In an interview between Ivan Lozano and Risa Puleo, the two discussed self-help books as modern day grimoires. Following the logic that negative thought patterns are magic spells cast to weaken one’s ability to be a full agent in her own life, then a self-help book is a tool for removing the spell and reestablishing one’s connection to her power. To test this theory, Puleo reviewed and performed the methods of Louise Hay’s book I Can Do It! (2003). After a couple weeks of deprogramming her negative thought patterns through the methods of affirmation therapy, she had a visceral response and went on a little bit of what would be called a “tear” in Texas and a rant in other places.  

Ali Fitzgerald, Hungover Bear and Friends: It Works if You Work It, January 20, 2014

I double-teamed my unconscious and conscious mind by listening to Steve G. Jones’ subliminal hypnotherapy while I slept and Louise Hay’s affirmations while I was awake. A variation of The Secret™ and the Law of Attraction, affirmations operate on a belief that we are all human energy magnets. If our energy switch is turned to positive frequencies, we will attract positivity in our lives. It also works in reverse: we may be causing our own misfortune by having our switch turned to the dark side of the force. The goal of affirmation therapy is to implant positive messaging deep into your subconscious so positivity becomes foundational to your perception and decision-making. (See the movie Inception. And this.) As a result, positive events will flood your life. The underlying precept is that what goes on in your interior monologue affects your physical reality.
 

Louise Hay’s voice is relaxing like white noise. She is a grandma cheering me on from the sidelines. Go me! I can do it! I am lucky to have been told that I was “good enough, smart enough and gosh darnit, people like me” often while growing up. I was also kept in check when I was unlikeable, which to be honest is about 30% of the time. I think that’s a fair assessment. “And that’s… okay.” We all have things to work out. I can imagine, for the person with an interminable interior monologue of self-defeating thoughts, listening to Louise Hay tell you “You Can Do It!” until you believe it would be very empowering.

But what about the arrogant blowhard with an excess of self-aggrandizing thoughts who’d be better served by self-reflection? For narcissists, affirmations are the uncritical shortcut to a deeper self-righteousness. There’s also Al Franken’s satire of Alcoholics Anonymous, in which Stuart Smalley repeats affirmations as a thinly veiled mask for a deep-seated anger. When positive thinking becomes magical thinking affirmations have the potential to break our tethers to reality. (“I’ve been daydaydreaming about being on the cover of Artforum for months, but haven’t made anything! Why am I not famous yet?!”) Do we really need more ego in the world?

The cheerier cousin of aversion therapy, which attempts to displace one’s positive associations to socially unacceptable stimuli, affirmation therapy overemphasizes the individual’s capacity to be a fully autonomous agent within the context of the larger world. In the mid-1980s, Louise Hay and others proposed that the AIDS epidemic was the product of a collective imaginary of people who just didn’t love themselves enough, and healing was possible by overcoming shame through affirmation. As a philosophy, affirmation therapy combines all the elements of mansplaining—condescension, ignorance and optimism—with capitalism. It rides the coattails of shame to forge a toxic politic that 1) conflates criticality with negativity and 2) would have us blindly accept the things we cannot change while bypassing the wisdom to know the difference. We become happiness-chasers without understanding that the very industries trying to make us happy are the ones interested in keeping us complacently productive—human machines keeping the wheels of capitalism turning.

Part Christian apocalypticism, part social Darwinism, affirmation therapy asks us to take responsibility for events that are not entirely our responsibility (plague, for example). This Protestant-Capitalist logic over-prioritizes happiness as the ideal state and positions misfortune as moral calamity, as if a state of continuous “flow” were possible and life’s lows could be separated from its highs on an ever-ascending escalator towards emotional and class mobility. Incidentally, this escalator also leads to heaven. Misfortune as visible proof that you are straying from the path of righteousness is a very old idea. The logo-centrism of affirmations reemphasizes an illusion of control and mastery—“If only I could control my mind, I could control the waywardness of my life”— that negates the validity of affective, intuitive and sensual experience, as well as mistake-making or chance, as part of a dynamic and dimensional world. In other words, there are instances when anger, sadness and fear are appropriate and productive responses, and to move through these responses imparts both perspective and wisdom. Without a spectrum of emotional experience and affective valuation, nothing would be at stake. This goes back to the Reformation, which arguably arose because of the inability to reconcile a salvation founded on blind faith (Protestantism) with a belief that good deeds and acts pave the path to heaven (Catholicism). Color me Catholic, but believing yourself to be good, and still acting like a prick, doesn’t actually make you good, it just makes you a sanctimonious prick.

Wars are (still) being fought over this.

