Ten years ago millennials were mocked by older generations for enjoying avocado toast while complaining that housing was arithmetically unaffordable. This was a resentful mockery. An accusation by older people that millennials didn’t know how good they had it, which ignored the fact that, despite being young, they didn’t have it that good compared to their accuser’s salad days. Today, they are roasted differently, by younger people of TikTok for millennial’s conflicted love of Harry Potter in the face of J. K. Rowling’s transphobia. At the same time, their housing situation has become increasingly untenable unless they can enter the fraught realm of parental loans or have sold themselves into careers making powerpoints for the most mendacious of corporations. This mockery is more like trying to cajole a friend out of self-infantilisation in the face of the struggles we both have to share. Born in 1990, I am in the middle of this heuristic designation of “millennial”. When I consider many of my peers as they struggle to make sense of what to do with their educations, values and desires in a political economy that is not only indifferent to them but often actively hostile, I am struck by the distress and stuckness they experience. Many, even those well versed in political, social and cultural critique, cannot understand why they find themselves in situations where there is seemingly no right move to make to live the life that they want. Often, I find myself in this position too.
The material analysis of millennial discontent charts the avaricious rise of house prices, the educational arms race that has increased competition for the dwindling number of jobs that would actually allow one some degree of autonomy and creativity, and the closure of educational and welfare loopholes that gave people the breathing room to consider what they could do. And while this explains the environmental circumstances of frustration, it doesn’t explain the depth and severity of anxious despair that prevails. For that, we have to unpick the hurt that lies beneath. To do so, we should attend to how the problem is so often phrased by those who followed the familially and educationally reinforced structure to end up where they are. “I thought I did everything right, why is it not working”.
It is this sentiment that captures what burnout is as opposed to stress, exhaustion, grief or terror. Burnout can contain those things but it also comes with disappointment. Burnout is finally landing your ‘dream job’ only to find the pay and conditions cause you to realise what a mistake it was to dream of labour. The job cannot be what you imagined. Especially, if what you imagined was an end to the disquieting itch of desire and the nagging feeling that you are being exploited. The stress of demands that exceed your capacity, the exhaustion that follows, the grief of a dream now lost and the terror of the abyss that this opens up are all difficult to cope with, especially in a world filled with stress-inducing, exhausting, grievable and terrifying things, and more so if they compound. But burnout intensifies this to paralysis, as the disappointment that accompanies it is less a judgment about your objective situation, but self-directed at the feeling of gullibility that let you think happiness could really be something that someone like you could achieve. And this is if you get the job. Then you might have money to distract yourself with treats. But many in post-financial crisis economies don’t get close to positions of prestige or even financial stability. And while it may be articulated differently, and different dreams may be the ones that were dashed and there may be various flavours of the scorn we pour upon ourselves, this sensation would seem to be widely felt by millennials across the swathe of the broadly defined middle class in the “post-industrial” parts of the world.
So why do we, millennials, make an objectively difficult situation more intractable for ourselves? Here, Gilles Deleuze’s redefinition of the psychodynamics of masochism can provide a model for what is going on. Unconvinced by the popular conflation of sadism and masochism that Freud instantiated as sadomasochism, Deleuze suggests that these capacities for the enjoyment of inflicting or receiving pain reside within all of us and are accessible to different degrees and in different ways depending on our experience. However, they each operate under distinct logics. I would argue that the anxious despair of millennial burnout is a case of millennial masochists experiencing the vertigo of the violation of the logic around and under which they had structured their enjoyment and sublimated their desires.
So, what do these terms mean? Sadism takes its name from the sexually transgressive novels of the French writer and libertine, the Marquis de Sade. De Sade’s work, such as The 120 Days of Sodom, or the School of Libertinage (1785), indulge in fevered descriptions of uncouth, exploitative, violent and often murderous sexual practices that attempt to evoke a pleasure for the reader through the accounts of pain and suffering described in the stories inflicted mostly of young women. Masochism got its name from the Slavic writer, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose most famous novel, Venus in Furs (1870), is narrated by a man utterly in love with a woman from whom he can only receive pleasure by establishing elaborate games in which she is his mistress who must punish and demean him.
In 1905, Sigmund Freud used these terms to describe the character of the fantasies and sexual behaviours he heard from his patients, which he considered to be symptomatic of aberrant parental relationships in a child’s psychological development. Put far too simply, these tendencies were considered as short-circuit resolutions to the Oedipus complex, in which the child’s desire for the affection of the parent of the opposite sex results in a dissociative fear and hatred of their same-sex parent, who they consider a rival for this affection. Again, putting it too crudely and allowing for the cis-heteronormative assumptions that are baked into this theory, for a boy, one would become a sadist by removing this complex feeling by over-identifying with the father in an attempt to gain mastery over the objects of their desire (the mother), and one would become a masochist by over-identifying with the mother to take on the role of a desired object. This led to the linking of the terms as sadomasochism, where sadism and masochism become polar opposite expressions of an underlying Oedipal logic.
Deleuze has some problems with the Oedipus complex, as is evidenced by his co-authored volume with Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus from 1972. We can read the seeds of this discontent with this complex in his essay, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, which came out five years earlier in 1967. In this essay, he argues that these symptoms should not be understood merely as different expressions of the Oedipus complex but as distinct articulation of the problem of desire’s implicit agency within a number of oppressive structures, including the family. So, Oedipus is still around in Deleuze’s theory but in a post-structuralist manner informed by Spinoza’s ethics of affect and a critical reading of the psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan. Meaning that, for Deleuze, this Oedipal problem of child development must be understood as being inseparable from the historical and material forms of social organisation, and the symbolic structures and embodied affects that induce sensation and produce the imagination.
