Upstream - The Politics of Pleasure w/ Eric Wycoff Rogers and Zarinah Agnew

Episode Date: September 24, 2024

Capitalism’s addiction to growth doesn’t just show up in the external world. It can also be found inside us—in our manufactured desire for more and better. Not only do we have to keep wanting to keep the machine going, we have to keep wanting what is “scarce” and easily privatizable or commodifiable so that the capitalist class can continue to profit. Critical hedonism(s) is an approach to pleasure and care that is critical of capitalism. It is a politics of pleasure that invites us to remake our desires to be less antisocial, competitive, and harmful, and to instead be more prosocial, collaborative and mutually beneficial.  The idea of critical hedonism(s) has been deeply studied and explored by our guests in today’s episode. Zarinah Agnew is a trained neuroscientist formerly at University College London, and then UCSF, a self-described guerrilla scientist, and part of the Beyond Return organization. Eric Wycoff Rogers is a historian, writer, community organizer, and designer currently based in London. Eric runs a thirdspace project in London, convenes a discussion series on the politics of pleasure, and is the author of the Critical Hedonist Manifesto. This is Eric and Zarinah’s second time on the podcast, they joined us in 2022 to talk about Fully Automated Luxury Communism, which is a great compliment to this episode. This is also a great episode following our most recent conversation with Jason Hickel, Better Lives for All. Where that conversation focused on human needs, this one takes up the topic of human wants.  In this conversation, we explore what capitalism tells us to desire and why, we interrogate what is truly “cheap,” “expensive,” and “valuable,” and explore what it would be like to participate in a politics of pleasure based on critical hedonism(s)—creating conditions and opportunities for distributed pleasure that don’t cause harm to people or the planet. Finally, we are invited to learn about community gatherings and how to do the work of reclaiming and remaking pleasure. Further Resources: Critical Hedonist Manifesto Critical Hedonism(s) Beyond Return Decoding Labs The Joyless Economy, by Tibor Scitovsky The Right to Sex, by Amia Srinivasan The Zero Marginal Cost Society I Dream of Canteens The Listening Society: Possible and Necessary Post-Growth Living: For An Alternative Hedonism, by Kate Soper Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, by Adrienne Maree Brown Becoming Feminist: Consciousness Raising and Social Ecology, Eric Woycoff Rogers (blog) Related Episodes: Fully Automated Luxury Communism with Zarinah Agnew and Eric Wycoff Rogers Better Lives for All w/ Jason Hickel Grassroots Urban Placemaking with Mark Lakeman Sex, Desire, and the Neoliberal Subject Suburban Hell and Ugly Cities Intermission music: Night Cafe Radio Upstream is a labor of love—we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/upstreampodcast or please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at  upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.    

Ah Ah We need a politics that addresses pleasure and desire, especially if we are living in developed countries, one of the main ways that we're exploited and extracted from and held back from our own well-being is actually through our own desires. I think we're all sort of familiar with the feeling that we may be strongly desiring something but as soon as we achieve that thing the goalposts move and we need something else. We really want this apartment, we get the

apartment and suddenly you need an apartment with a garden. Oh you really want this job and you get the job and suddenly you need a promotion and so there's this sort of constant chasing of the dragon and worse than that oftentimes the things that we actually want are bad for us and preclude us from findings of the satisfaction and peace. Bad for us, bad for others, bad for the environment and we're all competing with each other for these sort of arbitrarily scarce things. You are listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Robert Raymond. And I'm Della Duncan. Capitalism's

addiction to growth doesn't just show up in the external world, it can also be found inside us. Not only do we have to keep wanting to keep the machine going, we have to keep wanting what is quote scarce and easily privatizable and commodifiable so that the capitalist class can continue to profit. Critical hedonisms is an approach to pleasure and care that is critical of capitalism. It's a politics of pleasure that invites us to remake our desires and to be less anti-social, less competitive, and less harmful, and instead to be more pro-social, collaborative, and

mutually beneficial. The idea of critical hedonisms has been deeply studied and explored by our guests in today's episode. Zarina Agnew is a trained neuroscientist formerly at University College London and then UCSF, a self-described guerrilla scientist and part of the Beyond Return organization. Eric Wyckoff Rogers is a historian, writer, community organizer, and designer currently based in London. Eric runs a third space project in London, convenes a discussion series on the politics of pleasure, and is the author of the critical Hedonist manifesto. This is actually Eric and Zarina's second time on the

show. They joined us in 2022 to talk about fully automated luxury communism, which is a great compliment to this episode. This is also a great episode following our most recent conversation with Jason Hickle on Better Lives for All. Where that conversation focused on human needs, this one takes up the topic of human wants. In this conversation, we explore what capitalism tells us to desire and why. We interrogate what is truly quote, cheap, expensive, and valuable, and explore what it would be like to participate in a politics of pleasure

based on critical hedonisms, creating conditions and opportunities for distributed pleasure that don't cause harm to people or the planet. Finally, we're invited to learn about community gatherings and how to do the work of reclaiming and remaking pleasure. And before we get started, Upstream is almost entirely listener-funded. We could not keep this project going without your support. There are a number of ways in which you can support us financially. You can sign up to be a Patreon subscriber, which will give you access to bonus episodes, at least one a month, but usually more, along with our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes at

patreon.com forward slash upstream podcast. And you can also make a tax deductible recurring donation or a one time donation on our website upstreampodcast.org forward slash support. Through your support, you'll be helping us to keep Upstream sustainable and helping to keep this whole project going. Socialist political education podcasts are not easy to fund, so thank you in advance for the crucial support. And now, here's Della in conversation with Serena Agnew and Eric Wyckoff Rogers. our projects. Abundance and joy are totally possible. They've just been regulated out of existence by profiteers, their servants in the state, and a gaggle of economists who constantly steady us with the lie that we can't have nice things. These are some of the words that you've written,

Eric, about our topic of today, critical hedonisms. So let's start with an introduction from the two of you and also how might you introduce critical hedonisms possibly to someone who's never heard it before. So Eric, let's begin with you. Yeah, so I'm Eric. I am a historian, an organizer, a writer, and designer living in London. I also collaborate with Zarina on Decoding Labs, which is this experimental social strategy and spatial strategy consulting firm for trying to imagine how cities and social structures might work differently in the 21st century. But the thing that got me thinking about the politics of pleasure is a real discontent with our cities and feeling like our cities don't provide the amount of enjoyment that they should for 21st

century life. I'm also a scholar on urbanism and gender and sexuality and so looking at some of the ways that our institutions that have very much shaped our both urban and social fabric have deliberately designed artificial scarcity into how we live our lives. Got me to feel very political about these topics. Also reading Jill Deleuze, I think Deleuze and Guattari really shaped my thinking on this. So just to introduce the topic of critical hedonism, so it's about trying to transform how society distributes pleasure and care. So this requires a sort of remaking and a remapping of desires and aspirations

so that people can pursue good lives and pleasures in ways that are less antisocial, competitive, and zero-sum, and more pro-social and collaborative and mutually beneficial. So it investigates how we might generate a new economy of desiring and solidarity that's not just constructed and exploited and taxed by external agents, so whether you're talking about the state or capital, but something that has the potential for people to desire in ways that are mutually beneficial, where we can desire in ways that are abundant and mutually beneficial and non-zero-sum. Yeah, my name's Zarina, I'm a scientist, I'm part of the organization Beyond

Return and I co-run decoding labs with Eric. I think my personal journey into critical hedonisms came from a lot of my work in transformative and restorative justice and abolition work, in which we are figuring out how to prevent harms and how to respond to harm in the world. And through that work I have started to realize that a tremendous part of transformative justice centers around desire and our intimacies and getting our needs met and being in relation and knowing how to be both able to hold pleasure and joy such that conflict doesn't destroy us. And so I think that's a huge way in which I found myself doing this work. So the main

point really is that we need a politics that addresses pleasure and desire, especially if we are living in developed countries. One of the main ways that we're exploited and extracted from and held back from our own wellbeing is actually through our own desires. I think we're all sort of familiar with the feeling that we may be strongly desiring something,

but as soon as we achieve that thing, the goalposts move and we need something else. We soon as we achieve that thing, the goalposts move and we need something else. We really want this apartment, we get the apartment and suddenly you need an apartment with a garden. Oh, you really want this job and you get the job and suddenly you need a promotion. And so there's this sort of constant chasing of the dragon. And worse than that, oftentimes, the things that we actually want are bad for us and preclude us from finding sort of satisfaction and peace. Bad for us, bad for others, bad for the environment. And we're all competing with each other for these sort

of arbitrarily scarce things. Yeah, so there's sort of two main pieces here. So the first is that the goalposts just keep shifting. And this is something that is made much worse under consumer capitalism, but it probably exists outside of capitalism and it's worth addressing, you know, intentionally. But the second piece, and perhaps worse, is that oftentimes the things that we are seeking are actually in the end not making us happy and maybe even making our lives worse and making the world worse. Yeah, and I think it's important to sort of think about or to notice the ways in which the sort of fuel that goes into the desire engine is sort of propelling us further and further. And actually, the sort of desire engine is almost no competition into the desire engine is sort of propelling us further and further.

