CathERi NE RyaN

MANIFESTO FOR

The New
Political Pop
Song

15
INTRODUCTION
Left Melancholia and Dwelling in the Negative
The left, it is professed, is losing, if it hasnt lost already; our neoliberal present is intolerable and
yet appears insurmountable. This argument takes myriad forms. Wendy Brown writes of the
melancholia that follows the loss of the promise that left analysis and left commitment would
supply its adherents a clear and certain path toward the good, the right, and the true.1 Lauren
Berlant characterizes the present as a time in which many fantasies of the political good-life are
fraying, including upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and lively, durable
intimacy.2 Nina Power puts it thus:

It has to be admitted that we have lost, if not quite everything, then nearly. The strug-
gle continues. But it cannot do so without the admission that we have been and continue
to be hurt, time and time again. For some, many, every day is a continual exercise in
the external construction of failure by the state.3

Each theorist acknowledges these wounded situations in order to ensure that the most pressing
political challenges continue to be addressed. For Brown, the left must overthrow its melancholic
and conservative habits,4 its civilizational despair, to avoid abandoning its dual projects of
puncturing common neoliberal sense and developing a viable and compelling alternative to
capitalist globalization.5 For Berlant, the task is to figure out how to be with different negativi-
ties so that we can convert our non-sovereignty or out-of-controllness into an awkwardness that
is affirmatively energizing for the work of transforming sociality itself.6 Power advocates the
analysis of negative states, all the better to make them militant where we can.7
If it is granted that these analyses and injunctions are correct, then from a practical point of
view, it must be asked: upon what foundation can such a project be built, given that so many are
depressed and anxious? How do you dwell in the negative without it absorbing you entirely?
Without ones energies dissipating? Without beginning to fetishize a species of abject hopeless-
ness, as Laurie Penny warns many left-wing groups and progressives have done?8 It cannot be
through sheer willpower alone.
Following Keats, we can acknowledge that remaining in negativity requires a capability, a
resourcefulness, but we must also insist that such aptitudes for endurance are not innate.9
Dwelling in a negative state is an art, a techne, a labour requiring supportive techniques, practices,
and devices. Each individual relies on external help. We must begin by admitting that the means
and procedures we presently havemindfulness apps, positive thinking, self-medicating with
booze and Xanax, yogaare insufficient to the task at hand.

PART ONE: Against Bootstrapism

To dwell in the negative is to feel like rubbish. Consider the following quotidian examples: an
hour-and-a-half s wait to speak to the government functionary who will deny ones dole claim; or
being informed that one must reapply for the job one already has, competing alongside the new,
casual employees, who have been brought on to replace existing employees at half the cost. Feeling

