more here: http://www.manipulations.info/hes-just-not-that-into-you-negging-and-the-manipulation-of-the-negativity/
Counter Counter-Culture
The style of the subcultural milieu of negging is one that draws, as we’ve seen, on many sources. It is motivated by revenge. This revenge is one taken on women but also, of course, on feminism and various other social gains that emerged from the revolutionary moment of the long 1960s. If neoliberal governance is the overarching roll-back of those movements, while absorbing and retooling elements of the counter-cultural programme, negging is another twist on this recuperation. The neggers claim a freedom that they see as at threat from any infringement on their ‘rights’. They claim and pervert the French 1960s slogan ‘Enjoy without shackles’ [jouir sans entraves]. Alain Badiou has noted how this slogan implies a ‘de-linking’, a nihilism which then turns to the notion that any enjoyment can be bought.[15].
The style of the subcultural milieu of negging is one that draws, as we’ve seen, on many sources. It is motivated by revenge. This revenge is one taken on women but also, of course, on feminism and various other social gains that emerged from the revolutionary moment of the long 1960s. If neoliberal governance is the overarching roll-back of those movements, while absorbing and retooling elements of the counter-cultural programme, negging is another twist on this recuperation. The neggers claim a freedom that they see as at threat from any infringement on their ‘rights’. They claim and pervert the French 1960s slogan ‘Enjoy without shackles’ [jouir sans entraves]. Alain Badiou has noted how this slogan implies a ‘de-linking’, a nihilism which then turns to the notion that any enjoyment can be bought.[15].
The line between ‘radical’ nihilism and capitalist nihilism is a short one. While the counter-culture has its own well-documented problems with feminism we should note that it also formed an horizon from which questions of liberation could be posed. Feminism was a revolution in the revolution. The reworking or recuperation of these radicalisms by the capitalist restoration, which begun in the 1970s and accelerated since 1989, aims to nullify or pervert those radical negations into the service of the market. Therefore negging is expressive of the empty core of capitalist subjectivity and this process of roll-back.
Negging is not simply one of the ‘new’ counter-cultures, which freely borrows elements from past counter-cultures to construct its ‘retro-sexism’ as the expression of a ‘true’ freedom. It is a counter counter-culture, amplifying the worst elements of the counter-culture (sexism, a de-linked vision of life, radical individualism, etc.) and using those to neutralize any thinking of freedom as a social form by confining freedom to the freedom to enjoy on the sexual marketplace.
While the social conditions that made the counter-culture possible have exhausted themselves, while that dynamic is ‘saturated’, as Badiou would put it, this does not mean this ground should simply be ceded. The neg-ativity of negging is the sign of what comes to fill the absence: the cultural forms of capital lack their own dynamic capacities are operate as parasites on past invention, draining or perverting their content to serve the cultural marketplace. What negging reveals is the violence in this process. Abstractions turn malign and absorb and channel a negativity become malignant once it is blocked from the process of the realization of freedom.
This is why negging is an activity, an endless yearning that freezes liberation into the form of liberation into abstraction and the ‘joys’ of exchange rendered as violent exploitation. Although definitely a minor and peripheral form, this activity attests to a wider series of strategies that inhabit the mode of scandal and shock as affirmative of the status quo. The signature expression of these strategies is the line: “we are just saying what everyone really thinks”. Invoking an uneven and socially necessary policing of speech as ‘totalitarian’ oppression and manipulation, what we are ‘all’ really thinking turns out to be the molten core of capitalist ideology: racism, misogyny, class hatred, fantasies of dominance and control.
Where once the counter-culture aimed to reveal the manipulations of capitalist ideology, the counter counter-culture of neg-ativity reveals the ‘manipulations’ it imputes to any attempt to regulate, control, or restrict the commodification of existence. This is why the neg-ativity of negging is emblematic of the blocking of any transition of negativity to the affirming of freedom. Instead it offers a pseudo-freedom, which is ‘pseudo’ because it is bought through the subjection of the Other, qua victim, and the concomitant emptying of the self. It inhabits neg-ativity as a state of ‘yearning’, which only confirms the world ‘as it is’, or better the ideological vision of the world as violently colliding elementary particles.
Benjamin Noys is Professor of Critical Theory at the University of Chichester. His most recent work is Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism (Zero Books, 2014).
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