Becoming-Subversive

A Brief Polemic Against Inwardness

This text is about becoming-subversive. What I call subversion is a specific way in which antagonistic energy – the energy that arises as a result of the tension between the individual and society – is organized and to what end it is utilized. Subversion upsets the rules and orders of a system by exposing it to hiccups, breaks and fault lines. It is a form of what I call ‘experimental outwardness’ in which we connect the tensions and problems in our lives to the system responsible for them in the first place.

Modern culture is characterized by the absence of subversive energy. Or, to be more precise, modern culture turns subversive energy inward, making people endlessly adapt and modify themselves in order to keep up with society. Antagonistic feelings such as frustration, anger, jealousy and disappointment are not aimed at a broken and bizarre socio-economic and cultural system, but are rather thought to express some deficiency, lack or problem within us, something we should ‘work’ on. The resulting atmosphere is one of inwardness, where massive amounts of energy, time and capital are invested in self-analysis, self-improvement and self-preservation. Turn into the best version of yourself. Meditate. Practice selflove and selfcare. Stay close to yourself, be authentic. All of this adaptive ritualization to suppress the tensions of modern life, to make life a little more bearable, the day a little easier to get through.

I want to counter this narrative by arguing that, rather than turn inward, we should move outward and become-subversive. We should embrace the idea that our many frustrations and struggles are often social, rather than individual, in nature. They arise out of the irrational, cruel and unjust systems which shape our social reality. Currently, the desire to change this situation is turned inwards, becoming a form of hostility aimed at the self. However, it does not necessarily have to be this way. Antagonistic energy is also expressed in (and released through) art and literature. It fuels protests and social movements. Moreover, it can disrupt the subliminal messages of modern culture, which tell us that we should turn ourselves into a commodity by trading in the messiness and uniqueness of our lives for the smoothing sensation of increased market value. Becoming-subversive combats the micro-fascisms telling us that we are the problem, that we are what needs fixing by becoming more efficient, more lean, more adaptive, and frictionless. It is a way of re-introducing tension and contingency into a system which presents itself as inevitable and its way of life as the only available option. It is a celebration of the anomaly.

The Tension

Let me start by unpacking my basic claim: there is an insurmountable tension between the individual and society. This tension is a fundamental part of human existence, or rather of what it means to live socially. Just like an employer can never fully express your value as a human being in money, so society can never fully express your existence, satisfy your desires, meet your needs and enhance your capabilities through the way it is organized. This can be read as a bald statement that societies are by nature corrupt, but that is not what I am trying to say. Rather, my point is that a society is something to which people have to adapt in order to participate. In order to be a member of society, every individual has to sacrifice a part of their identity, energy, time, relationships, and desires for the greater good of the social game. Importantly, this sacrifice is not voluntary. One has to be a part of some social order, or one loses. People seldom survive on their own. And in order to become socialized, one has to strip away elements of one’s existence that society deems unacceptable, superfluous or worthless. As social beings, we do not get to choose how these value judgements are made: we have to deal with these values as they stand. There is therefore an inevitable remainder, however large or small, between unique, concrete, living individuals and the larger societal aggregates of which they are a part.

History is moved forward by the various ways in which people respond to their involuntary integration into the social order. In the 1960s and 70s, for example, large swaths of American and European citizens rejected their integration into the capitalist culture of mass consumption. They noticed that the logic of capital had invaded virtually every domain of their lives (healthcare, housing, education, agriculture, entertainment, art, politics, sports) and decided to experiment with ways of living that radically deviated from the beaten path. Some experiments failed spectacularly – as the rise in cults during this time shows rather beautifully – whereas others had more long-lasting effects. The abundance of various school-types in the Netherlands, for example (Montessori, Dalton, Vrije school, Agora) is an outgrowth of these social movements, which rejected the uniformity and standardization of the educational landscape. Billions of euros have since been spent on innovation and renewal in education, but the results of these investments pale in comparison to the achievements of the 60s and 70s.

This might seem like a trivial, cherry-picked example, but it’s not educational renewal that interests me. What is important is the underlying ethos, the mode of being, that helped bring it into existence. People in the subversive movements of the 60s and 70s saw that the tensions in their lives were strongly connected to, if not simply caused by, their social reality, and decided to change that reality in response. They put their antagonistic energy to use, out there in the world. Their ethos was one of experimental outwardness, seeking change not within isolated individuals but within the transformation of their communities, neighbourhoods, schools, farms, factories, hospitals, offices and churches