And actually the sort of desire engine is almost no competition for the pleasure engine, if you think about it in that way. So we rarely get to sit still in pleasure, joy and satisfaction. We're constantly on this moving engine that's desiring ever more and rarely letting us sit in a moment of peace, satisfaction, joy or pleasure. Yeah, and this is just like a really common attribute of sort of late capitalist society where we're sort of manipulated, controlled, and exploited through our desires. So we have marketing, there's social media, there's all sorts of versions of propaganda, and also just all these dysfunctional cultures that constantly instill in us these pleasures that are very burdensome, often antisocial, often destructive, unsustainable, and exclusionary.

We seek to be rich or we seek to be successful in some way that sets us apart from other people. And by definition, we can't share the pleasure of that. So we have this old idea that pleasure is this thing that sort of forces us to do things under threat of sort of injury or death. It prevents us from doing the things we want or it doesn't deal in desire. But a much more common form of power in our society, and here I'm really speaking to people in the developed world, we're mostly steered by the sort of power to want things. So a lot of the things that we're sort of struggling with in our world is because so many people's desires are invested in these destructive and zero-sum and unsustainable

structures in our world. And of course, this poses a huge problem for traditional sort of emancipatory politics. So if your desires are flawed or a society's desires are flawed, then achieving the freedom and the resources to successfully pursue them is not an acceptable goal. And of course, we're not the only ones to say this. Lots of political theorists have been writing on this from Foucault to Ernesto Laclau, and also economists and historians have pointed out that struggles for liberation can actually become new sources of hierarchy and oppression

when they become nationalist struggles and so forth, anti-immigration struggles. So democratic and or emancipatory politics that simply seek to deliver us what we already want are liable to be corrupted by the deleterious nature of the things we want. So what the 21st century needs therefore is a sort of probing and effective politics of pleasure and that's exactly what critical hedonism is trying to do. It's trying to create a movement around engaging our own desires and altering those on a collective level and it focuses on the ways that we have sort of latched our desires and aspirations to these destructive modes. So the basic premise of critical hedonisms if we can

finally come to a definition of it, is that to transform systems of oppression and control, we need to remake the entire economy of desiring and aspiring that we ourselves are participants in. So critical hedonism is really trying to be this sort of movement and also this identifier. You know, you might say, oh, I'm queer, I'm a leftist, but you also might say I'm a critical hedonist. And what does that mean? It means that I'm trying to be deliberate and intentional about the ways that I engage in pleasure. Yeah, well, thank you for that. And maybe let's get into why critical and why hedonisms.

Eric, what was the choice there of those words? Yeah, well, I think it's worth just getting a little bit into definitions. So hedonism fundamentally is the practice of avoiding pain and pursuing pleasure. But beyond this, there are sort of two distinctive forms of hedonism when we're thinking about hedonism and talking about hedonism. So there's psychological hedonism and ethical hedonism. So psychological hedonism describes the observation of a tendency, let's just say among human beings, the tendency to pursue pleasure and avoid pain. Ethical hedonism,

on the other hand, posits that hedonism is good. So basically, psychological hedonism on the other hand posits that hedonism is good. So basically psychological hedonism is a descriptive theory that pleasure and pain motivate people, whereas ethical hedonism is a normative theory about how things ought to be. So it argues that we ought to increase pleasure and reduce pain. So without getting into the history of philosophy too deeply, not that I would do it any justice anyway, I think it's worth just saying we're going to generally be talking about ethical hedonism, so the extent to which the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain can be valuable for a transformative politics. And we'll also want to discuss the parameters that might make hedonism positive and the parameters that might make it negative from the standpoints of both individual and

societal well-being. So it's also worth saying that happiness is not the same thing as pleasure. So again, I'm not going to go through the whole history of philosophy, but there's a lot of debate about the degree to which pleasure is a component of or whether it's a subservient or an overriding component of happiness. So a key figure here is Aristotle who argued in favor of a happiness that goes beyond the pursuit of pleasure. So rather than merely pursuing immediate gratification, which only lasts for a short while and does not necessarily leave us any better off, Aristotle argued that people should seek a more sort of enduring form of subjective well-being rooted in sort of living our lives well. So it necessarily involves being virtuous, that

is fulfilling our potential, finding and preserving meaning in our lives, and generally cultivating satisfactions that derive from a plethora of social, cultural, and psychological sources. He called this a state of eudaimonia. Anyway, he contrasted this with hedonism, which for him was a much sort of shorter term exercise, and it involves, as I've said, sort of the narrow pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain. So yeah just to fast forward to the late 19th and early 20th centuries and I'm just gonna get a little bit in the history of how this actually like these ideas have actually concretely affected us in our world in the late 19th early 20th century particularly in the United States but this is true in Britain and elsewhere in Europe as well you had this major

efflorescence of Protestant social reformers who were witnessing the rise of industrial capitalism and who were really panicking about the effects that this was going to have on society. And they were especially concerned about sort of the moral dimensions of the economy. So slavery until that was abolished in the 1860s, alcohol consumption and prostitution. And sort of operating from a standpoint that sort of valued hard work and temperance and believing that the pursuit of pleasure was detrimental to both individual and society. These reformers essentially like rejected hedonism as a social good and tried to build institutions that would prevent people from having too much pleasure in their

lives. And this is important. They possessed a hypothesis about happiness that I've been provisionally calling the Puritan hypothesis. And this is the. They possessed a hypothesis about happiness that I've been provisionally calling the Puritan hypothesis. And this is the belief that pleasure can only be short-lived because humans really rapidly become desensitized to stimulation. So we therefore, according to this hypothesis, constantly seek more and more extreme forms of pleasure in order to gratify us, and the result is this sort of greedy, antisocial, and self-destructive, and ultimately futile spiral. So in other words, the Protestant social reformers, and I might add like a lot of educated people

at the time who were in positions of power, saw pleasure and happiness as being inherently at odds with each other. This was just like the common sense of the day. So these reformers had a profound impact on the institutions that shaped our sort of modernizing societies. So schools, municipal governance, architecture, urban planning, the criminal justice system, publishing, and the media, et cetera. So much of what we take for granted is sort of normal in the Western world, especially the institutionalized Western world, was greatly influenced by these reformers and by this

idea that you shouldn't have too much pleasure in your life. But at the same time, there's this growing tendency within both state institutions and consumer capitalism to try to get people to desire things as a means of motivating them. And so this is what a lot of my historical research has been on over the last few years, the ways that certain psychologists, military officials, social reformers and advertisers, and politicians in the early 20th century created a new paradigm around motivation. So if you could deprive people of pleasure, and especially sexual pleasure, then you can make them desire much more deeply. And so under these conditions, you associate some of the sort of socially desirable or profitable outcomes that these figures wanted you to have,

whether that was buying a new car or whatever, working in a steel mill, marching off off to war with the sort of pursuit of your own pleasure. You see pursuing those societal goals that you're being exploited in as being in your own best interest. And this is especially true of sexuality. So one of the things I'm currently looking into is the way that these reformers and educators eliminated as many opportunities for sex from our cities and from urban spaces as they could through a mixture of building regulations, licensing laws, policing,

educational campaigns, especially directed at women urging them not to have looser free sex, and the closure of red light districts and saloons. So at the same time there's this dramatic rise in advertising movies and magazines and other forms of media that deliberately stirred up sexual desire. So basically you're regulating on one hand and on on the other hand, you're stirring up this desire. And these big moves were aimed to make sex more desirable, something that you would strive for. And the result is what I've been calling parasexuality, following the sociologist Peter Bailey. So parasexuality is a situation where you use the allure of sex to sell something other than sex. Anyway, just to draw this story to a close a bit,

there are many reasons that parasexuality is really important because it's basically part of this broader framework of building artificial scarcity into our society in order to clear the way for consumer capitalism because consumer capitalism relies really heavily on the production of these unmet desires. And so this is part of the foundational story about how that works. And the purpose of this, I would argue, was not to benefit the individual, but to exploit the individual, to make the individual behave in ways that were beneficial to both the state and to big business. Yeah. So I think, you know, all of this together raises really important questions about the