In short, Deleuze claims that people are not either sadists or masochists, and indeed to the extent that these groups could be distinguished, they really don’t have much to offer each other. As he writes:
“The fact that the one enjoys inflicting while the other enjoys suffering pain seems to be such striking proof of their complementarity that it would be disappointing if the encounter did not take place. A popular joke tells of the meeting between a sadist and a masochist; the masochist says: “Hurt me.” The sadist replies: “No.” This is a particularly stupid joke, not only because it is unrealistic but because it foolishly claims competence to pass judgment on the world of perversions. It is unrealistic because a genuine sadist could never tolerate a masochistic victim…”
The sadist cannot enjoy a masochist because the pain and humiliation they would inflict would allow the masochist to experience enjoyment thus denying the sadist their enjoyment of having the power to harm the object of their desire. While the masochist cannot enjoy a sadist because the pain and humiliation inflicted on them must serve as a permission structure, on their dominator’s authority, to allow them to enjoy themselves without tarrying with the agential problem of their desire.
It is in this convoluted relationship to enjoyment that we will find a clue to the despair of millennial burnout, because Deleuze, through a careful reading and Masoch and de Sade, shows from this apparent incompatibility the disavowed presence of sadism in Masoch and masochism in de Sade. In Masoch, the sadism is found in the satisfaction of the apparently submissive narrator as he forces his love to become his mistress even as she protests and is hurt by taking on the role. In de Sade, his attention to the pain of the victims of the sexual tortures is more proper to one who finds ecstasy in agony than an apathetic master merely playing with objects. Thus, for Deleuze, one does not find one’s self at a point on the sadomasochistic continuum but instead with habitual tendencies to actualise the potential of both in either a proper or pseudo form.
As mentioned above, Delueze explodes the Oedipal origins of the practices to encompass the chain of symbolic associations that make the family something entangled in society, history and embodiment. Thus the sadistic identification with the father becomes an identification with the institution as a arbitrary, apathetic authority that sets and enforces the law. Even the libertine rebellions of de Sade are not so much about attaining freedom from institutions as gaining their dominant position. The masochist, on the other hand, never learnt to challenge the law as it exists and instead lives in fear that their enjoyment will violate it. So instead, the masochist casts the mother as a representative of the law with whom a contract can be negotiated. Believing that their desire and its evidence in enjoyment cannot be allowed by the law, Deleuze argues that the masochist sets up an arrangement with their torturer so they are punished in advance and thus allowed to enjoy themselves later. Neither of these tendencies should be read as laudable or risible. They are merely different ways of responding to the call to action that comes with desire as it encounters the material resistance and symbolic restrictions of the world.
I don’t want to insist on the Oedipal language or even Deleuze’s reworking of the psychoanalysis at play here. Father and mother should be read as referring to much more nebulous assemblages of things that anchor the desire to affect the world and the desire to be protected from being affected by it, respectively. It is with this expanded notion that I want to argue that the burnout, the anxious despair, we see in many people born between roughly 1981 and 1996 comes from feeling that the masochist’s contract has been violated. Coming of age at the end of “the end history”, as millennials did, our entire social environment was one in which the desire to become the institution, to inflict our desires upon the world, to change it, had been apparently abolished. Instead, we were left with one ostensible option that looked like a contract. We would be allowed to enjoy our lives if we submitted ourselves to the institutions of the school, the university, the internship and the market. But unlike the good faith one could find in setting up such a contract in a BDSM relationship, the libidinal and political economy of this moment in history had no such ethical commitments. The contract we tacitly agreed to was only ever a discourse of political expediency and a cultural niaveté that allowed us to believe we should abandon the violent and creative potential of our desires for the promised pleasure that would follow our punishment. Unfortunately, this impasse seems to linger on because, according to Deleuze, the masochist not only places their punishment ahead of their enjoyment, but “waits for pleasure as something that is bound to be late, and expects pain as the condition that will finally ensure (both physically and morally) the advent of pleasure”. As masochists, we risk believing our patience will grant us what we want if we can wait a little longer, prolonging our suffering and buying time for an unjust and collapsing system.
We should, however, not think of millennial masochism as a weakness or a folly. What Deleuze’s model of masochism and sadism offers is an abstract framework in which we can develop ethical ways to utilise these capacities and mechanisms for negotiating with our desire and agency. We can both embrace the desire to abolish the institutions we have inherited while establishing our own and the desire to conditionally give our agency over to others. To me, this would seem to be the project left to us as the social contract from the world before the 2008 financial crash finally, entirely disintegrates.
While it may seem excessive to propose an ethics of responding to the crises of care, community, climate, capital, purpose, and power, in the present with a reading of what many may consider niche sexual perversions, I’d argue it’s actually about adequate. Because these crises are practically unaddressable while we are still stuck in the distress of frustrated desire and broken contracts. And coming to terms with that frustration means acknowledging both the violation that has taken place, and the violence, that is the denial of our desire, we did to ourselves in believing it would be otherwise. This should be done without judgment but merely as a recognition of what has been, which can serve as an invitation to do otherwise. In Aliens and Anorexia, Chris Kraus refers to what she calls an S/m moral, “it isn’t chemistry or personality that counts, it’s ‘what you do’”. The doing of sadism is easy enough to understand. But millennial masochists need to learn what they have been doing too; making contracts to delegate our desires to sadists who do not care about us. What we should do now, is make contracts with those who will respect our terms of enjoyment.
MaconHolt - Aesthetic Theory 
Leave a comment