Good For Nothing - Mark Fisher

description: Article by Mark Fisher on the relationship between depression and class.
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Article by Mark Fisher on the relationship between depression and class.
马克·费舍尔（Mark Fisher）关于抑郁症与阶级之间关系的文章。

I’ve suffered from depression intermittently since I was a teenager. Some of these episodes have been highly debilitating – resulting in self-harm, withdrawal (where I would spend months on end in my own room, only venturing out to sign-on or to buy the minimal amounts of food I was consuming), and time spent on psychiatric wards. I wouldn’t say I’ve recovered from the condition, but I’m pleased to say that both the incidences and the severity of depressive episodes have greatly lessened in recent years. Partly, that is a consequence of changes in my life situation, but it’s also to do with coming to a different understanding of my depression and what caused it. I offer up my own experiences of mental distress not because I think there’s anything special or unique about them, but in support of the claim that many forms of depression are best understood – and best combatted – through frames that are impersonal and political rather than individual and ‘psychological’.
我从十几岁起就间歇性地患有抑郁症。其中一些事件非常虚弱——导致自残、退缩（我会在自己的房间里连续几个月，只冒险出去签到或购买我消耗的最少量的食物），以及在精神病房度过的时间。我不会说我已经从这种情况中恢复过来，但我很高兴地说，近年来抑郁发作的发病率和严重程度都大大减轻了。部分原因是我生活状况变化的结果，但也与对我的抑郁症及其原因有了不同的理解有关。我提供我自己的精神困扰经历并不是因为我认为它们有什么特别或独特之处，而是为了支持这样一种说法，即许多形式的抑郁症是通过非个人和政治的框架而不是个人和“心理”的框架来最好地理解和对抗的。

Writing about one’s own depression is difficult. Depression is partly constituted by a sneering ‘inner’ voice which accuses you of self-indulgence – you aren’t depressed, you’re just feeling sorry for yourself, pull yourself together – and this voice is liable to be triggered by going public about the condition. Of course, this voice isn’t an ‘inner’ voice at all – it is the internalised expression of actual social forces, some of which have a vested interest in denying any connection between depression and politics.
写自己的抑郁症是很困难的。抑郁症部分是由一种冷嘲热讽的“内心”声音构成的，它指责你自我放纵——你并不沮丧，你只是为自己感到难过，振作起来——而这种声音很容易被公开病情所触发。当然，这种声音根本不是“内在”的声音——它是实际社会力量的内化表达，其中一些社会力量的既得利益是否认抑郁症与政治之间的任何联系。

My depression was always tied up with the conviction that I was literally good for nothing. I spent most of my life up to the age of thirty believing that I would never work. In my twenties I drifted between postgraduate study, periods of unemployment and temporary jobs. In each of these roles, I felt that I didn’t really belong – in postgraduate study, because I was a dilettante who had somehow faked his way through, not a proper scholar; in unemployment, because I wasn’t really unemployed, like those who were honestly seeking work, but a shirker; and in temporary jobs, because I felt I was performing incompetently, and in any case I didn’t really belong in these office or factory jobs, not because I was ‘too good’ for them, but – very much to the contrary – because I was over-educated and useless, taking the job of someone who needed and deserved it more than I did. Even when I was on a psychiatric ward, I felt I was not really depressed – I was only simulating the condition in order to avoid work, or in the infernally paradoxical logic of depression, I was simulating it in order to conceal the fact that I was not capable of working, and that there was no place at all for me in society.
我的抑郁症总是与我一无是处的信念联系在一起。直到三十岁，我一生的大部分时间都相信我永远不会工作。在我二十多岁的时候，我在研究生学习、失业期和临时工作之间徘徊。在这些角色中的每一个角色中，我都觉得我没有真正的归属感——在研究生学习中，因为我是一个以某种方式假装通过的懒惰者，而不是一个真正的学者;失业，因为我并不是真正的失业者，就像那些诚实地找工作的人一样，而是一个推脱者;在临时工作中，因为我觉得自己表现不佳，无论如何我并不真正属于这些办公室或工厂工作，不是因为我对他们来说“太好”了，而是——恰恰相反——因为我受过过度教育，毫无用处，接受了比我更需要和更值得的人的工作。即使在精神病房里，我也觉得自己并没有真正的抑郁——我只是为了逃避工作而模拟这种情况，或者在抑郁症的地狱矛盾逻辑中，我模拟它是为了掩盖我没有工作能力的事实，在社会上根本没有我的地位。