sort of purpose and the motivations for curbing and regulating pleasure. Going back to what Eric was saying earlier about Aristotle's ethics concerning pleasure, that we're meant to be pro-social. You refrain from engaging in too much narrow hedonism because it's better for yourself and it's better for society if you don't. And something of the same concern made its way into these Protestant social reformers who clearly cared about the well-being of everyday people, even if they had a sort of flawed understanding of what individuals and society needed. But consumer capitalism and the state then exploit the Puritan hypothesis about pleasure, enforcing and leveraging a sort of artificial sense of scarcity around pleasure in order to motivate people to work, serve and consume, and ultimately

pursue things that aren't in their own actual best interest. And there's a big difference between engaging in pleasure that's bad for you because you're concerned about well-being or whether you're looking after the interest of society and doing so because you want your workers to be more productive and you want to sell more cars, perfumes, apartments or whatever. Yeah sort of like a bad faith use of Aristotle's argument about pleasure to say oh you know we're just looking after the individual, but really we're trying to make a society where people don't have a lot of pleasure in their lives so that they can pursue sort of narrow

commercial interests and so forth. Yeah. And so I think, you know, the sort of point of narrating this history, as Eric's done really nicely, is to be able to sort of think critically about how we got where we are, how we came to be desiring subjects and the ways in which our desires have been shaped to serve economic interests rather than collective or pro-social interests. And we start to see a picture of why hedonism is actually a key leverage point in transforming society. The forces and structures that shape our collective hedonisms not only become a

site of resistance to these influences but also a site of liberation and I think this is really important because we don't just want a politics of resistance. We will also want to create something that's worth living for a sort of world of collective flourishing. Yeah. And it's also worth saying that like, hedonism can also be really bad. And especially when the things that you are seeking to fulfill your desires are placed in your head by people who are trying to exploit you. And so since 1968, especially in the United States,

in the Western world in general, you see lots of people trying to reject the sort of strictures of mass industrial society by sort of being counter-cultural or seeking to emancipate themselves from work and discipline in various ways, but this resistance is often struggling to gain traction because we're seeking solutions within the system still. So we don't critically evaluate the actual things that we want. A lot of the time we're rejecting production in favor of consumption and oftentimes conspicuous and hierarchical consumption and there's a lot of reasons for this, but critical hedonisms is trying to sort of offer a way for questioning the things we desire, so that rather than just pursuing these aspirational lifestyles as a means of liberating ourselves, we actually can collectively come together and be like, what do we as a society want to want? And how can we want better?

for that history and that breaking down of why critical and why hedonisms. And one thing I'm hearing, I love what you said about, you know, there are ways that hedonism can be unhealthy. And one of them, as you said, is when it's like manufactured, manufactured wants. But also the other thing I think about is when hedonism can be harmful to other people or the planet. And that's why I love this critical part at the beginning, really thinking about the ethical hedonism can be harmful to other people or the planet. And that's why I love this critical part at the beginning, really thinking about the ethical hedonisms and that pleasure and joy is not inherently wrong or bad. It's more looking critically at it and also how it was created over time. And, you know, one thing I'm really hearing too is, you know, this show is really a lot about the things that we need to unlearn and

decolonize or deprogram within ourselves, particularly around mainstream economic thinking or capitalism. And so one of the things I'm hearing is around what our current economic system deems as valuable, right? So scarcity being that which is valuable, things that are abundant or not. And so maybe can you talk a little bit more about what do we need to unlearn or deprogram in order to explore or embrace a path of critical hedonisms? Certainly, I mean just to quickly touch on your point about hedonism being bad, I think it's worth saying it could be bad for both the individual and for society. And you know, just looking at the individual, I mean there's this idea of the hedonistic treadmill that some philosophers talk about because of our tendency to become desensitized

to stimulation really easily. We can often just like chase and chase and chase new pleasures or more intense, usually it's more intense pleasures because we can't really sustain a normal level or a constant level of stimulation. And it's worth saying that, you know, we live in a world that's full of people struggling with addictions. I think there's a lot more people dealing with addiction than we actually like our statistics show I mean we tend to speak of addiction as pertaining to drugs but I think the amount of people who are

addicted to shopping and addicted to dopamine hits from their phone and social media and all these things I mean there's so many ways in which we're constantly seeking stimulation in more and more intense ways and I think in a lot of ways that can be a dead end, at least the way we're practicing it. There's also this idea of the paradox of hedonism that numerous writers have pointed out, which is that if you pursue your pleasure and you're sort of seeking to make yourself happy

as the goal that you often have sort of miss it. So John Stuart Mill insisted that happiness is only attained by not making it the direct end. There's also Lauren Berlant's work on how the pursuit of good feelings often leads to terrible consequences for the individual and society. This is Berlant's idea of cruel optimism, where the thing that you're placing your faith in to make you feel good is actually the thing that's causing you harm. And so this happens when you pursue the American dream and you're maybe not actually upwardly

class mobile or if you're pursuing some you know dysfunctional romantic partnership or relationship model that actually brings a lot of pain and sadness into your life but you still you know the more you fail at it almost the more you believe in it because like oh now I just even more deeply believe in the good version of this thing. So these are all ways that like basically our pursuit of hedonism can be quite negative but there's also ways in which it affects society negatively. And so this gets to the economic thinking piece. So degrowth, the degrowth movement is a really great, I think site of academic production here and innovative thought,

really trying to decouple economic growth from societal wellbeing and subjective wellbeing. There's also a book from the 1970s by Tibor Skidvotsky, I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing his name correctly. It's called The Joyless Economy. And in it, he argues that our economy optimizes for comfort at the expense of pleasure. So if pleasure is this sort of fleeting feeling that you have as you transition from a state of discomfort to comfort, as he argues, and we can actually engage with that a bit later because I think it's a bit more complicated than that.

But nevertheless, if we try to optimize in our economy as we do with our current form of development for comfort, that a lot of pleasure is sort of leaving the scene. So we're like living in air conditioned boxes and driving around in air conditioned boxes and moving from air conditioned box to air conditioned box. You're never super warm or super cold, and so therefore you never have the satisfaction of getting warm or getting cold, or you rarely have it in modern life. All sorts of things about the types of diets we pursue, when we eat sort of hyper-commodified food, yeah, sort of ways in which we try to reduce our need for exertion and so forth. These are all forms of comfort that are sold to us in our economy, and they equate

with the more of these things we consume, the more developed our economy supposedly is but it comes at the expense of pleasure because pleasure again comes from that transition into a state of comfort and if you're maintaining a constant state of comfort you can't have that pleasure experience and yeah other degrowth arguments too I think are really interesting here so Jason Hickle has argued that it's totally possible to basically dramatically reduce energy consumption and the consumption of resources while at the same time dramatically improving people's lives. Kate Soper has this wonderful book

entitled Post-Growth Living for Alternative Hedonism in which she advocates for sort of non-consumptive forms of hedonism, so a culture where we enjoy the small things like riding our bicycles around and working less and gardening more and spending more times with friends and family. So there are a lot of possibilities for this in the digital sphere as well I think. So ideas around sort of virtual reality that maybe we could do really big exciting things in virtual reality that don't actually have the humongous sort of material footprint that like building Dubai or building Las Vegas has. But you can have a Dubai or Las Vegas in a digital sphere and

perhaps that would have less consequences on the biosphere. Yeah, I also sort of want to touch on this idea of austerity because I think we often are sort of equating making moral or ethical choices with having less or having withdrawing from the world. And I think it's interesting that we're starting to see research and awareness that sort of points to the fact that individuals cannot really change our systems through individual choices and of course while we all have a responsibility to make good choices I do think the focus on the individual actor is the wrong sort of unit to be looking at and research suggests that individual consumers or actors don't always have the willingness or the information or even the capacity to

change the world and often we assume that individual choices will actually end up sort of accumulating to some systemic change, which actually is not the case. And so to address this, there are people who are advocating for what they call moral markets. And the moral market refers to sort of marketplace of choices where you can now choose to take an action that also has a social good. You can choose to sort of purchase carbon offs offsets feel flights and things like that. And so the problem with this however is it still put the sort of onus on the individual as the sort of actor to think about the consequences of their action. And often these sort of more ethical air quotes choices are more expensive or hard to achieve than the conventional ones and moral markets sort of is situated within

our current economic system as a sort of like form of harm reduction as opposed to sort of really transforming it from the outside. And I think to sort of situate critical hedonisms in contrast to this, critical hedonisms is really focusing on transforming how society distributes pleasure and care, transforming the economics in which these desires are made and it's an attempt to reconcile personal pleasure and benefit with a broader societal good. I think one of the things that's really challenging for humans at the moment and leads to a lot of anxiety is that often our sort of moral principles are set in contrast to pleasure and I really want us to think

