Alasdair Cannon’s reply to a review of “Holding Patterns” (2022)
Early last year, a self-proclaimed “paleoconservative” and “reactionary” magazine, O&R, reviewed Alasdair’s first book, Holding Patterns (2022). Today, Alasdair published a reply to that review, which outlines some of the theoretical underpinnings of the Infinite Discontent project.
Since my first book of leftist cultural criticism, Holding Patterns, was published in 2022, it has attained the strange distinction of being reviewed in one of Australia’s leading progressive publications — Arena Quarterly — and the country’s newest “paleoconservative” and “reactionary” right-wing magazine, Observer & Review. Both reviews offer sustained analyses of my book and its politics, but from wildly different political perspectives. One, broadly left-wing. The other, radically, specifically, and proudly right-wing.
O&R’s editor, a man named Edwin Dyga, invited me via my publisher early last year to respond to the second review (published in Vol. 2, Issue 2, №3, 2024). Ordinarily, I wouldn’t reply to a review of my work. Yet at this moment in time — when the world’s most powerful country is veering rapidly toward unmitigated fascism, when Israel continues its genocidal onslaught against the Palestinian people despite the so-called “ceasefire,” and Russia’s war in Ukraine rages on— it is also more important than ever both to refute far-right ideas and to present progressive alternatives in their place.
The review in O&R is anonymously authored, and contains much I could discuss further. When the reviewer asserts, for instance, that my work is “ironically a reflection of a world bereft of essentialist meaning” (p.288), I could reply that this is not ironic as I do not believe such meaning exists. I could also mention the meanings the reviewer mistakenly projects into my book. I never described my boss in the book’s first essay as a “diversity hire manager” nor did I mention “affirmative action appointments” (pp.282–283); I only called her a “director.” One could argue such mistakes demonstrate the reviewer’s sexism and anti-woke fixations.
But instead I want to address what I take to be the central disagreement between myself and the reviewer. This disagreement is firstly psychological and epistemic and finally ethical and political. It involves differences between the reviewer’s theory of empathy, sketched on p.290 of the review, and my own, which is unstated but implicit in Holding Patterns, and laid out in more detail in my new book, Infinite Discontent: Writings on the Allure of Fascism (eidolon ink, 2024). Whatever similarities (superficial, in my eyes) the reviewer perceives between my leftist views and their “reactionary” position (p.282), the differences in our views of empathy ultimately leave us diametrically opposed as political writers and ethical actors.
The reviewer’s theory of empathy is as follows:
“empathy” cannot be legislated… It is cultivated by a religious tradition that cannot survive the diversification of moral perspectives and which is actively undermined by the attack on cultural particularism. It is unsurprising that people do not treat each other humanely given that they no longer see an ethical reflection of themselves in the face of their neighbour” (p.290).
This view of empathy should be read alongside what they took to be lacking in my political criticism (i.e., that I do not treat “the religious” with “the urgency and import it demands”) (p.290):
“Many of the issues identified by Cannon can also be referenced to Western society’s loss of culturally inherited structures of transcendence (i.e., so-called ‘organised religion’ which is rooted in the history of a people)” (p.288).
And alongside their “paleoconservative” claims about psychosocial wellbeing:
“The maintenance of a community’s essentialist characteristics [are] an important mechanism to ensure social and individual, psychological as well as physical, wellbeing” (p.291).
The position implied by these statements is clear. Firstly, psychosocial wellbeing and the capacity for empathy depend on the maintenance of the religious tradition and the community’s “essentialist characteristics” that emerge from the history “of a people.” That tradition and those essentialist characteritsics, however, are undermined by the “diversification of moral perspectives,” or what we might generically refer to as the presence of otherness or difference. Difference therefore undermines the capacity for empathy and psychosocial well-being, leading to the sociopolitical problems that concern myself and the reviewer. These problems subsequently give rise to the need for a politics that insulates a people against difference and preserves their community’s essentialist characteristics, its religion, and its traditions — to a need for “paleoconservatism,” in short.
Cultural pluralism, the reviewer states, destroys a community’s capacity for empathy. They also suggest empathy relies on a prior similarity between people, generated by their shared cultural background or “structures of transcendence.” This implies that empathy cannot function across cultural differences, and derives from history rather than immediate, present experience. I cannot treat you humanely, this perspective suggests, unless you are like me. And you can’t be like me if you are other.
This an essentially narcissistic vision of empathy that ends in an essentially narcissistic form of ethics, politics, and human relations. Its invitation to racism and ethno-nationalism is undeniable. (Ironically, it also makes a very good case for Australian decolonisation.) It is also precisely the ethical position I critique at length in Holding Patterns.
My vision of empathy and politics — a psychoanalytic one — is rather different. For me, empathy depends not on “inherited structures of transcendence” but on the ceaseless and mundane “imaginative labour” (a term I borrow from Afropessimist theorists Jared Sexton and Frank B. Wilderson III) the subject carries out as a condition of its existence. As we navigate the world, I contend, we engage in the unending psychic work of identification, negation, projection, introjection, incorporation, and expulsion — the work of fantasy, in a word. This work, as Freud’s theoretical output from 1914 onwards suggests, constitutes the ego’s character, sustains human groups, and enables our reality-testing. It also defines and redefines the borders of the “human” and the “inhuman,” self and other, the desirable and the undesirable, the ideal and the abject, and so on. The same work, Donald Winnicott and Jessica Benjamin later argued, determines what we take to be “real” and “imaginary.” It underwrites our recognition of the other as a subject in their own right, too.