When I eventually got a job as lecturer in a Further Education college, I was for a while elated – yet by its very nature this elation showed that I had not shaken off the feelings of worthlessness that would soon lead to further periods of depression. I lacked the calm confidence of one born to the role. At some not very submerged level, I evidently still didn’t believe that I was the kind of person who could do a job like teaching. But where did this belief come from? The dominant school of thought in psychiatry locates the origins of such ‘beliefs’ in malfunctioning brain chemistry, which are to be corrected by pharmaceuticals; psychoanalysis and forms of therapy influenced by it famously look for the roots of mental distress in family background, while Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is less interested in locating the source of negative beliefs than it is in simply replacing them with a set of positive stories. It is not that these models are entirely false, it is that they miss – and must miss – the most likely cause of such feelings of inferiority: social power. The form of social power that had most effect on me was class power, although of course gender, race and other forms of oppression work by producing the same sense of ontological inferiority, which is best expressed in exactly the thought I articulated above: that one is not the kind of person who can fulfill roles which are earmarked for the dominant group.
当我最终在一所继续教育学院找到一份讲师的工作时，我有一段时间兴高采烈——但就其本质而言，这种兴高采烈表明我还没有摆脱很快导致进一步抑郁的无价值感。我缺乏一个天生就适合这个角色的冷静自信。在某个不太沉沦的层面上，我显然仍然不相信自己是那种可以从事教学这样的工作的人。但这种信念从何而来呢？精神病学的主流思想流派将这种“信念”的起源定位在大脑化学失灵中，这些“信念”需要通过药物来纠正;众所周知，精神分析和受其影响的治疗形式在家庭背景中寻找精神困扰的根源，而认知行为疗法对定位消极信念的根源不太感兴趣，而是简单地用一组积极的故事来取代它们。并不是说这些模型完全是错误的，而是它们错过了——而且必须错过——这种自卑感的最可能原因：社会权力。对我影响最大的社会权力形式是阶级权力，尽管性别、种族和其他形式的压迫当然通过产生同样的本体论自卑感来发挥作用，这在我上面阐明的思想中得到了最好的表达：一个人不是那种能够履行为主导群体指定的角色的人。

On the urging of one of the readers of my book Capitalist Realism, I started to investigate the work of David Smail. Smail – a therapist, but one who makes the question of power central to his practice – confirmed the hypotheses about depression that I had stumbled towards. In his crucial book The Origins of Unhappiness, Smail describes how the marks of class are designed to be indelible. For those who from birth are taught to think of themselves as lesser, the acquisition of qualifications or wealth will seldom be sufficient to erase – either in their own minds or in the minds of others – the primordial sense of worthlessness that marks them so early in life. Someone who moves out of the social sphere they are ‘supposed’ to occupy is always in danger of being overcome by feelings of vertigo, panic and horror: “…isolated, cut off, surrounded by hostile space, you are suddenly without connections, without stability, with nothing to hold you upright or in place; a dizzying, sickening unreality takes possession of you; you are threatened by a complete loss of identity, a sense of utter fraudulence; you have no right to be here, now, inhabiting this body, dressed in this way; you are a nothing, and ‘nothing’ is quite literally what you feel you are about to become.”
在我的《资本主义现实主义》一书的一位读者的敦促下，我开始研究大卫·斯梅尔的作品。斯梅尔——一位治疗师，但将权力问题作为他实践的核心——证实了我偶然发现的关于抑郁症的假设。斯梅尔在他的重要著作《不幸的起源》中描述了阶级的印记是如何被设计成不可磨灭的。对于那些从出生起就被教导认为自己低等的人来说，获得资格或财富很少足以抹去——无论是在他们自己的头脑中还是在他人的头脑中——他们很早就标志着他们的原始无价值感。一个离开他们“应该”占据的社会领域的人总是面临被眩晕、恐慌和恐惧的感觉所征服的危险：“......孤立、隔绝、被敌对的空间包围，你突然失去了联系，没有了稳定，没有任何东西可以支撑你直立或原地;一种令人眼花缭乱、令人作呕的虚幻占据了你;你受到完全失去身份的威胁，一种完全的欺诈感;你没有权利在这里，现在，穿着这样的衣服，住在这个身体里;你是一个虚无，而'虚无'就是你觉得自己即将成为的样子。