to ourselves like what if this was something we could change? What if we didn't have to be constantly choosing between doing something that is good for society or that feels good to us? What if we were to build a world where winning doesn't depend on losing? Yeah, so this is predicated on basically two axioms. So the first is that desire is political and the second is that desires can be changed and directed in more positive directions. Yeah, I actually just want to sort of say something on this, which is, you know, I often find that when I talk to people about the ideas that our desires are plastic,

it's a bit upsetting to people. People are like, no, my desires are who I am. This is, I just want this thing and this is how I am. This is inherent to my personality to, you know, don't be interfering with this. But of course we sort of really know that our desires are plastic. We see this in fashion trends. We see the ways in which maybe in our teens we

were all desperately trying to buy flared jeans and then somehow in our twenties we were all desperately trying to buy cropped jeans. We see this in trends in sort of body modifications also where in you know in the 90s it was like everyone was having sort of breast enhancement surgeries and nowadays the sort of most common body from modifications are increasing the size of your bum and so these are clear evidence that our desires are plastic and being shaped and they're being shaped by someone that isn't us and so there's something really powerful here which is to say that not the individual but we as

a group as a social sphere can think about the things that we desire, and we can shift that together, and it doesn't have to be somebody else that's telling us what to desire. We can think about the kinds of things we want and what kind of world that gets us to. Absolutely. And I'm also hearing, too, what are our desires for, right? There are, you know, in a lot of ways, the manufacturing of our desires is for profit, right? There are a lot of ways the manufacturing of our desires is for profit, right? The changing of trends is really a part of the fast fashion, like it needs to change every season so that we continue to buy. And we continue to see something that we liked even a season ago is now obsolete or old fashioned.

So yes, absolutely. Thank you for all of those. And just to accentuate what you're saying, these are the things that we need to unlearn that really we've been programmed to believe. Things around growth, both on the external but in the internal, that scarcity is what creates value or makes something valuable and that individual consumption is what leads to happiness. Those were a couple. And of course, these frames or views are really upholding the justification for inequality and endless growth and the endless accumulation of wealth and also status hierarchy and whatnot. So, yeah, maybe can

you either of you want to say a little bit more about why is it that we were programmed to have these manufacturing of desires? Like, what is that serving or what is that justifying? Well, it's the growth paradigm that you're pointing to. I mean, if we're pursuing fast fashion, if we're pursuing status consumption, if we're trying to elevate our status in the eyes of others through consuming or keeping up with the Joneses or so forth,

then that keeps the economy going. And we have an economy that if it doesn't grow all the time, it collapses, right? When the economy stops growing, it's a recession. Like what kind of economic technology is that? You're basically what you find yourself in when that's the paradigm in place is a pyramid scheme. Yeah. And so you write, Eric, it is subversive to take pleasure in plentiful things. And also perhaps there is a paradise buried in the cheap and easy, convenience-oriented, humble pleasures, little treats and vivid colors of low-end consumption in the presence of friends.

So let's just touch for a moment on what is cheap and what is expensive, because I think that's an interesting thing to explore. So how would you describe what cheap and expensive is in our current economic system? And then how would you redefine it or invite us to rethink cheap and expensive? Sure. Well, a lot of how we think of cheap and expensive just comes down to prices. And I'm not entirely against having prices as a signal for whether

something should be more or less available. But unfortunately, a lot of the ways in which we price things are really flawed right now. So take for example, housing. It should be the case that living in the center of a city in the most efficient way you can live, right? Living in the middle of a city in an apartment is one of the most efficient ways you can live, at least in a developed world. I think this is untrue in a place where you can still do maybe subsistence farming or whatever, but I don't think 8 billion people can do that. But anyway, urban housing should be affordable. And living in a very wasteful way in suburbia in a giant McMansion or wherever, that should

be very expensive. But unfortunately, it's flipped around. And so the price per square footage of a McMansion is much cheaper than in terms of price economic pricing Than the price of a square footage of you know inner city apartment So ideally we'd have some kind of an economy that make those things that are that are less wasteful More attainable and those things that are more wasteful less attainable. So that's just to the question of Cheapness and expensiveness. But I think there's another thing it's worth commenting on, which is that a lot of our economies built upon

sort of pursuing luxury goods. And one of the things that critical hedonisms has been sort of flirting with a lot lately as a project is these sort of arguments against luxury. So many people advocate for luxury goods on the basis that they can reduce material consumption. So this starts to look like the argument I was just making. Okay, so rather than buying tons of cheap stuff all the time, we should just buy a few really expensive things and keep them forever. And then you're not consuming tables for your whole life. You don't buy 100 IKEA tables in your life. You buy one and it costs you $5,000, but you bought only one because it was precious.

And in a way there is some soundness to this argument and for many things this may make sense, but luxury goods don't really, the market for luxury goods don't really offer this. What they do is they keep us on this treadmill of sort of striving for nicer and nicer things that are less and less attainable. And again, it starts to be this sort of pyramid scheme, but a pyramid scheme of sort of status hierarchies where, you know, oh, you have a designer bag worth $40,000. By the way, I can't believe these things exist, but apparently they do. I'm told they exist. Well, I have a $100,000 bag.

Oh, well, I have a $1 million bag. So I'm more inclined, and I think those of us who are involved in critical hedonism, more inclined to lean towards sort Sir Jeremy Rifkin's argument in the zero marginal cost society, that we should be aiming to make things less expensive, especially those things that we need in day to day life. And then we're just reducing the amount of time that human beings need to work. So this is very much Andre Gors' argument about work that, you know, we should have universal employment, but also reduce working hours and all gains in productivity should go to everyone who's

doing work. And we should all just constantly reduce the amount of hours that we work. And this is something that we previously sort of argued on this very podcast in the episode on fully automated luxury communism. And it's ironic because obviously that episode and that word has the term luxury in the title, but we nevertheless they are argued that actually luxury is a misnomer, that what we really want is a sort of neo-decadent communism, fully automated neo-decadent communism. So I think this is a good time maybe to introduce something that we've

been calling the neo-decadent hypothesis. So we've talked already about the Puritan hypothesis. So remember this is the idea that pleasure is necessarily this fleeting feeling because we get desensitized to stimulation and that we should therefore just have less pleasure in our lives. But this is precisely the logic that luxury caters to. So these rare expensive savored pleasures that you don't have very many of. And again, this makes sense if you only believe that pleasure occurs in these fleeting moments as you transition from discomfort to comfort

But those of us working on critical hedonisms have been playing with this idea of neodeconance, which is an aesthetic paradigm that leads into intensity Creativity and contrast so rather than having one singular spectrum of pain or pleasure So like okay You're either like have you have nothing or you have this million dollar handbag and everything Exists on this linear scale between here and there. We argue that people can have many, many sources of pleasure and therefore many, many sort of spectrums and that you can also maintain or sustain much more pleasure in your life if you cultivate these many pleasures and transition not from a state of discomfort

to comfort, but from one pleasure to another. So when you become desensitized to one pleasure, you can just shift to another pleasure. You don't have to just sit out in the cold and wait till you're freezing and then go inside and have warm food and that's your one nice thing for the day. You know, food can be a source of pleasure, yes, but so can napping and so can sitting by a campfire and so can reading a book, so can cooking, right? So the neodecadent hypothesis is that we can, and this is very much on a psychological level, that we can enjoy life where we ambulate from pleasure to pleasure. So you don't, at least for psychological reasons, need to

live in a plain or difficult life in between. And this is not to say that people should not strive or that people should not work to sort of build social and cultural infrastructure for doing challenging things. I think that is an important part of life. But the Puritan hypothesis about pleasure, which again is one of the main arguments in favor of the Protestant work ethic, is we think that this is not the only formula of happiness. Yeah. And I think it's worth sort of touching on the idea that again this is not about the individual. This is about creating structures for these things. And it's worth thinking about why do we not have spaces to do these things?

Why are there not spaces where I can go into the sort of public arena and cook for a bunch of people? The only way to go into the public arena and eat is in a restaurant where someone is serving you and somebody is employed to do that and so there's all these ways in which there are structural barriers to us engaging in these kinds of co-pleasures where you are you're both experiencing and giving pleasure and so it's really about thinking why do we not engaging in these kinds of co-pleasures where you are you're both experiencing and giving pleasure and so it's really about thinking why do we not have spaces why do we not have structures for distributing these kinds of joys. Yeah so

also there's this question of like if it's psychologically possible to sustain pleasure and we believe again it is that is the neodecadent hypothesis that you can go from pleasure to pleasure to pleasure if it's psychologically possible is it socially responsible? And you know, Freud famously argued that civilization only is able to exist because we basically repress people's desires. If we didn't do that, society would collapse. And to the extent to which our desires are hostile, say we have a desire for being aggressive

or hyper competitive, whatever, I would agree. But a big part of the picture here is work. So Freud was not wrong to say, you know, we need to do a certain amount of work to keep society going. But increasingly in our current moment, given our level of technological advancement, increasingly that's becoming less and less the case. And so the amount of work that we need to do in order to keep society going is becoming less and less.