16 PUBLIC 55 RYAN
stressed and panicky, one might go through a weeks worth of wine in a day, day after day, or be
unable to leave bed. What happens then?
We all know what a standard, neoliberal remedy would be: pull yourself together, try some
CBT if you can stand the length of the wait for an appointment, or get an analyst (you do have
hundreds of dollars to spare each week, dont you?). Think inspiring thoughts about how much
Beyonc gets done each day. Take some me time. Download an app that gamifies the endless
imperative to be productive, disguising being chased by credit agencies and ticket inspectors as
being chased by something fun, like zombies or dungeon monsters.10
No matter how soft or hard the discipline proposed, this is all bootstrapism: the injunction to
haul yourself up by your own shoelaces, the endless recommendation of the same (best) practices
of the self. Self-restraint, self-knowledge, self-management, self-controlthese are the virtues that
bestow success, and those without them, the tired and depressed, well, they bloody well deserve
whatever doesnt come to them. Lacking moral fortitude, spineless, disorganized mouth-breathers
should be crushed beneath the bureaucratic wheels of the privatized state. If you didnt spend all
your money drinking with your friends, you could be a millionaire like me! (Please ignore my bil-
lion dollar inheritance).11
An article of faith for the rarely-questioned neoliberal orthodoxy is the lie that each of us as
individuals can sustain ourselves mentally, physically, and emotionally outside of networks of care
and support. Prescriptions for self-management are not given solely because of ideology, as if the
political impasses of the present were simply a problem for thought. We must turn in on ourselves,
lean in12 to the table ourselves while bracketing our exhaustion and pessimism, because the
material basis for robust collective social forms no longer exists. Avenues which historically pro-
vided sustenance have been eroded: union memberships are at an all-time low; few have time for
student politics while paying so much in fees and working two jobs; artists, now post-studio,
address only their own laptop screens; workers no longer have an employer or a workplace but are
part of the sharing economy, freelancing for a disruptive organization whose name sounds like
an evil, alien planet from a B-grade sci-fi movie (Plansify, Uber, Deliveroo, Foodora).13
Given the historical erosion of traditional sites of collective support, is it any wonder that we
are susceptible to the advice that we must run ourselves like so many individual entrepreneurs?
Where once we had company, now we have only companies: little mini-companies called selves
homo oeconomicus, as Brown puts it, financialized selves endlessly measuring our rankings, likes,
and ratings. We are no longer humans but so many instances of human capital, relentlessly requir-
ing self-investment and attendance to the metrics of our self-realization.14 The idea that we are
atomized does not arise from individual thought, of course. Individuals did not invent these prac-
tices of entrepreneurial self-governance in isolation: investments in freelancing, online dating, and
internships are learned. As Foucault reminds us, modes of relation to self are not generated from
some space that is internal to the subject. They are, rather, power relations like any other, with
reciprocal connections to social, political, and epistemological structures.15 The irony of the atom-
ized, neoliberal mode of relating to the self is that it is, like all modes of subjectivation, a collective
product resulting from shared techniques, practices, training, and media forms. The world view
that figures us as so many monadic entities, that walls us off to be free individuals, comes from
concrete political structures and social apparatuses. Its motto: many people will suffer, but they
will cope as individuals.

17
 Let us return, then, to misery. Faced with problems and anxieties, we want, if not a cure for
our pain, then at least a schema that grants it meaning and intelligibility, that lets us know our mis-
eries are not isolated problems experienced uniquely by us, alone. The danger is that in our hunger
for understanding, we latch onto anything that might explain the situation. We feel uncomfortable
at a party and then find ourselves consumed in an evenings frenzied reading of clickbait articles
about our newly self-diagnosed introversion. We explain the anxiety that makes us want to die by
buying into narratives about how our fight-or-flight, caveman brains arent suited to the modern
world and the constant spikes it induces in our cortisol levels. We find in the announcement of a
new, obscure syndrome the narrative that accounts entirely for a lifetime of awkwardness and
wrong existence. We pray to the graven image of the fMRI brain scan. We take on explanations
that grant, through recognition, a reality to our ghostly, ghastly internal life. This leaves us wide
open to be interpellated by any quackery going. And we will pay for it.
The worst thing about so many contemporary therapies, be they pop psychology or the type
administered by someone with a degree, is their reinforcement of the atomization that makes the
neoliberal world go round.16 They encourage us to fold in further upon ourselves, like horrible
pieces of narcissistic origami, with no reflection upon the social circumstances that underwrite
our sadness. If they ever speak of collective conditions, like the caveman-brain-in-the-modern-
world hypothesis, it is only ever collective in the sense of the Jungian collective unconscious: a
pseudo, ahistorical collectivity without politics that exists only to be the dark counterpart to the
unique, flourishing, self-actualized individual of modernity.
Furthermore, these frameworks imagine the source of our unhappiness to spring from our
organic, biological existence itself. They are instances of what Alenka Zupani identifies as the
rising doctrine of the bio-morality of successfulness, whose axiom is that a person who feels good
(and is happy) is a good person; a person who feels bad is a bad person.17 These doxa naturalize
economic, political, and other social inequities, so that the poorest and the most miserable are no
longer perceived as a socioeconomic class, but almost asa special form of life.18 Through an ide-
ological sleight-of-hand, our negative states come to be grounded in our bare life, in the type of
person we are, incurably.
So, it falls to us to create new therapeutic means. We must formulate new devices and proce-
dures for ourselves while we dwell in our negative states! Fresh, collective strategies that reject
atomization and the perpetual pressure to be enterprising. Novel and cunning sources of solace to
support ourselves and one anothernot in order to feel positive and great, but to find the suste-
nance to remain proximate to the very desire to be political and oriented towards activism, even
when it hurts so bad.
Revolutionaries once daubed walls with the slogan: kill the policeman inside your head. In
what form does this policeman appear today? One of their contemporary guises is the voice that
barks at us to stay positive when everything is negative. Following welfares replacement with
workfare and unemployments reclassification as a psychological disorder, the policeman in the
head is also the belief that what is wrong in the world is only something wrong with ones head.19
But the head-cop cant be killed without a weapon: they have mace, a baton, a Taser, maybe a gun,
most likely even a water cannon. Swatting at them with bare hands wont suffice.
As Brown, Berlant, and Power observe, the left is tempted by civilizational despair. Both the
collective political body and activists actual, corporeal bodies quiver at the memory of insur-

