While scrolling social media over the past week, I’ve been thinking a lot about our affect theory readings, particularly Ngai’s Ugly Feelings. Ngai doesn’t really engage with the digital, which makes sense since the text is from 2005. Yet so much of her argument works for me in helping to articulate how it feels to be online right now. To me, being on Instagram, TikTok or Twitter (sorry, I know it’s X) is characterized by the experience of an array of shallow micro-emotions – or maybe, affective states – that are often just different shades of bad. Obviously, there are silly or funny videos that might make me laugh and there are tiny moments of joy. But more often than not, I feel Ngai’s uglier feelings: “moods like irritation and anxiety, for instance, are defined by a flatness or ongoingness entirely opposed to the ‘suddenness’ on which Aristotle’s aesthetics of fear depends” (2645). And I often feel irritated or anxious or paranoid even if the content itself leans neutral or positive (fashion styling, animal videos, makeup tutorials). Like “anxiety, distraction, and cynicism,” which Ngai describes as “haunt[ing] the workday like a mood that cannot be escaped,” our current political, economic and cultural moment also permeates social media like a collective bad mood. But often, these emotions flit by so quickly (as I cruise through video after video), that it’s difficult to clock them – and that’s why affect theory’s ability to help capture this kind of pre-conscious, pre-cognitive state resonates with me.

Ngai’s point about how these more minor emotions might stifle political power also helps explain why we may not be moved to action even when we consume content that desperately, urgently warrants attention… like first-person accounts out of Gaza or existentially dark climate  news. The affective experience of our political situation feels connected to Foucault’s point about biopower’s displacement of disciplinary power. Maybe Ngai and Foucault’s ideas describe a one-two punch of disaffection. Just as it might’ve been more straightforward to cut off the head of the classical, pre-modern sovereign, maybe it was also easier to rise to resistance when the grand emotions dominated our experience of political life.

There’s one part of Ngai’s argument, though, that didn’t land as much for me in our contemporary moment. On p. 2646, Ngai notes that “something about the cultural canon itself seems to prefer higher passions and emotions–as if minor or ugly feelings were not only incapable of producing ‘major’ works, but somehow disabled the works they do drive from acquiring canonical distinction.” I’d argue that in the years since Ugly Feelings’ publication, these minor affects have become so dominant to our experience of life that they’ve also made their way into the contemporary literary canon. As with our discussion of White Lotus, we see anxiety, irritation, envy and paranoia in a number of “great” recent literary works. I’m thinking of the disaffected female protagonists in the new canon of so-called “cool girl literature,” also referred to sometimes as “hot girl” or “sad girl” lit. As Charlotte Stroud writes in The New Statesman, the cool girl novelist’s “prose is bare” and “her characters are depressed and alienated.” I think novels like Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (which is kind of the poster child of this subgenre) have reached the status of contemporary classic because they’ve traded in the classical emotions for these “sentiments of disenchantment.” Now, our major works might deal in minor feelings. But, like our social media content, they have yet to move us toward major change.

Since class, I’ve been thinking more about the contemporary examples of biopower we raised. I’d like to further explore some of the many ways individuals have internalized biopolitical incentives – and question what it means for the population to manage itself:

While reading “Society Must Be Defended,” I thought a lot about the venture capitalist Bryan Johnson and other self-proclaimed biohackers. An early profile of Johnson in VICE from 2023 called him “The Most Measured Man in Human History”… which feels very Foucauldian already. He’s famous for his obsession with reversing the aging process and – although he’s 47 – claims his biological age is much younger. (He says his heart functions at the level of a 37-year-old and his lungs like an 18-year-old, so I guess he’s somewhere between.) Here’s an excerpt from VICE that gets at what Johnson’s up to:

“Johnson says that he spends more money on his body than LeBron James. With this sizable budget (more than $2 million a year), he pays for the food he eats (a precise 1,977 calories a day, made up of the world’s most nutritious elements), as well as the 112 to 130 supplemental pills he takes on a daily basis, and the ultrasound machine and other medical-grade machinery he keeps on the second floor of his discrete compound in Venice, Los Angeles, where he and his team of more than 30 doctors, clinicians, and researchers analyze how the 78 organs that make up his body have responded to the latest tweaks to his diet, sleep, and movement.”

