Through their beautiful acts of transgression, youth around the world have translated their affective intensities of frustration, anxiety, and hope into poignant poems, love letters, and short stories on behalf of the causes they feel most strongly about.

Acts driven by climate change in particular have caught the attention of the spectacle, yet the practical effects of these protests have been diminished by their own uniqueness, especially because youth are barred (whether by law or tradition) from being full participants in politics. Ultimately, the responsibility rests on the illusory broad shoulders of the adults which are presented as continuously failing the youth – yet adults are somehow expected to perform a complete reversal to rewrite our stories and retool our approaches. Historically and recently, youth have played major roles in prior activist and revolutionary events including May ’68, Occupy and the Arab Spring when acting alongside other marginalized groups. This collective, artistic approach to activism seems to be the best, if dismal, shot at breaking up the current stagnation – and in some cases, regression – of politics where the power has cohered around rich, Western countries bloated by bureaucracy, infighting and capitalism.

By the time the current generation of youth comes of age as a force to be reckoned with in political offices and other halls of power, it will be much too late for the most vulnerable members of society who face the ravages of imperial warfare, gun and police violence, an upsurge in anti-LGBTQ (especially trans) sentiments and legislation, and perhaps most tragically, climate change. But young people are not uniformly united behind the climate issue – or any other issue – and this will only become truer as we (particularly Western youth) get older. For this reason, it is problematic to celebrate youth too much, especially at the expense of decentering other important activists from marginalized backgrounds. Even if we were united, and even though we possess the techniques to slow down the devastation of the environment, if we fail to reckon with the facts of suffering and desire, our worldmaking attempts will result in destruction rather than being constructive and we will continue to exist in fractured realities and social media bubbles, with no agreement on what is important or true, and injustice will still reign supreme.

In his book Enjoyment Right & Left (2022), Todd McGowan suggests that the new basis of the social should start with accepting the notion that we are all suffering and perpetually consigned to a sense of non-belonging. In another article, McGowan asserts that through this suffering, we can find satisfaction because according to (especially Lacanian) psychoanalysis, society’s views on primary mechanisms of satisfaction are beside the point. Enjoyment as an intrusion is generated through the experience of obstacles to pleasure, whether that be the subject’s pleasure or the pleasure of someone else that the subject forecloses through deliberate acts of exclusion and denial. For example, climate deniers experience an immense amount of enjoyment from the denial of climate change – generating enjoyment from thwarting their own long-term pleasures and accelerating the collective death drive towards ultimate self-destruction. The environmentalist position is sustained by opposing the evil polluter(s) and denier(s) and the enjoyment of sacrificing presumed objects of desire—in this case, the material comforts of the Western world. As of yet, these sacrifices without any structural change are clearly incomplete and mostly serve to generate enjoyment rather than to contribute anything meaningful towards diminishing the effects of climate change. This logic can be applied to almost any political cause today, and just as the environmentalist position is sustained by the position of the denier, each activist is sustained by its opposite.

Double-page spread from Mémoires (Debord 1957)

Far from glorifying the image of the exceptionally suffering artist, my own artistic intention with this move is to demonstrate that we all possess the spirit of artists/activists/politicians with the ability to create (enjoyment, if nothing else) from acting on behalf of our suffering – in this, we might follow the Situationists’ (re)creative acts of (self)destruction as in détournement:

“the integration of present or past artistic productions into a superior construction of a milieu[…], a method which reveals the wearing out and loss of importance of those spheres”, and psychogeography, “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals”.

A psychogeographic guide to Paris—the red arrows indicate affective intensities of emotions between deconstructed and decontextualized districts of the city (Debord 1955)

Starting from suffering is not a completely flattening move, but it does not seek to make hierarchical distinctions between varying levels of suffering, or worthy causes. The political program I am proposing has its ancestors in collaborative undertakings like Occupy Wall Street. In the words of the late, great David Graeber who was one of the masterminds behind Occupy and the broader alter-globalization movement, the global occupy movement was sustained by the following ethos:

“[…]creating and enacting horizontal networks instead of top-down structures like states, parties or corporations; networks based on principles of decentralized, non-hierarchical consensus democracy.”

This typology of anti-structure has the tenets of mutual aid, anti-tokenism equality, knowledge sharing, and accountability built within it to not act on behalf of the downtrodden, but to lift up the voices of the downtrodden. If we (the youth included) are to be the authors of our own demise (a creative endeavor that is shared unevenly in favor of the Global North), why not at least let those who will be forced into their future have the chance to write a page or two before the book is burned?

As activists (especially young ones), our attempts to be creative and positive will often be self-destructive, they will fail, and we will offend one another – in short, we will continue to make art through our actions (whether self-consciously or not). So, we might as well consciously embrace the art form of politics as a creative and destructive force so that we can enjoy our own mistakes and transgressions collectively, rather than at the expense of others. This is not to advocate the acceleration of suffering, but to oppose the use of suffering or past mistakes as an unqualified disqualifier from civil and political society. I admit that what I am articulating here sounds abstract and utopian, but many grassroots collectives here in Iceland (REC Arts Reykjavik, Andrými, what was Jon Gnarr’s Best Party, and the Pirate Party of Iceland, among others) are already living up to many of these tenets through their actions and empowerment of those who are suffering – yet we must still be more expansive. As we do so, it is vital to heed the words of Felix Guattari:

“One might object that large-scale struggles are not necessarily in sync with ecological praxis and the micropolitics of desire, but that’s the point: it is important not to homogenize various levels of practice or to make corrections between them under some transcendental supervision, but instead to engage them in processes of heterogenesis[…]. Ways should be found to enable the singular, the exceptional, the rare, to coexist with a State structure that is the least burdensome possible.” (2014, 51)

Embrace contradictions and keep these principles in mind while you perform your artful activism on behalf of the causes that motivate you, without completely discounting the other issues that exist in the world or forgetting the importance of radical, yet constructive politics in a world full of destructive “nos”.

Artistic Politics from the Ubiquity of Suffering