that the collective sense of meaninglessness observed on social media and through fashionable nihilism, along with the meme culture that satirizes and pokes fun at our collective plight, ironically produces meaning. I provide some examples of the potential causes and contributions to the aura of meaninglessness prominently observable online to suggest that the element of humour in neonihilism acts as a coping mechanism against the “tragedy.” The

80 tragicomedy of neonihilism gains meaning as it unites us in collective suffering. The theoretical difficulty here is determining whether meaninglessness, especially in the neonihilistic sense, is a universal condition. I am skeptical of universalizing ideas because they hide important marginalizing intersections that serve to further oppress the already disenfranchised. I would hesitate to construct a universalizing theory of neonihilism that presumes all suffering is equivalent.

Neonihilism is then unifying, instead of universalizing, in the sense that it captures meaninglessness produced within the context of neoliberalism but is experienced in multifarious ways in subjectivity, particularly as it intersects with class, race, sex, gender, and sexuality.

However, these inscriptions are not alienating. I argue that the sense of meaninglessness experienced in a particular subjectivity can be effectively communicated to another person at least conceptually and invoke a compassionate response that may trigger an approximating affective tone in relation to one’s personal encounters with meaninglessness. An understanding can and is developed in hearing each other’s suffering, and only in this way is neonihilism unifying—by appreciating the nuanced ways it operates in different subjectivities, it’s marginalizing political effects, it’s epistemic and experiential limitations, and its intersections with privilege and power.

I won’t be proposing any solutions to neonihilism. I don’t have any. I don’t think they’re important or feasible. Furthermore, I am opting out of solution-focused thinking as a Foucauldian strategy to avoid the pitfalls that come with a problem-solving paradigm. Pitfalls such as myopic approaches, intellectual enthusiasm without practical implication, moral prescriptions, and most of all I am avoiding the structure of solution-based thinking that rests on the problematic of reason and rationality, which I explore in-depth later. I argue that neonihilism is a justified reaction to this world as a coping mechanism. It may, however, have the intrinsic potential to be overcome if

81 neonihilism creates meaning in uniting us in our suffering. In this way, the solution may already be built into the problem so to speak.

Part of neonihilism is a sense of growing compassion as well. The information age has triggered ethical hyperawareness (see Floridi, 2010; Vaccaro & Madsen, 2006), which cannot be stifled without sacrificing compassion. It’s not enough to try to solve problems internally. In other words, self-help is insufficient if you restrict yourself to working on the self because you cannot control the circumstances around you and the things that affect other people. If you have an ounce of compassion it would not suffice for you alone to be happy in this world while others exist in misery. So perhaps the information age has provided enough visibility to activate collective compassion, frustration at feeling hopeless to make sufficient changes, and an aura of meaninglessness. For many, this either pushes them to activism—which is exhausting—or to retract to their family unit and ignore the plights of others (see, Teo, 2018).

Neonihilism then provides a new theoretical lens for interrogating preexisting existential constructs and their historicity. It is also useful in analyzing the frenzied political atmosphere that leftists on social media have dubbed—late-stage capitalism (see De Keere, 2014; Jameson, 1991).

This sentiment captures the absurdity and egregious unsustainability of capitalism but suggests there is hope in a post-capitalist society. Nietzsche requires nihilism in order to overcome it

(Crowell, 2012). The overman (Übermensch) is a paradigm shift, a reassessment of values, to defeat nihilism and bring about a period of joy marked by a meaningful existence (see, Nietzsche,

1885/1975). Neonihilism may then be a theoretical lens and also a description of a paradigm that we may shift away from through reassessment. I turn here to a suggestion for collective action and solidarity. This work is intended to mobilize knowledge for epistemic, affective, and ethical changes to occur in our values and beliefs, which has liberating potential in raising awareness,

82 compassion, and resistance. This framework is inspired by the collective action and solidarity of movements like feminism, civil rights, the Black Panthers, and Black Lives Matter where education was sought and fought for because of its liberating potential (see, Beauvoir, 1949/1989;

Garza, 2016; Newton, 1972/1995; Wilson, 2013).

The tragicomedy in neonihilism

The origin of the tragicomedy is Greco-Roman. Aristotle (ca. 335 B.C.E./2006) first describes the combination of tragedy with comedy in his Poetics using Homer’s (ca. 800 B.C.E./1999)

Odyssey as an example of a double plot where tragedy and comedy are intertwined, and “the people most hostile to one another, the way Orestes and Aegisthus are, go away having become friends at the end” (p. 38). However, it is the Roman poet Plautus (ca. 190 B.C.E/2002) who coins the term tragicomedy (tragicomoedia) in the introduction to his Amphitryon to justify the absurd idea of combining kings, gods, and slaves into one play. Plautus teases that it wouldn’t be appropriate strictly as a comedy so he calls it a tragicomedy (Foster, 2004). Over time, the genre has become solidified in poetry, theatre, literature, and film, giving rise to modern iterations like dark comedy and satire, often mixing elements of pain and pleasure. Post-WWII British theatre saw an upsurge of tragicomedies with notable authors like Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), Harold Pinter (1930-

2008), and Tom Stoppard (1937-), among others (Dutton, 1986).

In the aftermath of the Second World War, making sense of tragedy with recourse to comedy or an acknowledgment of the absurd was itself existential. Beyond the British theatre where famous existential plays like Waiting for Godot (Beckett, 1952/1956) captured the essence of tragicomedy, the existential fictions of Sartre and Camus touched on the sense of meaninglessness and absurdity derived from tragedy. In the absence of comedy, tragedy focuses solely on the vapid absence of meaning. Sartre’s (1939/2005) short story The Wall depicts a prisoner of war named

Pablo facing the dilemma of saving his own life by revealing the hiding spot of his friend Romano or face the firing squad. Pablo, having given up all hope and accepting the inevitability of execution, takes surreptitious pleasure in lying to the authorities about the hiding spot, not actually knowing Romano’s whereabouts, and thinking he’s sent the enemy on a wild goose chase. Later on, Pablo discovers that Romano had been shot and killed in the exact location he’d led the authorities, thereby ironically saving his own life. The story ends with Pablo rolling on the ground laughing at the absurdity of the circumstances. The absurdity is that Romano still had hope and continued to fight in the rebellion while Pablo had lost all hope in the POW (prisoner of war) camp, yet through an ironic twist of fate the meaningful life was sacrificed for the meaningless. Pablo laughs at the irony because it confirms how meaningless his life is when he’s permitted to live despite his renunciation.

For Camus, absurdity cannot be an end in itself, and he refuses to relent to meaninglessness.

He, therefore, concludes that we must find the absurd meaningful; otherwise, we would not have reason to continue living. In The Myth of Sisyphus Camus (1942/1955) defines the absurd as a strictly human experience marked by the inability to understand the world through reason alone, and argues that we must confront the absurd in a process that enables revolt, freedom, and meaning.

In recognizing the meaninglessness of existence, we understand the absurdity in life, which liberates us from the hope for meaning and constraints of normative values. We become free of the tragedy by exceeding it, which then frees us to live with passion. Similarly, in The Outsider,

Camus (1942/2000) shows that meaning is only arrived at when we face meaninglessness with indifference, in other words, an encounter with the absurd. Unlike Sartre’s Pablo, Camus’s

Meursault finds meaning at the point of renunciation, when faced with his own mortality.

For both Sartre and Camus, tragedy is not ameliorated or uplifted through comedy. In fact, comedy or a sense of pleasure only appears as an effect of becoming aware of the absurdity of existence, such as when Sartre’s Pablo rolls on the ground laughing in stupefaction, or Camus’s

Meursault finds happiness in his indifference to his execution. Both existentialists describe an uplifting element similar to that found in tragicomedy, but only as a psychological byproduct of the awareness or confrontation with meaninglessness. It is not humour per se, but a mix of pain and pleasure that is typical of tragicomedy. More importantly, they see it as a spontaneous reaction to the absurd, which I argue is a coping-mechanism. Moreover, it is a coping mechanism to deal with meaninglessness that I believe is at the core of what I will describe as neonihilism.

First, however, a discussion of nihilism is required. The idea of combining elements of tragedy often associated with poverty, oppression, and adversity, with comedy, which lightens the mood, seems to have had strong appeal for audiences from ancient to modern. However, nihilism, which shares the element of meaninglessness found in some tragedies, lacks the uplifting element found in tragicomedies. In other words, nihilism is defined by pain in the absence of pleasure. Unlike tragicomedy, which had its birth in the arts and sought to mimic reality, nihilism emerged first with its roots in philosophy, then flowered as a sociopolitical movement in Russia that influenced much of the literature at the time. German philosopher Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1819) first used the term to argue that rationalism, in abandoning the absolute transcendence of God, reduces philosophy to nihilism (see Jacobi, 1785-1815/2009). In other words, in the absence of faith in

God, we are left with only meaninglessness.

However, the popularization of the term “nihilism” began later with Turgenev’s (1862/2008)

Fathers and Sons published in 1862, contemporary with the Russian nihilism movement (1860-

1881) that ended with the assassination of Tsar Alexander II (Hingley, 1969). Nineteenth century

Europe saw turmoil between the aristocracy and the working class. In Russia, despite some liberal reforms in the tsarist regime of Alexander II, the most important of which was the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, the anarchist revolutionaries that formed the nihilist movement wanted a complete rejection of authority for radical reform and freedom (Radzinsky, 2005). In one of the most influential documents of the Russian revolutionary period, Catechism of a Revolutionary

(1869), Sergey Nechayev (1847-1882) proposes a nihilistic philosophy where he outlines the qualities of amorality, and detachment from social affairs, property, sentiments, and society as indispensable to achieving the outcome of the revolution (Avrich, 1974)15. Nechayev’s manifesto embodies nihilism as a complete obliteration of state and society, the dangers of which were only appreciated following the assassination of Alexander II, after which the Russian nihilist movement became associated with violence and terrorism, and was thereafter effectively subdued with militant government action and policy (McLaughlin, 2007).

The dangers of nihilism were addressed in literature prior to the rise and fall of the revolutionary movement. Particularly, Russian literature at the time, which belonged to the genre of realism for its accurate and honest depiction of society, was well respected as social commentary

(Kvas, 2011/2019). Victor Hugo’s (1862/2015) Les Miserables, published in 1862 (the same year as Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons), inspired Lev Tolstoy’s (1869/1982) historical epic War and

Peace, both novels depicting the strife between the rich and the poor, the powerful and the oppressed, capturing a sentiment of the times. What followed, especially in Russian literature was

Dostoevsky’s progressively bleaker depictions of life, underscoring a somewhat more nihilistic tone in Memoirs from the House of the Dead (1862/2001), Notes from the Underground

15 The original manifesto was a ten-page pamphlet. It is reprinted in its entirety in English in this book without credit to a translator. An English translation of the manifesto can also be found at https://www.marxists.org/subject/anarchism/nechayev/catechism.htm

(1864/1994), and Crime and Punishment (1866/1978), to the darkest depiction in The Brothers

Karamazov (1880/1976) where one of the protagonists, Ivan, sums up his feelings about the notion of his brother murdering his father as “one vile reptile consumes the other” (p. 782).

Nevertheless, 19th-century Russian literature did not relent to nihilism but actively rejected it, offering salvation through faith. Even the French writer, Hugo (1862/2015), in the introduction to

Les Miserables reveals that the real protagonist in his story is God (or what he calls “the infinite”), perhaps both questioning the purpose of misery while also justifying its necessity in the grand scheme, in a sense hoping for meaning. In Man Overboard, a brief philosophical section of the novel, Hugo compares life to a man having fallen overboard from a moving ship, experiencing shock (birth), despair for hope (adolescence), the futility of fighting against the inevitable end

(adulthood), and the final submergence to mysterious depths (death). The treacherous waters represent society, against which the individual hopelessly struggles. For Hugo, the only salvation is to float by looking toward the sky, perchance to see God, and finally to submit to his will. In the appendix of the book, Hugo (1862/2015), in his own voice, directly counters nihilism with faith:

“There is, as we know, a philosophy [nihilism] which denies the infinite [God]. There is also a pathological state which denies the existence of the sun: It is known as blindness…it is as though a mole were to exclaim, ‘really I’m sorry for them with their sun!’…The denial of the infinite leads straight to nihilism” (p. 1209).

Tolstoy also deferred the question of meaning to God, and eventually formed his own version of Christianity called Tolstoyism, focusing on humanism and rational faith to pursue a life of meaning (McLean, 2003). In War and Peace, Prince Andrei’s character arch outlines an elitist philosophy praising the virtue of powerful individuals exacting their force to the presumed benefit of the masses, followed by a post-war humanism instilled by the realization of Napoleon’s carnage,

87 that results in Andrei eventually renouncing his elitist views and freeing his serfs upon returning from war (Tolstoy, 1869/1982). The anti-elitist stance becomes part of Tolstoyism along with faith, which is most evident in Tolstoy’s (1886/2003) short story, The Death of Ivan Ilych, where only upon his deathbed does Ivan realize his life and accomplishments have been meaningless in the absence of faith. Tolstoy relies on mortality as the final opportunity to reassess the value of one’s existence when faced with the inevitable, a juxtaposition of the finite with the infinite, thereby according magnitude to the predominance of God as the infinite when life itself is only temporary suffering (McLean, 2003). In other words, for Tolstoy suffering is justified if and only if it is toward meaning; in his case, the only meaning is faith in God.

Dostoevsky did not have the same faith as his contemporaries, and perpetually struggled with the question of God and meaning, at times resolving to find meaning via love rather than faith directly. In the final pages of Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov is serving a seven-year sentence in Siberia for murder. He is in the company of Sonia, a young woman devoted to him whom he eventually learns to love. It is his renunciation to this love for her that gives him hope for the future. Sonia, believing in his salvation, had been reading him the New Testament. Eventually,

Raskolnikov discovers meaning through the realization of his love for her. He takes the New

Testament in hand, doesn’t open it, and instead thinks, “Can her convictions not be mine now?

Her feelings, her aspirations at least…” (Dostoevsky, 1866/1978, p. 492). Dostoevsky is not ready to commit entirely to faith but love, for him, becomes the condition for the possibility of faith in something meaningful and life-renewing, even in the direst of circumstances. It is through the faith of another that Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov is inspired to meaning. He loves God only indirectly through the embodiment of His benevolence in Sonia. He is not yet ready to embrace faith, but not yet prepared to abandon it either, perhaps because he is incapable of finding meaning elsewhere.

Faith, however, does not appear in Turgenev’s (1862/2008) Fathers and Sons. Instead, he examines the ideology of nihilism brewing throughout Russia in the mid-19th century through the narrative of two young men, Arkady and Bazarov, who return home from university to challenge the norms and values of their friends and family, a pretext for Turgenev to explore the tribulations of the generational gap. Turgenev treats nihilism as an unsustainable philosophy of cynicism, vulgarity, and destruction that seems to waver in its integrity for the sake of love. Unlike

Dostoevsky’s salvation through love, Turgenev’s more practical approach is to challenge the sustainability of nihilism when both protagonists are seduced by the potentially meaningful experience of romantic love. In the end, love does not save either Arkady or Bazarov, but it does reform their views and indicates that some human experiences defy meaninglessness.

These literary examples serve as commentaries on the intellectual discourse of the mid-19th century European fascination with nihilism, both in its philosophical and sociopolitical forms. The class struggle depicted in Hugo and Tolstoy specifically, exemplifies a growing frustration with the feudal conditions in European Monarchies of the era. These are the same conditions that prompted the Russian nihilist movement. The rejection of nihilism depicted in the literature was meant to divert us from accepting meaninglessness on philosophical grounds by outlining its practical implications, consequences, and ultimate failure. The resounding themes across these novels expressed a distaste for society at large and the collective masses, who are depicted as chaotic and violent. The recourse is focus on the individual, for whom faith can be discovered to alleviate the suffering of the world. Faith is not treated as an uplifting element (pleasure), like humour in tragicomedy, or joy in absurdism, but a reassurance that suffering (pain) has purpose even in the absence of pleasure.

In much of the culture surrounding tragedy and nihilism, suffering is treated as though its modus operandi is toward meaning. If the underlying meaning in suffering is uncovered, it justifies the experience of suffering because we can now reframe a “suffering from” to a “suffering for” something. In the 19th century literary examples, that “suffering for” is toward God, through which all meaning is discovered, if not in this life, then the next. Moreover, these novels are early examples of existential commentaries on meaninglessness with desperation for a solution that often takes the form of resorting to faith. It is important to note that the faith prescribed here is specifically Christian-centric, which is both implicitly evangelical and simultaneously exclusionary, especially of Jews given the notable anti-Semitism in Russian literature (see Gorev,

2007; Morson, 1983; Schefski, 1982). Victor Hugo, by contrast, wrote against the persecution of the Jews in Europe and specifically dedicated a piece to the Jews in Russia (see Hugo, 1882). It is then no surprise that “about fifty percent of the membership of the revolutionary parties was

Jewish” (Schapiro, 1961, p. 148) in the Russian Revolutionary Movements (1905-1907 and 1917) against Tsarist dictatorship.

Christian faith as salvation is consistent with much of the early philosophy surrounding nihilism from Jacobi, to Kierkegaard, to Nietzsche. It was the latter, however, who not only acknowledged the plunge into nihilism at the loss of faith but also formulated a novel solution that did not require God. In his famously over-quoted passage, Nietzsche (1882/1974) states, “God is dead...And we have killed him” (pp. 181).16 What follows is a philosophy often misattributed to nihilism, but actually aimed at its exact opposite: a life of meaning in the absence of God

(Kaufmann, 1950).

16 This idea first appeared in The Gay Science (see Nietzsche, 1882/1974), but was explored in much greater depth in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (see Nietzsche, 1885/1975).

The meaning of meaninglessness

Nihilism was of growing concern in 19th-century Europe, and its connection to a loss of

(Christian) faith was evident in the available discourse. Even Kierkegaard (1846/2010) describes the symptoms of nihilism in his notion of levelling, which outlines an arguably existential apathy from putting faith into the public rather than God, to the point of losing individuality and all meaning in life. Nihilism was not necessarily a philosophy to be overcome by faith, but rather, the perceived consequence of losing faith in God. “For he who loves God without faith reflects on himself, while the person who loves God in faith reflects on God” (Kierkegaard, 1843/1983, p.66).

The challenge presented here by Kierkegaard is where to place our faith—in ourselves, in others, or God? Placing faith in ourselves is too easy because we can interrogate ourselves mercilessly, while faith placed outside the self seldom answers our inquires, especially when placed in God.

For this reason, a test of faith requires sacrifice, which is the theme of Fear and Trembling. In the book, Abraham sacrificing his son Isaac to God is juxtaposed with the reality of Kierkegaard sacrificing romantic love for his work. On his deathbed, Kierkegaard expressed regret at not having married his betrothed Regine (Hannay, 1983).

Kierkegaard had complained that his entire life had been filled with suffering, and perhaps part of the torment was an internal struggle with faith. In Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard

(1849/2004) argues that the only solution to despair is faith; however, his own despair seems to have persisted despite his faith. Perhaps like Dostoevsky, he too was unable to commit entirely to faith for salvation and, in the end, when it was too late, Kierkegaard may have preferred to have committed to love instead. Beyond all his faith, Kierkegaard regretted most not having married the love of his life Regine, to which he left everything he owned and to whom he dedicated his life’s work (Garff, 2007). The search for meaning is often associated with faith and/or love. Both stand

91 as redeeming principles to salvage existence from meaninglessness, yet both can be ephemeral and volatile. Both are tested, and both bring pleasure and pain. When Nietzsche addressed nihilism as the result of a loss of faith, did he also resort to love or some other solution? For the answer, we must return to tragedy.

In the previous section, I discussed the origin of tragicomedy. Its predecessor is of course tragedy. The origin of tragedy as an art form is Greek mythology and captures a pessimistic, if not nihilistic, sentiment. Sophocles, in Oedipus at Colonus, proclaims “What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is—to die soon” (as cited in Nietzsche, 1872/1967, p. 42)17. This passage was quoted by Nietzsche

(1872/1967) in The Birth of Tragedy to highlight the inception of tragedy, for which the Greeks necessitated respite—an antidote—to exist without anxiety, and hence they created the Olympian gods, which stand as the ideal, the artistic, the virtuous, in other words, the idols of humanity. The

Greeks found their salvation from tragedy in art, made art of tragedy, and celebrated tragedy to overcome it. To capture the ideal is to capture perfection, which is possible in art, not in reality, and provides for humanity a hope for salvation from nothingness.

The emphasis on art as the uplifting principle in tragedy as a parallel to existence itself where art can perform much the same uplifting task was also recognized by Nietzsche’s intellectual predecessor and infamous pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer. When Nietzsche wrote Schopenhauer as Educator in 1874, he had idolized the philosopher in the way the Ancient Greeks idolized their

Gods. Nietzsche’s praises of Schopenhauer were consistent with his philosophy of the overman

(Übermensch)—the true self that is high above you, not deep within you, but a true self that you

17 The original passage in Oedipus at Colonus, “Never to be born is the best story. But when one has come to the light of day second-best is to leave and go back quick as you can back where you came from. (Sophocles, ca. 406 B.C.E./2005, p.84).

92 discover by meditating on the qualities you love in someone you consider your educator

(Kaufmann, 1950). However, in The Birth of Tragedy published in 1872, Walter Kaufman (1921-

1980), a notable Nietzsche translator and biographer, claims that the first instance of a break away from Schopenhauer’s influence occurs when Nietzsche argues that tragedy is overcome through art, offering the Ancient Greeks as the primary examples of how art becomes salvation from tragedy (Nietzsche, 1872/1967).18

For both philosophers, the only redeeming quality that makes life bearable is art; however, for

Schopenhauer, art negates the will (our striving to live), while for Nietzsche art reaffirms life. For

Schopenhauer (1819/1966), art enables access to universal knowledge and temporarily alleviates the pain of existence, which is fraught with desires. For Nietzsche (1872/1967), the power of salvation through art becomes a joyous experience to quell the nausea of knowledge. The distinction is that Schopenhauer relies on a drive-reduction model where art merely alleviates suffering, while for Nietzsche art makes life joyous and meaningful. For the first time also, and

Kaufmann notes this as well, Nietzsche describes life as nauseating, absurd, and meaningless (in the absence of art), all of which later become the tenets of existentialism, especially in Sartre. The example Nietzsche (1872/1967) offers is Hamlet, for whom the overwhelming nausea of knowledge, of knowing the truth, destroys all motivation for action and leaves him uncertain and perplexed. How does one deal with knowledge, especially when that knowledge of reality becomes the profound realization that life is absurd? Action cannot prevail, for it certainly makes reality no less absurd, and then perhaps the only salvation is in the aesthetic of the tragedy itself, the art of life, the beauty in the meaningless opera we all perform in tandem.