18 PUBLIC 55 RYAN
mountable losses and injustice. To remain committed to progressive political projects then, old
formseven not so old formsmust be turned upside down and emptied out, dug into to see if
they will yield to us anything that will give us more juice.
One strategy that wont work is asceticism: bootstrapism and austerity by another name. It is
unrealistic to suggest that the way out is a turning away from the pleasures of the world in order
to work on the self. We must leave the pious advocacy of fasting, self-punishing regimens, and
mortifications of the (wheat-intolerant) flesh to good, neoliberal subjects. We are not going to
turn off any of our devices, spend less time on Facebook, develop more willpower, or eat a more
balanced diet.
Instead, we will repurpose the pleasures we already have, that our world makes abundant and
freer than air (providing that The Pirate Bay is still online). What is already to hand for us? What
is in abundance?
Pop music.

PART TWO: Manifesto For The New Political Pop Song (NPPS)
The NPPS will be tragic.
The NPPS will be affirmative.
The NPPS will be anthemic.
The NPPS will be lyric, but will not speak of love.
The NPPS will go viral.

1. The New Political Pop Song Will Be Tragic

The decline of the welfare state, the galloping advance of capital, and the death of twentieth cen-
tury left projects: what structure does this trajectory assume? The inevitability of failure, the
forecast of endless struggle, the surety and rapidity of every small, halting progressive victory
being re-appropriated and re-territorialized by conservative forces (queer folk demanding mar-
riage and access to the military; women leaning in to corporate boardroom tables). What generic
structure do these phenomena take? The structure of tragedy!

When your full-time job is gone and the commute to your precarious non-job is long.
Its tragedy! When they privatize and you dont know why.

The commercial pop song is a cultural artifact already present with us that speaks to the inevitabil-
ity of promising things coming to an end, the certainty of hopelessness, and feeling wretched.
What makes pop songs so appealing, so unique? The pleasure they bestow on the intoning of tales
of woe and heartbreak. The cheesy, clichd, upbeat love songthe one that we hear as piped music
in supermarkets and train stationsexpresses relationships of misery and knowing self-torture.
The singer articulates the pain of an attachment that hurts, an attachment to a future promised by
a person, the desire for whom, to use Berlants phrase, is itself an obstacle to your flourishing.20
To recall Powers summation of our political predicament, we have been and continue to be
hurt, time and time again.21 Are we, too, not like the dejected singer of a generic pop song, faced

19
with impossible longing for things that will never be reached or achieved in our lifetimes? The
only difference is that our wounds werent inflicted by some neglectful lover, but by a desire for
equality and justice, by an investment in a progressive project that imagines alternative collective
futures, by our broken trust in institutions that we assumed would always be there for us, but have
been dismantled overnight, faster than we could ever have imagined possible.
If one can never hope to permanently ascend, only for the opportunity to repeatedly climb a
greasy pole, one is living in a situation with a tragic design. An attachment and optimism that is,
as Berlant puts it, cruel.22 And if misery is inevitable, one may as well be miserable with a bit of
drama, taking pleasure and catharsis in the expression of suffering.

