Failure to Appear
Nathan R. DuFord
ROBERT FLUDD, DEPICTION OF HYLE IN THE MACROCOSM AND THE MICROCOSM, 1617
Robert Fludd, a physician living at the turn of the seventeenth century, was deeply invested in occult practices. He was a Rosicrucian and kabbalist, an astronomer and cosmologist. Out of this interest, he wrote a number of books detailing his philosophy. In The Macrocosm and the Microcosm,[1] he composed a series of manifestos that related the natural and the divine. In one, an image of the void is reproduced. The image, which has come to be called “And so on to infinity” is meant to be a representation of the infinite nothing out of which the universe came. Fludd termed this nothing, a kind of preformed matter, “hyle.” It is a substance without form. The depiction is meant to evoke the unformed, infinite hyle composing the universe itself.
“And so on to infinity” is meant to be a representation of the infinite, yet the infinite never appears. Every element of the representation points further to the limitation of finite materiality. The frame of the page is bounded, and, if you look closely, you can even see where the edge of the copper plate was overlaid on the paper. The etching is uneven, allowing the paper to show through the ink.[2] The visible materiality of ink and paper makes plain the contradiction of trying to represent nothing with something. As a kind of final admission of failure, language appears on each side of the image to tell us that the blackness is an infinite nothing. Language communicates what the representation itself cannot, disappointing the viewer who was promised a portrait of infinite nothing. As Fludd puts it, “we have painted an imaginary picture of this formless matter, as a black smoke, or vapour, or a dreadful gloom, or the darkness of an abyss, or, in a word, any kind of unfinished, raw, impalpable material.”[3] In this “imaginary picture,” the subject of the picture fails to appear.
Disappointment is like this. We feel disappointed when something that should appear has failed to materialize: the failure to visualize infinity, the son who doesn’t fulfill his father’s expectations, the future that is not what we imagined. To disappoint is to miss an appointment—to fail to appear on schedule. When someone is disappointed, their wishes have failed to materialize. Disappointment corresponds with the frustrations imposed on us by reality. As Freud puts it, “we must reckon with the possibility that something in the nature of the sexual instinct itself is unfavorable to the realization of complete satisfaction.” In other words, we can never quite get what we’re attempting to attain. Fulfillment will always, in some way, fail to appear.
We remain at least minimally unsatisfied, sustaining the urge to attain a satisfaction that remains illusory. In our fantasies, we imagine ourselves to be blissfully satisfied by an erotic event, while real erotic events are conditioned by the fantasy’s failure to appear. A lover, being an independent and opaque subject, has fantasies of their own that they attempt to make real to satisfy their sexual urges. In the push and pull of sexual engagement, neither party gets what they wish for. At best, both achieve a compromised approximation of fantasy.
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“I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed.” Apparently, this anxiety-inducing phrase is intended to soften the blow, but disappointing someone can leave you feeling worse than if you had made them angry. Being told you’ve disappointed someone as an adult does throw you back into an oddly childlike state. It’s a familiar state of striving to be grown enough or good enough to fulfill the expectations of others, or to fulfill your own expectations of yourself that have been projected onto others. The anticipatory anxiety of disappointing and being disappointed structures our psychic life, both as infants who discover that they cannot always have what they want when they want it, and as adults who have to accommodate ourselves to reality, which always falls short of our fantasies.
As Max Pensky puts it, “the implication of a thwarted expectation or entitlement probably explains the slight tinge of childishness that the disappointed affect carries. What is perhaps distinctive about disappointment as an affect, though, is that it manages to combine this aspect of unseemly childishness with its complement, the premature and un-earned resignation of the mid-life crisis.”[4] One can just picture the frustrated and tantrum-throwing toddler, having not gotten what they thought they would or ought to have received because they must share with a sibling. Or we can imagine little Anna Freud, prohibited from eating strawberries due to a stomachache supposedly caused by eating too many, talking about them while she dreams. Both responses are a revolt against reality: the type of thing that only children do. Adults are meant to be hard-nosed realists, accepting when we cannot get what we had expected. No wonder Freud has it that we only wish when we dream, where we all become children once more.