18 Although The Birth of Tragedy (1872/1967) was published two years before Schopenhauer as Educator (1874/2014), Kaufmann’s (1950) argument is that the disagreement marks a first instance of a break from Schopenhauer—eventually Nietzsche would repudiate him altogether.

According to Nietzsche (1872/1967), tragedy is born with the Greeks but also dies with them at the hands of Euripides, who relied on Socratic critical-thinking to bring about a new movement in Greek art, one that forewent tragedy in the classical sense and made a mere caricature of it.

Resentful of the death of tragedy, Nietzsche proclaims that the scientific or Socratean paradigm that overtook art is excessively optimistic in its tone, attempting to assuage humanity not through the comforts of metaphysics, but rather through knowledge, by promising to explain the world and through this knowledge obtain satisfaction. In the absence of art as salvation from the absurd, everything is thus reduced to a problem that purports an attainable solution. Reason only satisfies knowing. Art as salvation instigates a joy for life. Joy would then become the major premise of much of Nietzsche’s works and a true deviation from Schopenhauer’s bleak pessimism.

Joy, in Nietzsche’s view, is unlike faith or love, which were purported ways to justify or ameliorate nihilism rather than overcome it. For Nietzsche (1882/1974), joy is the by-product of a reassessment of values and overcoming the self until one can say yes to life—yes to the eternal recurrence19— “This life, as thou livest at present, and hast lived it, thou must live it once more, and also innumerable times, and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and joy…in thy life must come to thee again, and all in the same series and sequence...wouldst thou not throw thyself down and gnash thy teeth, and curse the demon that so spake?” (p. 152). Presented as a thought experiment, Nietzsche challenges us to assess whether we could bear living this life again in every detail, and further presumes most of us would be terrified at the mere thought because we do not truly live as we desire. Once we reassess our values and create our own, we can overcome the self and eventually say yes to reliving our lives again in every detail ad infinitum because then, and

19 “…the eternal recurrence—as distinguished from the profound experience of joy that comes to the overman— was presented by Nietzsche not as dogma but as a hypothesis…” (Kaufmann, 1950, p. 332).

94 only then, will every suffering, joy, and banality have meaning. It is what Nietzsche (1908/1969) calls love of fate, or amor fati: “that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity, not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it…but love it” (p. 258).

Ansell-Pearson (1994) describes Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence20 in relation to tragedy:

What one affirms in the eternal return is life as 'self-overcoming', that it, life as an eternally

self-creating and self-destroying force, and the ' law' of life as passing away, death, change,

and destruction, and, as Nietzsche says, this must include: 'saying Yes to opposition and war.’

This is a tragic view of life because it sees no redemption from the pain and suffering of life,

and, moreover, wants none (p. 52).

Nietzsche is not attempting to alleviate or justify suffering. He accepts it as given and instead sees its value in a meaning-making potential. Nietzsche (1901/1968) writes, “I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage” (p.

206). Suffering here is taken as a brute fact about the world without recourse to reason—it is neither justifiable nor unjustifiable, good or evil—it is instead valuable. Suffering has the potential to create meaning in an otherwise meaningless world. For Nietzsche, the purpose of reassessing all values is to create alternative routes to meaning where former avenues have reached a dead end.

Faith is regarded as a dead end, not only religious faith but also the faith placed in morals derived from religion, especially Christian morals. Nihilism is, “…a consequence of the faith in morality”

(Nietzsche, 1901/1968, p. 9). If we cannot attain our highest values through morality, then we ought to reassess those morals rather than resign to nihilism. Perhaps then, we arrive at joy, or more precisely, a celebration of life that is worth living along with its suffering.

20 Ansell-Pearson (1994) uses eternal return where I prefer Kaufmann’s (1950) translation, eternal recurrence.

Nietzsche argues that art is produced through suffering; it is the product of adversity, not good health (see Kaufmann, 1950; Safranski, 2003; Tanner, 2000, Young, 2010). Art is the reaffirmation of life within a history of suffering. Nietzsche praised Ancient Greek tragedies for fortifying the

Greeks through suffering thereby creating a profoundly artistic culture. It was out of pain that joy was born, and Greek tragedy is the retelling of this story. Unlike Schopenhauer’s drive-reduction model21, Nietzsche’s notion of health is not the absence of sickness, but rather, the amount of sickness one can endure successfully and still say yes to life. In this way, without suffering, there would arguably be no art, or at least not the type of art that Nietzsche upholds as life reaffirming, in other words, meaningful. Meaning then appears to be intimately tied to suffering. If meaninglessness, or nihilism, produces suffering, and we can use that suffering to create art, among other things, we successfully create meaning out of meaninglessness. Suffering is then neither good nor bad, but merely incidental toward our striving to create meaning. This process, for Nietzsche, requires reassessment of all our values and even ourselves.

Nietzsche is a problem-thinker, not a systems-thinker, where problem-thinking is a process meant to examine all premises with a lack of attachment and a willingness to be wrong, discard ideas and values, restart, and perpetually reassess—it’s experimental (Kaufmann, 1950). With the dwindling of faith and rise of nihilism in the late 19th century, the return-to-faith philosophies didn’t gain much traction and the recourse to love was primarily literary. What emerged was a novel way to conceptualize the problem of suffering rather than to try and solve it. Nihilism became paramount in Nietzsche’s philosophy as a problem to spark the experimentalism of reassessment, self-creation, self-overcoming, and the eternal recurrence. His method was notably

21 “All happiness and all gratification, is that which is negative, the mere abolition of a desire and extinction of a pain” (Schopenhauer, 1850/2004, p. 4).

96 anti-system and meant to disrupt a process of thinking that limited one’s ability to question premises, intuitions, values, and beliefs. The point was to try a new approach where the existing systematic philosophies would potentially fail in dealing with the nihilistic symptoms of the time.

“Nietzsche believed that, to overcome nihilism, we must first of all recognize it” (Kaufmann, 1950, p.110).

Tragedy and nihilism are marked by suffering and meaninglessness. Philosophers and writers have attempted to use faith and love to demonstrate that life does have meaning despite the suffering and meaninglessness. For Nietzsche, suffering and meaninglessness are taken for granted, but instead of diverting our attention to other ways to find meaning, he encourages us to consider the meaning-making potential of suffering. He does this by showing us that tragedy was born as an art form out of suffering and made that suffering meaningful in the process. Suffering and meaninglessness found an outlet in art thereby also formulating that uplifting principle necessary to endure it. It’s the mixture of pain and pleasure that we often describe as bittersweet.

The uplifting principle in tragedy that is recognized by Nietzsche, is likely also recognized by

Aristotle when he rates tragedy as a higher art form than tragicomedy (in which the uplifting principle is explicitly comedy). Aristotle (ca. 335 B.C.E. /2006) complains that the addition of comedy to tragedy is made to pacify the masses because they cannot stomach tragedy in its pure form: “It seems to be first because of a weakness of the spectators, for the poets follow the crowds, making what suits their wishes. But this is not the pleasure that comes from tragedy but one more appropriate to comedy…” (p. 38). It appears that the pleasure derived from tragedy is differentiated here from the pleasure derived from comedy. The first is arguably achieved by accepting suffering, and the second in negating it.

I reiterate these points here to outline a distinction in the ways suffering has been dealt with philosophically. The push to accept and acknowledge suffering both in art and in life suggests a sort of virtue. The recourse to faith, love, or comedy to lift us out of suffering suggests temporary relief from the inevitability of suffering. If suffering is pervasive then the suggestion to overcome rather than negate it appears more promising. As discussed, Nietzsche’s proposal is certainly to overcome nihilism, first by recognizing it and then by accepting suffering as inevitable. The new path carved by Nietzsche is perhaps why he is often strongly associated with nihilism. However misleading that is, the associations are important because he addresses nihilism in a novel way that allows others to follow in the footsteps of reassessing suffering without recourse to faith, reason, or love as temporary solutions. Meaning-making then became a method of using suffering to overcome nihilism, part of which entails overcoming the self.

Viktor Frankl (1905-1997) quotes Nietzsche several times in Man’s Search for Meaning where he explores the potential for meaning-making through suffering as a self-overcoming process. He is inspired by Nietzsche’s words, “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how” (as cited in Frankl, 1946/1984, p. 84)22, and cites them as the motto for surviving prison conditions.

Taken from his own experience, Frankl (1946/1984) survived WWII and recounted the time he spent in several concentration camps witnessing the extent of human suffering and adaptation to miserable conditions. He describes how the shock of witnessing brutality slowly subsides to a point of apathy, even to the gas chambers, that save many the trouble of committing suicide. Survival then becomes the hiding of pain and discomfort to be economically viable for work.

22 Original quote from Twilight of the Idols, “If we possess our why of life we can put up with almost any how” (Nietzsche, 1889/1977, p. 23).

The dehumanization of daily beatings do not so much bother the inmates as the indignation that comes with the beatings from the insults hurled at them by the guards: “…indignation not about cruelty or pain, but about the insult connected with it. That time blood rushed to my head because I had to listen to a man judge my life who had so little idea of it” (Frankl, 1946/1989, p.

38). The body can become numb to pain; however, the judgement of one’s character, the insult to one’s identity, remains a constant source of resentment. In the private sphere of one’s subjectivity, there is perhaps a sacred notion of the self that cannot submit to another’s cruel judgement23. Frankl

(1946/1989) is saying, you can subject one’s body to the worst conditions but you cannot interfere with one’s internal freedom: “…everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way” (p. 75). This small act of freedom is the nexus of his meaning-making psychology and the basis for developing his logotherapy.

Along with internal freedom, Frankl also describes other measures employed to withstand the conditions in the concentration camps. In the midst of the routine suffering, Frankl (1946/1984) recounts moments of pleasure when the inmates witnessed a beautiful sunset, caught a sneak peek at cabaret show for the soldiers, or began to joke about their miserable conditions. He lists art, humour, and love among these small pleasures. “The meager pleasures of camp life provided a kind of negative happiness,—'freedom from suffering,’ as Schopenhauer put it—and even that in a relative way only” (Frankl, 1946/1984, pp. 57-58). Frankl acknowledges the respite from suffering found in art, humour, and love while maintaining that it only acts as temporary relief. He

23 A sentiment that is also captured in Sartre’s (1943/1992) notion of the gaze: “A judgement is the transcendental act of a free being. Thus being seen constitutes me as a defenseless being for a freedom which is not my freedom. It is in this sense that we consider ourselves as “slaves” in so far as we appear to the other” (p. 243). This concept is further exemplified in No Exit and forms the ground behind his famous saying “Hell is—other people!” (Sartre, 1944/1989, p. 45).

99 accords love a slightly more powerful role in alleviating suffering and even cites Dostoevsky’s recourse to love at the end of Crime and Punishment as the only salvation from suffering. Love becomes another central aspect of meaning-making and logotherapy. Namely, Frankl believes meaning is to be found outside the self, in others, and through love. It is only by focusing on the world and others that self-overcoming may be achieved as a by-product.

…the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own

psyche, as though it were a closed system. I have termed this constitutive characteristic “the

self-transcendence of human existence.” It denotes the fact that being human always points,

and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself—be it a meaning to fulfill or

another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause

to serve or another person to love—the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself

(p. 116).

Frankl elaborates three ways to discover meaning through logotherapy: (1) creating work or doing something (e.g., art or activism); (2) experiencing something or someone (i.e., love); (3) our attitude to inevitable suffering (internal freedom).

Logotherapy is informed by existentialism as a future-oriented psychotherapy focusing on the will to meaning. It is assumed that the will to meaning is the primary driving force in individuals, unlike the will to pleasure in psychoanalysis or the will to power in Adlerian psychology (Frankl,

1967). Nietzsche not only influenced Frankl’s belief in an internal freedom to overcome, but also that it was reserved for the few who had the willpower to do it. Nietzsche (1901/1968)24 defines

24 I cite Nietzsche’s (1901/1968) The Will to Power here because it discusses these concepts collectively as a summary of a philosophy developed in piecemeal in his previous works. The Will to Power was published posthumously and is Nietzsche’s most controversial work for being tampered with by his sister to be misused by

100 the will to power25 as freedom and accords it special praxis in the overman (Übermensch)26—the unique and powerful individual capable of reassessing all values and creating their own meaning— thereby overcoming the self and nihilism. Frankl (1946/1984) writes,

It is true that only a few people are capable of reaching such high moral standards. Of the

prisoners only a few kept their full inner liberty and obtained those values which their suffering

afforded, but even one such example is sufficient proof that man’s inner strength may raise

him above his outward fate. (p. 76)

Logotherapy is then Frankl’s method for according people the agency to reassess their suffering and enable them to create meaning through it. Frankl (1946/1984) argues that the will to meaning can be inhibited by existential frustrations that leads to what he calls noogenic neurosis.

Noogenic neurosis is specifically an existential neurosis about meaning. However, Frankl

(1946/1989) notes that existential frustration is not pathological and does not entail that one’s suffering is necessarily bad: “In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice” (p. 118). In this way, his noogenic neurosis is merely a starting point for analysis toward helping people discover their goals and how to achieve them

(find meaning). People without meaning are caught in an existential vacuum for which Frankl suggests noo-dynamics as a method to have them realize their meaning. Noo-dynamics are represented by two poles. On one end is meaning. On the other end is the person needing to fulfill it, and the therapist’s job is to apply the right amount of tension to realize this goal.

the Nazi’s to justify their philosophy (see, Kaufmann’s introduction in The Will to Power). Below I cite the origins of the concepts I discuss. 25 First discussed in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (see, Nietzsche, 1885/1975), then elaborated in Beyond Good and Evil (see, Nietzsche, 1886/1989). Explicitly defined as freedom in On the Genealogy of Morals: “The instinct for freedom (in my language: the will to power)” (Nietzsche, 1887/1969, p. 87). 26 First discussed in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (see, Nietzsche, 1882/1975).

101

Frankl (1946/1989) describes his notion of an existential vacuum as a widespread 20th-century phenomenon that is manifested by meaninglessness, which causes boredom. He refers to

Schopenhauer’s (1851/1974) theory that we oscillate between suffering and boredom,

Pain and boredom are the two foes of human happiness. In addition, it may be remarked that,

in proportion as we succeed in getting away from the one, we come nearer to the other, and

vice versa. And so our life actually presents a violent or feeble oscillation between the two. (p.

329)

Sartre (1938/1959) also uses boredom as a theme in Nausea, attributing it to a lack of meaning.

In logotherapy, boredom becomes the basis for anxiety and depression if it goes unresolved. The will to meaning is then called into action, which is itself based in freedom—a notion central to existentialism as well. Rollo May’s (1909-1994) existential psychotherapy, which acknowledged the importance of confronting nihilism (see May, 1982), also recognized freedom in overcoming anxiety,

I trust that the fact that existential psychotherapy places emphasis on these tragic aspects of

life does not at all imply it is pessimistic. Quite the contrary. The confronting of genuine

tragedy is a highly cathartic experience psychically. (May, 1960, p. 695)

Existential freedom is then both a confrontation of nihilism and the condition for the possibility of overcoming nihilism. Like, Sartre, Frankl (1946/1989) does not endorse freedom without responsibility: “I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast” (p. 134).

Freedom is then seen at the core of meaning-making, which enables us to accept suffering as an inevitability in the process of existing while acknowledging the opportunity to use that suffering

102 to create something meaningful. Freedom also allows us the ability to reassess our own tragedies and use them to create; in some instances, it produces art. Art has been shown to be a form of salvation from absurdity. For some, it’s the production of art, while for others it’s making art of life. What is beautiful in tragedy can then also be beautiful in personal tragedy; what is beautiful in literary dialogue is then also beautiful in conversation; what is beautiful in theatre, film, and music, is also beautiful in lived experience; and what is beautiful in abstract suffering is also beautiful in our pain. It’s the epistemic shift away from reason and cause and effect, to the existential experience as profoundly aesthetic. For what is art if not the desperate attempt to capture the beauty in the real? And so to live aesthetically is to make art of existence, in conversation, in conduct, in body, in hobbies, and especially in suffering. The only way we endure suffering is through meaning, and if meaning can be found in art, then we can turn to the art of tragedy to find the meaning in our suffering and overcome nihilism—as mortality manifest, as the profound affect of loss, as grief over something worth grieving for, at having been witness to life in all its transient manifestations. In our personal tragedies, we find love and bittersweet compassion for ourselves, we find our humanity in our flaws. Perhaps we find love in our imperfections—for perfect beings are not loved, they are feared.

Neonihilism

Pessimism has long social ties in European culture. In The Dark Side: Thoughts on the Futility of Life, Alan Pratt (1994) argues that nihilism, in one form or another, has been a part of the

Western intellectual tradition from the beginning. The Skeptics in Ancient Greece negated the possibility of truth and formulated what is now called epistemological nihilism (Russell, 1984).

Even Boethius (525AD/1999) challenged the value of happiness in his attempt to console us on mortality, “Happiness itself is wretched, inasmuch as it never endures reliably nor, even when it

103 is present, satisfies” (p. 39). On the other hand, Nietzsche (1908/1969) accepted happiness and suffering in equal measure, “Pain is not considered an objection to life: If you have no more happiness to give me, well then! You still have suffering” (p. 297). Goethe’s (1774/1990) The

Sorrows of Young Werther touched on romantic notions of meaninglessness at the loss of love.

Whether tragic, comedic, or romantic, the obsession with suffering has a distinct cultural lineage to the birth of nihilism in 19th century Europe.

The import of Vedic philosophy and Buddhism into Europe in the 19th-century interpreted the bulk of the teachings as misleadingly nihilistic because of the pronouncement that life entails suffering (Coleman, 2002). One of the early adopters of Vedic and Buddhist ideas was

Schopenhauer, who particularly appreciated what he understood to be pessimistic philosophies in these Eastern traditions (Cartwright, 2010). In fact, much of Schopenhauer’s philosophy on the unconscious, the denial-of-the-will-to-live, and suffering, in general, are derived from Buddhism

(Hansen, 2007). Nietzsche also understood Buddhism to be an ultimately nihilistic religion

(Elman, 1983). He became critical of Buddhism for the same reasons he became critical of

Schopenhauer, namely for proposing ascetic and life-renouncing philosophies (Kaufmann, 1950).

Nevertheless, the association of Hinduism and Buddhism with nihilism is a Western interpretation, which evidently says more about Western thought than Eastern religions27.

Martin Heidegger (1956/1958) claims that nihilism is deeply rooted in the normal human state, which is also indicative of this Western pessimistic bias. In The Decline of the West, Oswald

Spengler (1918/2006) uses nihilism as an interpretive lens to explain the root of collapsing

27 An early exception to this is Herman Hesse’s (1922/1951) Siddhartha, originally published in German in 1922, which takes a positive perspective on Buddhism as a search for meaning. However, his novel only gained notoriety posthumously (1962) and was a romanticized fictional perspective on Buddhism and Hinduism from a Western author (Morris, 2002).

104 civilizations. Marquis de Sade’s (1904/2016) The 120 Days of Sodom is arguably nihilistic for endorsing extreme cruelty, violence, and sexual assault as expressions of absolute freedom. Tristan

Tzara28 left Romania to become one of the founders of the nihilistic anti-establishment Dada art movement in Paris (Hentea, 2014). Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran (1911-1995) who was heavily influenced by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, also emigrated to Paris and spent his entire life writing some of the most pessimistic aphorisms (Zarifopol-Johnston, 2009). In A Short History of Decay, Cioran (1949/2010) reduces 20th-century Europe to a decadence in ideas founded on illusions of truth—“Decadence is merely instinct gone impure under the action of consciousness”

(p. 116). These examples highlight a continuing trend in Western nihilistic thinking from the 19th to the 20th-century, whether philosophical, sociopolitical, or romantic.

Frankl (1946/1989) believed the 20th-century was experiencing a collective neurosis, partially due to industrialism, that he compares to nihilism, or a sense of meaninglessness—his notion of the existential vacuum. At the same time, he talks about a logotherapeutic technique called paradoxical intention by which one acknowledges an anxiety and behaves ironically to reinforce it, thereby dispelling its effects. Frankl (1946/1989) explained that “this procedure consists of a reversal of the patient's attitude, inasmuch as his fear is replaced by a paradoxical wish. By this treatment, the wind is taken out of the sails of the anxiety” (p. 127). Both of these concepts, namely nihilism and paradoxical intention, taken together make up part of my notion of neonihilism (see below). I also parallel Frankl’s understanding of the existential vacuum as a partial result of industrialism when I discuss neonihlism as a partial result of neoliberalism.

28 Born Samuel Rosenstock, his pseudonym Tristan Tzara is a play on words in Romanian, trist în ţara, meaning sad in the country (Hentea, 2014).

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Before I discuss neonihilism, it is important to distinguish it from fashionable nihilism, which is another conception of a contemporary form of nihilism sweeping Western consciousness.

Fashionable nihilism has been documented as a social phenomenon in various forms. In

Fashionable Nihilism, Wilshire (2002) criticizes analytic philosophy for dissociating us from the important matters of meaning, which in turn produces a nihilistic culture among contemporary analytic philosophers. This account problematizes nihilism as fashionable among philosophers and attempts to overcome it to give purpose back to philosophy. Other contemporary philosophers are also interested in recognizing nihilism in order to propose solutions. Michael Novak's (1970) The

Experience of Nothingness and Donald Crosby’s (1988) The Specter of the Absurd aim at reinterpreting nihilism to overcome it through freedom and creativity. However, my concern here is with a broader understanding of nihilism as socially fashionable among the public. In The

Banalization of Nihilism, Karen Carr (1992) describes cheerful nihilism as a fashionable way we have begun to accept meaninglessness without critical thinking. This account is closer to the type of fashionable nihilism I mean.