2. The New Political Pop Song Will Be Affirmative

The NPPS will not be a song of protest. There are enough protest songs already. The NPPS will
not be a song that teaches a lesson: it will employ no Bildung, didacticism, or killjoy tactics. Its
sonic ointment will contain no flies.
Instead, the NPPS will describe directly all of the blows rent unto the singer by the awfulness
of the contemporary world: the stresses of juggling multiple precarious jobs; the indignity of being
profiled each time you cross a bureaucratic threshold; politicians and pundits constant character-
ization of those who need help as leeches, leaners, and loafers.23 The NPPS will speak of these
misfortunes without judgment or denouncement. It will enumerate them with joy. It will revel in
everything that threatens the singer.
Is this depressing and defeatist? Is what is being advocated the love of ones captorimploring
people to love their chains? No! Although our contemporary neoliberal reality is despicable, we
must speak with Baudelaire and say, you have no right to despise the present.24 This does not
mean that what exists must be accepted as is, or that we must conjure up some reason to excuse
it. It means, rather, that we must look our world in its face, in all its ugliness, rather than instantly
pronounce a moral judgment, as if doing so would permit us to quit the scene of our discontent.
This is why the NPPSs affirmation of tragedy is markedly different from the incessant neolib-
eral demand to remain positive. As Berlant observes, negative states are not an it, they have no
pre-given unity but are, instead, diffuse, loosely, chaotically, and complexly shaped and moti-
vated.25 The command to look on the bright side of things, to breezily swap your present affective
circumstance for another, happier mode, precludes there being sufficient time to understand what
is going on, or to give acknowledgement to the situation at hand. It denies you the chance to gather
yourself together. The NPPS, by contrast, will give sharp form to the incoherent crapulence of our
present, allowing us at least to know our enemies.
The truly life-abnegating song is the one that imposes cheerfulness, that demands we stay
optimistic by disregarding our wounds, as though turning our back on the world would make it
go away, rather than allowing this world to stab us in the back once more. Songs that recommend
such brightness are marked by a plasticky inability to empathize: Vanessa Amarosis Shine;26
Germanys entry into the 2003 Eurovision Song Competition, Lets Get Happy, by Lou;27 Katy
Perrys Firework, with its flippant and meteorologically unsound assurance that After a hurri-
cane / comes a rainbow28 (try telling that to the residents of New Orleans, witnesses to Hurricane
Katrinas swift exploitation by the proponents of disaster capitalism).29 Perhaps the worst of these

20 PUBLIC 55 RYAN
is S Club 7s 1999 hit, Bring It All Back, which doles out the following prescription as a panacea
for lifes setbacks:

Dont stop, never give up

Hold your head high and reach the top
Let the world see what you have got
Bring it all back to you

Hold on to what you try to be

Your individuality
When the world is on your shoulders
Just smile and let it go30

These demands to pick your chin up and forge onwards are none other than pop music playing its
part to administer bootstrapism to us all. Sort yourself out. Ignore all the bad stuff. Stride on for-
wards. Avoid drowning in shit by gripping onto the buoy of your individuality. Ventriloquists
puppets for dominant ideology, S Club 7 literally tell their listener, in times of woe, to bring it all
back to you. Could there be any clearer demand that we cope with neoliberalisms systematic econ-
omization of all parts of socio-political life as individuals? Was Margaret Thatcher part of the song-
writing team? Every problem in the world, the song asserts, must literally be brought back to you.
The NPPS, by contrast, will be neither a lament nor an imperative to cheer up.

3. The New Political Pop Song Will Be Anthemic

The mood of the NPPS: upbeat. The genre: anthemic dance-pop. It will be auto-tuned. It will be
welcomed at parties. It will be the best karaoke torch song.
The NPPS will learn from already-existing exemplars of this form, such as Kylie Minogues
1987 hit, I Should Be So Lucky.31 This is a song about the performance and maintenance of a fan-
tasy that is always acknowledged to be a fantasy: the singers wish that the love she bears towards
her addressee were requited. The content of these fantasies is systematically elaborated: There is
no complication. We walk together hand-in-hand. You fell in love with me / Like Im in love
with you. What is simultaneously foregrounded is that all of these celebrations are located in the
realm of ideation: In my imagination. In my mind. Its only make-believe. Stripped of the
pumping sonic architecture that props up the singers joy, the lyrics are miserable: My heart is
close to breaking and I cant go on faking / The fantasy that youll be mine. The singer must pro-
duce ever more energy to maintain her fantasy, and now this energy is running out. The demands
of keeping up hope, of sustaining imagination, have exceeded her libidinal capacities. And yet, the
Hi-NRG productionits taught, mechanistic, beat-driven relentlessnessensures that these
exclamations about her dreams impossibility are pleasurable. (Kylie would measure up nicely to
Nietzsches test of the eternal return.)
The NPPS can draw on songs that use metaphors of war, destruction, and forced capitu-
lation to figure what love does. ABBAs Waterloo captures the paradoxical pleasure in
disaster that the NPPS must convey: I was defeated, you won the war. Falling for someone