And something that Herbert Marcuse argued is that like the extent to which you maintain people's repression beyond that which keeps society going is what he called surplus repression. So there's all these ways in which the only reason like we need as much repression in our lives as possible is it's not because it's some psychological barrier, it's because basically there is this massive effort to continue to accumulate wealth at our expense. This is a massive effort to maintain hierarchies at our expense. And so the degree to which we need to repress our desires goes down and down as our technology gets better and better and our productivity goes up.

You're listening to an Upstream Conversation with Eric Wyckoff Rogers and Zarina Agnew. We'll be right back. the the the the the the the the the the

the the the the the the So, I'm going to go ahead and start the presentation. That was Critical Hedonism by Night Cafe Radio. Now back to our conversation with Serena Agnew and Eric Wyckoff-Rogers. You know, when I'm, when I'm hearing the really delicate unpicking and exploring of these

words, you know, one thing I'm hearing, like we take the example of fast fashion, right? So you could have a sweater that is very cheaply made but very expensive to carbon emissions and even to people's lives, right, in labor, especially in the Global South. But then you can have a luxury good that is like, let's say, a Dolce & Gabbana shirt or something, a sweater, that actually can be just as cheap and just as expensive in the way that it's not actually well made and it could even be harmful to people on the planet. And then you can have something that's like, let's say, I'm idolizing this here, but like a sweater that's made maybe locally,

maybe ethically sourced materials and labor that is with care. So it really is very delicate, like what is luxury and also what is the reason for it. So I'm thinking about to have a sweater that brings one warmth and comfort and that sense of like physical pleasure versus to have a

sweater that has a logo or emblem on it to signify conspicuous consumption. So there's like the actual material and the supply chains and then there's the motivation or the reason why we have such a thing. So yeah, and I might go a step further and say like, there's this world like we live in like a built environment, right? An environment, a social and built environment that might make you care about a logo, you know? And I think we need to factor that in too. Like, what is the actual social and physical built fabric that you're existing in that makes you want to have these things, that makes those things valuable and that distorts that sort of like cost?

Yeah. I also think, you know, we should touch on novelty here because I think there's also this idea that we should buy one table and keep it for our whole lives. But that sort of negates the fact that humans do enjoy novelty and a new table, new to you is still more enjoyable than perhaps a table you've had for 10 years. And so, but there's ways of rotating between us, you know?

Like, and I think you, we see this in clothing sw of rotating between us, you know, like, and I think you, we see this in clothing swaps, for example, where people are like, oh, I don't need to go and buy a new thing, but I can rotate between us in our sort of communal environment so that we're all experiencing sharing and novelty. And there's something wonderful about being like, I've got this great thing that I've loved for a long time, but I don't need it anymore. My friend's going to love it. So I'm gonna rotate that through and in that way there is again joy in the giving and joy in the receiving and so I think it's important again to sort of like put a point on this isn't about austerity or like never being able to have novelty but it's about new forms of social and economic relations

that allow us to experience pleasure and joy on a regular basis without putting anyone under. Yeah, which speaks, I think, to a different kind of freedom, right? So much of the justification for sort of consumer capitalism is that it gives us all this freedom. But I know I really like your thinking on this, Serena, about like, basically that there's better forms of freedom, essentially, than consumer freedom. I don't know if you wanted to speak to that. Yeah I mean I think, Delia, you asked about sort of luxury and what's cheap and what's expensive and I think it's important to

say that like you know in modern society we're subjected to this sense of like compulsive achievement and compulsive personal optimization and we're told it's okay to sort of do anything in order to achieve this objective. And so for me when I think about what's cheap and expensive I'm really thinking about how do I find things I want that don't put anyone under? Where are the kinds of joys that we can find that we both or we all come out better for it? And I think conversation is a really good example of this. Conversation is something that we can only do together. We both go into a conversation and we both come out of it

better. Not only have you had a conversation but I've into a conversation and we both come out of it better. Not only have you had a conversation but I've had a conversation but we collectively have had a conversation and no one was put under for it. There was nothing extractive in that dynamic and so I think it's really important to think about the kinds of structures that can create joy and pleasure that are liberatory in contrast to the kinds of pleasures that come at somebody else's expense. And so the latter for me feels expensive because whilst the financial cost might be manageable, the cost to society is immeasurable. And so I sort of think we need to reimagine what freedom

means and looks like and we need to think about how we can sort of lean into freedoms that are mutually beneficial. We're living in a world where so many things are sort of artificially rendered scarce, but also for another proportion of society, there's so much abundance that it's almost painful. And, you know, sometimes the freedom of can is a more intense experience, you know, that sort of agony of choice than even the sort of like idea of what one should have. Because, you know, the things that one should have has a limit, but the things that one can have has none. And so it can actually be really agonizing to have too much abundance.

Yeah. Thank you for that. And I love what you just said. How can I set our joy that doesn't put anyone under? And again, I'm hearing a little bit of Manfred Max Neaf's work around ways that we meet our needs that we can have satisfiers, things that satisfy our needs, strategies and things, but we can also have pseudo-satisfiers, things that we attempt to meet a need but we don't actually satisfy it, and then we can even have violators, things that we try to meet a need but we violate

either another one of our own needs or somebody else's needs, as you say, put someone else under. So that's another great lens to bring into this critical aspect. One of the things that I was thinking about as I was reading about critical hedonisms and your work together is whether everyone is entitled to joy and pleasure. And perhaps I'm not even phrasing that question correctly, but what I mean by that is I'm thinking about being a person, a white person in a settler colony. I'm thinking about being in the global north. I'm thinking about just all of the ways that a lot of my joy could actually put people under just

by way of, you know, it's hard to live right in a wrong world. And I'm also thinking about a lot of articles and writings around Black joy and like centering Black joy and other types of joy of marginalized communities. So I'm just curious, you know, how do you reconcile this, maybe entitlement is the problem, right? But this idea of joy and pleasure and whether we all have maybe equal access or equal entitlement to it, how would you respond to that? Yeah, I mean, I think, again, I want to emphasize that critical hedonisms is not about any single person's individual right to joy. It is about creating structures of distribution such that

all have access to these kinds of things. And, you know, I think something that really meant a lot to me was Adrienne Marie Brown's book Pleasure Activism, Pleasure Activism The Politics of Feeling Good. And it's a really wonderful book and it describes pleasure activism as the work we do to reclaim our whole happy and satisfiable selves from the impacts, delusions, and limitations of oppression and or supremacy. And it references Audre Lorde's piece, The Uses of the Erotic, which talks about the sort of erotic as this really powerful form of pleasure, but not limited to sex, right? And so, Adrienne Marie Brown talks about the ways that we can reclaim our relationship to our body through somatics

or through various forms of dance and through relationality as a form of political activism, and both as resistance and liberation. And I think that's really important. They also speak to the idea from Bambara that we need to make the revolution irresistible, right? It has to be something that is enticing and sort of delicious to all of us and it crucially makes the point that this isn't something we just do for ourselves, this is something we do for each other and so I sort of feel like the idea of are we all entitled to pleasure is maybe the wrong way of thinking about it and sort of a different way of thinking about it is this is the collective responsibility that we owe each other to co-produce together.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's just drawing on this question of sort of black joy. I think it's how do we think about pleasure and yeah, sort of settler colonial locations and the global north which exploits the labor and resources of the global south. I think it's worth mentioning that that colonial project does not work without bodily dispossession and alienation that a core part of what drives this push to civilize the whole world. In other words, bring it under the rule of capitalism or the exploitation of markets. Is this alienation of these things, these pleasures that are just out there, that are with us when we were born, to create moral strictures around sexuality,

around enjoying just laying and lazing in the sun, around enjoying that bike ride lazing in the sun, around, you know, enjoying that bike ride in the rain or whatever, that you need to sort of clear some of these pleasures out of the way to make them less desirable, to make people feel like they don't have ownership over their bodies, whether that's literal as in the case with slavery and wage slavery you might argue, or, you know, metaphorical where you see your body as more and more just an instrument for performing labor. So yeah, I also just want to say just relating to maybe like some of the intellectual heritage

that critical hedonisms is building on, we're not necessarily inventing some new way of doing things. It's really an attempt to codify and formulate a sort of politics of pleasure that makes sense for people to adopt in their lives and communities, very much for the 21st century. And eventually we hope that it can become this framework that can inform our politics and our institutions. But yeah, we're very much drawing upon and building on sort of existing cultures and movements that we I think owe great gratitude towards and whose contributions have not finished making their mark. I mean, it is an ongoing and open project.