The most accurate interpretation of fashionable nihilism for my purposes, insofar as it describes the social phenomenon and popularity of nihilism, is captured in a podcast episode titled

In the Dust of this Planet by Radiolab (see Abumrad, 2014). In the episode, host Jad Abumrad discusses how his brother-in-law’s book, In the Dust of this Planet (see Thacker, 2011) became the catalyst for a deep investigation into fashionable nihilism. The episode begins with an introduction to Thacker’s (2011) book, in which he writes about the intersection of the horror genre and philosophy as a way to conceptualize thinking about the unthinkable—nihilism—the horror that existence may not have any meaning or purpose. Abumrad (2014) then talks about the first instance the book entered popular culture, somewhat indirectly, when screenwriter and producer

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Nic Pizzolatto listed Thacker’s book as one of his influences in writing the nihilistic character Rust

Cohle for his television series True Detective (see Pizzolatto, 2014). On the podcast, Thacker explains that he had watched the show and noticed the influences in Cohle’s character prior to the discovery that his book had inspired the show’s creator (Abumrad, 2014).

Later, unbeknownst to Thacker, a Norwegian artist painted the cover of his book, which was then picked up by a fashion label and printed onto some expensive clothing that appeared in Lucky magazine worn by actress Lilly Collins and then in a music video featuring Jay-Z wearing In the

Dust of this Planet on his leather jacket (Abumrad, 2014). What follows in the episode is a discussion of fashionable nihilism as seductive posturing of the darkness of nihilism without absorbing the philosophy or its existential effects. In a way, fashionable nihilism negates nihilism by caricaturing it. Fashionable nihilism demonstrates that even the sentiment of meaninglessness can be commodified, highlighting the power of neoliberalism. The marketable element of nihilism is its rebellious undertone—a rejection of morality and norms, an acceptance of mortality, and an attitude of defiance. The popularization of nihilism in culture and media, which is expressive of social realities, conditions the possibilities for commodification in the neoliberal imaginary.

If nihilism has become a sufficiently popular sentiment that it carries marketable sociocultural value, then by sanitizing the existential depth of meaninglessness, the façade of nihilism— fashionable nihilism—can be sold as a disposable pacifier. When a consumer can purchase meaninglessness on a t-shirt, no less from an expensive fashion line, they are simultaneously supporting a sentiment of nihilism while also negating it by according value and meaning to the signifier of meaninglessness on their clothing. This contradiction may or may not be apparent to the consumer; in the former case, it would be consistent with irony, and in the later with ignorance.

However, the appeal of nihilism is reflective of the popularity of meaninglessness, and its

107 commodifiability is arguably problematic in reinforcing meaninglessness. Seeing meaninglessness as a commodity demonstrates that anything can be sold under neoliberalism.

Thacker talks about the popularity of nihilism as a form of youthful rebellion against authority, citing Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, the punk rock movement, and the Dada movement in art

(Abumrad, 2014). Punk rock emerged in the 1970s as an anti-establishment movement, countering the peace and love of hippie rock with rebellious lyrics focusing on politics, sadomasochism, and violence (see Christgau, 1981). Dada was an early-20th-century nihilistic anti-art movement in rejection to the logic of modern capitalist society (see Trachtman, 2006). Nevertheless, both punk rock and dada have become marketable. Likewise, nihilism has become marketable, which may then be effective in temporarily dulling its effects; however, it fails to address the causes. The podcast episode ends with a justification for our contemporary nihilistic sentiments, given the information age and climate change. Abumrad (2014) makes the case that growing up during the

Cold War, it was much simpler to identify a problem or an enemy to point the finger at than today where hopelessness is reinforced by the fact that we have no one to blame for climate change and sociopolitical problems—or alternatively, we are all to blame.

The issue with accountability raised in the episode, at the reality of climate change and the information age, paints a holistic sentiment of meaninglessness and hopelessness that we are, to some degree, forced to encounter. It is much harder to avoid sociopolitical issues in the information age where media is less of a choice and more of a necessity, whether for work, communication, and merely participating in social life. If the proliferation of information is accelerated and we are dependent on information, then the added stress of assessing the overwhelming amount of information contributes to a feeling of hopelessness in addressing the number of problems to which we are exposed (see, Fortier & Therrien, 2018; Hoofd, 2009). Furthermore, without the ability to

108 hold individuals or states accountable for many of the problems we face, the possibilities for solutions are seemingly diminished. Even when we have entities we can hold accountable, we have witnessed the degree with which powerful individuals and corporations have evaded responsibility and penalty.

I provide here some recent examples that I argue contribute to the feeling of meaninglessness

I have described in neonihilism. The Panama papers leak of over 11 million documents implicated more than 200,000 offshore entities in tax evasion and corruption. Approximately 40% of those involved saw zero impact or backlash (see, O’Donovan, Wagner, & Zeume, 2019; Reuters

Institute, 2019). Amazon founder and wealthiest person in the world Jeff Bezos has been criticized for anti-competitive practices, poor workforce treatment, and tax evasion (see Barrett, 2019;

Kovach & Pagano, 2019). Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has faced congressional hearings for misuse of user data and alleged attempts by Russian operatives using Facebook to spread misinformation prior to the 2016 US presidential elections resulting in an 18% user drop rate on

Facebook (see, Cartwright, Nahar, Weir, Padda, & Frank, 2019; González, Yu, Figueroa, López,

& Aragon, 2019). The impeachment of US President Donald Trump, which is also partially related to the Russian Facebook election interference, resulted in Senate acquittal (see, Alfonso III, &

Wagner, 2019; Kim, 2020).

These are just some examples to highlight a sentiment of futility in addressing global issues when powerful entities dilute the meaning of accountability, while the lower classes are often shown to suffer at their expense. In Iran, a 300% increase in gas prices sparked mass protests that resulted in the government responding with force, killing over 200 civilians, and cutting off nation- wide internet access to prevent media coverage of the events. The Iranian government’s response is currently under investigation by the United Nations (Gigova, 2019). Wealth and power

109 inequalities have become more transparent, and their consequences more readily proliferated to the public. Tax evasion has been a demonstration of power and privilege by the wealthiest class in the top 0.01% (Alstadsæter, Johannesen, & Zucman, 2019). Tax evasion and wealth inequality have resulted in mass protests and violence, with examples like Occupy Wall Street, international

G20 protests, and the Charlottesville protest in the US, among many others. Recent research shows

Americans have pessimistic views of the future when it comes to the environment, economy, and politics (Parker, Morin, & Horowitz, 2019).

Most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated conditions on a global scale that have affected health, medicine, economies, employment, businesses, access to resources, affordability and sustainability, and mortality for nearly everyone (see World Health Organization, 2020). In the midst of this pandemic the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter (see Garza, 2016) movement, sparked by the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis Police (Fernandez & Burch, 2020), has spread to a global scale and potentially become the largest civil rights movement in U.S. history

(Buchanan, Bui, & Patel, 2020), fighting against systemic racism in police, government, and what has been described as a White supremacist patriarchy in North America (see Busey, & Coleman-

King, 2020; Holt, & Sweitzer, 2020; Jason, 2020). In response, U.S. president Donald Trump signed an executive order to protect American monuments, memorials, and statues (United States

Government, 2020) which, in turn, authorized him to send federal troops into specific cities to quell domestic unrest. The federal troops have been accused of brutality, shooting non-lethal ammunition, pepper balls, and tear gas at protesters, targeting medics, and abducting protestors in unmarked vehicles (see Badger, 2020; Zimmerman, 2020). The president’s actions and use of federal troops have been condemned by city officials and lawmakers, most notably representative

Pramila Jayapal questioned attorney general Bill Barr’s deployment of federal troops to

110 specifically target antiracist Black Lives Matter protestors and not White supremacists storming government buildings, brandishing guns and swastikas, and calling to lynch a governor in the president’s name (see Frias, 2020). Jayapal argued that these actions represent the president’s agenda and, moreover, highlight the operations of systemic racism in America.

What these examples outline are conditions for the possibility of hopelessness and meaninglessness due to the hyperawareness of sociopolitical conditions, pandemics (and climate change), corruption, systemic racism and inequity, and diminished accountability and penalty. As

Brassier (2007) points out in Nihil Unbound, nihilism has been overexposed in philosophy, literature, history, and popular culture; however, it remains a phenomenon worth investigating because of its potential intellectual depth and historical persistence. I am not attempting to universalize meaninglessness or nihilism as a contemporary paradigm. Instead, I am acknowledging an existing phenomenon and relating it to my interpretations of media coverage, social media responses, and a growing meme culture that recognizes a sentiment of nihilism in response to these sociopolitical problems. Global internet access, as a catalyst of the information age, has increased the visibility of how this neonihilistic zeitgeist has impacted marginalized folks and their communities as well. This introduces intersectionality (intersections of social identity structures such as race, gender, sex, and class) into the discourse around meaninglessness, which is why I hesitate to universalize nihilism and neonihilism. What we learn from intersectional accounts of oppression, marginalization, and suffering, are the nuances of lived experiences that we can only approximate intellectually and perhaps with compassion, provided our ethics permit it.

When social media becomes the virtual stage for political activism, the intersectional messages are more visible and thereby harder to ignore. This is what I mean by hyperawareness of

111 sociopolitical issues as one of the conditions for the possibility of hopelessness and meaninglessness. Nevertheless, in the absence of a universalizing nihilism, what intersectionality permits is a unifying factor through understanding and compassion. For example, I cannot inhabit a trans body to experience transphobia and I cannot assume my existential suffering is the same as the existential suffering of a trans person experiencing the consequences of transphobia. However, the proliferation of trans and queer activism on social media can inform me about the sociopolitical issues underlying transphobia, the consequences of it—like violence and suicide—and facilitate understanding both intellectually and affectively. Likewise, the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements, among others, depend heavily on online activism and are powerful examples of intersectional activist efficacy online and offline through the amount of scholarship that followed and will continue to emerge (see De Choudhury, Jhaver, Sugar, & Weber, 2016; Mendes,

Ringrose, & Keller, 2018).

What this hyperawareness of sociopolitical issues in marginalized communities provides is an opportunity for understanding in the way Foucault conceptualized the term. I return here to understanding (see Chapter 1) to distinguish between conditions for the possibility of liberation from oppression through the hyperawareness that we experience, to avoid treating hyperawareness as a fashionable “woke” culture of moral signaling that overrides moral efficacy. Understanding, unlike knowledge, which aims at truth, is a genealogical analysis of the conditions for truth and knowledge with the aim of liberating us from the power-knowledge relations that marginalize and oppress, through reassessment (Foucault, 1977/1980). Therefore, although our individual existential suffering, sense of meaninglessness, hopelessness, or nihilism may not be the same, the unifying factor lies in understanding the conditions for the possibility for nihilistic sentiments.

These conditions stem from systemic issues in governmentality, corruption, power-knowledge

112 relations, wealth inequality, systemic racism and sexism, neoliberal responsibilization, and global climate change, among others. Liberation is facilitated through understanding as a unifying factor that calls for collective action and solidarity, in contrast to a sweeping universalization of nihilism as a popular sentiment, the effects of which are self-defeating and demoralizing, thereby deflating the opportunity for resistance and revolt.

Teo (2018b) argues that neoliberalism has endorsed a new nihilism that makes societal and systemic change appear impossible: “This status quo supporting nihilism does not refer to the idea of God, the meaning of life, or to existing values, but is rather about de-conceptualizing the notion that systemic, political-economic change is possible” (p. 243). What I call neonihilism incorporates

Teo’s notion of meaninglessness as a response to sociopolitical conditions in neoliberalism.

However, it distinguishes itself from traditional nihilism with the addition of humour that is most explicit in online meme culture. Neonihilism is defined by an acknowledgement and acceptance of meaninglessness that is satirized through irony as a coping mechanism to the disposition of hopelessness. The effect of neonihilism is to examine the poignancy of sociopolitical issues by highlighting the irony in our awareness and simultaneous lack of revolt. It both disseminates information on important issues while making the message more easily digestible with a comedic tone that is typical of memes—satirical pieces of media.

Neonihilism then uses the uplifting element found in tragicomedy, often through irony, self- deprecating humour, or dark humour to acknowledge meaninglessness and to joke about the pointlessness of existence, thereby ironically creating meaning in embracing nihilism as a way to cope with despair. Neonihilism works similar to Frankl’s (1946/1989) paradoxical intention, which is the deliberate practice of a thought, anxiety, or neurotic habit, exercised to first acknowledge its existence and then dispel its effects. The humour in neonihilism works like paradoxical intention

113 without necessarily being a deliberate practice to dispel the effects of nihilism. For it to be deliberate would entail that a person was intentionally aiming to quell their sense of meaninglessness with humour. There are plenty of studies on humour as an efficacious therapeutic technique (see Dziegielewski, 2003; Franzini, 2001; Hirsch, Junglas, Konradt, & Jonitz, 2010;

Pasquali, 1990). However, I argue that the humour in the context of neonihilism operates more like an “unconscious” coping mechanism rather than an intentional therapeutic technique, which may or may not alleviate some sense of meaninglessness by ironically creating meaning. Humour is often used as a literary device to help establish difficult connections, such as those found in tragedy (see Ruggieri, 1999). This same process is evident in meme culture, where humour is often used as a device, along with popular culture, to point out irony, hypocrisy, and sociopolitical issues, which established a connection and reduces the impact of the potentially painful content.

For example, a meme with two news article screenshots. One image indicates that celebrity

Kylie Jenner is not, in fact, a billionaire, as is popularly believed; she is shy one hundred million dollars, and a GoFundMe crowdsourcing campaign has been initiated in her honour to raise funds for Jenner to become a billionaire (see, Bernard, 2018). The second image is of a man whose crowdsourcing campaign was short $50 to buy insulin, leading to his death. The caption of the meme reads, “This is why people keep saying we should eat the rich, just in case you’re wondering.” This meme comments on an ironic situation with an undertone of dark humour while highlighting that we exist in a world where we prioritize celebrities over the wellbeing of disenfranchised people. The meme is both informational, in providing insight into wealth inequality and its consequences, while calling for resistance with a hyperbolized socialist catchphrase.

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Another meme has the following dialogue—“Millionaire: Makes $20m in 2020. Millionaire:

Hires “artist” to make “art” for $25k. Artist: Puts one streak on canvas. Millionaire: Thanks artist and has art appraised by an appraiser in his same circle of friends. Appraiser: Values artwork at

$20m. Millionaire: Donates $20m artwork to museum to get $20m tax write off. Millionaire: Pays no taxes in 2020. Me at museum: This is stupid, it’s just a line on a canvas. Hipster next to me:

No, you just don’t understand it because you’re uncultured.” Below the dialogue is an image of comic actor Dave Chappelle with the caption “Modern problems require modern solutions.” The

Dave Chappelle meme is taken from a skit in season 2, episode 1, of Chappelle’s Show (see

Brennan & Chappelle, 2003) where the actor plays a politician suggesting absurd solutions to sociopolitical problems (e.g. fake Canadian ID cards for Americans to obtain free healthcare). The meme overall uses dark humour to highlight tax evasion, corruption, and wealth inequality using a hypothetical based in real-world examples of tax evasion (see Duquette, 2019).

In another example, a meme depicts three images of a White woman with dreadlocks holding a bundle of burning sage. The image uses Hindu iconography to denote spiritualism, while the caption reads, “Remember to smudge your crystals of child labour and then use your crystals to cleanse your White sage of indigenous genocide creating a perfect loop that will finally allow you to ascend to the dimension where you can’t see race.” In this meme, both irony and dark humour are used to criticize cultural appropriation, spiritual bypassing, colonialism, and racial blindness.

It also indirectly highlights the absence of intersectionality by commenting on the way some White spiritualists appropriate cultural and religious elements without critical reflexivity and sociopolitical awareness.

These memes are only a small sample of an ever-growing online tradition to satirize and mimic sociopolitical problems through the use of irony to point out hypocrisy and absurdity. They

115 nevertheless provide insight into the popularity of sentiments of displeasure, disapproval, criticism, hopelessness, meaninglessness, and sometimes blatant nihilism. Unlike traditional nihilism, which has been undertaken as a serious philosophical, spiritual, and social problem, neonihilism is a parody of nihilism with paradoxical intention exercised through humour as a coping mechanism. Neonihilism is a response to the overwhelming depressing effects and hyperawareness of sociopolitical problems and our individual inability to solve them. This sentiment is reinforced through neoliberal responsibilization, when systemic problems are reduced to individual responsibility, self-help to overcome systemic problems, or victimization for becoming depressed, anxious, unhappy, and/or nihilistic (see Harvey, 2005; Teo, 2018b). The neoliberal commodification of nihilism as fashionable nihilism ironically validates the popularity of nihilistic sentiments, while simultaneously attempting to ameliorate them and capitalize on their marketability.

In this way, neonihilism belongs in the lineage of nihilism, existentialism, and absurdism for recognizing symptoms of meaninglessness, but in the context of contemporary problems with the added element of ironic humour. Neonihilism captures the sense of meaninglessness and hopelessness inherent in traditional forms of nihilism while adopting the uplifting principle found in tragicomedy that ironically creates meaning out of the meaninglessness. One could argue that in creating meaning out of meaninglessness, the idea is self-refuting, namely, it is no longer nihilistic because neonihilism seems to negate the ground of nihilism—meaninglessness. Although the concepts seem contradictory, neonihilism is not an intentional practice of creating meaning, the meaning is merely the interpretation of the phenomenon. In the same way, the Dada movement was nihilistic anti-art—“Dada does not mean anything” (Tzara, 1918/2018, p. 4)—and yet created art in the process that was then interpreted to have a profound meaning (see, Forbes, 2017), so too

116 neonihilism is a practice of self-deprecating dark humour and irony as a coping mechanism to meaninglessness in neoliberalism.

The meaning that is produced out of neonihilism is a secondary effect that occurs only through the process of interpretation, for example, my analysis of the above memes. Further analysis using neonihilism as an interpretive lens can reveal important cultural and historic moments and their meanings, which are in fact still being experienced and created. As I have demonstrated through the genealogical and historical investigation, every form of nihilism has been a reaction to sociohistorical conditions and have also been the proverbial “calm before he storm” that have led to inevitable revolt and revolution. It may be too soon to tell if a revolution will ensue, but a revolt has certainly begun and neonihilism can serve an interpretive lens of to identify the meanings that have taken shape from the sense of meaninglessness preceding this revolt.

Another meaning that is created through neonihilism is the unifying factor from diverse voices calling for action and solidarity. The proliferation of memes online is not merely for comic effect, they can be informational, poignant, and raise awareness of marginalized communities and their allies. Neonihilism then indicates not only the existence of problems. Through the meaning- making tragicomedy an understanding and reassessment are revealed. Reassessment creates the conditions for the possibility of overcoming neonihilism much like Nietzsche’s reassessment of all values is meant to overcome nihilism (see Kaufmann, 1950). Within neonihilism then, rests the possibility for its own overcoming. The resurgence of the Black Lives Matter Movement may have already initiated the process of overcoming neonihilism by actively challenging conditions that have produced despair—systemic racism, racial inequity, police brutality, and White supremacy— thereby fighting for meaningful change. If the use of digital activism (see Chon & Park, 2020;

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Seger, 2020) and memes are any indication of a shift in consciousness and a move toward direct action, the self-defeating meaninglessness of neonihilism may be overcome.

Post-neonihilism?: A conclusion

“Man would rather will nothingness than not will” (Nietzsche, 1887/1969, p. 163).

Is neonihilistic memeing revolutionary? It uses the uplifting principle of humour to deliver poignant and informational messages that are sometimes forms of online activism. Whether this is effective in creating systemic changes remains undecidable, partially because any changes would likely appear as correlations rather than causation. Nevertheless, the popularity of neonihilistic memes is both indicative of the growing hyperawareness of social issues and a collective desire for change. Neonihlism is a reaction, and also resistant, to sociopolitical problems, much like traditional nihilism was a reaction and resistance to 19th-century problems. It encompasses marginalized communities that do not have other platforms. Previously unheard voices are part of our daily exposure to media. Some of those voices are actively silenced, like the Iranian protests, which is not a unique circumstance (see also Kim, Whitten-Woodring, & James, 2015), and some are commodified because their campaign has become marketable (see Gershon, 2011).

Neoliberalism then obscures the question of effective resistance in neonihilism, which enables its persisting nihilistic tone—the uncertainty and undecidability of whether meaning-making in meaninglessness is a process of overcoming or just hopeless cynicism. On the one hand, if the meanings being created facilitate a better understanding of the conditions that cause oppression, resistance and liberation become possible. On the other hand, if neoliberal commodification absorbs neonihilism, it may simply become a parody of a parody (if it hasn’t already).

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Naturally, this uncertainty reinforces meaninglessness, which itself can be meta-satirized—a specialty of Harmon and Roiland’s (2013) Rick and Morty. In the show, the persistent theme is the uncertainty and undecidability of meaning-making in a seemingly nihilistic universe. The sci- fi cartoon adventures typically lead viewers to believe the story has a purpose or meaning, only to reveal that it had been meaningless all along but worth doing nonetheless. This is best captured in season 1, episode 8, Rixty Minutes, where a 14-year-old Morty is attempting to prevent his sister from running away after she discovered she was an accident, with the following dialogue:

Morty: Hey, uh Y-Y-Y-You doin' okay? [she doesn't answer] I-I-I kind of know how you feel, Summer.

Summer: No, you don't. You're the little brother. You're not the cause of your parents' misery. You're just a symptom of it.

Morty: Can I show you something?

Summer: Morty, no offense, but a drawing of me you made when you were 8 isn't gonna make me feel like less of an accident.

Morty: [pointing out the window] That, out there? That's my grave.

Summer: Wait, what? [walks over to the window]

Morty: On one of our adventures, Rick and I basically destroyed the whole world. So, we bailed on that reality, and we came to this one. Because in this one, the world wasn't destroyed.