21
is as involuntary and disastrous as being defeated in battle. Backed by a galloping charge of
guitars, jangly keyboards, and hooting saxophones, the band recounts how a particular seduction
happened in quite a similar way to Napoleons 1815 defeat at the Battle of Waterloo.32 (ABBA
observes that The history book on the shelf / Is always repeating itself, as if misquoting Marx
to say that all significant historical events occur, as it were, thrice: first as tragedy, second as farce,
third as a Eurovision entry.) The singers revel in their annihilation: How could I ever refuse /
I feel like I win when I lose. Other songs in this vein, such as Britney Spearss Im a Slave 4 U,
will also act as models for the NPPS.
Finally, the NPPS will draw on songs that present litanies of bad advice, wrong approaches to
life, serious lack of balance, and self-destructive ways of conceptualizing your troubles: Sias cele-
bration in Chandelier of euphoric oblivion, drinking until you swing from the chandelier;33
Adeles intonation in Someone Like You that her source of solace lies in finding someone just
like the lover she has lost, so unable to let go that, in a compulsion to repeat, she can only resolve
to find an exact replica of the source of her present misery.34 If a friend rang up and told you these
things on the phone you would tell them that they were making very unhealthy life choices.
The NPPS, like these songs, will be about the pleasure of impossible, destructive desire. The
joy of having thwarted political fantasies. The same insatiable appetites that could render one
melancholic, that make the sad songs so sad, will be sugary and sweet, a thunderous, shimmery
seduction into being with that which makes you miserable. It will not be a song of phoenix-like
rising, like Destinys Childs Survivor or Gloria Gaynors I Will Survive, but a paean to coping
badly, a death drive hit for the dance floor. Wrong love cannot be loved rightlyand its the sound
of the summer!

4. The New Political Pop Song Will Be Lyric, But Will Not Speak Of Love
The NPPS will be composed in a new mode: the collective lyric. Lyric refers to verse in the first
person, sung by an I, about personal thoughts and feelings. The NPPS is designed for our contem-
porary situation in which we already habitually interpellate ourselves as individual units. Our
songs incline us to turn inwardsto the self, to the couple, to the polyamorous, complicated situ-
ation that sucks up all of the time we didnt have but which we can parcel out nonetheless via
shared Google Calendars. This is what recommends the lyric mode to be the form that we adapt.
And yet almost the only subject matter that ever appears in a pop song is love, as if romance
were somehow the sole transcendent thing remaining for us. If aliens attempted to decipher twenty-
first century civilizations through songs, they would wonder how anyone on our planet managed
to get anything done given that 99.99 per cent of all songs are about tribulations of the heart. Where
does one find a commercial pop song that has routine, everyday experience as its basis (a function
served once, perhaps, by the blues), rather than a singer crying by herself in her room? The ordi-
nariness of being eternally in debt, of having your job outsourced, of feeling anxious because you
cant find a job and there are no jobs but youre constantly told that its your fault somehow?
Proving that these topics can be sung about, a rare few pop songs do speak about labour and
productivity, such as Ru Pauls Supermodel (You Better Work), Britney Spearss Work B**ch!,
and Rihannas Work. They share many features, often being songs of instruction, sung in the second
person to a you who must work, a you who does not voice these verses. The lyrics literally