Let's go into what you write as the strategies for finding joy in the everyday and the plentiful and for extending plenty to others. I just love that frame. And you offer five that I found or maybe more, but one is engage with creative production rather than conspicuous consumption. You have complicate rather than expand, ambulate rather than replace, be an easy lover and foster an abundance of places. So let's dive into these. Let's start with engage with creative production rather than conspicuous consumption. Yeah, and just to say before diving in or before asking you about this, the phrase led me to research what does conspicuous mean and what does conspicuous consumption mean. And that led me to find inviduous consumption, which is consumption to provoke the envy of

others, conspicuous compassion, which is the ostentatious use of charity meant to enhance reputation or social prestige rather than doing it for like what it gives to the other, and then as well as conspicuous frugality. So portraying frugality for what it gets you in terms of social status. So yeah, tell us a little bit about engage with creative production rather than conspicuous consumption because that conspicuous consumption really seemed to me part of the root of what we're trying to address here with critical hedonisms. Well, some of those terms are, I mean, all those terms are fantastic, some of which I

had not heard before and I'm looking forward to reading about them after this. But yeah, just the idea of swapping conspicuous consumption with creative production. So conspicuous consumption is consuming things to elevate your social status. It's not consumption that keeps you alive or necessarily even gives you joy, not in the direct sense, but in the indirect sense of basically elevating your status and then taking satisfaction in the way in which you have risen beyond or above some other person. You consume in order to have people witness you consuming. You consume in order to solidify your class position.

Creative production on the other hand is coming from a totally different angle. So creative production is, well, let's look at a concrete example of it, the DIY movement. There's lots of people who rather than going and buying tons of stuff all the time, they would rather produce creative things, interesting things that you can't buy on Amazon. And perhaps they go buy some parts on Amazon, you know, I myself do this,

I'm a tinkerer, I'll buy some, you know, resistors and some wires or whatever off Amazon. But then I turn them into some unique thing, like in this space I run, there's a bathroom that has a thunderstorm that just constantly rumbles as you're in the bathroom. You can't buy a thunderstorm ceiling on Amazon, but I was able to produce that creatively through these modular pieces. So taking satisfaction in the things that you can create,

the worlds you can build, the new satisfactions you can put on other people's palettes, I think is a major part of what we're imagining in imagining in this sort of neo-decadent vision of critical hedonisms. Yeah, I think it's worth touching on the idea that the difference between cooking dinner for your friends versus going to a restaurant, and perhaps even further, is co-creating dinner with your friends. You all get together and you cook dinner together and you're sort of laying the table together and that feeling that you get when you are co-producing an experience is very different from when you go to a restaurant and you're served.

And you know, both are enjoyable, but I think the creative production is sort of tangible there where you're all sort of co-creating an experience. And I think there's a myriad of ways in which I think the way that we design spaces and create experiences with our friends, or even for strangers, could be really creative and generative and open up spaces for different kinds of pleasure and joy, rather than the sort of routine things that we're told that we should go and buy to make a Friday night a meaningful Friday night, you know.

Yeah, I love those examples. And it also reminds me, Zarina, your example of novelty and the table. If you have a table, another way to work with that desire for novelty is to repaint it or write or repurpose it. And I do that often with jewelry. When I find myself getting hooked into like an Instagram ad or something and I'm like, okay, what is this about?

I'm obviously wanting novelty or something. Can I'm like, okay, what is this about? I'm obviously wanting novelty or something. Can I work with what materials I have to reinvent or redesign to give me that sense of the novelty, but also the creation that I'm somehow seeking. And then to be able to engage with creative production, I love that we're also thinking about the systemic or societal collective changes

that would be supportive of this. So, you know, fab labs, share shops, the sharing economy or like trade or just, you know, you said clothing swaps, right, for example. But also thinking about degrowth and Jason Hickles' work, you know, being able to fix, so the right to repair, right, the right to actually fix things and also ending planned obsolescence, right? That's another thing. So just think about it on those two levels. The next one that you offer is complicate rather than expand, which I wrote down as from the writing, the logic of adding in rather than

adding on. So tell us about that invitation. That's an interesting one. Yeah. So there, I think it's useful to use maybe a land metaphor. So imagine that you own some land and you're, you know, we're in a fully automated economy. I'm not saying we actually are, but let's say you were, and you're like, okay, how can I make my life better? You might say, okay, I'm gonna buy more land. And then, you know, I'll have an orchard,

and then I'll have, I don't know, over there, I'll have a cornfield, and over there, I'll have, I don't know, a hedge maze or whatever. Or you can take the land that you already have, let's say it's an acre, and make it more complicated and interesting. So rather than, you know, leaning on this crutch of having big open geometries that you find, I don't know, satisfying because of their symmetry or whatever, you can start to really treat that land as like being sort of full of all these potentials. And so yeah again rather than making a bigger piece of land you like make it more complicated and more interesting and more featureful parcel

of land. I think the same can go for space, I think the same can go for relationships, I think the same can go for communities. There's lots of ways in which you can complicate things as a means of making them better or more enjoyable to you rather than growing them and necessarily increasing their footprint. Yeah. And I also thought about it in terms of, I think we would call it knowledge production, but this idea of people wanting, and this is very colonialist language, but like pioneering thinkers or innovators. And instead this idea that, and I don't know who said this quote, but where we're given a branch, make a bud, where we're given a bud, make a flower,

where we're given a flower, make a fruit. It's like you don't have to invent or completely create something anew. Take someone's work who inspires you and go deeper into it. Add your own inquiry to it or, you know, complexify or complicate or bring in your own location in the question or the inquiry. So that's interesting that you went to land because when I read it, I went to, yeah, knowledge production or thinking. Yeah. That's a great parallel. There's also a piece in this complicate rather than expand that like speaks to the novelty,

right? Which is like often when we're seeking novelty, we have an expansionist project. We're like, I must get a second thing or I must go elsewhere. But the complicate rather than expand speaks to finding and building novelty through increasing the richness of what you already have at your disposal that I think is really meaningful, you know. Yeah. So then the next one was ambulate rather than replace. And of course Clothing swaps come to mind right trading things or sharing them But anything else you'd add on that invitation to ambulate rather than replace

Yeah So this this sort of ambulatory approach to pleasure is very much at the core of this neodecadent project. We've been describing so drifting from thing to thing to thing rather than sort of living on this axis where you're either closer or further away from your ideal. And I might use an example from the sexual economy that sticks out in my mind. So through the years I've known people who have been really picky about their like sexual and romantic partners and have had some really specific ideal about like, oh, I want to date people who are like this. And unfortunately that leads to a situation where they're always any person they date

is like either closer or further away from that specific sort of platonic ideal that they have about what the desirable partner is. And unfortunately, that leads them into a terrible situation where like most, you know, once you date it for a while, most situations you're going to have are going to be further away than like the nearest to that ideal that you've attained at some point. And like there's something very sort of unnecessarily hierarchical, unnecessarily sort of disposable occurring there. Whereas a more ambulatory approach to desire might be about like having a variety of experiences. And so you might be like, oh, I'm interested in meeting people, friends, dates, whatever,

who are different from people who have already been friends with or dated or whatever. And yeah, sure, there's like, you might say there's like a growth dimension to that, but it's an immaterial growth. It's about like shifting from a different, like one thing to a different thing rather than always trying to outdo your best personal score on some specific linear sort of hierarchical trajectory. Yeah, I think there's an important piece in here which is that like you know we're sort of trying to point to a critique of

hierarchies of desire because these are leading to a sort of pyramid scheme upon which nobody's really satisfied and you know oftentimes I think people are like, oh the solution to that is some sort of egalitarian world where everyone has equal access to everything and I think what we're trying to say here is like, no, if we allow our desires to be ambulatory, rather than constantly replacing something that's a bit better on the on the hierarchy, but we allow ourselves to sort of be nomads in the sort of ecosystem of pleasure and desire, we're all moving through and moving and experience

novelty, experiencing new things, but in ways that aren't creating a pyramid system, we're all moving through and moving and experience novelty, experiencing new things, but in ways that aren't creating a pyramid system. We're not all trying to move up to the next layer of the hierarchy, but we are more meandering through and past and with each other. Yeah. And so this is where it pertains to like the sort of sharing economy ideal of like, yeah, let's just say we just like stop making clothes next year, just no more new clothes. And now like the whole world's clothes economy is just about shifting the clothes we already have around. Right? Well, that only works if you don't have these like

