Recently a friend of mine confessed that he is one corny, cheesy, sentimental son of a bitch. Try as he might, he said, he cannot pull of that jaded, cynical, sardonic “too cool for school” thing that so many of his friends have down to a science. It seems to me that the “too cool for school” (hereafter TCFS) phenomenon is pervasive throughout the field of radical politics and those branches of the humanities particularly oriented towards the project of critique. Everywhere we encounter a sort of cynicism and haste to dismiss any affirmative claim, any proposal, and any claim that something is the case. Those that are TCFS find a dirty secret behind everything. Every enunciation is said to harbor something shameful and the winning gesture consists in showing that anywhere an affirmative claim is made, there is some sort of moral guilt or culpability.
Long ago Mark K-Punk referred to such people as “grey vampire”. Vampires, of course, suck blood, the force of life. Grey vampires are particularly fearsome because they are like smoke. Mark Fisher referred to it as “the sneer from nowhere”. The grey vampire masters everywhere because he never commits himself to anything. He sneers from nowhere so he’s like smoke. The ultimate Bro. Whenever you attempt to get hold of them they slip away, all the while sucking your blood. The grey vampire’s great advantage lies in being nowhere, all the better to be everywhere. Occupying no position of their own, they can all the better function as the superego. Everywhere they strive to demoralize, to instill guilt, to fill others with inexpiable debt. Their sharp teeth strive to inflict one of two wounds, and often both together.
read on!
On the one hand they strive to instill stupidity in the source of their nourishment. The person who has dared to make a claim is treated as being guilty of grotesque stupidity. Only a complete idiot, only someone who is profoundly ignorant, the grey vampire says, would make such a claim. Of course here there grey vampire can always triumph, for the finitude of language guarantees that no one can ever say it all and certainly no one can say it all at once. The moment anyone begins to speak they are guilty a priori, for everything that is said necessarily leaves something unsaid and everything that is spoken or written always leaves something out. Make a generalization about the history of philosophy? Well you left something else out about that history! You are guilty of ignorance, of stupidity. Grey vampires can always win at this game, because it is structurally impossible to say everything. On the other hand, grey vampires strive to instill moral guilt. Every enunciation becomes reflective of the greatest sins and abominations. Claim that being is composed of substances or objects? You are promoting commodity fetishism, neoliberalism, and therefore exploitation! Everywhere the grey vampires find guilt, nothing but sin and moral depravity. The hermeneutics of suspicion becomes a sort of pathology.
It is difficult to determine what creates grey vampires and why they are so pervasive. Is it the result of a certain form of political and theoretical training; a sort of occupational hazard where the project of critique becomes a sickness? Perhaps. However, there is something sad or melancholy about the grey vampire; almost as if he is repressing something. Jameson famously said that we more easily imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. A lot of our problems seem this way. The morally praiseworthy dimension of the grey vampire is that he seems to want to do something about a lot of injustices, yet is filled with the unconscious belief that nothing is to be done. That which is repressed is doomed to return. It’s as if the grey vampire is caught in the midst of a compulsion to repeat, where his ego says “do something!”, but where his pathological form of critique endlessly pleads that nothing can be done. The grey vampire is paralyzed, frozen in a symptom, finding nothing but a world that falls short. In a very real sense, this compulsion to repeat is a repression of finitude and death. What the grey vampire cannot avow is that our actions and the world are finite, that there are no archimedean points. In finding guilt between every affirmative claim– a guilt that really amounts to the guilt of finitude and mediation –the grey vampire finds a sort of immortality and omnipotence, for he will never be done finding guilt everywhere. The cynicism of the grey vampire is a will to power, the ultimate mastery, for there is never risk of not finding a dirty secret behind things. If the world is without foundations– and it is –then there will always be some dark secret. Every move becomes a winning move.
The grey vampire exists in contradiction with himself. On the one hand, he speaks on behalf of justice and emancipatory projects. Yet in finding a dirty secret or shame behind everything, in patiently demonstrating again and again that there are no archimedean points, the grey vampire instills a generalized paralysis. We dare not take a step because each step will merely reinforce the filth, the injustice of it all. We reach a point where we must apologize (confess) for the sin of sincerity, sentimentality, or having some hope. Every action must be confessed and every action must be expiated. We become so obsessed with unearthing our sins and denouncing them that we are unable to take any action at all. The paradox of the grey vampire is that generally their gesture unfolds against the reigning injustice of things but ends up reinforcing that injustice. And perhaps this is a symptom of our time. If there’s anything characteristic of the anthropocene, it’s paralysis and a compulsion to repeat. We know that it’s a mess. We know what the problems are. Yet somehow we seem unable to act, to do anything about it.
However, the other paradox of the grey vampire is that he generally proceeds under the banner of justice and egalitarianism, yet his superegoic operation seems to consist in installing rank and hierarchy. The grey vampire seems to strive to show that he is superior to you, a person of greater moral worth, a being of greater goodness and intellectual superiority. Everywhere there’s a sort of disdain and an air of indifference. You’re not worth his time, even as he spends all this time patiently showing why you’re not worth his time. Here we might think of the grey vampire anarchist that somehow fails to get the egalitarian, non-hierarchical inspiration of anarchism, that everywhere is more anarchist than thou, while simultaneously promoting rank and hierarchy. Grey vampirism is a strategy for attaining prestige. The grey vampire creates the illusion of “knowing it all”– which is different from being a “know-it-all” –without having to know anything. Of course, he accomplishes this by creating an other that knows nothing. If he can show others know nothing, then by the law of the excluded middle he knows everything. It’s a very particular strategy of transference.