And in this one, we were dead. So we came here, a-a-and we buried ourselves, and we took their place. And every morning, Summer, I eat breakfast 20 yards away from my own, rotting, corpse.

Summer: So, you're not my brother?

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Morty: I'm better than your brother. I'm a version of your brother you can trust when he says, "Don't run". Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybody's gonna die.

Come watch TV.29

The last two phrases have become some of the most popular depictions of fashionable nihilism, with t-shirts, memorabilia, and memes with the words “Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybody’s gonna die. Come watch TV” (see, Stamato, 2016). However, the show itself captures some of the essence of neonihilism as a tragicomedy that acknowledges the seriousness of a meaningless existence, the problems of capitalism, and addresses sociopolitical issues, while satirizing meaning-making and ironically creating its own meaning with dark humour

(see Miranda, 2017). Yet at the same time, Rick and Morty is a cartoon made for entertainment without revolutionary or arguably even educational intent. The show is a capitalist product that uses the tools of capitalism to criticize capitalism. It is uncertain and undecidable whether the meaning behind the humour in Rick and Morty is overcoming nihilism in satirizing it, or merely another clever way of pointing it out. Neoliberalism obscures the possibility for the show to effectively be more than fashionable nihilism when any meaning that is made can be sold as a catchphrase on a t-shirt.

When neoliberalism succeeds in commodifying nihilistic sentiments, it further propagates the status quo and reinforces the idea of the impossibility of systematic changes. The individual is then drawn out of the social world and persuaded to seek change within the self. This is what Teo (2018) calls the neoliberal form of subjectivity (NLFS), which renounces collective change in favour of personal change and endorses a new nihilism that regards social-political change as impossible.

29 Transcribed from Rixty Minutes (see Harmon & Roiland, 2013). Episode clip can be found in Stamato’s (2016) The Uplifting Nihilism of ‘Rick & Morty.

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The information age sustains the NLFS with overwhelming and catastrophizing global affairs: The

Trump impeachment (see Alfonso III, & Wagner, 2019; Kim, 2020), lack of efficacy against blatant governmental corruption (see O’donovan, Wagner, & Zeume, 2019; Reuters Institute,

2019), companies violating human rights (see Barrett, 2019; Kovach & Pagano, 2019), tax evasion and infringement of privacy (see Alstadsæter, Johannesen, & Zucman, 2019; Cartwright, Nahar,

Weir, Padda, & Frank, 2019; González, Yu, Figueroa, López, & Aragon, 2019), and ongoing protests over civil liberties (see Gigova, 2019). The message is that we (they?) are all corrupt, dirty, and nothing is to be trusted.

Neonihilism is marked by a loss of faith in the secular institutions that promised to provide in the absence of moral institutions (i.e., religion). Faith in humanity is now being lost in the way faith in God had in 19th century Europe, a sentiment echoed in postmodernism (see Lyotard, 1984).

One might say in a Nietzschean tone, humanity is dead, for we have killed it. Then in the absence of faith in God, in secular institutions, and humanity, the focus is on the self to change with the available resources, and here the self-help industry prospers. As an individualized and responsibilized neoliberal form of subjectivity, you seek happiness in self-activities to ameliorate the constant stress of unchangeable sociopolitical conditions (Teo, 2018). Self-help cannot be understood or accomplished in a vacuum, no less an existential vacuum (see Frankl, 1946/1989).

Overcoming neonihlism—whether it has this intrinsic possibility or not—is not a self-overcoming project, but rather, a recognition of unity in suffering under the same conditions with various intersecting consequences. Understanding those conditions as systematic problems that cause nihilistic sentiments is an exercise in liberating ourselves from the knowledge-power relations that marginalize and oppress (see Foucault, 1977/1980). I suggest that this process of understanding can facilitate reassessment, which sets the conditions for the possibility of liberation as collective

121 action and solidarity. Frankl (1946/1989) believed in salvation as a humanistic endeavor that reaches out to others, not within the self30,

The only reason why she had decided not to commit suicide was the fact that, rather than

growing angry because of having been disturbed in my sleep in the middle of the night, I

had patiently listened to her and talked with her for half an hour, and a world—she found,

in which this can happen, must be a world worth living in. ( pp.139-140)

30 Rollo May (1960) also incorporates this idea as a principle in his existential psychotherapy: “all existing persons have the need and possibility of going out from their centeredness to participate in other beings” (p. 691).

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4. THE ANTI-SELF-HELP PROJECT: A REASSESSMENT OF SELF, FREEDOM,

AUTHENTICITY, ANGST, AND ALIENATION

“He who does not believe in the impossibility of truth, or does not rejoice in it, has only one road to salvation, which he will, however, never find” (Cioran, 1934/1992, p. 112).

This anti-self-help project aims to exploit the dangers of the self-help discourse and look at other opportunities to find liberation through reassessment. I want to talk about identity in Judith

Butler’s (1956-) terms, ontology in Frantz Fanon’s (1925-1961) terms, power and liberation in

Michele Foucault’s (1926-1984) terms, and intersectionality in Maria Lugones’s (1944-) terms, among others. For the most part, this will be a descriptive account. I suggest solidarity and collective action as viable alternatives to self-help. However, these “prescriptions” are not meant to be totalizing. The scope of this anti-self-help project is to foster understanding and demarcate avenues for liberation from oppressive power-knowledge relations. Understanding is meant to be incomplete, sometimes undecidable, and solution-aversive, to maintain the consistent conditions for the possibility of change and subversion from oppressive power. Unpacking this loaded statement will be the scope of the rest of this work.

To better illustrate what my anti-self-help project is, I must first establish what it is not. The best way I can think to do this is to interrogate the leading anti-self-help literature and draw parallels to and distinctions from my own aims and arguments. The anti-self-help genre has been primarily established as a parody of self-help. The leading non-academic “anti-self-help” literature is replete with satirical titles like Manson’s (2016) The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, which challenges tyrannical positivity with realism to secure enduring happiness. Knight’s (2015) The

Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck, which parodies Kondo's (2014) famous self-help book,

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and instead offers advice on living more care-free. There

123 is Bennett and Bennett’s (2015) F*ck Feelings, the subtitle of which outlines the scope of the book,

One Shrink's Practical Advice for Managing All Life's Impossible Problems. Alkon’s (2014) Good

Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck, which attempts to outline modern etiquette for the 21st century. Sutton’s (2017) The Asshole Survival Guide outlines how to deal with difficult people and how to prevent yourself from becoming a difficult person. Then there are less edgy titles like Burton’s (2010) The Art of Failure: The Anti Self-Help Guide, which takes a more existential approach to deal with problems by understanding things like freedom, death, and meaning, among other philosophical topics.

The majority of these proclaimed anti-self-help books are plainly satire or alternative self-help books for the countercultural audience, hence the frequent use of expletives in the titles. However, the popularity of Svend Brinkmann’s (2017) Stand Firm: Resisting the Self-Improvement Craze has helped legitimize anti-self-help as a potentially serious genre while launching his career as a public intellectual31 (see, Alford, 2017). I will focus on Brinkmann’s book here as a genuine attempt at anti-self-help literature to distinguish where my approach differs as an anti-self-help project.

Brinkmann (2017) argues that speed has become an end in itself in liquid modernity (or flexible capitalism) and is perhaps the cause of the rise in depression, anxiety, and burnout. Liquid modernity affects our self-assessments and our interactions with others: “We think of human relationships as temporary and replaceable. Other people are tools in our personal development rather than individuals in their own right” (p. 6). Our personal development is fueled by the internalized you-can-do-anything mentality and, when we fail, we seek psychological diagnoses

31 This information is also based on the biography section on Brinkmann’s Amazon page for his books. Retrieved from https://www.amazon.com/Svend-Brinkmann/e/B005ITUJ0Y%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

124 to explain our failures and use therapies or drugs to fix them. We consume self-help books to deal with our shortcomings and work toward constantly developing ourselves. “We turn inwards to master an uncertain world, which seems less and less certain as we become more and more isolated” (Brinkmann, 2017, p. 7). Brinkmann’s solution is to stand firm, to recognize the pitfalls of the self-help industry and take some lessons from stoicism to cope with liquid modernity. Stoic lessons include negative visualization, acknowledging limitations, emotional self-discipline, and contemplating mortality, among others.

Brinkmann (2017) anticipated some potential objections to his approach,

I am only too well aware that this book will not resolve the fundamental social and

structural problems that demand collective solutions and political action. But perhaps it can

help individual readers…I am also fully aware that the book, paradoxically, is a symptom

of the individualisation it seeks to challenge. (p. 11)

Nevertheless, I am not convinced why collective action and solidarity are not addressed as viable anti-self-help tactics in a book that attempts to step away from neoliberal individualization and self-help. This marks the first instance where my view of an anti-self-help project diverges from Brinkmann’s. It is certainly more difficult to accommodate a multitude of voices than to speak for individual solutions, but I see no other meaningful way forward. Existentialism, perhaps

Stoicism as well, has already exhausted the individual work we can do, among other individualistic practices. To provide a work of individual resistance seems to me no more than a curated seminar on existentialism as an individualistic philosophy rather than a contextualized being-in the-world- with-others approach (the latter is part of the scope of this project)—a rehashing of the old—or in

Brinkmann’s case a rehashing of Stoicism. Furthermore, it is impossible for me to see myself independent of my indebtedness to others, from which I’ve learned, grown, and continue to be

125 nurtured. I no longer see the self in a vacuum, but hopelessly dependent on the world with others.

So why not bring them into the solution (if there is one) and/or call for collective action? I do not propose solidarity and collective action as solutions but rather as preexisting alternatives to individualistic approaches, which can be found in community psychology (see Rappaport, 1987;

Dalton, Hill, Thomas, & Kloos, 2013), the alter-globalization movement (see Broad & Heckscher,

2003; Pleyers, 2010), and Marxist philosophy (see Hardt & Negri, 2004; Hardt & Negri, 2009), among others.

I do not think Brinkmann (2017) is opposed to solidarity and collective action, and his view of the self is also demonstrative of an indebtedness to others:

You need to learn to look outwards, not inwards; to be open to other people, cultures and

nature. You need to accept that the self does not hold the key to how to live your life. The self

is merely an idea, a construct, a by-product of cultural history. As such, it is by its very nature

more external than internal. (p. 16)

Nevertheless, he opts to proceed with an individualistic approach. Although prima facie this appears as a mere methodological choice, I believe it is problematic. For Brinkmann and also the self-help industry in general, the running error is theorizing the self in a vacuum. Let us call it the solipsistic self (see also Husserl 1931/2013; Hutcheson, 1979). It is not as though these approaches ignore the complex interactions we have with others and the world. Brinkmann, and likely most self-help literature, acknowledges the powerful effects others have on our lives but continue to provide solipsistic solutions, or at best one-sided solutions in dealing with the world-with-others.

Concisely, they all seem to say the self is shaped by the world, and here’s what you can do about it. The theoretical point here is not gnarled in language games about the solipsistic self and

126 the self-in-interaction-with-others amounting to the same idea, namely, what the individual is able to do with more or less influence from others and the world. My point is that the solutions generated to combat angst, neoliberalism, the tyranny of positive-psychology and its self-help industry—are themselves self-help. You are addressed as an individual with the freedom and responsibility of recognizing the problems and stressors caused by systemic issues that you are told you can change. Whether you try to live authentically, self-actualize, or “cut out the navel- gazing”32 (Brinkmann, 2017, p.15), the onus of responsibility is on you to accept, omit, defy, resist, understand, reframe, deconstruct, and learn. Let’s call that a bottom-up approach to solving what

I argue are systemic rather than personal issues (more on this in the next section). Alternatively, a top-down approach could be considered: systemic issues seen from a sociohistorical context, then leveled down to interactions between global governments, to national governments, to local government, to social movements, to grassroots activism, to solidarity and collective action, to the individual participant. Approaching a solution top-down seems impossible, and ultimately it boils down to what the individual can and ought to do—or a feeling of overwhelming defeat in the face of systemic powers.

Perhaps both bottom-up and top-down approaches are limited. Why not a middle-out approach then? In other words, why not an approach that relies on intersubjectivity (see, Husserl,

1931/2013)? To avoid a monist account of intersubjectivity, we must focus on embodiment and relationality to infer the subject, the other, and the world (Zahavi, 2005). Embodiment allows us to theorize the immediacy of experience and affect on the body while suggesting the impossibility of a solipsistic self (see, Kirschner, 2013). Relationality entails an ontological causal relationship between self and others, and self and society, as the ontological nexus from which we can

32 Reference to the first chapter of Brinkmann’s (2017) book—Cut out the navel-gazing.

127 understand subjectivity (see, Richardson & Woolfolk, 2013). Relational ontology, as Levinas

(1961/1969) conceived it, implies an ethical responsibility to the other as a primary and irreducible feature of intersubjectivity. It is a descriptive phenomenological account that explains subjectivity through the ethical relationship that is formed when our embodied subjectivity encounters the other

(Morgan, 2007). In other words, when we become conscious of the other, that relation is first recognized as a spontaneous responsibility to the other. Relation is the formative nexus that explains subjectivity. In this way, subjectivity is not inferred prior to the relations it forms while existing among other objects, but those relations are taken as a primary. As Slife (2004) explains, this is a form of strong relational ontology where, “each thing, including each person, is first and always a nexus of relations” (p. 159). Gergen (2009) and Slife (2004) both attempt to reintroduce relational ontology and intersubjectivity as a theoretical premise for psychological practice to begin at the relational level and avoid atomistic treatments of subjectivity.

Intersubjectivity is then a descriptive account of the relations that exist among subjects and objects, the ethical responsibilities that are formed in embodied subjectivity as a conscious awareness of the other in a face-to-face encounter (see Levinas 1961/1969), and the theoretical nexus that allows us to explain psychological relationships rather than psychological objects. This forms the theoretical ground for the middle-out approach I suggest and can address the systemic problems I have outlined by relying on embodied and relational intersubjectivity, which allows for solidarity and collective action to be integrated into theorizing subjectivity. Furthermore, in treating subjectivity as embodied and relational, we can also account for the performativity of self in context, multiplicitous and conflicting subjectivities, power and privilege, and reflexivity (see,

Teo, 2015).

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The solipsistic self is too small, the systemic issues too large, but the self-in-the-world-with- others (see, Heidegger, 1927/1962) is a given. This is our starting point at all times before we begin theorizing or problem-solving. We are in a given point in time and space, in a world with preexisting relations, history, and an indeterminate future. A middle-out approach would take the self- in-context (my shorter form of the self-in-the-world-with-others) and consider what influences the world-with-others has had on the co-construction of the individual’s subjectivity, how that subjectivity exists in relation to the world, what possibilities are given, and what privileges and what opportunities. In a middle-out approach, we can take for granted the following: (1) We exist in relation to pre-existing conditions and objects. (2) Subjectivity is constantly being reconstructed through power-relations with the world and with others. (3) Whether or not we have free will, we behave as though we have agency and accountability. (4) Our actions have a causal chain to preexisting relations and continue to cause new relations. (5) Suffering is necessarily a part of the causal process. (6) We want to minimize suffering, especially that which is caused by oppression through power relations.

It may not be immediately clear exactly how a middle-out approach is different from

Brinkmann’s suggestions. First, it bypasses the causal-determinism vs. free-will debate (I see it as relevant. Brinkmann does not bring it up). It does this by focusing on the relations between subjectivity and society. For example, learning can then be considered an act of solidarity. The individual stands within a sociohistorical moment in a state of understanding or opposition, usually facilitated by others (e.g., the author, the teacher, peers). Ethics are also a learned act. Rules and norms form behaviours that we obey or resist. We find ourselves already in a world of relations where our knowledge and ethics are in motion. Middle-out means acknowledging these relations first, their history, and their future, and most importantly the realization that they cannot be

129 achieved solipsistically. More importantly, whatever we decide to do will affect others. Therefore, we may begin with solidarity and collective action, listen and learn from each other, and move forward together. This may imply the necessity of second-order change, which requires systematic changes of rules over first-order changes that play within the systemic bounds (see Watzlawick,

Weakland, & Fisch, 1974). If it sounds a little idealistic, I say the alternatives sound a little naïve.

The middle-out approach I propose is a method for theorizing the self as self-in-context, with others and the world. It attempts to put relationality at the forefront instead of focusing strictly on the self. In so doing, I form a descriptive account of subjectivity that avoids moral prescriptivism.

Brinkmann (2017) states, “Often, the quest to find the self will even lead to others being sacrificed along the way, making it impossible for you to fulfil your duties and obligations to others properly”

(p. 26). Duty to others is treated as a taken-for-granted moral position. Instead, I would propose relations-with-others as a necessary condition for the existence of the self, and then working out the sufficient conditions for existing in the world with others. In this way, we can theorize subjectivity descriptively as necessarily bound to relationality, and then consider potential prescriptions as sufficient conditions for that relationality to be mutually prosperous33. Solidarity and collective action may satisfy those sufficient conditions, if and only if, we agree that in the absence of solidarity and collective action we risk an increase in suffering to ourselves and/or to others. The suffering of the self envisioned here is caused by alienation, loneliness, depression, and/or exile. The suffering of others can be understood as usury, abuse, abandonment, segregation, and systemic oppression.

33 I am implying ethics of care not utilitarian ethics.

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The methodological distinctions I have outlined here, between my approach and Brinkmann’s, are meant to carry my argument forward in the rest of this work. As an anti-self-help project, my work is indeed intended to remove the primacy of the self in theorizing subjectivity. The justification is that the focus on the self in attempting to help the self begins with an error that undermines the aim of theorizing subjectivity. The error lies in the notion that we are self- determining. This presumes that a true self exists in an entangled process of self-creation where one is simultaneously a stable self and a self-creating self. If we accept notions of a true self, (see below, Identity and the real self: Fictions of a prediscursive you) then we are in search of something we can never hope to achieve. How would we even know with certainty that we have obtained this ideal of a true self? If we take a humbler approach and accept a self-in-process, with or without a final aim at a true self, then we forego any notion of a completely stable self. However, if we accept the self-in-process without focusing on the self, but instead focusing on the process, we can begin to theorize the relations that form subjectivity as opposed to a self-determining subjectivity.

The middle-out approach looks at the relations that create the conditions for the possibility of subjectivity from a context with an available discourse. Within this process, self-determination as a form of agency can exist, but it first understands the conditions for subjectification. It does not assume naïve agency in self-creating, but how power relations operate in subjectification. Agency is then made possible through liberation in understanding the power-knowledge relations that objectify and subjectify the self (see Foucault, 1982). I unpack these arguments later (see below,

Determinism and the freedom to construct a self in neoliberalism).

Reflexivity here becomes an important part of situating my theoretical arguments. I rely, to some extent, on autoethnography as a reflexive methodological decision that positions me within

131 the context of my work. I want to focus on transdisciplinary reflexivity (see Holland, 1999), which aims at evaluating systems of knowledge and power rather than an examination of an existing paradigm. To begin with, I read Stand Firm eagerly, yet with a critical lens because I was reminded that I used to practice Stoicism, pessimism, and self-control. Moreover, as Brinkmann (2017) remarks in the introduction, “you, dear reader, will find this out for yourself as you proceed through the seven steps. You will learn to observe, perhaps with a mild degree of smugness, how others are engaged in a frenzied dash around the hamster wheel, chasing the next signifier, trend or conquest” (p. 12). Despite the advantages of fortifying “will-power”—whatever that means— practicing Stoicism made me feel active, in-charge, good, better, superior. In fact, it is exactly what got me in academia. Perhaps this says more about me than Stoicism or Brinkmann. But, in my case, the practice of self-control meant feeling superior to others who couldn’t do what I was able to, and this included those who would simply never be able to do what I do because of circumstance or disability. Brinkmann (2017) says to cycle in the rain instead of taking the bus or your car. I did. It felt great. Not once did I imagine in my Stoic-self the others without cars, bus passes, bicycles, or able legs. Even when I saw others, there was no empathy, often not even pity, just my

Stoic smugness.

Brinkmann’s (2017) criticism of positive psychology is fair. The tyranny of the positive has been shown demonstrably to be ineffective for the people who cannot already help themselves (or at least there are plenty of such criticisms). I had the privilege to be able to help myself. I remember being motivated by the pessimistic wisdom of Boethius (525AD/1999), who tells us that life owes us nothing. Knowing that there was no fate or destiny that owed me a good life made me believe

I had to create it, and that I merited it, because I was able. The underlying problem was that in thinking I was owed nothing, I inadvertently believed others did not deserve the good life either.

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This toxic mentality was something I eventually had to unlearn when I realized it was harmful not only to others, but also myself. I don’t know that tyrannical negativity is the solution to tyrannical positivity or even moderate negativity. We may not need a solution. The critiques of positive psychology and the self-help industry are sufficient to create the possibility for change in the way we understand subjectivity.

Brinkmann’s (2017) suggestion of negative visualization is something I practiced often and enjoyed the results of. However, he and I are two able-bodied White educated men with the privilege of having learned about Stoic philosophy, among other things, to help ourselves overcome our problems. Perhaps it is also helpful to visualize the problems and mortalities of others or, better yet, listen to them directly, or read their accounts. It is not a matter of minimizing your own problems because others experience exponentially greater suffering than you—it is not a competition and you are justified to feel how you feel about your own problems. However, in thinking about yourself in relation to others and the systemic problems that bind you to others, you might feel less alienated and find a sense of empathy in solidarity. Again, I’m sure Brinkmann would agree as well.

Overall, I agree with Brinkmann’s (2017) critique of the self-help industry, “It is a fundamental paradox that self-help literature, on the one hand, celebrates the individual, their freedom of choice and their self-realisation, and on the other, helps create people who are increasingly addicted to self-help and therapeutic intervention(s)” (p. 88). However, I do not find his solution of Stoicism to be an adequate anti-self-help solution. Without acknowledging the intersections of privilege, race, sex, gender, and accessibility this book becomes an alternative version of self-help. It is in fact listed under self-help. Brinkmann (2019) has recently published another “anti-self-help” book,

The Joy of Missing Out: The Art of Self-Restraint in an Age of Excess, which follows the same

133 formula as Stand Firm. Namely, the formula of self-help in terms of step-by-step instructions and references to ancient philosophies as viable solutions to contemporary problems divorced of intersectional context. These books are for a wide audience but still merit criticism for their universalistic and unreflexive approaches, a lack of theoretical argumentation, and adopting an apolitical stance. Ultimately, I don’t know if Brinkmann achieves the goal of producing anti-self- help literature.