This is, of course, a rather progressive way of organizing antagonistic energy. We need not look back far in history to see that antagonistic energy can also be used to support populists, fascists and reactionaries. Here, the tensions in people’s lives are connected to some foreign threat, something outside the system which creates problems within that system. This foreign threat is always ‘the Other’ of the dominant social order: immigrants, Jews, Muslims, trans people, or other minority groups. Of course, this externalization of threat functions as a smokescreen to obscure the many failings, contradictions and corruptions inherent to the system itself. It is not the foreign Other which causes the system to malfunction, it is rather the system itself which is continuously malfunctioning, and its inability to integrate foreigners in a humane and decent way simply reflects that fact. To stretch this point even further, the system inevitably produces its own ‘Other’ in the form of those left behind by the logic of private property and capital accumulation. The homeless people on the streets of our major cities occupy precisely this position: they do not come from some place outside the system, yet they also do not participate in it. They are the big ‘Other’ of modernity, the people we see everywhere yet who we decide to ignore.

Yet I digress. The general point here is that, regardless of who is right politically, antagonistic energy is the driving force of social and political movements. Whoever can organize and channel antagonistic energy the best holds power in the modern world. Because our system works so terribly for so many people, there is an abundance of antagonistic energy across the political spectrum. The flaws of modern, globalized and unregulated monopolistic capitalism have started to seep through to the fibres of our being, creating tensions everywhere. Modernity, however, turns this massive amount of potentially liberating energy against itself, forcing us to moving inwards. This form of inwardness not only hinders the emergence of social movements large and powerful enough to realize true change, but also obstructs our collective imagination and shared struggle against the systems of late capitalism in which we all play a part. It is therefore this phenomenon of ‘inwardness’ that I’ll discuss next.

Modern Culture and/as Inwardness

Modern society posits that the self is the origin and center of social reality. Moreover, this self is constantly being “thrown back upon himself”, as Byung Chul-Han states in The Disappearance of Rituals. This means that the modern subject is surrounded by an abundance of his own ego. The world is made in his image, and he is the measure of all things.

This fetishization of ego is mainly produced through social media, personalized advertising and entertainment. As I alluded to in my previous text, it is a mistake to think of modern hyper-individuated consumer culture as simply mediated by ‘screens’. The word ‘screen’ still has connotations of a portal or gateway, something which connects us to the outside. This is not what we are surrounded by. Rather, our culture is dominated by mirrors and simulations in which we do not see reflections of the world, but rather of ourslves. There is not only an abudance of mirrors reflecting our personal selves back to us (images, selfies, sharing personal intimacies with others, shameless self-promotion), but also the production of a wholly virtual self: the bundle of data-points that algorithms use to transform a personality into a quantifiable consumer susceptible to its continuously adaptable advertising. Whether we are looking for new shoes to buy or pondering over which show to watch, we are literally haunted by our past selves, saturating our future with the things we liked in the past. Therefore, the overload of images and information to which we have access does not make our world larger, but rather smaller. Because we are only ever presented with that which we already know and recognize, we are constantly being folded back into ourselves. This creates a suffocating, isolated atmosphere of ipseity from which it is very difficult to escape.

As many social theorists and philosophers point out, there is a price to pay for the bliss of our empty, consumptive and disconnected lives. When we combine the continuous folding and re-folding of the self with the pandemic of depression, anxiety, loneliness, burnout and stress swarming the modern world, we arrive at inwardness. Inwardness is the idea that the source of all these antagonistic feelings is some deficiency within us, a problem that we are personally responsible for. For example. take a look at the way in which this university professor characterizes her students:

[They] are 'painfully defenceless'. They pass by my desk with their hollow eyes, I-messages and verbalized feelings. The suggestions I make (Go dancing. Get drunk. Go on a trip alone. Watch an old movie. Learn to sing. Go out with your colleagues and complain about me) are bizarre and borderline offensive to them. But their solutions make me feel anxious - running, exercising, spinning, setting boundaries, frantically separating work and life, becoming vegan, and documenting it all on social media. (…) These are now familiar reflexes. These students, they direct their energy inward. Do self-examination, go to therapy, try to regain control over themselves and their lives in the hope that one day they will be able to participate happily again.

As this quote shows, the (young) people suffering under late modernity turn their energy and attention inward, becoming ‘painfully defenceless’ against the cruelties and problems of life. They are driven by the idea that smoothly verbalizing your fears, insecurities and anxieties is enough to make them go away and that mastering your narrative identity will alleviate suffering.

Two interrelated assumptions follow from this. The first is that you can detect the cause of your malaise through rituals of self-examination: speaking about yourself with a psychologist, keeping a journal, and adopting other practices of self-analysis. The second is that you can then neutralize or even eradicate these tensions through self-care: meditation, yoga, eating healthy, reading books on self-love, creating discipline, having a good rhythm, and so on. There is, again, money to be made here, and a massive ‘happiness industry’ has arisen which benefits from our endless desire for self-modification. To me, this is the kind of sublime irony that only modern culture is capable of producing: the only response we can think of to combat the malaise of modern capitalism is to buy more products.