This work, I argue, is ultimately an epistemic labour. It creates our knowledge of self, other, and reality. It also alerts us to the limits of that knowledge. As Freud suggests in his metapsychological paper, “The Unconscious,” this labour of fantasy is the sole source of our understanding of the other’s subjectivity — of empathy, that is, or what Heinz Kohut called the “vicarious introspection” we accomplish through imaginative activity. This work also constitutes the grounds of politics and ethics as such. It determines who or what we recognise as valid political entities. Inversely, it establishes who or what may be disregarded, excluded, subjugated, or otherwise exposed to violence. This imaginative labour is “metapolitical” (p.290), then, but also immanent, contingent, and determined by the politics it establishes. One might define it as a “grassroots” metapolitics that opposes the “transcendent” metapolitics that the reviewer sees as lacking in my work (p.290).
This view of empathy and politics is not articulated explicitly in Holding Patterns. Yet it is part of the reason the book exists. For me, the book is an attempt to perform exactly this kind of imaginative labour — to use empathy and introspection, alongside memory, fantasy, and analytical thought, to break the “holding patterns” of thought and action that ensnare us in relations of dehumanisation, domination, or subjugation, as victims, perpetrators, spectators, or otherwise. The book — my literary/political project more broadly, too — stakes itself upon the claim that we can only overcome our repeated ethical failures through this kind of imaginative labour, through which we contest and rewrite the boundaries of thought and our visions of the future, and, by extension, relationality, action, and politics.
It is through imaginative labour that we do politics, that politics becomes possible. For me, the presence of otherness — both within different groups of people and other individuals, and, perhaps most critically, within ourselves — is precisely why we must engage in political imaginative labour. Psychoanalytic theory is clear on this point: it takes work to establish, maintain, expand, and contract the boundaries of who or what we recognise as human. I believe it is our ethical responsibility — insofar as we value peace over violence — to do this work.
Yet for the reviewer, politics is envisioned as a means of insulating ourselves against precisely this labour. The reviewer’s “paleoconservative” ideas of empathy, selfhood, community, and religious tradition invite us to abandon this work. Their view of empathy and ethics suggests we should not entertain the “diversification of moral perspectives” because doing so is corrosive to individual, social, and communal wellbeing. But this kind of diversification necessarily follows from the attempt to live among and empathise with the people of different cultural traditions and religious backgrounds that make up our world today. Indeed, this diversification follows from the attempt to recognise anyone at all that we do not conceive narcissitically as a reflection of ourselves.
Paleoconservative politics emerges from just this kind of narcissism, and in fact seeks to create it. It calls us to separate ourselves into communities united under our own particular and historically cultivated “structures of transcendence,” into groups insulated against the otherness diversity brings. Within these groups, it suggests, we need not work to empathise with those outside the community because they have been excluded. It also suggests we need not work to empathise with those inside the community, because we believe — falsely, I must add — we have achieved identity, unity and narcissistic wholeness under our shared “structures of transcendence.” Paleoconservatism envisions an erasure of otherness, both inside and outside the “organic community” (p.289) it seeks to establish and preserve.
Even acknowledging difference is dangerous for the paleoconservative. The paleoconservative therefore fetishises a pre-emptive cancellation of imaginative labour. To me, the paleoconservative solution is not political, then, but anti-political. It is an abnegation of responsibility, built upon psychic closure and the unnecessary limitation of the mind. It invites the failure of imagination — the preservation, but never the expansion of empathy. In this sense, it is a precise example of the hopeless, nihilistic politics I work to reject. (It is utopian, too. Our imaginative labour does not even cease in our sleep; we must continue to imagine the other while we live, a fact shown by the far-right’s endless need to invent fictions that demonise those they wish to exclude from their communities.)
The belief that one neither can nor should empathise with others unlike themselves because their tradition, community, and finally, their self, “cannot survive” the encounter (p.290) is a sign that the subject fears reality and yearns for a world without difference. It indicates what Michael Balint called a “basic fault” in the subject’s being. It shows that they desire a reality devoid of one of its most basic, ontological features and a community denuded of anything resembling actual community or relationality. It belies a yearning for nothingness. Translated into political action, this yearning aims to make the stillness of death a feature of the world, and so demands an unthinkable degree of violence. That violence first harms the other, but ultimately ends in self-destruction: the far-right, as authors from Albert Camus to Christina Wieland have argued, unconsciously desire suicide. We are all familiar with the historic and present examples of such violence — Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza is its foremost manifestation in recent years. Any activist working for peace today must seek its prevention and end.
In the Editorial of the edition of O&R where this review appeared, Dyga writes that “nothing seems real any longer” in our political moment because we have no transcendent “reference points” left. If the reviewer shares this feeling, perhaps they ought to address their refusal of the work of imaginative labour before they turn to God or the “transcendent” for answers. For their refusal of this work, which enables empathy between people despite their differences, which allows us to distinguish between fantasy and reality, and which allows us to collectively create new ways of living together, is, in the most precise sense, nihilistic. It is a rejection of reality and of any possibility of hope for living peacefully with others. It is a sign, too, not of the self’s strength but of its absolute destitution — a destitution that cannot be reversed through a fearful retreat into narcissistic enclosure, but only through work that creates peaceful connections with the others unlike ourselves with whom we share our world.