Here’s the worst part. In writing this post, I myself have become a grey vampire by finding a dirty secret behind and within the grey vampire. Maybe that’s the worst part of grey vampirism. Maybe grey vampires turn everyone into grey vampires. Socratic irony. I don’t know what to do here. Part of me wants to declare that the truly revolutionary gesture lies in embracing our finitude, that we can’t say it all, that no action is pure or archimedean, and continue to act and speak. Be sincere! Be sincere even while recognizing that your sincerity necessarily contains or hides an insincerity. Derrida’s gift. Another part of me recoils in horror from this. That will to sincerity strikes me as lacking in critical vigilance. It strikes me as naive. I feel that we must enter Ariadne’s cave and unveil the insincerity behind the sincerity to be all the more sincere. Yet then I become paralyzed. How can we speak and act while knowing full well that words and actions will never be enough and there will never be enough words and actions? Perhaps the great health is tragedy or the ability to act in the dimension of this knowledge. Or maybe the great health is comedy, where we know that our actions and words are doomed to error but that occasionally, after the fact, apres coup, nachtraglich there’s an eruption of the real and a little bit of truth, justice, and goodness happen.
February 10, 2016 at 3:46 pm
Kudos for the last paragraph. When I read the twin attacks of the grey vampire–instilling stupidity, and instilling culpability–I recognized these both in my own admonishments of others, but I also recognized such mechanisms at work where I was the victim. In other words, I’ve been both the giver and recipient of such nefarious “gifts.” And finding ourselves in the situation of perpetrating this mechanism seems to be quite the deadlock, for as soon as we decry another for having done this, we ourselves do it!
My way of resolving this deadlock is to create two dichotomies where we previously only had one dichotomy. Before, we had the dichotomy “is a grey vampire” vs “is not a grey vampire.” And we strive not to be grey vampires, so this is a prescriptive, rather than descriptive schema, because it has an obvious good term and an obvious bad term. So far so good.
Well, what is the inverted equivalent of this dichotomy?
Maybe the bad side of not being a grey vampire is getting tricked into believing “stupid” things and being guilty of perpetrating injustices… and the good side of being a grey vampire is not letting yourself be duped, and being more aware to injustices and negativity? I’m just brainstorming here.
With the quaternity of good-grey-vampire, bad-grey-vampire, good-not-vamp, bad-not-vamp, we may be able to open up a way towards thinking of the positive within the negative, and the negative within the positive, rather than purely in terms of positive-negative.
I know that when I mentioned Jung in the past, I was called stupid, not just by you but by many people. And I was also shamed and told that I should feel guilty for perpetuating harmful misinformation that literally is unethical to perpetuate. Like, I was guilt-tripped for even having a different opinion to the prevailing dogma. My pro-Jungianism was compared to phrenology, racism, sexism etc—I have been called racist, sexist and many other things for espousing a belief in the majority of Jung’s theories.
What do we do about that? Am I the grey vampire for making others feel stupid for “not knowing Jung,” or for guilt-tripping them, “You should read Jung or you’re an unethical person”? I don’t know that I’ve ever done those two things, but maybe I have, implicitly. And what of those who call me stupid and shame me for my beliefs, yourself included? Is this justified because my beliefs really are that dangerous that I deserve to be shamed for them, in the hopes that I will eventually feel so guilty about having these defective beliefs that I either shut up about them or perhaps “check out” in some way–literally or otherwise? Is it meant to scare me off, as intimidation tactic, or out of sincere concern for the human heart? This last one is the most dangerous fantasy, in my opinion: “I’m only helping you because of my sincere concern for you.” Well, I’m with you on this one—I want to reveal the insincerity behind the sincerity. But why do I want to do this? I certainly can’t say it’s because I consider myself more sincere, for that would be the worst hypocrisy… believing my sincerity to be more sincere than others’ sincerity. No! I must throw out my own with everyone else’s—all sincerity gone in one fell swoop. But what are we left with? I came up with a funny quip that addresses this very problem:
“Good intentions mean everything before you act, nothing after.”
What do you think? :)
December 8, 2016 at 10:21 am
I LUV IT
December 9, 2016 at 11:03 pm
I find this when I attempt to respond to questions about “what do we do”,” or, more often “what do you propose?” The assumption, being, that there must be some course of action spelled out, a course of action that will bring about an expected or predetermined set of consequences, and that one has to know and defend both the action and the consequences beforehand.
There’s where the gray vampire leaps from behind their cape: this demand to know.
I don’t know. I don’t have any answers as to how we’re going to get ourselves out of the mess we’re in. What I trust, is not in what I ‘know” … as some static in time understanding of– if we do this, this will happen, but that every action, taken as fully aware and ready to meet what comes as we can ever be, changes the conditions on which our best assumptions are founded, and those who are most ready to respond to the unexpected, unanticipated–which meets us, will be in the best place to creatively influence whatever unknown comes next.
Action is thought, as thought is action. Give thought bodily force, take action–and be there with all the presence of mind we can master–together, because this isn’t about thinking alone, but our hive mind, or our most individual mind as the collective it is… and observe what changes. And devise, together, what we must do next. Sorta like how science progresses, innit…
We aren’t altogether lost in where to begin, ever. We know what we abhor, have some idea of how we would like to change, what we would like the world to look like–we find a chink in the wall, some room for action. And do it.
Then, as best we can, critique what is new that has emerged from that action. What we’ve provoked. And it ain’t action, if it don’t provoke! What’s the word? Ah… yes. Perturbation!
What else, does ‘dialectic’ mean? What does it mean, at all… if not drawn out of action and response? From unknown to unknown?
Fuck the gray vampires. They believe in Being-Without-Change. Becoming is their undoing. It becomes us… if we leave them in their conundrums, and do what is to be done.