In his response today, David Rakoff read his 9-year 1st chapter of his book, Half Empty. According to Rakoff, Half Empty is "essentially about pessimism and melancholy: all the other less than pleasant to feel emotions that because they are less than pleasant to feel have been more or less stricken from the public discourse but in fact have their uses and even a certain beauty to them"...."a defense of melancholy, pessimism, anxiety and all of the emotions that have been tarred with the brush of negativity and therefore stricken from the larger cultural conversation. I hope to argue...that, while these emotions may well be hedonically less pleasant, they remain necessary and even beautiful at times."
At the mercy of any readers, I must generalize that there has been a major shift in cultural consciousness towards positive thinking. I think its great. All things positive generally make us feel safe, comfortable, joyous, and lots of other "pleasant" things which ultimately bring us to homeostasis. Positive thinking DOES create a world of images which is generally more supportive of a person's well-being. But I have observed that positive thinking has become overly dogmatic and stifling. Consider what free expression means in the context of reality where there are multiple shades of human experience. With a constant emphasis on being positive we have generalized our labeling system to +/- . Nobody likes to be classified, but of course we have to do it. The way we as a culture have operated in the past is by a complex taxonomy of genre. No genre has ever implicitly signified any kind of qualitative value over others. What I see is a paradigm where +/- means constructive/destructive or worthwhile/notworthwhile.
I do not mean to be partial to pessimism. I find it hard to be an -ist of any kind other than an idealist of free expression and independent thought. What Rackoff does for me is restores some of the compelling frustrations that we have. I often prefer frustration over negativity. When we are frustrated there is something real there and it is by nature ambiguous and difficult. What better means than art to reveal it in ways that might seem indirect or destructive. Rakoff mentioned in his responses today that he recognizes an "optimistic belligerence" which I would explain as a reaction to frustration. Frustration is something that is detrimental to the image of an intellectual, but I think its distinction of how it is dealt with.