The primary issue rests with the bottom-up approach. It places special emphasis on you.

Brinkmann’s anti-self-help, and the self-help industry, proceed in the same individualistic direction. Neither puts the collective first, their suffering, their relations, and looks middle-out.

This outlines a major theoretical difference with my anti-self-help project. Anti-self-help must begin at the relational level in the in-betweenness of self and others. This approach is inspired by

Judith Butler’s (1990) theorizing of the self in relation to others, which I discuss in the next section.

As an interpersonal approach, this anti-self-help project sidelines the growth or actualization of the self in favour of understanding. Understanding, in the Foucauldian sense, focuses on how the self comes to be co-created in the relations we have with others, and the power structures that sustain the available discourses and conditions for the possibilities of our subjectivities. In other words, how we are objectified and subjectified through power-relations (see Foucault, 1982).

Identity and the real self: Fictions of a prediscursive you

The first reassessment in this anti-self-help project is essentially the self. The self can be synonymous with identity or merely a part of it, and both belong to subjectivity. I treat subjectivity as the theoretical work regarding notions of self and identity. I consider some theories of subjectivity and rely on intersubjectivity (relational self) as my primary theoretical groundwork. I use self and identity interchangeably unless otherwise specified (e.g., the true self). In order to

134 proceed with any theorizing about subjectivity and relationality, some work needs to be done to disambiguate notions of the self and interrogate the problematic aspects of a true self—an illusion with high marketability, especially in the neoliberal self-help industry. The idea of a true self is often defined as authentic in contrast to a pathological false self (see Winnicott, 1965). Sometimes the true self is a positive and moral overestimation of ourselves (see Strohminger, Knobe, &

Newman, 2017). Other times, the true self is a self-help goal to be achieved through a stepwise program for a certain price—some examples: The Shadow Effect: Illuminating the Hidden Power of Your True Self (Chopra, Ford, & Williamson, 2010); Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our

True Self (Rohr, 2012); How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety

(Hendriksen, 2018).

There are of course alternative theories arguing that the self is a fiction. Lacan (1973/1981) argues that subjectivity is merely a collection of ideas (or images) dependent on others, language, and society. Zizek (2006) refers to Sartre in claiming that the self is entirely constructed, “Man is a lack which, in order to fill itself in, recognizes itself as something” (p. 44) Zizek reduces the constructed reality, where the self is assumed, to an ontological reality that he calls a “zero-level” subjectivity. He hopes to demonstrate that the emergence of subjectivity and freedom are then irreducible. De Vos (2009) argues that subjectivity is dead and has been replaced with a psychological aesthetitization of the self as a product of media. We thus treat ourselves as observed subjects and react based on how we want to be perceived, guided by the adoption of psychological behaviours we see in media. In attempting to study the self, psychology also creates novel possibilities for selves to become actualized (see Danziger, 1997) and for evaluations of self to take on new meanings through operationalizing constructs like self-esteem and self-reliance under neoliberal ideology (see Pettit, 2020). The self then becomes constructed (at least partially) under

135 the influence of the authoritative power of Psychology34, which is a discipline that purports to try to understand the self and is itself subject to the influence of neoliberal ideology. These accounts seem to take a socially deterministic perspective notion of the self while accounting for

Psychology’s influence in determining what constitutes the self. What is perhaps implied is that beneath the construct there is no self, or perhaps at the core, there is a true self. Regardless, I treat the self as an important construction that requires agency and understanding, whereas I argue that categorical definitions of a true self are illusory because such definitions are aspirational rather than intrinsic.

The subjective notion of a true self is a heuristic shortcut for a set of beliefs and values that we use to make meaning rather than a stable set of qualities that define a person. In fact, the true self is just one of the subjective beliefs we hold about ourselves among other beliefs that define who we are and how we behave (see Strohminger, Knobe, & Newman, 2017). What appears to be the most consistent notion of the true self or the self in general for that matter, is its definitional malleability. The primary error then is in attempting to stifle this malleability with a closed definition of self, which is often set as a future-oriented achievement of an optimum true self or conversely a return to an authentic true self. For this anti-self-help project, I propose an open definition of self to permit theorizing subjectivity from multiple intersectional lenses without the boundaries of a closed definition that often subjects identity to coercive power. To accomplish this task, I rely on Judith Butler’s theorization of gender and identity.

“It was and remains my view that any feminist theory that restricts the meaning of gender in the presuppositions of its own practice sets up exclusionary gender norms within feminism, often

34 Capital “P” Psychology refers to the formal discipline as contrasted by small “p” psychology, which refers to psychological subject matter (see Richards, 1987).

136 with homophobic consequences” (Butler, 1990 p. viii). I would like to parallel gender with identity here. Gender, I believe belongs to identity, but also shares with it in common a difficulty in theorizing without restricting meaning, essentializing, and constructing exclusionary norms.

Identity, like gender, requires an open definition that is subject to reassessment and change as an intrinsic characteristic because of its performativity, multifarious adaptations, and proclivity to change over time and in different contexts. Both gender and identity are adaptive and performed in context—and both prosper when their meanings have open boundaries that allow for change.

They are social constructs that also reflect cultural and political moments and cannot be understood with closed definitions.

For example, Butler (1990) examines the category, “woman,” arguing that it doesn’t require an essentialist definition and, in fact, the indeterminateness of the category itself is its liberating aspect because it leaves room for multiplicity, contradiction, and change. “The assumption of its essential incompleteness permits that category to serve as a permanently available site of contested meanings. The definitional incompleteness of the category might then serve as a normative ideal relieved of coercive force” (p. 21). Indeterminacy is then justified in promising robust definitions of categories that are subject to change and can thus accommodate multiple meanings. With the same definitional incompleteness, the construct of identity begins to have a liberating potential.

This potential is then explored through performativity, which is discussed later. First, a definition.

Butler’s indeterminate definition of gender:

Gender is a complexity whose totality is permanently deferred, never fully what it is at any

given juncture in time. An open coalition, then, will affirm identities that are alternately

instituted and relinquished according to the purposes at hand; it will be an open assemblage

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that permits of multiple convergences and divergences without obedience to a normative

telos of definitional closure. (p. 22)

Similarly, I here offer an indeterminate definition of identity. Identity is a holistic idea resulting from performative acts that cannot be simultaneously realizable as a cohesive whole. The wholeness of identity that is experienced in the first person, and assumed in the third person, is only a heuristic shortcut to a collection of ideas about the self consisting in a higher-order (meta) belief about a set of changing beliefs. This collection of ideas about the self is perpetually revised in the process of existing, is constantly becoming, is never complete, is co-constructed in the world with others, yet presents a consistent representation of a unique self. In its adaptive indeterminacy, identity is multifarious, contradictory, and without a finite aim or definitional end. Identity is then real, but is not indicative of, or designated as, a true self. Identity can be categorized and regulated, and at times this is important for political action, however, identity categories are products of repetition and imitation (Butler, 1996). Nevertheless, this does not indicate a true self. To use poststructruralist terminology, there is no prediscursive self.

“My argument is that there need not be a ‘doer behind the deed,’ but that the ‘doer’ is variably constructed in and through the deed” (Butler, 1990, p. 194). Butler (1990) maintains her initial argument from the beginning of her book—there is no prediscursive subject to invoke whose identity forms a constructed layer over a true self, “…this kind of reasoning falsely presumes (a) agency can only be established through recourse to a prediscursive “I,” even if that “I” is found in the midst of a discursive convergence, and (b) that to be constituted by discourse is to be determined by discourse, where determination forecloses the possibility of agency” (p. 195).

Identity is constructed and performed with historical ties and power relations. There is no sense in helping ourselves to some subject or identity existing before social, cultural, and political

138 inscriptions. The self is created discursively and understood discursively. Nevertheless, a discursive self does not preclude the existence of a material self on which the effects of these discourses are inscribed and embodied and from which some of the discourses emerge (see Simon,

2013).

Butler (1993) clarifies that performativity is not a choice, but instead, part of a ritualized process of the repetition of existing norms, that constrain and produce both the material and discursive self without determining either in advance. For example, the category of sex is constrained by scientific classifications (repetition of norms) that have constitutive power over the material and discursive possibilities for identity, in this case over the possibilities for gender and sexuality. Barad (2003) specifically points to the importance of matter in theorizing performativity to avoid an entirely representationalist account of subjectivity. In other words, identity is not only discursive, but also material, and is not determined entirely by either. I find this to be a more liberating theory than presumably fixed internal characteristics that are displayed externally with some promise of change. I say this because agency is built into performativity, even if the performance is difficult to analyze and reinterpret. “For an identity to be an effect means that it is neither fatally determined nor fully artificial and arbitrary” (Butler, 1990, p. 196). The performativity of identity not only indicates agency, in the same way freedom is inferred in existentialism as a given in consciousness (see, Heidegger, 1927/1962; Sartre, 1936/1991), but also promises liberation through subversion. Like freedom in existential consciousness, agency is not granted passively in performativity. Butler (1993) reiterates,

performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability, a regularized and

constrained repetition of norms. And this repetition is not performed by a subject; this

repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition for the subject. This

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iterability implies that “performance” is not a singular “act” or event, but a ritualized

production, a ritual reiterated under and through constraint, under and through the force of

prohibition and taboo, with the threat of ostracism and even death controlling and compelling

the shape of the production, but not, I will insist, determining it fully in advance. (p. 60)

Furthermore, Butler (2004) argues that performativity happens outside conscious awareness, yet this does not imply that it is automatic. Performativity is regulated by social norms that have the potential to be interrogated and challenged to enable the possibility for divergent needs and desires to become viable parts of our identities. Subversion then becomes integral to performativity in enabling liberation from regulating and oppressive norms. Butler (1990) refuses to define what exactly is subversive in performativity because it changes. It can become stale and cliché. It can become marketable. Contexts change and, as such, what can be considered subversive ought to remain ambiguous if it is to be subversive at all. Performativity of identity prospers from this same kind of ambiguity, especially if part of the aim is to subvert the possibility of commodifying the self. Confusion becomes part of the anti-capitalist art of performing identity. Activism is part lived performance of the self as ambiguous and frustrating to the understanding. Performativity then disrupts a power-knowledge dynamic from exerting influence over identity in subverting the demarcation of identity as identifiable. Instead, structural power is lost in the process of seeking out boundaries, norms, and definitions of identity, while autonomous power is gained through the performance. This is only a descriptive account of how subversion operates through the performance of identity, not a prescriptive account with instructions on how to subvert.

Nevertheless, even in the absence of agency, the self is susceptible to social and cultural construction. What liberation offers is the agency to participate in the co-construction of the self through performativity. In the first instance, we have the self as a product of objectification, and

140 in the second, the self is the co-product of subjectification. I’m referring specifically to Foucault’s

(1982) three modes of objectification: (1) Dividing practices35—the subject is the victim of processes of objectification (e.g., prisoners and mental patients, marginal groups). (2) Scientific classification36—the subject is objectified through scientific developments and classifications

(e.g., diagnostic manuals, IQ, gender). (3) Subjectification37—the way a person turns themselves into a subject (self-understanding mediated by external authority) (Rabinow, 2010). These modes of objectification intersect in co-creating the self.

The self becomes an object of knowledge in a power-knowledge relation, where institutions observe, classify, and consolidate bodies of knowledge that delimit possibilities for the co-creation of the self (Foucault, 1975/1995). Subjectivity is then the effect of power that instills a body of knowledge, which itself exists to fortify that power. The body of knowledge holds the truth conditions for the available discourse we have to understand our subjectivity. In this way, subjectification is a process of co-creating the self within a context, subject to power relations, and limited by the institutional bodies of knowledge that reinforce those power relations to the self.

The power of subjectification can occur through surveillance (see Foucault, 1975/1995).

Sartre’s (1943/1992) gaze, for example, demonstrates the power of surveillance in the objectification and subjectification of the body. We partially understand ourselves only through the gaze of others. We learn our facticity through their judgements of us and use that to inform our notions of self. The other’s gaze acts as a mode of objectifying surveillance in instituting the

35 This theme is found primarily in Madness and Civilization (Foucault, 1961/1988), The Birth of the Clinic (Foucault, 1963/1994), and Discipline and Punish (Foucault, 1975/1995). 36 This theme describes Foucault’s method of inquiry in The Order of Things (Foucault, 1966/1994b) and The Archaeology of Knowledge (Foucault, 1969/2002). 37 This theme is primarily found in The History of Sexuality (Foucault, 1976/1978; Foucault, 1984/1985; Foucault, 1984/1988), Discipline and Punish (Foucault, 1975/1995), and The Subject and Power (Foucault, 1982).

141 normative parameters of our available discourse in the social sphere. Normative parameters are maintained through the authoritative power of ideology (see Gramsci, 1929-1935/2010) that we are subjected to and which, in turn, subjectify us (see Althusser, 1968/2001). The combination of ideologies and repressive norms is a process Althusser (1968/2001) called interpellation, which constitutes the social possibilities for identity and is echoed in Foucault’s (1975/1995) notion of subjectification and Butler’s (1993) notion of iterability38. Subjectification depends on the available discourse that is mediated in the authority of the public gaze, which itself is supported by a normative ideology. Both subjectification and objectification form a mutual process governed by social constructs, their reinforcement and surveillance in the gaze of others and our submission to the available social roles creates our subjectivity. Objectification is the institutional power that governs identity, and subjectification outlines the ways in which we employ those powers to construct our identity from that available discourse (Foucault, 1975/1995).

Objectification does not form a determining relationship to identity, but rather, a co- constituting of the self with the subject’s agency. Objectification can nevertheless be coercive, oppressive, and marginalizing based on the power-knowledge dynamics that delimit the possibilities for subjectivity. Liberation from coercive objectification is found in understanding the origins of these bodies of knowledge and how they exact power over subjectivity (Foucault,

1982). Power itself is not problematic—it merely produces (Foucault, 1975/1995). Understanding power as a phenomenon is, in a manner of speaking, seizing the means of production. We free ourselves from boundaries by knowing what the boundaries are to begin with and what holds them in place. Then we can begin to disentangle, resist, and subvert by crossing boundaries.

38 Butler relies of Derrida’s (1988) notion of iterability.

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To illustrate by example, I turn to Fanon’s existential ontology of Blackness both as a representation of the objectifying power of the gaze and the institutional power-knowledge dynamics that reinforce the boundaries of his subjectivity. Furthermore, the oppressive and marginalizing discourse in Fanon’s time (i.e. the 1950s and 60s) demonstrates the importance of interrogating power-knowledge dynamics with the aim of liberation. Fanon (1952/1968) argues that the Black man is created by the White man. When the Black man is born, he does not know he is Black. He discovers it when the White man comes in and makes him Black. In other words,

Blackness is a categorical distinction made to juxtapose Whiteness, and it is created to classify superior and inferior. It is then that the Black man learns he is inferior and begins to search for equality.

The equality he seeks would have been beneficial before he started asking for it, but

afterwards it proves inadequate to remedy his ills–for every increase in equality makes the

remaining differences seem the more intolerable, for they suddenly appear agonizingly

irremovable. (p. 78)

Fanon (1952/1968) describes his experience of being Black and feeling the marginalization that forces his consciousness into the being of the Other and, more so, the inferior, scary, alien

Other. It is an awareness that the Black body is visually different to White people that carries with it all the burden of the stereotypes associated therewith—all the ancestry. He begins to associate the fear and disgust that the Whites have toward him as an authentic response, and thus begins to agree that his body as an object is something despicable. Furthermore, the Black body is something inescapable. It is permeated in stereotypes and cannot become invisible. Other stereotyped people, like the Jews and Arabs, might hide behind White skins, become invisible, and are more often granted some civility because of their approximation to “White.”

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Subjectification is then not only a process of co-constituting identity, but in the absence of understanding and resistance, it can internalize the errors that persist in the bodies of knowledge that uphold and create truths. Subjectivity becomes inscribed with errors in the absence of understanding the objectifying power relations. The evident errors that have been historically consolidated as truths, such as colonialism as practice and mentality, racism, sexism, homophobia, among others, have been sustained by another problematic truth called reason (see Foucault, 1982;

Smith, 2006). Being subjected to reason is an oppressive maneuver to restrict the self within the boundaries of existing discourse that form the power-knowledge relations governing the possibilities of truth about the self (see Lugones, 1994). These power relations reinforce the notions of a prediscursive true self, often with truth claims nestled in biological and cultural determinism that make up scientific classifications, which then reinforce subjectification.

Foucault (1982) argues that reason is the language of the modes of objectification. Reason itself is a colonial language developed by the “White man” to universalize his ontology as the baseline from which all others deviate, an ideology that sustains White supremacy, and then further serves as the justification to colonize, marginalize others, and categorize them as subhuman (see,

Beauvoir, 1949/1989; Fanon, 1952/1968; Lugones, 1994; Smith, 2006; Teo, 2018c; Teo, 2020).

Beauvoir (1949/1989) rejected reason because reason rejected her being. Reason was strictly masculine. Her sex was denied the possibility of even approximating the White male ontology, while Fanon’s (1952/1968) Blackness was given an inferior ontology to the pure ontology that only a White man could occupy. Lugones (1994) points to reason as a constricting practice aiming at an impossible purity that fragments the self, rather than accepting a multiplicitous self, “the modern subject must be masked as standing separate from his own multiplicity and what commits him to multiplicity” (p. 464)—for which she suggests the logic of curdling. Where reason abstracts

144 the self as an ideal apart from the material body, her logic of curdling is in defiance of the universalizing purity of reason in order to accommodate for the possibility of a multifarious self whose parts do not neatly fit together or coalesce into a unified and stable, true self. This supports an open definition of subjectivity with multiple sites of contested meaning both material and discursive.

Smith (2006) breaks down the three pillars of White supremacy that are sustained by the logic of reason, namely, slavery/capitalism, genocide/colonialism, and orientalism/war. The logic of slavery maintains a racial hierarchy that is exercised in capitalism with the commodification of people, their value based on race, and their susceptibility to becoming the property of the state

(e.g., mass incarceration of Black folks, see also Alexander, 2020). The logic of genocide justifies colonialism in appropriating the culture of the indigenous while erasing indigenous people. The logic of orientalism demarcates the West as superior in contrast to an inferior and exotic other, which justifies treating others as subhuman and expendable. Teo (2018c) examines how scientific practices rely on reason to sustain and reinforce notions of what it means to be human, which has the effect of also demarcating what it is to be subhuman. Taken together we have a sufficient picture of what power-knowledge dynamics look like, how they operate to objectify subjectivity, and how the errors sustained in these institutions serve to marginalize and oppress based on closed categorical definitions of identity.

Anti-self-help then begins with a rejection of the self as true, stable, and categorically finite, not for philosophical obfuscation, but rather, in resistance to oppression. This is not to say self- help is inherently oppressive, or that self-help books are necessarily bad. It does however demonstrate the problematic nature in universalizing self-help as an unreflexive practice devoid of context and sociopolitical awareness. Spivak (1999) examines ideological and institutional

145 practices that continue to benefit from decontextualization, which works to silence opposition to colonialist supremacy in knowledge production. Real violence happens to real people when these intersections are ignored, the root of which begins with epistemic violence. Epistemic violence stems from authoritative interpretations of research that affects the lives, legitimacy, or validity of often already marginalized others, reinforcing a scientifically justified categorization of inferiority

(Teo, 2010). Problematizing the identity of the other with the authority of science is epistemologically violent because it renders their classification as subhuman reasonable.

For example, when the authoritative White male voice of Jordan Peterson (1962-), privileged with academic status, questions the validity of non-binary/trans gender with essentialist biological determinism, couched as a concern over the legal consequences of misusing pronouns, epistemic violence takes root and can sprout into actual violence against non-binary and trans folx (see

Cossman, 2018). Authoritative voices like his then justify common prejudices in the dominant group and force marginalized groups to defend their identity. The dominant discourse is subject to the language of reason, which carries all its historical errors and requires marginalized groups to justify their identities using that oppressive language, rendering them unintelligible and ultimately invisible (see Ardener, 2005; Dutta & Pal, 2010).

Representation of invisible subjectivities is difficult if they must violate their subjectivity for representation. “Discourse becomes oppressive when it requires that the speaking subject, in order to speak, participate in the very terms of that oppression; that is, take for granted the speaking subject’s own impossibility or unintelligibility” (Butler, 1990, p. 116). In other words, if you’re already marginalized, you do not have a voice. Even if you are allowed to speak, you must speak in the language of the oppressor that further eliminates your own existence. However, Butler

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(1990) is critical of accounts that accord totalizing power to language as dominant and oppressive39 and instead argues that language is malleable and presents an opportunity for resistance from within the dominant discourse. I am focusing on only one aspect of the dominant discourse, namely reason, as a discourse used coercively to oppress. Whether there is room for resistance within the dominant discourse of reason is for me undecidable—within “pure reason” perhaps not. However, with alterative interpretations of reason like the logic of curdling, there is definite potential (see

Lugones, 1994). Resistance through linguistic reclamation from dominant oppressive discourse has been possible (e.g., reclamation of terms like queer, cripple, slut), though the degree of success of such reclamation remains dubious considering the persistence of epistemic violence still possible with certain pejorative terms (Brontsema, 2004).

Nevertheless, when marginalized groups seek to have a voice outside the dominant discourse of reason or hold alternative interpretations of reason (i.e., the logic of curdling), they are viewed as senseless and dangerous (see Moeller, 2002). In the language of reason, their subjectivities are questionable because they do not conform to the boundaries of the institutional power-knowledge relations that sustain the available and dominant discourse. This highlights resistance and performativity not as options but as necessary subversive survival tactics of the Other.

Furthermore, authoritative voices in the dominant discourse provide justification through reason not only for marginalizing others, but also, for the subjectification of the dominant group.

