2025-07-20, On Fediverse narrating contradictions into aesthetic cruel optimism

Checked the Fediverse this morning, two posts caught my eye. The first, boosted by an American anarchist who complains folk are too liberal, advocating the donation of arms and materiel to the Ukrainian military. I wonder why there isn't a focus on getting plate carriers and plates to prominent American radicals?

The other post requested folk send mail to a political prisoner... on the basis of them being a sweet and compassionate person and I'm thinking about how that emphasizes certain values as worth supporting, and how those values aren't necessarily what you need from political radicals.

Between the two messages, you get a lovely liberal vignette: "fight at a distance to love up close."

Wendy Brown and Judith Butler have done a lot to explain how liberalism outsources violence, and the currently jus ad vim of the American left is playing wonderfully into that. I might also draw in elements of Lauren Berlant's 2; while not present in the post I saw today, there is a general attitude that if the Russo-Ukrainian War is handled a certain way, an American civil war might be averted.

Sara Ahmed's The Cultural Politics of Emotion presents an argument that emotions, like compassion, are not apolitical, and are used to emphasize certain subjects as worthy of care, implicitly (or explicitly) Othering those who don't express their emotionalism the same way. The danger of this is affirmed by folk like Mary Daly and Audre Lorde, who presented cases for political transformation requiring confrontation, rupture, and a refusal of the emotional norms of patriarchy - bell hooks and Kimberlé Crenshaw write on how affective normalization relates to patriarchy.

Combined, the posts, to me, show a desperate attempt to defer dealing with the actual crises at-hand (escalation into total war, including political repression) through liberal technology for deferring crisis. At this point, it feels almost like aestheticizing care has become a necessary practice in order to be seen as a radical by American radicalism, despite the counterinsurrectionary nature of such aestheticizing.

Some of this is just me being personally salty and maybe a little selfish. I know people don't like me because I'm not compassionate, which feels... like an ironic lack of compassion. It feels like a ridiculous expectation that I not be really pissed about the state of American radicalism, to the point of being distrustful of most everyone, given my experiences over the past few years.

And like literally, marginalized people are more likely to be exposed to environmental conditions that make emotional regulation harder - lead poisoning makes you less compassionate, straight up. I've got a brain full of expired chemical weapons that make irritation one of my closest somatic kin, and I... can't really change that.

It's hard not to feel like, justified by the necessity of oxytocin to a dopamine-disregulated population, there isn't a massively ironic reinforcement of the Western Man (as posited by Sylvia Wynter) through this quasi-political attitude toward "care," that simultaneously erases any need for care toward anyone who doesn't already align with that way of being... turning the whole affective leftist mutualist economy into one big assimilationist project.

I'll go on and say I think it shows just how much a failure the police abolition movements of the past few years have been. Folk are taking time making art to argue for supporting political prisoners based on their personality, rather than to advocate against political prisoners entirely.