Louise Hay would argue that institutional oppression is not the problem––it’s that you can’t get out of your own way. But let’s take the middle ground here: one’s success, in endeavors great and small, is determined by an ability to navigate through self-imposed and real-life obstacles. These real-life obstacles are not false paradigms, as Louise Hay would have it. They are real. For some, these obstacles are more real than most of us will ever know. (Being a black male in Ferguson, MO, Sanford, FL, or Jacksonville, FL, Staten Island, NY, et al., ad infinitum.) Thus, oppressive and dominating systems succeed in making us feel that some obstacles are insurmountable, in addition to placing obstacles that are actually insurmountable in front of us.
 

Let’s play master and servant for a moment; it's a lot like life. The psycho-emotional dynamics of power immediately establish opposing roles of domination and submission under which subjects of the latter get cast in terms of victimhood. Thinking of oneself as a victim is one of a range of common emotional responses to bullies at individual (your asshole dad / crazy ex / schoolyard bully) and institutional levels. Victimhood is sometimes seen as manipulation, an inability to take personal responsibility, rather than as a learned form of self-subjugation. And for some who have faced off with bullies too often, the expectation of being dominated is enough to trigger a self-subjugating response. Let’s roll that mouse video again. Thus, within the framework of this oppositional hierarchy, one is set up in a trap to aspire to overcome, which establishes liberation from this power dynamic as a goal for the future rather than a possibility for the present. This perspective is essential to the rags-to-riches aspirational narratives that Americans and Lifetime movie watchers love so much. The expectation that one would maintain a heart of gold and a positive attitude despite unreasonable hardship is a double indignity that denies personhood in favor of infallibility.

The chain keeps us together.

Back to Louise Hay: Sometimes you are an idiot. Whoa, there, princess, it’s just true. Don’t worry. I make mistakes of different scales of stupidity every day. We all do. It’s called being human. “And that’s…okay!” But instead of engaging in the bipolar swing from self-shaming deflation to over-inflated egotism, you could spend all that emotional energy reading a book or maybe figuring out the mistake, apologizing and moving on. Just a thought. It may also be helpful to recast yourself from the role of hero in the epic narrative of your life into just an ordinary person who does things in the world. Some of those things are awesome and some suck and the awesome stuff doesn’t mean you’re awesome and the suckier stuff doesn’t mean you suck. Where is the self-help book on having perspective? Sheesh.

Art and art history provide helpful parallels here, since what I’m talking about is scale, perspective, space, context and juxtaposition. Instead of continuing to affirm the space of our projections as reality, we need to see the flatness of their projected pictorial illusionism and turn our attention to the solidity of reality itself. From this position, we can understand that we are not autonomous agents of our own realities, but objects operating within a field of power. Instead of affirming our infallibility as objects that fail when we aren’t productive and smiling, we can recognize our own subjectivity and the subjectivities of other people. Our relationships and interactions, then, can be recast as interactions between subjects rather than mere juxtapositions of use-objects. Placing these subject-to-subject relations on the stage of the world rather than scaled to our egos/emotions, maybe we can understand that we are participating in something greater than our own endeavors.

From this position, we can also physically and emotionally measure the space that we occupy in relation to others: When do you speak louder to prevent someone else from speaking? Talk over someone instead of listen? When do you not speak? When do you make someone feel small to make yourself feel bigger? When do you negate or dismiss someone’s experience to validate yours? When do you take more than you need in fear that you don’t have enough? Take less because of a habit of deferring?

There is something to be said for not avoiding the so-called “negative” (read: suckier) aspects of your personality. An awareness of the ways in which you repeatedly sabotage yourself, let others hold you down or hold others down, is more useful for getting out of your own way than an affirmation to happiness. Taking a deep, shame-free look at the ways in which you create your own reality, and then making a decision to do something different, is more empowering than any mantra proclaiming your infinite lovability. Plus, you always have the option of continuing to be an asshole as part of an array of choices. And if you choose this choice, you can fully own all of your assholery. Now, that’s responsibility! And certainly more productive than telling yourself on a looping record that you’re pretty and smart. In fact, after a month of listening to Louise Hay affirm me and reaffirming myself, I foresee resentment that other people aren’t constantly affirming me. Can’t you all see that I’m smart and pretty?!

I’m arguing for a politics of horizontality. Literally—because the bedroom is a great place to work out one’s relationship to power (consensually)—physically, spatially and metaphorically. What would it mean to lie beside someone instead of stand above them? What would it mean to give care instead of care-take? I’m for feeling backwards, sitting in discomfort, and unraveling and reassembling a perpetual flux. Instead of working towards reinforcing the hologram of my own power, dispersing it to those who can’t see theirs.

Whew, I feel liberated. Thank you Mom, Pope Francis and Audre Lorde! Now, I’m going to manifest a cup of Oprah Chai using Shakti Gawain’s methods of Creative Visualization.
 

Risa Puleo is a curator and writer living in Brooklyn.