When Jordan Peterson was launched to fame for challenging Bill C-16 that stipulated gender identity and pronoun use in the Canadian Human Rights Act (Parliament of Canada, 2017), he became the voice of reason for many conservatives who oppose the progressive left, Marxism, and

39 Butler (1990) is specifically criticizing Monique Wittig’s (1980/1993) strong materialist feminist position that language is dominant, oppressive, and enforces compulsory heterosexuality.

147 political correctness (see Rozner, 2018). Peterson’s authoritative power becomes, in the

Foucauldian sense, a power for subjectification for young White men to adopt the signifiers of

White supremacy as legitimate parts of their identities. Peterson, and other “renegade” White intellectuals like him (e.g., Sam Harris, David Rubin, Ben Shapiro) that have been dubbed the

“intellectual dark web” (see Weiss, 2018) implicitly justify meritocracy, entitlement, privilege, racism, sexism, transphobia and conservative understandings of free speech as authoritative truths

(see Farrell, 2018)—the effects of which sustain the pillars of White supremacy (see, Smith, 2006).

Peterson’s (2018) bestselling self-help book furthered his popularity especially among the alt- right, where young conservative men found reason to fortify their identities with self-reliance, resistance to leftist ideas, and justification for human hierarchies of dominance constructed on baseless analogies to lobster hierarchies of dominance (see Beauchamp, 2018). White male followers of these authoritative public intellectuals are granted the power to subjectify themselves as reasonable while maintaining ideologies that are epistemically and physically violent to marginalized others. The language of reason as the dominant discourse has the inherent exclusionary criteria that serves to marginalize, oppress, and erase the other. Peterson used his authoritative power as an affluent university professor in clinical psychology to profit from the self-help industry and disseminate his extra-academic ideology in his self-help book. The self-help industry is not liable for the alt-right interest and epistemic violence made possible by Peterson.

However, with the benefit of an institutional decontextualized stance, or what Spivak (1999) calls sanctioned ignorance, the self-help industry implicitly participates in silencing, erasing, and continuing the oppression of marginalized others. Hence the need for anti-self-help as a critique of the neoliberal self-help industry.

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Anti-self-help is then a form of resistance to the individualizing practices that divide us and ignore the potentials for solidarity and collective action as viable alternatives to self-help. Self- help relies on a true self. Butler (1990) dismantles a true self and opts for liberation in the reality of self as a constructed performance. It is thereby indeterminate and real, insofar as it is the effect of that performance that makes it real. What is real about the self is that it exists as a changing performance. What self-help requires is a stable self in need of change with deterministic cause and effect chains that can be utilized to enact change. Even if there is a true self, it is conceptually useless, or in Foucauldian (2008/1979) terms—dangerous, especially for marginalized folks.

Butler makes this point as well. The return to a prediscursive true self is a dangerous fantasy that limits the possibilities we may have for the future. We can instead focus on subversion and liberation. That can be how we begin to define freedom.

Determinism and the freedom to construct a self in neoliberalism

The second reassessment in this anti-self-help project is freedom. There is a long history of determinism versus free will in philosophy yet for many laypeople the argument is banal. Many of us trust in scientific determinism but are closet dualists with faith in mental agency. In a poststructuralist sense, I would say it is irrelevant to decide but important to interrogate (see

Derrida 1992; Foucault, 2008/1979). My position is that even if freedom is an illusion, it is a necessary illusion for which we ought to behave as though it were real. We may not even be in contradiction if we simultaneously believe we have some agency in a deterministic world—hence, compatibilism (see McKenna, 2012). Existentialism relies on an implicit form of compatibilism to establish agency in consciousness. Existential freedom rests in transcendence; that is, our conscious ability to reassess the third-person facts about ourselves that allow us the future possibility of becoming (see Sartre, 1936/1991). I want to focus on the existential freedom to

149 become and the relevance it has for identity especially in recognizing power and enabling liberation of the self (see Butler, 1990; Foucault, 2008/1979).

Freedom must be reassessed in context where conditions for the possibility of becoming or constructing an identity are subject to repressive and prohibitive norms. To reiterate, the point is not to return to an original or real self, but rather, to open possibilities for intentional and creative future construction. These possibilities are for agentic construction of identity delimited by social and political possibilities. There may not be freedom from power, but we can learn to subvert the institutional powers to liberate ourselves from their oppression (see, Butler, 1990). Foucault (1984) argues that his methods of criticism, namely interrogation and understanding, alter the subject’s mode of thinking and in fact enables the freedom of “…no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think” (p. 46). Nevertheless, he remains skeptical if freedom alone will create meaningful changes that do not ultimately result in dangerous traditions resurfacing. He calls it an experiment to test if we can go beyond our limits because we have freedom.

Foucault (1984) asks: “How can the growth of capabilities be disconnected from the intensification of power relations” (p. 48); “How are we constituted as subjects of our own knowledge? How are we constituted as subjects who exercise or submit to power relations? How are we constituted as moral subjects of our own actions?” (p. 49). The last three questions make up his three axes: knowledge, power, and ethics. I want to keep these axes in mind as I proceed to discuss freedom at the intersection of neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism has its own restrictive norms that constitute part of the subjectification and objectification of our subjectivities. However, neoliberalism cannot be treated as monolithic. To draw a parallel, I return to Butler. Her criticisms were aimed at patriarchy in imposing restrictive norms around gender, yet she carefully noted that we must not treat patriarchy as monolithic.

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Butler (1990) argues that it is uncritical to consider patriarchy as a universal, much in the same way it is problematic to consider “women’s plights” universal. Just as women experience different struggles in different contexts, so too is patriarchy multifarious and contextualized as a set of problems and tactics. Treating it as monolithic has both the effects of seeing patriarchy uncritically and as insurmountable. Similarly, I suggest avoiding treating neoliberalism as universal and monolithic to circumvent considering it insurmountable.

Furthermore, if we proceed with a criticism of neoliberalism in restricting freedoms around identity, we must not consider identity recoverable from a preneoliberal time. This could commit identity to the problems of the true self discussed earlier (see Butler, 1990). The assumption that there was an ideal time before neoliberalism where the self flourished, a time we can and must return to, is problematic. It assumes a magical time for unfettered subjectivity (i.e., a true self) before neoliberalism, which essentially denies a future possibility for constructing identity and for new identities to emerge. It assumes that identity is not a cultural construct, but rather, that there is some authentic identity we have lost and to which we must return. Much of self-help and new age spirituality aims at these magical notions of (prediscursive) pre-social authentic selves, the feminine, the masculine, and the return-to fantasy (see, Heelas, 2008)40 without explicitly acknowledging neoliberalism.

Another site of ideological and normative production in neoliberalism is the family unit. In neoliberalism, the family unit is an extension of the self as an intergenerational form of individualization, responsibilization, and governmentality (see Teo, 2018). This is achieved when

40 This work is not a criticism. The title may be misleading: Spiritualities of Life: New Age Romanticism and Consumptive Capitalism (Heelas, 2008). The work aims to redeem spirituality from the criticisms that new age spirituality is merely individual capitalist consumerism. Heelas (2008) attempts to vindicate notions of authenticity and the true self.

151 social welfare is substituted by family investment in progeny, potentially as social, cultural, and financial capital (though mostly the latter). In economic terms, one of the major figures in the

Chicago school of neoliberalism, Gary Becker (1930-2014), wanted to create a family responsibility with “…infinitely elastic intergenerational debt” (Cooper, 2017, p. 226). One step toward this neoliberal goal was privatizing education. Cooper (2017) explains, “If the government would scale back on its investment in public goods, Becker surmised, then the family would resume its proper role of investing in children” (p. 225), where private loan debt for education would function as a stimulating factor for overall economic growth. In this way, the family unit is solely responsible for governing itself, making individual family members dependent on the family unit rather than the state for support. In that sense neoliberalism targets the family first.

The family unit then, instead of acting as a safe haven from neoliberal repressive and productive functions, is instead transformed into instrumental relationships. Teo (2018) argues,

Choosing to send one’s children to private schools in order to have an educational advantage

over other children, or to expand on social and cultural capital, is one example. The

instrumental approach taken in such a choice contradicts the need for a family to remain the

refuge away from current conditions. (pp. 593-594)

Economic obligations are then reduced to the family rather than the state, which serves to reinforce the instrumentality inherent in neoliberalism. “Agency in work and personal relationships is instrumental, and even the choice of partner can be reduced to utilitarian principles.

The neoliberal form of life equally colonizes the seemingly last sacred place of daily life, the family” (Teo, 2018, p. 593).

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Freedom to become or construct identity is then subject to restrictive and prohibitive norms that in neoliberalism seem to invoke instrumentality in relationships with the state, one’s family, and oneself. Instrumentality in neoliberalism is governed by the freedom to exploit above all else, where exploitation of others and the self is normalized (see, Polanyi, 1944). Moreover, neoliberalism requires freedom in order to function. Foucault (1982) discusses the emergence of power as a relationship of actions on other actions, never stagnant, and dependent on the existence of freedom. As such, power does not exist where there is no freedom, for it requires it as a precondition in order for power to be exercised. Power thus provokes freedom and vice-versa in an agonist relationship. For Foucault (1982) the investigation of power is a necessary political task to understand and perhaps undermine certain power relations, which “have been progressively governmentalized, that is to say, elaborated, rationalized, and centralized in the form of, or under the auspices of, state institutions” (p. 793). It would seem that the more we use reason to define and elaborate relationships of power the more they become institutionalized forms of power.

For freedom to be liberating from exploitation, it must assume the possibility of a future becoming that is independent of restrictive and prohibitive conditions or, rather, works to undo those conditions through the future-oriented becoming. Existential freedom in consciousness acknowledges the possibility of reassessing past and present toward agentic future becoming. In fact, for Sartre (1936/1991) our ability to create meaning from our experiences is a demonstration of freedom in consciousness. Human existence is self-creating in context (Fackenheim, 1961).

Nevertheless, self-creating cannot be understood naively as either an automatic process or as a simple self-help tactic.

The liberation of the body is complicated because there is no natural state to return to or an authentic body underneath the cultural inscriptions. Subversion then takes its place within cultural

153 laws through understanding how they operate and where possibilities for change or subversion exist. “The culturally constructed body will then be liberated, neither to its “natural” past, nor to its original pleasures, but to an open future of cultural possibilities” (Butler, 1990, p. 93). In understanding the power-knowledge relations that generate and sustain “truths”—like the family unit (especially a heteronormative nuclear family), or neoliberal individualization, responsibilization, and governmentality as internalized both in subjectivity and familiar relations—we have at least the awareness of a possibility to subvert their generative functions in the co-construction of the self.

I return to my argument that identity is real, but not constitutive of a true self. To claim it is not real is to ignore the power structures that enforce identity upon the body to generate the illusion of a true self. Understanding the necessity of identity and its simultaneous construction creates the conditions for the possibility of liberation from generative constrictions. We then do not simply become true selves no more than we become true men and women41 but we do become aware of the conditions that construct normative notions of gender or identity and how we come to embody those signifiers or perhaps reject them through understanding. Once more we return to the power- knowledge dynamics that sustain the available discourse from which we are objectified and subjectified. Freedom can then only be a liberation from the restrictive norms that marginalize and erase possibilities for identities to emerge and exist outside the dominant discourse. Liberation, as

I have already implied, requires a call for collective action and solidarity to counter the self- defeating bottom-up and top-down approaches I have mentioned earlier.

41 I am deliberately using a binary gender model here to emphasize the social construction of gender and in turn the binary model itself.

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Butler (1990) comments that solidarity does not require unity as its core assumption. Unity limits the possibilities for diverse identities. She calls instead for provisional unities to emerge out of actions and articulations of identities, especially as forms of political mobilization (see Butler,

2004). This is important for my purposes in vouching for solidarity. Preaching blanket solidarity is merely lip service. Unpacking solidarity from within marginalized communities and discussing its possibilities is more critically engaging. Solidarity must be intersectional and diverse, emerging out of identities, not around identities, which can otherwise serve to limit their possibilities.

Liberation, in turn, can be found through solidarity and it is the most tangible freedom that allows us to construct a future.

Authenticity in intersectional bodies

The third reassessment in this anti-self-help project is of authenticity. Part of these experiences necessarily involves inauthenticity as a demarcation of the instances when we feel unlike ourselves or that we have betrayed ourselves in our performance of self—or as Heidegger (1956/1958) would say, to act without freedom. Also, an important distinction must be made between authenticity and commodified authenticity. When authenticity is appropriated by the self-help industry, it becomes a parody of its existential counterpart and reproduces a misguided universality that was revealed in Fanon’s critique of Sartre’s original notion of authenticity. Namely, universal notions of authenticity, such as the kind found in popular culture and self-help, exacerbate an original problem of universality in authenticity identified by Fanon, and produces commodified authenticity. Fanon’s (1952/1968) initial critique of Sartre was aimed at his universalized ontology, for which he demonstrated that a Black ontology is denied that very universality. It is a criticism I have elaborated several times in this work. Sartre (1961/2004) accepted and understood

155 the criticism, leaving the door open for constructs like authenticity to be reassessed from the lived experience of the Other, who’s ontology had been denied universality.

If we accept Sartre’s existential authenticity as a valuable human experience, we must consider whether authenticity can be intersectional. The scope here is not to help universalize authenticity with inclusivity, but rather, to theorize multifarious ways to be authentic, which like the self, needs to be open to multiple, changing and, at times, contesting interpretations, and avoid definitional closure. I hope here to be able to outline some existing theories that have and continue to create conditions for this possibility. Before we look forward, we must first look back to understand where universality became problematic as a quality of authenticity and rendered commodified authenticity possible. The historicity of authenticity outlines a transition from an existential universal to a practical and incremental self-help tutorial to realize the individualized true self. Humanistic and positive psychology are partially responsible for this poor translation of authenticity. The popularization of psychology and the self-help industry finalize this caricaturing and render authenticity both sterile and problematic.

The humanistic tradition borrowed from existentialism with the aim of resolving existential plights by focusing on the healthy and positive ends of psychology (see Rogers, 1959). Maslow

(1962) began with a critique of existentialism, “I don’t think we need to take too seriously the

European existentialists’ exclusive harping on dread, on anguish, on despair and the like, for which their only remedy seems to be to keep a stiff upper lip” (p. 15). He attempted to pave the way to a new psychology focusing on authentic living and self-improvement by focusing on positive experiences, the potential for growth, and behaviour modeled by self-actualized individuals.

Authenticity was framed as an outcome of growth through positive psychological interventions.

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However, humanistic psychology remained primarily theoretical and received criticisms for its lack of empirical research, which positive psychology promised to undertake (see Yen, 2014).

Positive psychology continued the aims of the humanistic tradition and operationalized authenticity for empirical studies (see Medlock, 2012; Seligman, 2004). Authenticity in positive psychology maintains universality as a prescriptive technique toward obtaining the true self (as opposed to a false self) with empirically backed psychological benefits (see Harter, 2002). There are plenty of studies on the benefits, the how-to, and the various applications of authenticity in positive psychology (see Pajares, 2001; Ryan & Deci, 2006; Wood, Linley, Maltby, Baliousis, &

Joseph, 2008). The same critiques I have already elaborated, namely of universality in authenticity and the true self, also apply to positive psychology. However, my point here is that in re- popularizing authenticity with a scientific aura, the construct gained legitimacy and marketability for the self-help industry where the original errors continue to be perpetuated. These errors, I argue, produce commodified authenticity. I am not even taking into consideration the traditional problems with authenticity in positive psychology that have resulted in Seligman (2011)42 himself renouncing the term along with the use of the term “self”—problems like the definitional vagueness of authenticity (see Medlock, 2012) and its relation to narcissism and moral relativism

(see Lasch, 1978).

Attempts have been made to salvage authenticity from the self-help industry. Taylor (1992) envisioned a dialogical approach to authenticity to combat its capitalist usurping by the self-help prescriptive model. Medlock (2012) attempts to contextualize and unify theories of authenticity into an overarching ethos meant to unite humanistic and positive psychology in a collective goal.

42 Seligman (2011) writes, “When I wrote Authentic Happiness a decade ago, I wanted to call it Positive Psychology, but the publisher thought that ‘‘happiness’’ in the title would sell more books. (I also dislike authentic, a close relative of the overused term self, in a world of overblown selves.)” (p. 10).

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Nevertheless, authenticity remains a paradox. In pursuing it, authenticity becomes less attainable under neoliberalism when it is framed as a performative expectation to meet the demands of capitalism (Varga, 2011). I have already reassessed authenticity at the intersection with neoliberalism, and my argument here is somewhat different. Authenticity continues to perpetuate, at its core, problematic presuppositions that do not necessarily invalidate the construct. But, in the absence of critical engagement, the possibility of distinguishing it from commodified authenticity is obfuscated, which permeates the self-help industry.

Commodified authenticity is the effect of the unresolved errors in constructing authenticity as a universal experience resting on the presupposition of a true self—if I have not already made that clear enough. Furthermore, authenticity necessitates autonomy, which I have also indicated to be problematic insofar as freedom is taken for granted in its universal possibility for all people. We are not all free to authentically be ourselves, or to construct selves, and to presume the contrary is to naively or willfully ignore social and historical constraints, especially those imposed systematically on marginalized groups. To universalize authenticity as a project of self-creation is to also ignore the Western cultural bias of individualization that does not operate everywhere (see

Gambrel & Cianci, 2003) or for people who may find themselves living authentically deindividualized (see Audain, 1994). In what Taylor (2007) calls the “age of authenticity,” (p. 473) it appears the individualized neoliberal demands to be authentic further increases the possibility of commodified authenticity when the performance of authenticity is a marketable strategy for the self as a brand (see Varga, 2011).

To complicate matters even more, when commodified authenticity becomes a performance of the neoliberal imaginary, it creates a process of authentization that usurps the possible meanings of authenticity. In the same way as Foucault’s (1961/1988) conceptualization of subjectification is

158 a process of creating subjectivity based on systemic power-dynamics, authentization is the process of creating authenticity under neoliberal power-dynamics. When neoliberal authenticity is a process of authentization, which I argue is a form of commodified authenticity, it not only obfuscates the distinction between authentic and commodified authentic, but may altogether deny the possibility of authenticity. In other words, there may not be an authentic authenticity, only a process of authentization, which is influenced by the neoliberal imaginary to generate commodified authenticity. If authenticity becomes indistinguishable from commodified authenticity, then authentization is merely the process of authenticizing identities under neoliberal power.

To attempt to disambiguate authenticity from commodified authenticity and perhaps find multiplicity in an open and changing definition of authenticity, I want to return to Fanon. This reassessment also takes the spirit of Foucault (1984), as an experiment with possibility without the certainty of success. Part of this reassessment relies on autoethnography to relate personal experiences of Whiteness in contrast to Fanon’s experiences of Blackness, which highlights the nuanced differences in the way authenticity is experienced in different bodies. Hence, authenticity and self are here theorized as embodied experiences, which then rely on some of Butler’s (1990) arguments as well.

To begin with Fanon’s (1952/1968) experience, “A Negro behaves differently with a white man and with another Negro. That this self-division is a direct result of colonialist subjugation is beyond question” (p. 17). The body informs interaction and behaviour. Similarly, a White person may behave differently around White people and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of colour). In one way, it may be the result of discomfort or prejudice. In another, it may be through acknowledgement of the other’s identity in respectful ways, like actively listening to them (as

159 opposed to talking over them or critiquing their experiences). The behavioural difference may be proportional to the Whiteness-approximation of the BIPOC in question—a phenomenon known as colourism, which indicates disproportional discrimination toward darker skinned BIPOC (see

Craddock, Dlova, & Diedrichs, 2018; Phoenix, 2014). As Fanon (1952/1968) argues, the closer to being White, the closer to being human. So long as a BIPOC speaks the same language, behaves similarly, assimilates to the White culture, they are treated with less awkwardness and likely more respect (Gordon, 2015). At the intersubjective level, authenticity is then problematized by sociopolitical and historical realities, which introduces the problem of authentization as yet another universalizing construct defined by the dominant group and aspirational, or even impossible, for marginalized groups to achieve.

Fanon (1952/1968) discovers his Blackness at the intersubjective level: “I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects” (p. 82). He expresses his internal struggle to validate his Blackness as a form of value and strength. However, being trapped under White norms and values forces him to try to be White, to wear a White mask, and thus effectively lose himself altogether. He is neither Black nor White, he is irresolute, confused, and ashamed. His internal conflict acts as a source of psychological oppression (Bulhan,

1985). He is told he can never be White, and that he should never be Black.

As depicted in Wright’s (1940) Native Son, Black masculinity is only authentic in a White world as a problematic—thief, criminal, deviant—and it produces constricting discourses that reinforce those subjectivities to actualize. Under White oppression, Biko (1978) argues, “Black will kill Black to be able to survive” (p. 63), which then becomes a logical attribute of Blackness rather than the White colonialism that has created the conditions for violence. How then can the

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Black man understand self and authenticity as some prediscursive phenomenon? If feeling Black pride confirms his authenticity and that Black pride is rooted in Black cultural capital, it is built in context and under restrictive norms that oppress, marginalize, and forge identities through suffering (see Malone, 2015). For Fanon (1952/1968), returning to Blackness is authentic, but it is not a prediscursive Blackness. It is a rejection of a White discourse and the forced implementation of the invisible Black discourses—Black ontology liberated from a totalizing White patriarchy.

Black authenticity is not a measure of comparison to the White baseline, but an ontology in-itself that produces its own discourse, which enables the liberty to perform Black identity from within that discourse as authentic. Does the self-help industry then accommodate for intersectional forms of authenticity?

Self-help cannot adequately confirm or disconfirm intersectionality, but intentional or unintentional omission is dangerous because it presents that simplified and seductive universality of authenticity that favours the dominant groups and further marginalizes the oppressed—it is a return to White patriarchal ontology. Self-help authenticity not only omits but also commits to a colonizing universality. Colonial mentality works to assimilate the bounty of a culture and reign over it (see Smith, 2006). It is to take what is valuable and eliminate what is threatening. So long as the savages are domesticated, we can use them. We can take their goods, spices, talents, and art.

They will understand it as an honour—an appreciation of their culture through our appropriation.