Johnson has taken the example Professor Allred mentioned in class (a teenage boy’s casual interest in protein intake, macros, fitness, etc.) to the furthest possible extreme, self-policing his own body down to the level of his organs. But is this behavior representative of biopower? On the one hand, Johnson chooses to dedicate his own time and resources to this obsessive self-optimization, which feels different from the state interest in population-level metrics that Foucault describes. For Foucault, “the mechanisms introduced by biopolitics include forecasts, statistical estimates, and overall measures. And their purpose is not to modify any given phenomenon as such, or to modify a given individual insofar as he is an individual, but, essentially, to intervene at the level at which these general phenomena are determined, to intervene at the level of their generality” (1444). Johnson’s interest in himself, by contrast, seems very individually-motivated: he doesn’t want to die.

On the other hand, we could argue that Johnson – and the population at large – has internalized the interests of biopower so thoroughly that state intervention or management is no longer necessary. If individual members of a population are already interested in lowering the mortality rate or extending the general life expectancy, then does the power in biopower lose its oomph? In other words, does the alignment of individual motives with technologies of the state dull biopower’s teeth? Foucault argues the post-classical state has gained the power to make live and let die … but Johnson himself is desperate to live optimally. What’s left for the state to do?

That said, I think Johnson would be a much stronger example of the internalization of biopower if he were interested in the longevity of the entire population. His extreme self-interest in his personal biometrics seems more like a privilege of the ultra-wealthy than anything else. It would feel different if he were advocating for the health of the entire population. (Unfortunately, I’m assuming here that Johnson might be more interested in the health of people like him than the well-being of people in general – but I don’t know for sure.) But I think he’s still a good example of how comfortable we’ve become with the collection and analysis of our personal data. Tracking everything about our health might benefit us, but it also benefits the companies and governmental bodies who access and wield that data against us. It’s unsurprising, then, that a lot of biohackers are folks who aligned with the interests of the state and the market. Maybe it’s most useful to think of biohackers as sneaky spokespeople for the continued proliferation of biopower, or whatever kind of biopolitical-disciplinary matrix we’re living under now.

Last week, we discussed Marx’s argument that workers under capitalism are alienated from their labor in a few key ways. Alienation happens when workers don’t own the means of production, nor have control over production processes. In industrial/factory settings, for example, workers may only be responsible for one small step (attaching the aglet) in a long assembly chain (the production of a tennis shoe)–and the result is often a product that its own makers can’t afford (the Nike Air Force 1). Under these conditions, the worker is abstracted from both the product (the commodity) and their own time/labor (also a commodity).

I think Severance is useful in illustrating the relationship between these two levels of abstraction. First, it feels like an understatement to say that Lumon workers–at least the severed ones–are totally in the dark about what they’re working to create. Lumon is broadly described as some kind of biotech company, but the Macrodata Refinement team in particular has zero insight into the relationship between their daily work, which is described as “mysterious and important,” and the final product. (In fact, an underlying question in the show is… is there a final product?) Unlike the industrial landscape to which Marx & Engels responded, Severance is set in a familiar, late-stage capitalist environment in which workers are often tasked with the production of intangible, technology-based goods and services. Mark’s repetitive, instinct-based, game-like Cold Harbor project, for example, reminds me of the work of content moderators who are tasked with flagging and removing harmful content from platforms like TikTok, Meta, etc. Content moderators, often based in cities far from tech company headquarters (ex: India, Kenya and Malaysia are big hubs), might contribute to the goal of user safety, but their work also trains AI models that will ultimately replace their labor altogether. Like in Severance, content moderators are one piece in the production of one large, amorphous “product” but it’s not totally clear what’s being produced.

