About

“It is a time for using the impasse that we’re in to learn something about how to imagine better economies of intimacy and labor.”

—Laurent Berlant

Critical Hedonism(s) is about transforming how society distributes pleasure and care. This requires a remaking of desires and aspirations, so that people pursue good lives and pleasures in ways that are less anti-social, competitive and zero sum, and more prosocial, collaborative and mutually-beneficial. It investigates how we might generate an economy of desiring and solidarity that is not constructed, exploited and taxed by external agents—specifically by capital/commerce and by the state/hierarchical institutions.

Critical Hedonism(s) sees the transformation of desire as a trans-personal project. Rather than approaching the transformation of desire as a merely individualistic, ethical endeavor, or a completely collective, structural struggle, it considers how the personal and the collective interact and intersect to shape subjective tastes, preferences, aspirations, and dreams. The reason for this is that desires are social. They emerge exist within social, emotional, and sexual ecologies. People mostly desire what their social, cultural, and spatial environments encourage them to desire, and this environmental/ecological dimension makes individualized, personal transformation extremely difficult and grating. A more realistic approach to transformation recognizes that shifts in culture and society take place at the communal level, and it is only within communities that shifts in desire and social possibility become realized. For those who want to change how pleasure and care work in their lives, our suggestion is to find and/or build a tribe to think, feel, and transform with, in the spirit of the countercultural consciousness-raising group.

Why critical? The short answer is: we must be critical and analytical about the things we want, because many of the things we want cause us personal pain and misfortune, and/or are bad for the world. Hedonism has always presented a certain problem for humanity. The narrow pursuit of pleasure has invariably been criticized by philosophers, many of whom argue that there can be no greater unfreedom than being a slave to one’s desires. So at a fundamental level, no hedonism should go without being engaged in with some degree of critical self-awareness.

Why hedonism? The short answer is: because we don’t believe in asceticism. Many puritans, armed with the knowledge that the pursuit of pleasure can often be destructive, have argued for an outright dismissal of the passions. Yet, in an effort to mitigate the real risks inherent in pursuing pleasure, the puritan creates a reality that is dull and unnecessarily frigid. By affirming a (careful) commitment to hedonism, we seek to make space for pleasure as a social good that should be strived for in ways that are positive and not destructive.

The need for hedonism(s) that’s simultaneously critical: Pure, uncritical hedonism is dangerous, and purity is pointless. Yet there are also many traps that lie between these extremes. Especially since the early twentieth century, consumerist cultures have sought to shape and organize desires in ways that benefit commercial interests. All kinds of strategies of “canalization” have sought ways of simultaneously stimulating desire, while keeping the pursuit of that desire productive and profitable, relying on hierarchies, stigma, “good taste” regimes, circumscribed desirability criteria, and norms to control and capture the motivational thrust of the pursuit of pleasure. Alongside fossil fuels and labor power, the pursuit of pleasure churns the industrial machinery of capitalist society. In order for this to work, social goods like sex and care have both been made artificially scarce—through morals, stigma and taste-making (the logics of which have been largely written for us and not by us). Much of what we desire is shaped and even produced within this “social factory.” Liberation—in the sense of merely casting off repressive constraints and pursuing what we want—is a doomed project, from this vantage point, because our very desires are anti-social, self-destructive, and bad for the world. Emancipation cannot be a personal project (this, ultimately, is why “relationship libertarianism,” for example, is such a destructive force). This brings us to the second operative definition of ‘critical’: our relationship to pleasure must constantly be mediated by a culture that stems from critical inquiries into society and its power relations. Only this can circumvent the regimes of artificial scarcity, ‘surplus repression,’ and the destructive stratification of access to affective bonds that most of us suffer on a daily basis.

Critical Hedonism(s) therefore poses the questions: How can we dream bigger than mere ‘self-liberation’ in an era when sexuality is instrumentally used to sell products and entice commerce generally, with consuming (and, consequently work) today serving as a sort of passport into the world of sex and being desirable? How can we strategically saturate the entirety of austerity-choked, conditional pleasure fields? How can we structure desire in order to generate virulent abundance for others, as well as ourselves? Who is systematically deprived of care, affection and kinship (or situated in and held hostage by repressive/constrained fields of care relations), and how can we play a part in producing a less austere, cloistered field of care relations for these and other people? How can we come to desire both our own emancipation, and that of others, deriving pleasure and care from making pleasure and care possible for more and more people? And how can we desire the difficult and arduous work of critical thinking, research and logistics involved in imagining alternative futures? How can we build happy lives around resistance and reconstruction?