In the self-help narratives, authenticity is often obfuscated in spiritualism with markers of cultural appropriation and then sold to a predominantly White audience. The Other’s sociocultural capital is assimilated in a totalizing version of authenticity marketed at the dominant class. In other words, commodified authenticity.

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For the non-White consumer, it serves to erase their authenticity in favour of the universal

“authenticity” that is meant to unite us on false premises of prediscursive selves—a process of authentization. We are all human but we do not all perform human alike. If we did, we would be united, but we would relinquish agency and submit to a totalizing ideal. Denying the multiple contested sites of subjectivity not only assimilates but creates resistance, some of which is justifiably taken on by marginalized groups to reclaim their authenticity, and some of which is performed by the dominant group out of fear of losing their authenticity in accommodating for the

Other. When one assimilates within the dominant culture/class they can feel a sense of dignity bestowed upon them—I too have worth.

Fanon (1952/1968) talks about language as a marker of approximating Whiteness. In his case the language is French, and the better the French-speaking Black man, the closer he is to White and the further from Black. He discusses Black Martinicans returning from France with pretentions and scoffing at their former culture through the adopted French lens. It is a way of trying to lift oneself up out of the stereotype. To relate to Fanon’s experiences, I rely on autoethnography43, not only to elucidate the example here through compassionate approximation but also for my own understanding. I cannot compare my experiences to Fanon’s, but my only basis for relatability is a sense of shame I experienced for my Romanian background. Having immigrated to Canada at nine years old, I assimilated easily. Without an accent in English, I was able to pass as Canadian.

I recall in grade six I was ashamed of my last name and refused to answer during attendance in class. My father was called into the school to address the issue and he scolded me for my shame.

He told me I ought to be proud of my heritage.

43 Autoethnographic sections are in italics.

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Sometimes, growing up, I would see something about Romania on North American television.

I was always excited but then immediately disappointed that it was not nearly enough. It would be a slight nod to something, a comment about N. Ceausescu (1918-1989), a documentary on orphanages, or a film about vampires. There was never a real attempt to even guess at our culture, our language, our customs. I wanted so badly for some part of Romanian culture to be appropriated. Then, I submitted to the idea that there was nothing worth appropriating. As a teenager, I once told my parents that Romania is irrelevant in the history of the world. Had we really amounted to anything (e.g., colonizing) our history would have been known. Whenever I travelled through Europe, I would present myself as Canadian to avoid being stigmatized as a bad

European. Romanians seem to rank very low in the eyes of fellow Europeans, seen as a nation of corrupt, uneducated, thieving brutes, and most often confounded with Roma people—I have been called a gypsy numerous times. In my case, it’s not a terribly painful experience, just a lingering shame that I learned to bury with a new Canadian identity.

Is it worse to be stereotyped for one thing or not to be known at all? That’s the tradeoff when you face the powerful. That’s the idea also behind the feeling of belonging. On the one hand, I’d like to examine the existential angst that pushes alienated White boys into White supremacist groups (alt-right types). It is also a need for solidarity. On the other hand, I want to support healthy solidarity that preserves the dignity of the marginalized and the invisible. I think there is the same need evident in both types of group affiliation. However, in the former group, White privilege (and often male privilege) enables the opportunity to affiliate with a group that has access to power—a power that is exercised over others to elevate Whiteness and justify its colonial supremacy. I say this knowing I was once seduced by these ideas. They didn’t seem dangerous at the time. Just a way to justify my identity. A way to piggyback off a colonial Whiteness that Romanians didn’t

163 contribute to but could belong to by default. Furthermore, if I became Canadian, I could justify my membership completely. Part of my membership required denial and criticism of my Romanian roots—internalized hatred (I return to this later).

Even being reflexive about it now does little to inspire pride in my Romanian heritage. Not long ago I heard a Romanian comedian on television ask the audience, “Aren’t you tired of being

Romanian?”—to thunderous laughter and applause. I think part of Romanian culture is a sense of internalized shame. Many Romanians spend a good deal of time criticizing our culture, politics, and inability to make any changes in our sociopolitical status—domestically and in diaspora. Any well-to-do Romanians in Toronto refuse to associate with the local Romanian community. They’ve escaped their shameful ties and no longer need to find solidarity in the community (at least in my experience). What seems to bring people together in communities is collective need and suffering.

Once emancipated, people rarely look back. I don’t think this is unique to the Romanian community. Although, it is much easier to hide the invisible internalized shame than the visible.

For Fanon, it becomes a forced choice, either reject being Black (an impossibility) or accept it and fight for Black pride (and it is a fight). There is no way to hide the fact of Blackness in a White world. Romanians, despite their lack of colonialization and cultural influence globally, get to piggyback off White supremacy44—and many do! Many first-generation Romanians I know who escaped communism through emigration to Canada are staunch conservative capitalists. Most

44 This applies to the majority of Romanians who are or pass White. Roma people in Romania form a separate ethnic category and do not, for the most part, pass White, which makes them easy to identify and racially target— oppression of Roma people continues to be a problem in Romania (see Rauh, 2018; Voiculescu, 2019). Due to this ethnic segregation and racial tension, many Romanians do not like to be confused with Roma people and are offended when their Whiteness isn’t recognized as a site of racial distinction (purity) from the “gypsies” (a pejorative that continues to be socially acceptable in the Romanian vernacular) (see, Muresan & Salcudean, 2017).

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I’ve met carry the pillars of White supremacy gladly, along with explicit racism, sexism, and homophobia.

When I had nothing to take pride in culturally and my only options for adopting a Romanian identity seem to be laced with racism, sexism, and homophobia, I rejected it and found liberation in a new identity. I generally feel indifferent about it, sometimes angry. I sometimes wish there was something to be proud of. More often though, I question why I would ever be proud of a nation full of backward thinking. Other times I feel guilty for even complaining about it when I consider the “real” struggle marginalized groups face. I still get my White privilege, right? It’s ironic that my internalized shame isn’t even worth complaining about. Recently I’ve begun to think another approach may be more interesting, having discovered Foucault’s method. I don’t have to decide how to feel about my identity, but I can interrogate its historicity and effects on my subjectivity.

My cultural ties informed my former White supremacist and colonial views. It was something toxic

I had to unlearn. My rehabilitation was not a project of solipsistic self-improvement but an opening up and learning from others, from whose patience I benefited and grew.

It was not my being Romanian that influenced my toxic ideas. It was precisely my not wanting to be Romanian. It was a rejection of the cultural properties of inferiority that bind to

Romanianness in favour of the accessible power of Whiteness which, in order to work, must exercise that power over others to determine its dominance. The appropriation of White supremacy did not feel inauthentic, it was indeed extremely validating. It felt authentic. This marks the disambiguation between authentic, inauthentic, and commodified authentic (or authentization).

What I then felt to be authentic in retrospect I understand to be a process of authentization under colonial standards. I operated with an erroneous mentality that subsumed a false meritocracy, a sense of entitlement, and a ruthless disregard for systemic oppression that I viewed as a denial of

165 individual freedom in favour of complaining and expecting handouts. I had assumed authenticity to be a universal property of the individual acting freely in accordance with their true self. The marginalized were then appropriately stereotyped (e.g., thugs, uneducated, irrational) because they were assumed to be behaving freely and authentically rather than reacting to their circumstances and systemic power (perhaps in defiance). Their bodies were the observable sites where these meanings could be engraved through my objective and reasonable gaze. If I was ever challenged, I had the history of Western philosophy in my arsenal.

Although I never explicitly used my Whiteness to harm others, my authenticized sense of superiority implicitly rejected the Other’s possibility of authenticity. Fanon (1952/1968) had felt this also,

What! When it was I who had every reason to hate, to despise, I was rejected? When I should

have been begged, implored, I was denied the slightest recognition? I resolved, since it was

impossible for me to get away from an inborn complex, to assert myself as a BLACK MAN.

Since the other hesitated to recognize me, there remained only one solution: to make myself

known. (p. 115)

I noticed only on a second reading of Black Skin White Masks that the empowerment in

Blackness is described as a form of embodiment meant to be foreign to the White mind. I say mind intentionally to highlight the Cartesian duality in White western reason. “Yes, we are–we Negroes– backward, simple, free in our behavior. That is because for us the body is not some thing opposed to what you call the mind” (Fanon, 1952/1968, pp. 126-127). Blackness is always visible and then internalized. It cannot become separate from the mind. Perhaps this rejection of dualism forms a second contention (the first being ontology) for Fanon with White existentialism. Butler (1990) also makes this point, “There are many occasions in both Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s work where “the

166 body” is figured as a mute facticity, anticipating some meaning that can be attributed only by a transcendent consciousness, understood in Cartesian terms as radically immaterial” (p. 176). Black subjectivity is first a Black body. White subjectivity is sometimes described as a blank slate (see

Locke 1869/1998) with its own ontology—a human. What Fanon (1952/1968) proposes is meant to alienate the White man from the spirituality of the Black man,

I embrace the world! I am the world! The white man has never understood this magic

substitution. The white man wants the world; he wants it for himself alone. He finds himself

predestined master of this world. He enslaves it. An acquisitive relation is established between

the world and him. But there exist other values that fit only my forms. Like a magician, I

robbed the white man of “a certain world,” forever after lost to him and his. When that

happened, the white man must have been rocked backward by a force that he could not identify,

so little used as he is to such reactions. (pp. 127-128)

This part of the text became important to me only when I read and reread it. Then along with other readings from marginalized communities, I realized a pattern. First, the description of

Whiteness here encompasses privilege—the arrogance to assume you own the world. It is a sense of entitlement reinforced by Western philosophy. The mind-body distinction was a potent justification of higher reasoning power approximating divinity (see Descartes, 1641/2003). We are minds elevated beyond the vulgar corporeal. We are destined to know absolute truths. Nature and everything with it belong to us for the taking. Our religion says so. Our philosophy justifies it.

Our science provides us the tools to do it. Everything less than man is inferior, because men defined men as superior, in god’s image, the highest consciousness, the power to rule. Nothing new here.

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The second realization I had from this reading was that marginalized communities often rely on a sense of spirituality that is intimately tied with the physical world. Fanon talks about the Black body being of the earth (see Gordon, 2015). There is a magical relation between human and nature, unlike the human vs. nature dichotomy popular in Western thinking (see Code, 2006; Plumwood,

1991). Indigenous literature also speaks of spiritual connections with the world (see Coulthard,

2014). There is no distinction between magic and the real, between spirit and the physical, between mind and body. Some feminist literature also connects the spirit of femininity with the earth, and the spirit of nature within femininity (see Keller, 1985; Merchant, 1980).

This is the magic that Fanon denies the White man. The White man is lost because he cannot be the savage in the jungle. He can only ever attempt to take the jungle, to observe it, and destroy it. He denies himself this access because he wants so desperately to be only a mind—a pure substance. He wants objectivity, logic, and control. All else to him is superstition. So, he regards the savage, the women, the Other, as superstitious and attempts to cleanse them with hard rationality. Is this because he’s never had to look at his body? Because he’s never been objectified in a world of objects? Does he lack this experience—the embodiment of his subjectivity? The mentality of usury is built upon the logic of pure reason (see Lugones, 1994). The ability to categorize and fragment in order to control, use, dominate. The obsession with purity not only colonizes and controls but fragments the self and becomes internally destructive.

Fanon (1952/1968) sees that the White man seeks to attain the pinnacle of human being, whereas the Black man trails behind merely hoping to be accepted among his oppressors: “There is a fact: White men consider themselves superior to black men. There is another fact: Black men want to prove to white men, at all costs, the richness of their thought, the equal value of their intellect” (p. 10). The internalization of being less-than is still evident. Some studies continue to

168 demonstrate that in the case of Black folks there is a lingering element of self-hatred internalized through their historicity. For example, the classic Clark and Clark (1947) doll studies and their recent replications (see Byrd et al., 2017), which continue to show internalized racism in Black children. As well as the continuing studies on the IQ race gap, which still draws proponents of hereditary race differences in intelligence (see Cofnas, 2020) despite the research on stereotype threat. Brown and Day (2006) have shown the powerful effects of stereotype threat. If you inform

Black participants they are taking an intelligence test they perform worse than White participants, however, in the absence of this information, Black participants perform the same as White participants. Fanon (1952/1968) specifically addressed internalized hatred as a fact of Blackness well over half a century ago and these effects persist to this day, a potential artefact of intergenerational trauma (see also Bombay, Matheson, & Anisman, 2009; Graff, 2014).

Fanon (1952/1968) finds some resistance through interracial love, “When my restless hands caress those White breasts, they grasp White civilization and dignity and make them mine” (p. 63).

On the one hand, interracial love subverts segregation and purity. On the other hand, the revenge is not only outward but inward. Fanon describes the lust for White women as a form of revenge against Whiteness, obtaining the forbidden fruit, and slapping the face of their oppressors—the same oppressors who imagined saving the Black women from savagery by subjecting them to servitude (see Boulbina, 2011). However, interracial love then suffers from constant doubts of authenticity both externally and internally. Society asks, “Why are they doing this?” The lovers ask, “Why are we doing this? We know that doing this makes a statement. Are we more than a statement” (see Lemay & Teneva, 2020)? Against the heteronormative White love all other love deviates. Once more, authenticity is challenged.

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Butler’s (1990) argument against the prediscursive self becomes important here in dismantling universalizing humanism that is often postfeminist, colourblind, and postracial. The invocation of some pure or basic form of humanity without discursive markers of race, gender, and sexuality

(among others), as a “return-to” fantasy is impractical and serves to benefit the dominant class. By doing this we can alleviate the responsibility of dealing with the sociohistorical power relations that continue to carve meaning into identity and subvert agency. The possibility of authenticity is then obscured or at least easily confounded with commodified authenticity.

The point I’m trying to make is that one does not require a true (prediscursive) self in order to feel authentic. We can interrogate what authenticity feels like phenomenally and describe it in part as the existential experience of performing our identity in ways we find meaningful and liberating.

This involves complex intersections, the political, the social, the familial, the cultural, and the body, and how each inform the other. Mostly, it involves how these experiences are inscribed on the body as embodied subjectivity, and the ways in which we can subvert/perform them considering sociopolitical limitations. I say this also considering other marginalized people, like the gay community, where there are countless stories of folx wishing they were straight, and sometimes going as far as submitting themselves to conversion therapies (see Tozer & Hayes,

2004). When marginalization can be invisible, many folx spend a considerable amount of time hiding their identity, negotiating who to open up to, and considering context-appropriate situations to be themselves, in other words, to be authentic. This happens for people in the LGBTQ+ communities as well as for people with invisible disabilities, and those who pass White. When the site of marginalization is a visible part of the body, like skin colour or some sex/gender markers, the only option is to try and embrace it in the face of adversity.

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I could foresee an objection raised here on the grounds of identity politics (see Eisenstein,

1978; Crenshaw, 1991; Monroe, Hankin, & Vechten, 2000) and the criticism that typically follows.

Namely, that identity politics in attempting to articulate experiences of suffering and oppression from within marginalized groups, actually further segregates the marginalized from the dominant group and marginalized individuals then cease to participate in mainstream culture and society

(see Schlesinger, 1991; O’Neil, 2015). First, this type of criticism favours assimilation over resistance, which I have argued only serves to erase the identities of marginalized folks, their freedoms, needs, and existence. Secondly, it assumes that marginalized folks will further alienate themselves from the larger society in demanding visibility and a voice for their concerns, with the additional implicit assumption that different marginalized groups will be competing against each other by attempting to elevate their own needs over the needs of other groups. It is important to understand here that segregation and alienation are the very conditions that have created the rift between the dominant and marginalized groups through the oppression of the former over the latter. To then accuse the marginalized group for acknowledging their own oppression as a form of “special treatment” is insulting. To reiterate Fanon’s (1952/1968) statement, “Since the other hesitated to recognize me, there remained only one solution: to make myself known” (p. 115).

Mellino (2011) argues that “for Fanon we cannot fight against racism without bringing into question the whole system within which it grows. And this means that antiracism will become genuine and effective only by transforming itself into revolutionary or radical political action” (p.

73). Resistance through identity politics is a radical political reaction to oppression.

Finally, to address the notion that marginalized groups must compete for attention, I refer to

Spivak’s (1983/2000) strategic essentialism, which is a political tactic where marginalized groups mobilize together under a shared political identity despite their differences in order to achieve

171 certain goals. Strategic essentialism does not assimilate individual or group differences but is a negotiated political tactic to increase power toward political aims for marginalized groups.

Furthermore, Butler (2004), for whom identity politics is an important site of performativity also suggests provisional unities to mobilize for political action without requiring closed definitions of identity. In this way, liberation is sought from oppression for marginalized identities to exist and become visible in resistance to assimilation and erasure through intentional use of identity politics as a strategic form of survival.

Angst and alienation in intersectional bodies

Like authenticity, angst and alienation are phenomenological experiences worth interrogating, especially as they are often treated as the catalyst of the existential (or self-help) journey (see

Sartre, 1943/1992). They have their historicity in philosophy but also relate to the more recent pathological categorizations of anxiety and depression. Most people today do not say they have angst or feel alienation, they claim to have anxiety or depression. What distinguishes them? The former appear to be romantic afflictions reserved for philosophical minds while the latter are biopsychosocial products. Anxiety and depression are pathologized and treated systematically with drugs and therapy. They’re often subjects discussed in self-help literature that are meant to be ameliorated with some step-by-step behavioural instruction or rule for life. Some of the same arguments I have made for reassessing authenticity also apply to angst and alienation, specifically disambiguation and intersectionality. I will not reiterate the core of these arguments to avoid needless repetition, but I will attempt to at least highlight the nuances before coming to some theoretical conclusion.

First the matter of disambiguation, specifically between angst-alienation and anxiety- depression. For the moment I will treat each pair as comorbid for the sake of simplicity. Angst and

172 alienation have their existential historicity as described by Heidegger (1927/1962) and Sartre

(1943/1992) and are intimately intertwined in the existential experience of life where authenticity requires freedom, and angst and alienation are existential experiences of freedom in the profound realization of mortality. The experiences of angst and alienation, despite being unpleasant, are depicted as necessary suffering toward the realization of identity or self. In this way, these existential experiences are philosophically important in ways that are not analogous to anxiety and depression. These latter two constructs are the pathological counterparts to angst an alienation.

Clinically, the existential and pathological constructs are often treated as distinct. Sometimes, angst-alienation is treated as a phenomenological correlate of anxiety-depression (see Corr, 2011), or angst-alienation becomes the umbrella term for the historical development of pathological diagnoses (see Kahn, 2013). However, an integrated model of anxiety, for example, allows for distinctions between existential angst, normal anxiety, and neurotic anxiety while acknowledging their inseparability in human experience (see Iacovou, 2011). This model further outlines the distinction between adaptive existential angst and normal anxiety, and maladaptive neurotic anxiety highlighting therapeutic and existential treatments for the former, and stronger clinical treatments or drugs for the latter. Nevertheless, because their symptomology is similar, the self- help literature does not always successfully distinguish the existential from the neurotic/clinical.

In confounding these constructs, the risk arises in providing existential solutions to clinical cases or, less often, clinical solutions to existential cases.

The necessity for disambiguation is not solely to recommend the correct treatment, but also to alleviate the stress that can accrue from the overwhelming feeling that neither clinical nor

173 existential intervention will be efficacious45. Nevertheless, clean disambiguation may not always be possible if the experience of normal anxiety and depression comes with the existential feeling of angst-alienation. If we assume disambiguation is possible, then the solution is simplified.

Recourse to treatment depends on diagnostic accuracy, in which case the self-help industry ought to specify what form of anxiety-depression their treatment strategies address. In cases where disambiguation is not possible, and I assume these make up most of the cases, the solutions are complicated because of a correlation between the existential and pathological, in which case self- help technologies may be insufficient.

I might make a Foucauldian point here that prior to the intervention of psychology in pathologizing anxiety and depression, existential angst and alienation were both romantic and motivational (see Rabinow, 2010). It felt important to recognize angst, alienation, and mortality and to search for meaning. Now that search is obstructed by psychological interventions that render individuals either helpless, patients, or both. On the one hand, the self-help industry may rely on the romantic notions of angst and alienation to provide inefficacious advice to people with pathological conditions. On the other hand, demonstrating social or biological determinism for anxiety and depression alleviates the sufferer from responsibility, which counters the problematic self-help responsibilization but may induce learned helplessness.

Learned helplessness prevents the sufferer from seeing a solution (see, Seligman, 1972). I believe this is relevant to the freedom vs determinism problem. Overall, most people still behave as though they have agency and believe in change. The self-help industry reinforces these beliefs in an illusory and irresponsible way by suggesting that total responsibility and autonomy can be

45 The aim of this project is not to outline the critiques against the clinical interventions and diagnoses of mood disorders or the overprescription of drugs, which do exist in abundance (see, McCrae, Appasamy, & Haddad, 2017; Parker, 2007; van der Steen, 2003).

174 assumed over one’s life. Science pulls toward determinism and tries to reiterate that change is difficult. The sufferer is likely confused while becoming more anxious and stressed from negotiating freedom, choice, and responsibility for their anxiety and/or depression. On the one hand, they are helpless and, on the other hand, they are responsible for their condition and self- improvement. This follows a tradition of dichotomous thinking from Galton’s (1874) nature versus nurture, to hereditarianism versus behaviorism (see Boakes, 1981; Garcia, 1993), behavioral genetics versus environment (see Bailey, 1997; Winegard, Winegard, & Anomaly, 2020), to essentialized brains versus neuroplasticity (see Clark, 2016; Staub, 2018).

The ongoing debates over how much we can truly change about ourselves, how difficult those changes can be, what we ought to change, and what we cannot change are confusing and perpetuate some of the problems these debates attempt to solve like anxiety and depression. What this polarized discourse negates, is what I’ll here call the distinction between healthy and toxic adversity. Framed existentially, adversity is often depicted as an opportunity to overcome, become, or actualize, which I have already shown to have been incorporated rather loosely into the self- help industry. Framed pathologically, adversity is often treated with professional intervention.

Adversity in either scenario is conditioned by suffering and necessitates overcoming when possible.