According to Marx, the workers in Severance, like all workers, are also alienated because they exchange their own labor/time for the concept of money. However, the situation is complicated by the fact that severed workers also make another kind of exchange. They agree to undergo an invasive, experimental medical procedure and in return, their Outie gets to experience life “free” of work. Here, the through line with Marx gets a little muddy–but I’ll do my best. The Severance case takes worker alienation to a literal extreme as the procedure creates a work self and a non-work self. This is reminiscent of a great section from The German Ideology:

“The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home. His labour is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labour. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it” (659).

Severance mirrors Marx & Engels’ thinking here, down to the language of the self “outside his work.” And just as the above passage describes, an Innie’s labor–tragically–only exists to satisfy what is external to it. For me, the final twist in the Marx-Severance equation is that the primary commodity in the show is likely the severance procedure itself. Severance imagines a world in which we can skip the labor of work, but also of childbirth, the dentist, or a blood draw. The commodity, then, is the very procedure that enables the existence of severed workers–who likely labor only as a continuation of that initial experiment, as a way of testing and maintaining the technology. I’m not sure what to make of that in relation to Marx, besides the way that it so weirdly, eerily illustrates his prescient warning that capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction. Would love to hear what other Severance watchers think.

After class today, there’s at least one question that remains for me about the Nietzsche essay. Nietzsche sets up his argument by posing a central question: “where on earth can the drive to truth possibly have come from?” (753). But by the end of the essay, I had totally forgotten that this was (one of) his animating queries! The question can be read a number of ways–for example, does Nietzsche aim to locate a historical, biological, sociological or even psychoanalytic point of origin for the truth drive? Why pose this question and then (kind of) abandon it? Thinking it through, I wonder if the question is primarily a provocation. Ultimately, Nietzsche seems to use it as a rhetorical strategy that allows him to move away from the truth drive’s genesis and instead to identify the truest human impulse as one towards abstraction. Nietzsche calls the drive to form metaphors “that fundamental human drive which cannot be left out of consideration for even a second without also leaving out human beings themselves” (759). Part of what makes this drive a fundamental one is that the first metaphor is baked into the process of perception (“the stimulation of a nerve is first translated into an image”), then that metaphor is doubled by the process of communication/language (“the image is then imitated by a sound”) (755). 

Given this, maybe Nietzsche is arguing that what we conceive of as an impulse towards truth is in reality an innate drive towards abstraction. It’s provocative to name metaphor as the “fundamental” human drive. (It makes me laugh, for example, to think about metaphor being placed among the basic hierarchy of human needs–food, water, shelter, etc.) But by emphasizing the centrality of metaphor to the identity of human beings, Nietzsche emphasizes his argument that humans have little relationship to “the essence of things” (756). In this way, he suggests that humans might move through the world without ever actually intersecting with its objects, with the thing itself, with truth. Instead, we’re floating around in our own consciousness, which is walled off even from our own essential bodily processes. (753). I’d be curious to hear whether others think Nietzsche answers his own question about the origins of the truth drive, or if it really is just a way into his argument.

Ultimately, the impression that I’m left with from the essay is a call to remember the ways in which metaphor is inherent to the processes of human cognition. Nietzsche bemoans the fact that we “no longer tolerate being swept away by sudden impressions and sensuous perceptions” (756). I think he’s asking us to move a little closer to the animal kingdom, to our bodies, our senses. What would it be like to let ourselves experience a singular leaf for what it is? That would require, of course, not naming or recognizing a leaf as “a leaf” at all. What would it be like to “forget this primitive world of metaphor” and return to the “hot, liquid stream” of our imagination? (757). Nietzsche argues that “human beings allow themselves to be lied to” in both our dream and waking states (753), but how can we avoid that lie when abstraction is our most fundamental impulse?