22 PUBLIC 55 RYAN
repeat, to an extreme degree, the commands of the Protestant work ethic, as if the word work has
caused the singer to stutter. Britney has her all-occasions remedy for every desire or ambition, be it
to improve your appearance or own a luxury car: You better work, bitch.35 Rihanna half-heartedly
recounts the list of directions given to her by some man: He said me haffi / Work, work, work,
work, work, work.36 To the prospective supermodel, Ru Paul has one thing to say, over and over
again: You better work! / (Turn to the left) / Work! / (Now turn to the right).37
Rather than sing a list of instructions, the NPPS will be grounded in subjective experiences:
more cathartic than dictatorial. It will refurbish the lyrical love song, taking its first-person expres-
sion but replacing love and abandonment with austerity and the criminalization of poverty.
Embracing the lived realities of globalized capital, the NPPS will be the art form most ideally
adapted to our age. The soothing experience of climbing into a taxi after a painful break-up and
hearing a song on the radio about a painful break-up will no longer be reserved for those who have
lost love. The NPPS will answer our demand to know what it would be like if the unchanging
awfulness sung about in songs was not the unreachability of a lover, but the impossibility of ever
reaching the political outcome one desires! The improbability of state recognition of injustice! The
unlikelihood of devising new political systems! Let us imagine Kylie Minogues Better the Devil
You Know sung about the Keynesian welfare state! A song that does not say dance like no one is
watching, but dance, listening to music that knows full well that you are being watched, your pre-
cise dance moves and GPS location stored and analyzed by an unaccountable government agency
with a dubious private contract.

5. The New Political Pop Song Will Go Viral

The NPPS may be made in relation to particular political contexts and struggles, in response to
certain collective bereavements and losses. At this point, however, it is clear that the decimations
of capital have sufficient generality and global reach that a pop song created somewhere can be
consumed everywhere. The NPPS will not be a folk musicit will not originate from and be
addressed to a single community. It will be inauthentic and for everyone. Like a good meme,
people will forget to ask about its authorship or where it came from.
Today, people are less engaged than ever with the collective social structures and mass media
that once held our world together and structured our political engagements. We live online and
there is no single public to speak of, only multiple worlds of contagious feelings and tweeted invec-
tive, a series of privately-owned content platforms whose currency is clickbait, outrage, righteous
hashtaggery, and hyperbolic listicles.
We must leave re-establishing collective social spaces and dreaming about genuine, human
forms of connection to othersto anachronistic Labour Party members with their boring mem-
bership cards, to those who would organize a crafternoon. It is an unviable political project to
imagine that we will be able to wind back the digital revolution somehow. Atomization is the order
of the day. Widely distributed print media and television are dead, replaced by Reddit upvoting,
Lets Play Minecraft! videos, and narcissistic Twitter bubbles. The NPPS will infect these channels
and make them its own. It will have record-breaking numbers of views and likes. Pop music is one
of the only forms of mass media left to us. There are no public squares, but there are dance floors.
No newspaper subscriptions or widely-watched nightly news programs, only Spotify playlists and