For some time now, one of the most successful tactics of the ruling class has been responsibilisation. Each individual member of the subordinate class is encouraged into feeling that their poverty, lack of opportunities, or unemployment, is their fault and their fault alone. Individuals will blame themselves rather than social structures, which in any case they have been induced into believing do not really exist (they are just excuses, called upon by the weak). What Smail calls ‘magical voluntarism’ – the belief that it is within every individual’s power to make themselves whatever they want to be – is the dominant ideology and unofficial religion of contemporary capitalist society, pushed by reality TV ‘experts’ and business gurus as much as by politicians. Magical voluntarism is both an effect and a cause of the currently historically low level of class consciousness. It is the flipside of depression – whose underlying conviction is that we are all uniquely responsible for our own misery and therefore deserve it. A particularly vicious double bind is imposed on the long-term unemployed in the UK now: a population that has all its life been sent the message that it is good for nothing is simultaneously told that it can do anything it wants to do.
一段时间以来，统治阶级最成功的策略之一就是责任。从属阶级的每个成员都被鼓励，让他们感到他们的贫困、缺乏机会或失业是他们的错，而且是他们一个人的错。个人会责怪自己，而不是社会结构，无论如何，他们被诱导相信社会结构并不真正存在（它们只是弱者召唤的借口）。斯梅尔所说的“神奇的自愿主义”——相信每个人都有能力让自己成为他们想成为的人——是当代资本主义社会的主导意识形态和非官方宗教，由真人秀“专家”和商业大师推动，就像政客一样。神奇的自愿主义既是目前历史上阶级意识水平较低的结果，也是原因。这是抑郁症的另一面——抑郁症的基本信念是，我们都对自己的痛苦负有独特的责任，因此应得的。现在，英国的长期失业者受到了一种特别恶毒的双重束缚：一个一生都被传达了“一无是处”的信息的人群，同时被告知它可以做任何它想做的事。

We must understand the fatalistic submission of the UK’s population to austerity as the consequence of a deliberately cultivated depression. This depression is manifested in the acceptance that things will get worse (for all but a small elite), that we are lucky to have a job at all (so we shouldn’t expect wages to keep pace with inflation), that we cannot afford the collective provision of the welfare state. Collective depression is the result of the ruling class project of resubordination. For some time now, we have increasingly accepted the idea that we are not the kind of people who can act. This isn’t a failure of will any more than an individual depressed person can ‘snap themselves out of it’ by ‘pulling their socks up’. The rebuilding of class consciousness is a formidable task indeed, one that cannot be achieved by calling upon ready-made solutions – but, in spite of what our collective depression tells us, it can be done. Inventing new forms of political involvement, reviving institutions that have become decadent, converting privatised disaffection into politicised anger: all of this can happen, and when it does, who knows what is possible?
我们必须理解，英国人民宿命论地屈服于紧缩政策是故意培养的萧条的结果。这种萧条表现在接受情况会变得更糟（对于除了少数精英之外的所有人），我们很幸运有一份工作（所以我们不应该期望工资跟上通货膨胀的步伐），我们负担不起福利国家的集体供应。集体萧条是统治阶级重新从属计划的结果。一段时间以来，我们越来越接受这样一种观点，即我们不是那种会行动的人。这并不是意志的失败，就像一个抑郁的人可以通过“拉起袜子”来“摆脱它”一样。重建阶级意识确实是一项艰巨的任务，无法通过呼吁现成的解决方案来实现——但是，无论我们的集体萧条告诉我们什么，它是可以做到的。发明新的政治参与形式，复兴已经颓废的机构，将私有化的不满转化为政治化的愤怒：所有这些都可能发生，当它发生时，谁知道会发生什么？

By Mark Fisher 1 | *k-punk.abstractdynamics.org
作者：Mark Fisher1 |k-punk.abstractdynamics.org

1 Published in The Occupied Times, March 19, 2014 – http://theoccupiedtimes.org/?p=12841
发表于《 占领时报 》，2014 年 3 月 19 日 – http://theoccupiedtimes.org/?p=12841