seasonal or like multiple seasonal sort of fashion trends that everyone is bought into. Like, you know, in a world where we're all desiring the same things at the same time, you end up with what I call a school bus problem, which is like all these municipalities or school districts own a huge fleet of school buses that just sit in a parking lot, you know, 23 hours a day. And then all at once, they all need to go drive the children to school or whatever. And like, you know, if you staggered when school times were, then maybe you'd need like one tenth of the school buses or whatever. It's the same with traffic and commuting and transportation systems and so forth. When we're all pursuing the same thing, you end up with this rat race. We're all competing over the same things and you need to produce the newest thing again and again and again. Whereas if you can ambulate in your desires precisely, you're not all just climbing over each other for the same things. Yeah, that's very helpful to portray it that way. And you know, going deeper into the sexual piece of critical hedonisms. The next invitation you have is Be

an Easy Lover, which I loved this one particularly. And this goes back to, Eric, your introduction going over the history and puritanical thought and sex as it's been throughout pleasure and hedonism and the manufacturing of that. And just a quote from your writing, you say, sexual allure has never been more visually abundant, yet sex itself remains scarce. Under a hybrid regime of hyper-sexualized self-expression and puritanical notions of self-respect, we're all camgirls, nuns, and incels at the same time. So go back for us into that part around, you said our architecture is not created for sex, you also brought up the history of this, and then what does it mean to be an easy lover? Why is that an invitation? How would that help us here?

Yes, well, this is making me think of something that Sophie Lewis has written about, you know, how can we employ sort of gender and sexuality not as an accumulation strategy? I'm sorry if I'm Sophie Lewis, if I'm butchering your words there, but so many of us relate to Sexuality is something that is meant to get us something other than sex So how do you use sex or how do you use romance to get you know? Elevate your position your class position society to concentrate wealth I mean the marriage institution I think in on the one hand for a lot of people is this utopian vision of like

maintaining commitment to somebody which I think it can be a really beautiful thing but on the other hand from this sort of state's point of view it's a way of like basically assisting in the concentration of wealth ensuring that people have more children and bear more responsibilities in society, that they take on more of their own sort of care functionality and don't displace that out onto the state and so forth. So I'm just trying to say there's all these ways in which sexuality has been sort of used and we've been sort of taught to see it as something that can get us things.

And so this vision of being an easy lover is really a call for people to just try to deprogram the sort of functionality that has been placed upon their sexuality and to relate to it not just as a source of pleasure, which of course it is and should be, but also as a source of giving pleasure. And I guess this idea of easy in the title, easy lover, is yeah, a call to think about how to be generous in that. And I want to be really careful here because I'm not trying to say that anyone owes anyone else any sexuality.

I think Amia Srinivasan's writings on the right to sex are really good here, that people do not have a right, an individual right to sex, but, and this is me paraphrasing her a little bit, I think we might have a right to live in a society that doesn't make the category of person you are more or less desirable according to some arbitrary sexual racism or sexual classism or other sort of series of, yeah, sort of scarcity producing cultural codifications. Yeah, I also want to say that I think this pertains to relationships beyond sex. There's lots of ways to be a lover and sex does not have to be involved at all.

And yeah, I guess it's a call too to people to just think about not just what they're getting but also what they're giving that may be more relevant to certain people than others. I know like for a lot of women they often have felt like they need to really suppress their own desires in order to meet the desires of their male partners or whoever else in their lives. I don't want this to sound like a justification for that. It's more a call to think about how to deprogram our desires and our pleasures around sex and love. Serena, anything you'd add? Yeah, I'll add to that that I spend a lot of my life living and building life with people who've come out of very, very long sentences in prison for whom skin hunger is one of the primary injuries that they come out with and so it's not just about sex or just about romance it is an overarching deprivation

of the very thing that humans as a social species need and it's interesting to walk with them on the journey of trying to recover from this experience. And I think for many people coming out of prison, they're sort of surprised to find that the world outside of the prison walls remains a cage in a ton of ways, that these kinds of things are not available to them. And again, it's not just about sex, it's just about touch and hugging each other. And we have sort of created these ways of policing these intimacies and making them artificially scarce when actually it costs us very little to offer these things to each other.

And so, yeah, I think Eric's right to distinguish this from anyone has a right to anybody else's body, but more collectively, we should be producing a society in which no one's starving. And that is a really important collective goal. Yeah, fostering an abundance of opportunity for consensual touch and connection, whether it's sexual and otherwise, other forms of intimacy as well. And this really goes with your last invitation

around fostering or creating an abundance of places. And I love your use of the word. What does place mean? And the way that I read this one was reclaiming commons, right? And this is how it goes back to fully automated luxury communism. And I want to share another quote from your writing, Eric, because I am like Zarina in San Francisco and it's about San Francisco and I just I chuckled in reading it but also cried a little because of it being so true. So you write, how could it be possible in a city like San Francisco a night out could be of such low quality and at the same time cost so much money?

An arm and a leg to get there, an arm and a leg to get in, an arm and a leg for drinks, an arm and a leg for food afterwards, an arm and a leg to get home, all to stand in a lake to get there, an arm in a lake to get in, an arm in a lake for drinks, an arm in a lake for food afterwards, an arm in a lake to get home, all to stand in a dark room and shout a slow-paced, half-understood conversation over the noise of some shitty EDM DJ. It's not that there was a shortage of spaces to inhabit or experiences to be had. It's that the process of legitimately converting space into authorized places to be at night has been so thoroughly constraining that there were incredibly no alternatives. So I just love that exploration of what is place and how do we actually create urban spaces, but everywhere in the world?

Real true places. So Eric, tell us about this one. Certainly. Yeah, I mean, I hope that listeners can understand where I'm coming from on this. There's just so few places to just go and be, and we tend to have these sort of weird proxies for this, like cafes where you like buy a coffee or whatever, so you can like use the wifi or whatever. Yeah, my frustration also with nightlife is apparent,

I think in that quote, but especially at night, there's very, very few places to go and be cozy. So yeah, I'm urging us to try to foster a political movement, perhaps, where we urge public policymakers, the communities around us, our friends and neighbors and so forth, to create a new abundance of places to just experience joy. And yeah, I mean, it's, it's difficult to say what concretely that would look like in all instances, but just to offer a few examples, there's ways in which communities get together to create community gardens. I personally think that we should be pushing really hard to convert all these sort of

abandoned storefronts and brick and mortar shops and stuff that have been put out of business by e-commerce to convert those into communal spaces. Perhaps the city can buy them or rent them or whatever from their owners. Perhaps there's some more radical solution to using eminent domain or something like this. In certain instances, I know that would be controversial, but nevertheless, I think we need many more spaces and especially indoor spaces. Let me just say as someone who's lived most of my life in sort of temperate regions, I think there's this idea that, okay, you can have public parks, but then anything indoors is like private property. And that's just not true. I mean, obviously we have libraries, but also libraries are the kind of thing that

we stretch to sort of meet a ton of new different sort of functions. And I think that's great. And maybe we should just stretch what libraries mean. But I also feel like we should just have much more distributed spaces and Sweden there's these spaces I can't remember what they're called but they're in most cities you can just you just have these sort of clubhouses that you can just use for free and they're everywhere you can just use them for free if you have like a club or like I don't know an organization that needs to meet or it needs you know to have a little function or, you can just have these spaces for free.

So I just think we need way more spaces. There's no reason we don't have these. Yeah, I think it's worth just noticing how difficult it is. Say I wanted to go out and cook a free meal for the public. How difficult that would be. I'd have to go and apply for a license. I'd have to probably get some heinous liability insurance. I'd have to get permission and approval from all of the

neighbors. You know, there's all of these ways that we are being alienated by sort of invisible or maybe sometimes visible bureaucracy. And, you know, Eric and I have both spent a long, long stretches of our lives trying to create spaces in which people can feel otherwise. So I host a space in San Francisco that is a free space that people can just come and be in. And one of the things that's shocking free space that people can just come and be in. And one of the things that's shocking to me is how often people come in and they say, okay, well, where do I pay? What do I do? What do I have to buy? And I say, oh, no, you have to buy anything.

And, you know, I've had multiple people just burst into tears because it's an experience they've never had, that they are not being pressured by a waiter to sort of purchase another meal or like get another coffee and also that creating your space that feels safe enough that you can sort of like leave your Leave your wallet on the table while you go to the toilet You know that kind of thing those kinds of sort of psychological experiences are so rare in public And so I think it's really important to think about the ways in which we are being deprived of producing and experiencing collective joy. Yeah, I also just really want to shout out an amazing blog that explores this called

I Dream of Canteens. It's mostly focused on this city that I'm in now, London, but it imagines a world where there were just places that you could just get cheap food, Wi-Fi, sit down, use the bathroom, like just basic human needs that you have that these wouldn't be commodified. You only need to spend $14 on a salad in order to use the bathroom and charge your phone. I really love some of the thinking that's contained in that blog. I hope people can check that out.