Yet, disappointment in adulthood can generate the same frustrated response: when reality fails us, we may pout or become dramatically dejected, hoping for someone to notice the wound caused by the failure of our wishes to appear. Just as easily, though, a man with hair plugs in a luxury car, looking to “trade up” his wife for a “younger model” is attempting to replace his disappointment about the circumstances of his life with the fulfillment of childlike wishes: a hot woman, a hot car, and a James Bond appearance. This is the hegemonic ideal one imagines a teenage boy to have. Upon growing into adulthood, when more than half his life is over, he looks around and realizes his dreams are still dreams. The life he imagined never appeared. So why, when it’s an attempt at wish fulfillment, does Pensky describe it as “premature and un-earned resignation”? The man having a midlife crisis effectively abandons his life as he knew it until that moment. Disappointed in how his life has turned out, he believes the only thing left to do is to give up on it completely, despite it only being half-elapsed. He refuses to take action within the contours of his life as it exists; he simply destroys it and attempts to begin anew.
Much of our psychic life is conditioned and developed through this process of disappointment and affects—such as anger, frustration, rage, envy, and grief—that follow.
Disappointments are often understood as a loss, but the loss is a psychic one. We’ve lost the fulfillment of our expectations, but they were expectations precisely because we never had the object that fulfilled them. We expect one thing and are presented with something else, or with nothing at all. Disappointment is best captured by the sentiment “I didn’t think it would be like this.” Crucially, our disappointments can be vague or they can be specific. The process of becoming an adult requires that we accept that our wishes will remain unfulfilled. Yet, we never actually accept this. We continue to wish for what we cannot have and to find “fulfillment” of these wishes through dreams or neurotic symptoms.
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The Last of Us (HBO, 2023) is an episodic adaptation of a postapocalyptic video game. In the narrative, a fungus became capable of fully taking over human beings. In order to stop the spread, nations dropped nuclear bombs on themselves and militaries put people in encampments. The viewer enters the scene many years later and learns that nearly everyone lives in small, walled cities ruled by martial law. In episode 3 of season 1, we are introduced to Bill, who is making a life outside the walls, and outside of any other human community. Bill is a prepper. Prior to the emergence of the fungus that takes hold over the world, killing and animating human bodies beyond death, Bill had lived in a suburban house that is heavily securitized and armed. When the national guard arrives and tells everyone they must leave their homes, Bill hides and stays behind. He’s left with his supplies as well as whatever he can scavenge, build, or adapt to his needs.
Bill has the opportunity to enact the “lone wolf” fantasy: an individualist, masculine fantasy of full self-sufficiency, without the comforts that society or sociality can bring. As a lone wolf, Bill isn’t accountable to anyone except himself. He fashions a life out of the ruins of what others have left behind—an imagined rather than true self-sufficiency, for which he relies on the social cooperation of the past in order to exist as a lone wolf. What’s missing, though, is the copresence of the other wolves—wolves who could pose a threat, generate a hierarchy that subjugates Bill, or even just cooperate in such a way as to make obviously false (rather than ignorably false) the fantasy of individual, masculine self-sufficiency.
Yet, The Last of Us subverts this typical “lone wolf” prepper fantasy. Bill is not only a gay man, but he also helps travelers who come upon him and makes his life with one of them, Frank. After decades together, in what can only be considered the opposite of lone-wolf survivalism, Frank becomes so painfully disabled that he decides to end his life. While making the drink that will kill Frank, Bill makes himself one as well. They die together because Bill can no longer even sustain the fantasy of living independently. Without taking care of Frank, without his wolf pack, he loses his reason to live.
In the broader world of preppers, people organize themselves based on whether they are planning to be a lone wolf or planning to be part of a wolf pack. Those who see themselves as part of a wolf pack project a kind of sociality that will be amended through the process of “the collapse,” be it religious, alien, zombie, war, climate change, electrical storms, or merely material social collapse . . . this list could go on ad infinitum. For those interested in the wolf pack, the contemporary social order is seen as alienating and individuating. Though the reasons for this vary, somehow the destruction of society will enable a new, better, and more natural sociality to appear.