The distinction between healthy and toxic adversity requires intersectionality to be understood.

What can appear as a powerful technology to overcome adversity in one context can disempower in another. Intersectionality can work to examine adversity as a multifarious construct rather than a generalized experience that can be overcome, much less overcome in the same ways. For example, when Nietzsche (1901/1968) preaches the overcoming of self and the strength of the will as a demonstration of how much suffering one could endure and turn to their advantage, he likely

175 could not envision systematic oppression as a potential factor. To return to the point, universality, which I have argued is problematic in defining authenticity, is also a problematic factor in defining angst-alienation and perhaps also anxiety-depression. I return to Fanon to illustrate the point.

Fanon (1952/1968) uses the language of psychoanalysis to describe a “Negro neurosis” constructed out of the desperation to achieve humanity in a White world where constant adversity follows dark skin (see also Gibson, 2017). This neurosis is an internalized inferiority born out of the social environment in which a Black person lives. Where angst is described as an awareness of freedom and mortality, corporeal neurosis is the physical counterpart. However, the physical manifestations, whether neurotic ticks or merely a striving for affirmation, are also existential. The experience of this neurosis is not merely a physical sensation, it is a phenomenon that expresses a historicity, subjectivity, and series of behaviours. If one is at odds about the meaning of their existence because they are confronted with freedom and mortality, one is certainly at odds with existential meaning when their body, behaviours, and consciousness are struggling to validate their identity. The embodied experiences of angst-alienation and anxiety-depression are determined by a context that also creates the conditions for the possibility of their resolution.

Marginalized identities experience angst-alienation and anxiety-depression in ways that intersect specifically with their race, gender, sex, sexuality, and socioeconomic status. For example, gay, lesbian, transgender, and bisexual people have elevated risk of suicidal behaviour, that requires interventions to be reformed, knowledge gaps to be filled, and systemic policies to change for effective suicide prevention strategies to work (Haas et al., 2010). Intersectionality is an important framework in addressing practices for mental health (see Hallett, 2015). The self- help industry does not address intersectionality (see Rimke, 2000) and even if it did, I suspect it

176 would be used as progressive currency46. Intersectionality must be complemented with effective antiracist, anticlassist, and antisexist practices to avoid using progressive language as mere lip service (Luft, 2009). The self-help industry most often requires the assumption of universality, not necessarily for its proposed treatment strategies, as much as its marketing strategies, to work.

Universality is not only a conceptual problem but can be seen as a practical problem in applying self-help strategies cross-culturally and internationally without efficacy (see Ronel, 1997; Lavoie

& Gidron, 2014).

If we assume a universal notion of adversity (e.g., angst, alienation, anxiety, depression), we may be naively inclined to suggest something like resilience as a powerful technology of self- improvement (see Seligman, 1999; Seligman & Fowler, 2011). This cannot combat systematic adversity, where the root of the problem resides not within the individual suffering, but in societal systems that perpetuate the conditions for adversity against marginalized groups. Toxic adversity is then framed here as the systematic conditions that produce suffering though oppression and marginalization, which I argue cannot be resolved individually, but require collective action and solidarity. By juxtaposition, though by no means a complete definition, healthy adversity must be suffering that is possible to be overcome by an individual, though not necessarily individually, and consented to by the sufferer even if only in hindsight. This is not to suggest toxic adversity cannot be overcome or consented to unwittingly, but to present possible demarcations between the reformative kinds of suffering and the destructive.

The difficulty here in reassessing angst and alienation is precisely the intersections that confound these existential experiences with the contemporary pathologies of anxiety and

46 I have found no studies on intersectionality and self-help and every self-help book, program, workshop, or website I have cited in this work or encountered assumes a stance of universality—in other words the self-help intervention is meant for everyone in the same way independent of class, race, sex, gender, or sexuality.

177 depression, especially as their interventions and treatments become exceedingly commodified in the self-help industry. With the elevated rates of anxiety and depression, the market is ripe for selling treatments, whether therapy, drugs, or self-help. One’s access to treatment will depend on their socioeconomic status, education, and culture. For some, it may seem simpler to clean their room as an exercise in self-discipline and organization to relieve stress, anxiety, or depression, rather than to seek a therapist. A self-help book is also far more affordable than psychological intervention. Again, these points are reiterations of arguments I have already exhausted earlier.

However, in this case, the reassessment is far less satisfying because the critique here more than ever seems to require a solution. I have not promised any solutions and made a point against solution-focused thinking. However, I will return to my point at the beginning, which aims at the reduction of suffering though a middle-out approach. If we consider intersubjectivity as the relational ground from which we can access communal support, solidarity, and collective action, the avenues to the reduction of suffering, especially pernicious systematic suffering (i.e., toxic adversity), begin to surface.

Throughout this work I have consistently pointed to communal support, solidarity, and collective action as alternatives to self-help. To reiterate, I do not propose these ideas as solutions to the problems I have identified in the self-help industry but rather as pre-existing alternatives that have been a source of help, especially for marginalized communities who are stigmatized as being unable to help themselves. Anti-self-help aims at understanding the conditions that create and sustain the neoliberal self-help industry with a focus instead on community, support, and other-help (a focus on helping each other rather than a competition for self-improvement). In this way, anti-self-help is not merely a negation of self-help but a critical stance that acknowledges the importance of help and prioritizes the communities of people who most need help and the methods

178 of help that they request. Intersectionality and intersubjectivity are important parts of this process because it allows us to prioritize needs, support, and to make connections between the privileged and the disenfranchised through relations of allyship (see Sumerau, Forbes, Grollman, & Mathers,

2020) and to take direct action to combat systemic racism as accomplices in solidarity with marginalized groups (see Powell & Kelly, 2017).

I have already spoken about the importance of solidarity (see Butler, 1990; Butler, 2004;

Spivak, 1983/2000) as a collectivistic stance on help that aims at mutual support, which helps both the individual and the group prosper by fighting to change the conditions that subject them to toxic adversity—which sometimes requires facing adversity through activism (see Beale, 1970; Morgan,

1970). Communal support, as I have already mentioned, has a long-standing tradition in self-help, which first originated as self-help groups like Alcoholics Anonymous, second-wave feminism, and the civil rights movement (see McGee, 2005; VandenBos, 2015). Self-help groups continue today and have been incorporated as therapeutic methods with the emergence of community psychology

(see Rappaport, 1987; Dalton, Hill, Thomas, & Kloos, 2013) and continued research, notably participatory action research (see Chesler, 1991). There are many self-groups that operate to offer communal support in person and online for people living with cancer (see Gray, Fitch, Davis, &

Phillips, 1997), HIV/AIDS (see Coursaris & Liu, 2009), and addiction (see Moos, 2008), among others.

Finally, collective action has been and continues to be, an important political tactic for the marginalized to obtain rights and liberties. We can look at examples from anti-apartheid activism

(see Biko, 1978), the Black Panther Party (see, Newton, 1972/1995), the civil rights movement

(see Hallward, 2011; Wilson, 2013), the alter-globalization movement (see Broad & Heckscher,

2003; Pleyers, 2010), the #MeToo movement (see Hosterman, Johnson, Stouffer, & Herring,

179

2018), and the Black Lives Matter Movement (see De Choudhury, Jhaver, Sugar, & Weber, 2016;

Garza, 2016) to name a few. These strategies are suggested here as avenues of support because helping is acknowledged as an important resource to ameliorate suffering, especially when that suffering is toxic and systematic. I make these suggestions because, as I have argued, the self-help industry ironically contributes more to sustaining the problems of neoliberalism, like individualization, responsibilization, and relationships of usury, than to helping.

A reminder about undecidability: A conclusion

I want to reiterate that it’s acceptable here to be open-ended and undecidable (see Derrida,

1992), devoid of solutions, despite the temptation. This is a skeptical inquiry into ontology, identity, authenticity, and freedom. Our possibilities for change are limited when we decide exactly what is and isn’t, ought and ought not to be, part of our identity, behaviours, and beliefs. With an open definition that’s perpetually subject to malleability, we enable future-oriented potential for change (see Butler, 1990; Butler, 2004).

To consider here a brief genealogical acknowledgment of existential suffering, angst- alienation, and anxiety-depression, would help put things in perspective. For example, what are the exteriority of accidents (see Foucault, 1977/1980) that have produced an abundance of anxiety and depression in contemporary North American society? I’d start with neoliberalism. I wouldn’t be the first, but I might be the first to forego looking at it strictly from an individualistic perspective. Ultimately, it is about subjectivity, but the subject is a small part of a whole. However, most theoretical interrogations I’ve come across situate the cause of the problem somewhere in the whole, with relational effects to the individual. The solutions are then offered to the individual in a neoliberal maneuver that only amplifies the very problem. Proposing a solution in/to the whole also seems unfeasible.

180

In the Foucauldian tradition, I suppose I’m looking to test those boundaries. Neither top-down nor bottom-up seem to work—why not middle-out? The middle-out approach sees the individual as the nexus of a web of immediate relations, possibilities, human connections, and institutional access—like intersubjective relational ontologies (see Gergen 2009; Levinas 1961/1969; Morgan,

2007; Slife, 2004) and phenomenological models (see Hersch, 2003; Hutcheson, 1979). The closest conditions that inform and create the individual’s subjectivity, and the closest access to possibilities for change are solidarity and collective action. These are neither large-scale systemic changes nor purely individualistic ones, they are intersubjective. These are existing parameters we operate in that enable direct change. It’s manageable, and it’s already occurring. The middle-out is then the small communities one is part of that shape individual identities and are affected by the whole.

The synthesis of ideas here is by no means conclusive but intentionally open-ended and I want to move away from solution-based thinking. It may simply be a descriptive account of the immediate connections that inform subjectivity with a focus on solidarity and collective action for support. I don’t presume to fix anxiety and depression, for example, and these may indeed be exasperated by participating in solidarity movements and collective action because of the additional stress. Nevertheless, those communities speak for themselves and often offer a sense of communal support for their members or, in existential language, a sense of meaning and authenticity to counter angst-alienation, or even to learn to grow from adversity. Furthermore, if

Foucault (1977/1980) is correct, the power that knowledge and understanding can have over existential suffering, angst-alienation/anxiety-depression, is to enable our freedom for change (and at times acceptance).

181

Kaczynski’s (1995) argument in The Unabomber Manifesto is that leftists all suffer from an inferiority complex and band together because alone they are weak. Though he argues for a radical form of individuality, what he states as a criticism is not untrue. However, I don’t see it as a criticism of the left so much as, in the positive form, a revolt against power structures. It is true that alone we do not have sufficient power to resist systemic power structures. Ironically,

Kaczynski (1995) called for collective resistance to technology. He implicitly acknowledged that we are all powerless as individuals to create change and I suppose his dire need to prove the contrary resulted in his university bombings. My point here is again that solidarity is not only the avenue of the disenfranchised. In a corrupt form, solidarity as a hierarchical structure of mutual dependence exists even for the powerful. They require a submissive group to take advantage of in order to maintain power. Rather than assimilate with the dominant through an admiration of their power combined with the illusion of obtaining it, we can take Fanon’s (1952/1968) suggestion to take up resistance.

The point of resistance is vigilance to the insidious mechanisms that commodify and absorb the power to create change. Without resistance, solidarity and collective action sound like progressive catchphrases or worse, they become susceptible to commodification and end up participating in the neoliberal market. For example, the (former) CEO and co-founder of WeWork,

Adam Neumann (see Rayport, Gulick, & Preble, 2018) started his shared workspace company with new-age language centering around notions of solidarity and community. The S-1 form registering

WeWork, or what is now called The We Company, as a public company with the U.S Securities and Exchange Commission, begins with “we dedicate this to the energy of we – greater than any one of us but inside each of us” and the rest of the document is peppered with collectivistic currency like “community company…shared experiences…culture of inclusivity…collaborative

182 culture…worldwide community...[and]…foster human connection through collaboration and holistically support our members” (The We Company, 2019, August 14, pp. 1-2).

Adam Neumann capitalized on collectivist language, solidarity, and the need for community building to start a company that rapidly gained value with no financial oversight, leading to a disastrous collapse and failed initial public offering (IPO) (Borgenicht, 2020). Prior to the failed

IPO, Neumann personally purchased the trademark to the word “we” and sold it back to his company for 5.9 million, then cashed out over 700 million dollars from the company, all at the expense of shareholders and mass employee layoffs leading to over 2.9 billion in losses (Brown,

Farrell, & Das, 2019). The questionable ethics of the company were not limited solely to

Neumann’s financial mismanagement. Former executives filed lawsuits against WeWork for age and gender discrimination, and sexual harassment (Deitch, 2019).

I use this example to caution against using the language of solidarity to reinforce neoliberalism. This is also an example of how solution-focused thinking can be dangerous.

Furthermore, it highlights how bodies of knowledge as truth holders can be dangerous in the absence of understanding. The concept of WeWork was arguably good. However, by commodifying solidarity and community in the most literal sense by purchasing and selling the word “we” along with the promises of the company that it failed to meet, Neumann profited through usury of the very people he had claimed to want to help, his community of members and shareholders. For these reasons and the many others that I have outlined in this project, reassessment and criticism are consistently necessary so we do not become comfortable. Once we do, we’ve decided on a false notion of permanence that is due in time to become oppressive when conditions inevitably change.

183

Solidarity and collective action are the political tactics of the disenfranchised in resistance to their continued oppression. Fanon called for resistance through solidarity and collective action that inspired the civil rights movement (see Hallward, 2011). Newton (1972/1995) founded the Black

Panther Party as a Marxist organization to liberate the people from oppression, for which he assumed (correctly) that his life would inevitably be sacrificed. Violence, imprisonment, and death are real consequences for marginalized people fighting for their identities and rights to be acknowledged socially and politically (see Morgan, 1970). Intersectionality and radical antiracist, antisexist, anticlassist political action, part of which necessitates identity politics, are required not only for political efficacy but for the survival of the marginalized (see Luft, 2009).

To accommodate these changing demands, solidarity and collective action can benefit from provisional unities among diverse groups of marginalized people (see Butler, 1990; 2004) and strategic essentialism (see Spivak, 1983/2000) as temporary coalitions. Solidarity and collective action extend beyond marginalized groups to access power and support from traditionally nonmarginalized folks through allyship, which requires refraining from assuming allyship as a moral signal and instead actively listening and participating in group efforts (rather than individually) lead by marginalized groups and their leaders (see Russell & Bohan, 2016; Sumerau,

Forbes, Grollman, & Mathers, 2020). For allies, this means going beyond knowledge and awareness and actively using their privilege (e.g. nonmarginalized, White, class, gender) to support and assist the political aims of marginalized groups based on their explicit demands for what constitutes allyship, or becoming an accomplice as a commitment to take direct and continuous antiracist action against organizations and institutions (see Powell & Kelly, 2017).

184

CONCLUSION

An anti-self-help project is a timely response to the sociopolitical climate we face. Unlike

Brinkmann’s (2017) stoic counter-position to the self-help industry, I am not recycling old philosophies to combat the present. I do not care for solutions in the commonsense way. I may be accused of peddling solutions in this work, specifically where I advocate for solidarity, community, and collective action. However, these are not new ideas, I am not recycling them, and

I do not presume to suggest they will work to solve issues of capitalism, neoliberalism, or even my notion of neonihilism. I point out that these countermeasures exist, they do work, and they’ve been at work long before I was inspired by them. My point is to highlight alternatives to self-help that are already occurring and which could always use more academic, social, and political attention.

Awareness of these alternatives is progressively increasing regardless of my efforts. Perhaps I’m merely saying: hey look over there for inspiration. Call it a limitation of my work.

For example, If neonihilism is a powerful demonstration of coping with the meaninglessness of a neoliberal world, then we can look at the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement as a powerful demonstration of resistance to that meaninglessness through collective action and solidarity. During an already difficult time, with the Covid-19 pandemic, the murder of George

Floyd by Minneapolis Police (Fernandez & Burch, 2020) has sparked global protests, activism, and collective action against systemic racism. Solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement has resulted in corporations taking a stand against systemic racism. Many cities in North America have committed to reforming police, while Minneapolis city council has vowed to disband their police department and New York city has defunded their police department by fifty percent,

American lawmakers have proposed legislative changes in policing, and demonstrators have toppled statues symbolic of systemic and historic racism (Ankel, 2020).

185

Part of the Black Lives Matter activism has taken shape online. Digital activism has focused on sharing media and resources online to educate people on systemic racism, such as reading lists, films, documentaries, and podcasts; Online calls to action have been proliferated heavily, such as emailing city council members for defunding police, asking for the arrest of police officers involved with the killing of BIPOC, and signing petitions for legislative changes to address and end systemic racism in institutions such as police departments, among others. Other actionable steps have been spreading online, such as places to donate to support the Black community, where to support Black owned businesses, and instructions on how to address racism with friends and family in conversation, emphasizing restorative justice techniques over dismissal, or what has been labeled “cancel culture” (see, Andrews, 2020; Bellan, 2020; Seger, 2020).

The work of allyship, which frames how to stand in solidarity, has been outlined by leaders in the Black community with a heavy focus on understanding the reality of systemic racism as a prerequisite to taking action (or accomplice-ship). The value of understanding, much as in the

Foucauldian sense (see Foucault 1977/1980), is that it facilitates the possibility for liberation and change through an investigation of institutional power relations and how they came into place, in this case focusing on systemic racism as a production of an ideology of White supremacy rooted in colonialism. For example, Alexander (2020) argues that the American criminal justice system has systematically created a racial undercaste (through antiblack racism) since the abolition of slavery through a series of laws that continues to marginalize Black people to this day with the advent of mass incarceration and the economy of the prison-industrial complex. Kendi (2020) challenges us to first recognize our implicit and internalized racism as a powerful step toward undoing and unlearning that racism and toward engaging in antiracism, challenging racism in people, organizations, systems, policies, practices, and attitudes toward a redistribution of power

186 and equitability. Oluo (2018) provides a guide for White people to engage in critical and informed discourse around race and racism with the idea that these conversations not only address the often invisible systemic racism that underlies North American society, but also work to undo that racism.

Taken together these examples outline some of the existing possibilities for transgressing the neoliberal status quo through activism, which itself is a meaningful engagement that also challenges the meaninglessness of neonihilism.

This work is a critique, which aids the work of liberation through reassessment of ideas already at play (see Butler, 1990; Butler, 2004; Foucault, 2008/1979). I aim to do no more and I hope to do no less. The result of this work should hopefully motivate further academic study into the intersections of capitalism, neoliberalism, self-help, and existentialism through existing critical lenses, as well as new ones, such as my proposed notion of neonihilism. Seeing our sociopolitical climate through the lens of a self-deprecating, hyperaware, tragicomedy, ironically creates a meaning for meaninglessness that is most evident, if nowhere else, in art and pop culture. It’s like when life gives you lemons…but you have no sugar left—you get awful lemonade. If you’re thirsty, you still drink it with a disgruntled face. The inane becomes something. It takes on an existence of its own. And we humans do what we do best—adapt. This work and neonihilism as a construct looks at that adaptation. Future work can study the reaches of neonihilism, its representation in art, media, and pop culture, and hopefully avoid the irony of becoming a commodified idea, unless it already has.

Finally, where does psychology fit into the picture? I addressed this briefly in the introduction but only on the basis of its accountability for the reach of positive psychology. Essentially, this work, which is a critique, is also a critique of, and for, psychology. The critique of psychology is evident in my previous arguments but the critique for psychology should be explicitly stated here.

187

The anti-self-help project and neonihilism provide ways of thinking about subjectivity in context, at intersections, embodied, and socio-politically inscribed. With the aim of liberation through reassessment, psychology too can participate in politicizing mental health, abandoning restrictive categories, and envisioning a sustainable future for the world.

I have offered suggestions on how these aims may be feasible by understanding power- knowledge relations with a focus on liberation, critiques of neoliberalism and possibilities for subversion, and a move away from universality and toward intersectionality in reassessing the existing constructs we propagate theoretically and practically. I have made a point to steer away from a problem-solution dichotomy and focused instead on descriptive accounts and modes of resistance through understanding and subverting power. To reiterate the scope of understanding as

Foucault (1982) intended, understanding aims at historical genealogy and archeology of ideas as they take shape in bodies of knowledge that are then upheld by institutions and their practices, which constitutes a form of power that is recognized as truth. A Nietzschean/Foucauldian reassessment of these truths reveals their constitution as contextualized ideologies that often carry the fallibility of human error, which are then cleansed and authoritatively instituted through the coercive power of reason. Understanding then aims to undo this power of authoritative truth and reconceive problems as adaptive and malleable, which enables the liberty to relieve their hold on the prescriptive and normative conditions that subjectify us.

The result of this reassessment then, I hope, is a viable way of thinking about subjectivity and existential suffering from an anti-self-help stance that embraces a communal over an individualistic lens, without disparaging those for whom self-help has been important, reformative, or life-saving. The critiques have been exclusively aimed at the systemic problems, not the individuals caught up in them, in order to disentangle the relationships of usury that exist between

188 the state and the self and the relationships of usury with the self that is reinforced in the neoliberal imaginary—the aim of which is liberation from these conditions to create the possibility for identities to emerge out of diverse sites meaning.

What I have largely focused on is an implicit genealogy of the human search for meaning through various existential avenues and the intersections with suffering that now include nuanced perspectives on sex, gender, class, race, and sexuality. The lessons I have pointed to comprise a synthesis of ideas from Nietzsche, Sartre, Beauvoir, Fanon, Frankl, Foucault, and Butler, among others to help understand an aura of meaninglessness that I have found pervasive in social media culture and called neonihilism. These lessons were intended to outline the conditions for the possibility of overcoming neonihilism with an anti-self-help stance, which adopts a particular vigilance against neoliberal commodification, and considers the project indefinitely incomplete, always subject to change, available to multiple contested meanings, and always toward liberation from oppression especially for the marginalized. Furthermore, I hope to have shown that the notion of overcoming has multiple meanings in this context, from understanding to finding joy in inevitability, to averting toxic adversity and embracing healthy adversity as a reformative.

“…I am a being whose meaning is always problematic” (Sartre, 1943/1992, p.105).

189

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