Inwardness and Social Critique

I understand that the passages above can be read as the resolute rejection of any activity that is aimed at analysing and improving the self. But that is not my point. Some degree of inwardness is not only good, but also a necessary part of social critique, because it is only through introspection and self-awareness that we can discover the often ambiguous, overlapping and varied tensions, affects and emotions slumbering in the background of our lives. These tensions are in turn reflections of our world and thereby gives us access to its shortcomings. As Thomas van Dijk writes in a sublime piece on meditation in De Groene Amsterdammer:

"If you cannot consult yourself to discover the place and role of the individual in the noise of modern life, possibly undesirable systems and ideologies will be unconsciously reproduced and thus maintained. And in an economy where our attention is increasingly ingeniously grabbed, we become easy prey if we continue to react impulsively to the sensations we think we feel. Those who win the battle for our attention will partly determine how we see and shape the world. For example, the image of aesthetics and sex is increasingly determined by an algorithm that is aimed at generating as much advertising revenue as possible. If we direct our attention inward, we can experience for ourselves what is important and where our deeper desires lie."

What I like about this quote, is the way in which it exposes our inner lives and desires to the outside. It hints at the idea that our desires do not originate in us, at least not on the surface level of quick fixes and monkey-brain impulses: they are produced within us by technology, media, and entertainment. Where I deviate from van Dijk, however, is that his response remains essentially negative. His plea for inwardness is about refraining from certain impulses, behaviours or ideologies. It’s the insistence on not doing what we would usually do that is most important to him. But this is only part of the issue. What this kind of contemplative reflective inwardness lacks, is moving outward with our energy, to create things with it. It lacks becoming-subversive.

One, Maybe Two Ways Out

The movement of becoming-subversive connects contemplative inwardness with experimental outwardness. We must go into ourselves to discover how we are constantly made complicit in a system through the manufacturing of desires, ideas, beliefs and actions that maintain destructive practices and unjust relations of power. This form of inwardness can be done through various practices: talking, writing, meditating, you name it. None of these things are inherently wrong. But when our pens have run dry and our journals are filled up, we must go out and do something with the insights we have attained. If our energy is not projected outwards, wasted, expelled in some sense, we eat ourselves alive. We keep circling around our own egos, soothing ourselves with the idea that we are ‘getting to know ourselves better’ every day. But regardless of how much you think and write about yourself, you will never ‘get’ yourself. There will always remain a part of you that remains elusive and obscure, something you cannot quite grasp. Obsessing over yourself will not change that.

Crucially, this is something you are unlikely to discover if you remain stuck within your self rather than project your energy outward and meet the world on its own terms. When you move outward, you’ll find yourself in unexpected situations over which you have little to no control. You’ll respond and behave differently than how you thought you would. You’ll face the weird, the strange and the eerie, and thereby encounter the limits of your imagination and understanding of the world. Not because you recognize something of yourself in your encounters, but precisely because you don’t. It is only when you come into contact with something that truly deviates from yourself that you can start to question that self, because only then do you see a limit beyond your own frame of mind, a form of true alterity that you cannot integrate, neutralize, rationalize or control. In this way, a day of experimental outwardness might give you more self-awareness and personal insight than months of journaling could ever achieve. If a thing like ‘personal growth’ exists, I think this kind of messy, contingent and unexpected form of experimentation is our best way of getting there.

This outward projection of our energy is already a becoming-subversive, because it fights the idea that our problems reside somewhere deep within us and that we should turn inward to fix them. Rather, I think that it is important to stay with our tensions, drawing on them without desiring their absence. Going out means exposing yourself to the outside world and its dazzling strangeness; perhaps you will discover that the limits of your talent, imagination, values, knowledge and capacities lie in unexpected places.

The second variation of becoming-subversive has a more critical, antagonistic nature. It has to do with subverting and disrupting those technologies and systems that constantly attempt to make us fit the mold, to smooth things over, to make us jump through endless hoops. In our modern era, the existential struggle is about the right to deviate, to be an anomaly, to be unadapted, weird, and messy. To reject the standardization of the self is a vital task, and it lies at the core of becoming-subversive. By reclaiming the self in all its contradictory, messy, imperfect uniqueness, we can show what true individualism should look like.

Sources

Byung-Chul Han – The Disappearance of Rituals (2020)

Thomas van Dijk – “Zet die afzuigkap uit,” in De Groene Amsterdammer nr. 28 (juli 2023)

Marian Donner – Rooksignalen (2024)