Absolute Dread
“What is it like to exist in the aftermath of possibility and to keep going in some way?”
Political Disappointment
Though it may seem an inadequate term for articulating something of the nauseous terror calcifying in our stomachs, we are entering a new era of political disappointment, which I mean, in the brilliant Sara Marcus’s precise and evocative phrasing, as “a longing for fundamental change that outlasts a historical moment when it might have been fulfilled” (2023, 1).
Last September, when I asked Sara why her most recent book thinks with the concept of Political Disappointment to understand the failed promises of Reconstruction or the feminist movement, rather than something more acute like despair or anguish, she told me:
I don’t think of disappointment as itself a mood or an affect; I think disappointment is an experience, it’s a mode of desiring, it’s what it’s like to be going on wanting something that you no longer have any expectation of getting in the foreseeable future—and there are all kinds of different ways you can feel about that. You can feel rage, or you could feel despair or anguish. You could also feel wistfulness. And as I went through all of my case studies, there was such a range of how that actually gets expressed and worked out and experienced by different people that it was really clear to me that I wasn’t writing about a single affective flavor.
But also, a slight other thing is that...despair and anguish are more extreme versions, and this book got its start when I was trying to think of the milder ways that people deal that aren’t so clothes-rending...what is it like to exist in the aftermath of possibility and to keep going in some way? So that’s why disappointment itself came to be the operative principle for me.
While our acute experiences of 2016-related PTSD, our debilitating anxiety, and our dissociative inability to focus on the world around us remain, some two days later, the most viscerally present experiences of the calamitous 2024 election, such intense spikes of feeling will soon give way to something more regularized; while we wait for the other shoe to drop, it is likely that fascism will unfold one step at a time, forcing our dread back into our throats, held there while we try to get through the work-week.
This condition of living, if we’re lucky, amid the wreckage of what we once believed was possible, is what marks political disappointment as a concept: Rather than indexing the spike of grief we’re all feeling today, “Political disappointment entails an understanding of loss and defeat as chronic, collective, historical problems and important drivers of cultural practice” (20). Because we are able to continue on in some way, at least for now, our “untimely desires” for different futures than the ones we can bring about also persist, appearing in culture and art-making unbound by what’s materially available to us. This is reflective of a thorough defeat, to be sure. But the fact that our culture1 continues also shows how “disappointment can furnish grounds for affective solidarity capable of fueling and spurring powerful collective and coalitional practices” (13).
The 2020 election seemed to many an open door. Trump had been removed from power, however dangerously, and it seemed inevitable he would be arrested. Biden seemed to be proposing huge investments from a pandemic-informed sense of what needed to change in the structure of our society. When Merrick Garland delayed action, it felt to many frustrating rather than the five alarm fire it was. When Build Back Better died, we celebrated its reincarnation as the Inflation Reduction Act, not realizing what was truly at stake. The possibility for meaningful change is now gone. We will win if we survive.
Popular Music and Feeling Badly
Well before the breathtaking events of this election, popular music had already become marked by a notable uptick in depressive affects to the extent that, as musicologist Jessica Holmes notes, it has become (in her words) a “musical vernacular” unto itself. From emo rap to sad girl indie to the absolute top of the charts, artists like Olivia Rodrigo and Billie Eilish tap into the public’s desire for a public site where they can process, debate, and shape how depression shows up in daily life.
This kind of performance is distinct from Marcus’s political disappointment, but it is no less political; depression is raced, gendered, and generational, skewing disproportionately towards groups who are most harmed by patriarchal capitalism’s reliable machinery. “More the result of shared cultural conditions than a clinical diagnosis, depression and anxiety disorders are, in this framing, political: unevenly distributed amongst vulnerable populations who are less able to insulate themselves from what Lauren Berlant called the ‘crisis ordinary,’ bad feelings take on raced and gendered dimensions even as they appear to continue growing throughout the overall population.”2
Amid the horrors of our present and the ones to come, one small way I will be trying to continue living is by attending next week’s annual meeting of the American Musicological Society, where I’ll be hosting a special session that I organized, and which is all of a sudden even more timely. Bringing together pop/musical expressions of despair and Marcus’s historical study of disappointment, “Sex, Drugs, and Disappointment: Popular Music and Feeling Badly” will feature four incredible panelists as well as a keynote by Marcus herself.
Given the panel’s theme, I suspect that the occasion will be changed or at least charged by the election, if not in terms of scholarship, then in terms of function. In other words, I am preemptively grateful for what I imagine the panel will help create: the opportunity to not only advance conversations in our field, but also to grieve with some of the people I value and for whom I fear, to sift through debris for purposes of building.
If you’re attending AMS, please consider dropping by.3 The topics will be heavy, but the music will be excellent. We will, in all likelihood, cry hard.
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Marcus, Sara. 2023. Political Disappointment: A Cultural History from Reconstruction to the AIDS Crisis. Harvard University Press.
Readers will rightly ask, who’s the “we” implied in “our culture”? Throughout Political Disappointment, Marcus elucidates different setbacks for a variety of progressive causes often in conversation with one another, from the Civil Rights struggle to ACT UP activism. Following the broad portrait painted by this century-long history, I use “our” to encompass anyone and everyone who’s terrified of what’s coming.
This quote is from the CFP I’m referencing below, but I also elaborate on these ideas in Big Feelings with regard to Soccer Mommy and Indigo De Souza most specifically.
For anyone not attending, we are exploring the possibility of a “bootleg stream” for the session, likely facilitated without technological assistance, via someone’s personal laptop. If that kind of imperfect but nevertheless better-than-nothing option is of interest to any readers, please let me know.