Yeah. And I'm also thinking of the reclaiming the commons work of Mark Lakeman and how he has the like, let's take over our corners and our intersections, right, and create more public spaces and just how our streets have been designed to be for cars and not be for gatherings. I'm also thinking of universities in the ways that they've been designed without like centers, right. I'm thinking about UC Santa Cruz being designed for fear of where the students would gather

and protest, right, to really prohibit that kind of mass demonstrating, mass gathering. And yeah, just the ways that our desire to connect or to have intimacy with one another is so commodified, right? It's so financialized, even to the point of having to pay for the ability to have a picnic, right? You have to pay for like the spot, reserve it, or even pay for a spot on a beach to be able to access the beach. So the opposite of that neoliberal capitalism, instead communal spaces, free spaces where we can connect with one another. And this goes really well into the last question to explore, which again, another quote from your writing,

when great things don't exist, either out of complacency or out of design, scarcity and exploitation, the best thing to do is to find a few allies and create the paradise that you crave. So bringing back this theme of this is not an individual project, right, but this is a collective one, then this goes to this idea, this invitation that you say, get together in groups and create this paradise that you crave. So maybe first, can you just talk about that more generally? And then I want to ask secondly about the actual projects and communities that you two are a part of. So first, tell us about this idea that desires are social and we need to do this together, this collective pursuit of critical hedonisms.

Why is that so important? Yeah, I mean, basically because there's no point in freeing yourself if you're surrounded by people who are still struggling. You're also going to be disempowered. Most of our desires are shaped in the forge of sociality and culture. And so we really need to get together to remake our and remap our desires. And yeah, the sort of like a concrete form that we argue people should use to bring this about is the sort of consciousness raising group. And what's incredible about consciousness raising groups, they're brought around by the Wibbins and Gay Liberation Front in the 70s, 60s and 70s, but they're a way to basically transform

your individual subjectivity as part of a group. And what's amazing about that is the scale at which you're sort of engaging in sort of transformation. So there's sort of two myths, I think two competing myths, which are both kind of extreme about like where sort of agency occurs. So the first is like the myth and the individual that, oh, an individual just is this totally self-isolated unit. But I think there's another myth of the sort of total collective where like individuals don't matter at all. And so the scale that we're sort of trying to look at,

and this is inspired by The Listening Society, this amazing book on sort of meta-modern politics, is the transpersonal. So trying to consider that individuals are a meaningful location, social location, but so too is the collective. And really trying to honor both and to see how they're both sort of folded into each other.

Yeah, because again, like our desires are learned in social and cultural settings. And if you want to change your desires, you're not gonna have much luck if you try to do that on your own. But if you have a community around you that's like validating your choices, let's say you want to change your way of living, you want to stop living in a nuclear family house. Well, if you're just doing that alone in the world, then people are just going to be like,

oh, you downgraded and now you live in an apartment. But if you're doing this as a community, then you'd be like, yes, we all have decided to sell our stupid houses and move into an apartment building, or we've all decided to stop paying these ridiculous mortgages and to live in one city block and to split that up among ourselves or whatever. And so that stops being a personal choice and starts being a collective choice. Yeah, I think that's right. We don't really have that much agency as individual units We have some but collectively collective power is a really transformative

Unit of change in society. And so I think what's interesting about the sort of union of the consciousness-raising Circle and the collective project is that you can bring a group of people together in the consciousness-raising sort of circles You can work together to develop your values where you bridge the personal to the political. So that's a place where you're like holding each other accountable and working through tensions together and talking about your different experiences in the world and how you want to get free. And then rather than that just being something you talk about, building a collective project is where you can manifest those values in the world and start to see those sort of values transformed into something

in reality. And I think that is an incredibly powerful thing that anyone can do where they are. So just to flesh this out for folks, can either of you give a concrete example of a consciousness raising group that you're a part of? Just to give us like, what does that look like and feel like so that we can also imagine finding one or creating one wherever we are in the world? Certainly. I think Zerreen and I are both involved in quite a few of these, but just to give an example is directly related to critical hedonism. So we run a series of discussions here in London called Critical Hedonismsisms where people come together and discuss the politics of pleasure and we choose a different topic each time and we just discuss it as a group

basically and usually there's a discussion leader who just kind of like shepherds people through that conversation. But yeah, we all sort of try to like break down like our own relationships to the thing and to be analytical about the concept. So we had a discussion about incels for example, which was really a broader discussion about sexual hierarchy. We've had discussions about addiction and substance abuse and party scenes and nightlife, and we've had a lot of these. And yeah, one of the things I just want to say that Critical Hedonism is trying to do, and this, if you go on our Critical Hedonism's website, you'll find this there. There's a sort of kit that you can deploy in your own community.

It basically, it gives you some prompts and a way to like approach just hosting your own consciousness raising group. Cause there's no reason like we should gatekeep this as a thing. Like everyone should be able to just like do this in their own community. Kind of like the way you have AA meetings, like AA meetings can just. Pop up on their own, as long as they follow a specific set of sort of principles. It's like they can just exist and they're free and other people can sort of engage in them and you know different people have different perspectives on that program but I love the idea that this

can just be something that spreads anywhere that there's a desire for it that you know no one has to give you permission to do it. Yeah I can give you another example so one of the sort of circles I'm in and have been part of for many years now is for people impacted by incarceration and what's unique about this is it brings together anybody impacted by incarceration. Perhaps you have an incarcerated child, perhaps you're formerly incarcerated yourself, perhaps you're currently incarcerated, perhaps you just find the carceral system to be abhorrent and you feel impacted by that. And so it's not just a group for X group of people, it's

bringing together people from all sides of this issue into a place where they can talk about what it's like to be them. And after some years in this group, people started articulating the things that they wanted. They were like, why can't we have this or why doesn't this thing exist? And so we built those things. We started to build homes for people that are coming out of prison, that are not just full of people coming out of prison, but are half non-incarcerated people, half formerly incarcerated people. And that was a direct collective project that emerged from this sort of consciousness raising endeavor.

And to Eric's point, both of us have been involved in many, many different versions of this. And I think it's a really powerful way of taking a set of collective values and even collective injuries and not wasting those injuries, but turning them into something that gets you all free together. Yeah. Well, thank you for this invitation for us to either find others to be a part of a consciousness raising group or find a consciousness raising group near us. And then of course, from that point, seeing what emerged, what are the needs, how can we meet them together,

how can we change the structures so that we can have a critical hedonism that we participate in. And then this other larger invitation from this conversation that I'm coming away with is, may we find joy in the everyday and plentiful and for extending plenty to others. So the closing invitations from each of you as we close our conversation, anything else that you want to share or any closing invitations for those listening? Yeah, so I think this is a quote that I take a lot of inspiration from because I think it really points to the sort of transpersonal element. It's a Judith Butler quote, and they say, I'm most glad to have my personal liberty, but I only have it to the extent that there is a sphere of freedom in which I can operate. That sphere is co-produced by people who live together, or who have agreed to live in a world in which the relations between them make possible their individual sense of being free.

So perhaps we might regard personal liberty as a cipher of social freedom. And social freedom cannot be understood apart from what arises between people what happens when they make something in common or when in fact they seek to make or remake the world in common the world is given to me because you are also there as to one to whom it is given the world is never given to me alone but always in your company without you the world does not give itself we are worldless without one another. It's hard to follow that up. I just want to basically say very simply that a better world is certainly possible, that most of our resources we waste, and if we can just come up with a better

way to use our resources and a better way to take advantage of our proximity to other people, which I think is like the core joy in life, is like being in connection with other people in ways that feel nice. There's basically no limit to the degree of emancipation that we can experience in our lives. Yeah, and I invite people to try to find ways to do that creatively. You've been listening to an Up conversation with Eric Wyckoff Rogers and Zarina Agnew. Zarina is a trained neuroscientist formerly at University College and then UCSF, a self-described guerrilla scientist and part of the Beyond Return organization. Eric Wyckoff Rogers is a historian, writer, community organizer, and designer currently

based in London. Eric runs a third space project in London, convenes a discussion series on the politics of pleasure, and is the author of the critical Hedonist Manifesto. Please check the show notes for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode. Thank you to Knight Cafe Radio for the intermission music. Upstream theme music was composed by me, Ravi. Upstream is almost entirely listener funded. We could not keep this project going without your support.

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