23
Shazam inquiries. The NPPS must infiltrate every non-public space of our securitized, privatized
non-democracies. It will belong on the announcement systems of airports as much as the Apple
Music Store. It will be the earworm that feeds on the rottenness of our present.
We have nothing to dance to but our pain. Twerkers of all countries, unite!
NOTES
1 Wendy Brown, Resisting Left Melancholy, boundary
2 26.3 (Fall 1999): 22.
2 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2011), 2.
3 Nina Power, Introduction, in Bad Feelings, ed. Nina
Power (London: Book Works, 2015).
4 Brown, Resisting Left Melancholy, 26.
5 Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos (New York: Zone
Books, 2015), 222.
6 Berlant, Negative States, in Bad Feelings.
7 Power, Introduction.
8 Laurie Penny, Life-Hacks of the Poor and Aimless:
On Negotiating the False Idols of Neoliberal Self-
Care, The Baffler, 8 July 2016,
http://thebaffler.com/blog/laurie-penny-self-care.
9 John Keats, The Letters of John Keats, ed. Maurice
Buxton Forman (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1931), 19394.
10 Willie Osterweil, Discipline and Pleasure, The New
Inquiry, 28 March 2016, http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/
discipline-and-pleasure/.
11 Andrew Burrell, Gina Rinehart Tells Whingers: Get
Out of the Pub, The Australian, 30 August 2012,
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/gina-
rinehart-tells-whingers-get-out-of-the-pub/story-
e6frg8zx-1226461138251.
12 Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
2013).
13 Patrick Hatch, Deliveroo and Foodora Accused of
Using Sham Contracts for Bicycle Delivery Riders,
The Sydney Morning Herald, 30 March 2016,
http://www.smh.com.au/business/workplace-relations/
deliveroo-and-foodora-accused-of-using-sham-con
tacts-for-bicycle-delivery-riders-20160329-gnsu7g.html.
14 Brown, Undoing the Demos, 3239.
15 Foucault makes this point in a number of later texts,
including The Government of Self and Others:
Lectures at the Collge de France, 19821983, ed.
Frdric Gros and Arnold I. Davidson, trans. Graham
Burchell (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan,
2010), 3; and Polemics, Politics and
Problematizations: An Interview with Michel
Foucault, in Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth: Essential
Works of Michel Foucault, 19541984, ed. Paul
Rabinow (London: Penguin, 2000), 113.
16 Richard Brouillette, Why Therapists Should Talk
Politics, The New York Times, 15 March 2016,
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/03/15/why-
therapists-should-talk-politics/.
17 Alenka Zupancic, The Odd One In: On Comedy
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008), 5.
18 Ibid., 6.
19 Lynne Friedli and Robert Stearn, Positive Affect as
Coercive Strategy: Conditionality, Activation and the
Role of Psychology in UK Government Workfare
Programmes, Medical Humanities 41 (2015): 4147.
24 PUBLIC 55 RYAN
20 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 1.
21 Power, Introduction.
22 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 1.
23 Joe Hockey, Joe Hockey: We are a Nation of Lifters,
not Leaners, The Australian Financial Review, 14
May 2014, http://www.afr.com/news/policy/tax/joe-
hockey-we-are-a-nation-of-lifters-not-leaners-2014051
3-ituma.
24 Charles Baudelaire as quoted in Foucault, What is
Enlightenment? in Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth,
310.
25 Berlant, Negative States.
26 Vanessa Amorosi, vocal performance of Shine, by
Vanessa Amorosi, Robert Parde, and Mark Holden,
2000, Universal Music 158 577-2, compact disc.
27 Lou, vocal performance of Lets Get Happy, by
Ralph Siegel and Bernd Meinunger, 2003, BMG
82876 51068 2, Jupiter Records 82876 51068 2,
compact disc.
28 Katy Perry, vocal performance of Firework, by Ester
Dean, Katy Perry, Mikkel S. Eriksen, Sandy Wilhelm,
and Tor Erik Hermansen, 2010, Capitol Records
509999 17918 2 5, compact disc.
29 Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of
Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books
and Henry Holt, 2007), 36.
30 S Club 7, vocal performance of Bring It All Back,
by Eliot Kennedy, Mike Percy, Tim Lever, and S Club
7, 1999, Polydor 561 189-2, compact disc.
31 Kylie Minogue, vocal performance of I Should Be So
Lucky, by Stock-Aitken-Waterman, Mushroom, 1987,
K 485, 45 rpm.
32 ABBA, vocal performance of Waterloo, by Bjrn
Ulvaeus & Benny Andersson, 1974, RCA VAK1-0464,
cassette tape.
33 Sia, vocal performance of Chandelier, by Jesse
Shatkin and Sia Furler, 2014, Monkey Puzzle Records
88875 025 972, RCA 88875 025 972, Sony Music
88875 025 972, compact disc.
34 Adele, vocal performance of Someone Like You, by
Adele Adkins and Dan Wilson, 2011, XL Recordings
XLS533D, digital file.
35 Britney Spears, vocal performance of Work B**ch,
by Anthony Preston, Britney Spears, Otto Jettmann,
Ruth-Anne Cunningham, Sebastian Ingrosso, and
William Adams, 2013, RCA 88843 00075 2, compact
disc.
36 Rihanna featuring Drake, vocal performance of
Work, by A. Ritter, Aubrey Graham, J. Braithwaite,
M. Samuels, M. Moir, R. Stephenson, R. Fenty, and
R. Thomas, 2016, Universal Music, digital file.
37 Ru Paul, vocal performance of Supermodel (You
Better Work), by Jimmy Harry, Larry Tee, and Ru
Paul, 1992, Ultrapop ULT 9538-5, compact disc.
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