Fantastic social collapse will sever all the bonds that we have developed, except for the family. In the prepper fantasy, the family is maintained as the natural unit that sits outside of “society” and so can be preserved as a little society without threat from the broader social collapse. Family will not be a constant for everyone, though, as most of us have broken the tight bonds of provision and mutual protection that the family used to offer, or at least pretended it could. Preppers get to keep their families because they project a future of providing for their family, tying their spouses and children to them via the promise of satisfying their material needs.
There is a deep kind of conservatism embedded in this fantasy. The family as an economic unit, organized according to the will of the father as the provider and protector of his wife and children, is the product of the specific political economy of capitalism. It is the material structure out of which claims to paternal authority are generated, but also the material structure on which claims of patriarchal authority can be grounded. Patriarchs are made and their demands are given authority through this familial structure, often referred to as “the bourgeois family.” This demonstrates the real limitations on the imagination in the wish for social collapse: what the prepper wants is just enough social collapse to generate the world they imagine we used to have prior to “modernization.” And what is modernization? Well, it simply signifies any social, economic, political, or cultural system that has moved us away from the heteropatriarchal family unit.
The anxiety that leads to prepping for the fixated emergency is both a fear that some event will come about and a wish that it will.
In the wolf-pack model of prepping, we can rebuild sociality on the “correct” basis this time. The aim is to make the right forms of sociality— that is, the right forms of hierarchy— appear. The true prepper dream is impossible: he wants to go back in time and begin again. The past will always fail to appear in the sense that the prepper requires, but it will reappear over and over in different forms until the prepper is able to let it go. The prepper will continue to need increasingly expensive and extensive technologies and goods to ensure that he can become the patriarch. Ending this cycle would mean letting go of the patriarchal fantasy of power that could be enabled by a different set of historical material circumstances.
The division between wolf pack and lone wolf also demonstrates a key to the wish that undergirds prepping. In each case, the prepper is engaged in wishing for a future that will not arrive. In The Last of Us, Bill’s wish is made reality. However, in the show’s reality, the structures of modern social cooperation are much heartier and more resilient. Bill’s wish is only made reality through mass death by pandemic illness and atomic bombs, i.e., not just a single large-scale event. The anxiety that leads to prepping for the fixated emergency is both a fear that some event will come about and a wish that it will. What a waste it would be to spend your whole life preparing for a day that doesn’t arrive. After all, you want to become a real man one day.
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One of the most well-known dreams in Freud’s work belongs to Wolf Man. Freud hears of the dream long after the fact: the four-year-old child who comes to be known as the Wolf Man goes to bed imagining presents under the tree. This is a familiar wish (especially for someone who celebrates Christmas, the annual holiday of wish fulfillment and disappointment). Once asleep, the boy dreams that the windows of his room are blown open. In the darkness, there is a tree bare of leaves, and on its branches, six or seven white wolves with bushy tails. The wolves stare intently at the boy, seeming to reverse the usual order of seer and seen. Suddenly, the boy is under observation by the intently looking white wolves, who seem to glow and sneer in the darkness. Under their watchful eyes, twelve or fourteen of them, he begins to feel as though the wolves might consume him, and so the boy screams in terror, awakening from his dream.
Decades later, outside the dream and in the consulting room, Freud offers Wolf Man an interpretation: the dream signifies the child’s experience of watching his parents having sex. A sex act experienced by a child too early in their life cannot be fully cognized or assimilated due to a lack of linguistic and conceptual understanding. The surplus sits in our unconscious and is liable, as the contents of the unconscious are, to return as a dream, neurosis, and parapraxes. Freud names this initiating sex act, which may have been a fantasy just as much as a real observed act, the primal scene, which he argues structures childhood psychosexual development. He sees this scene as a violent or aggressive one in which the father is seen as doing violence to the mother. It doesn’t take much to imagine the tangle of bodies, hard breathing, moaning, yelling, slapping as indistinguishable from a fight of some kind.
The dream of wolves is interpreted through a series of reversals. Rather than getting what the child wants, he gets what he fears. The child wants presents, but rather than dreaming of himself watching his presents under the tree, he dreams of wolves watching him from a tree. It isn’t he who sees the primal scene, but the father who sees him seeing the primal scene. The wolves are not actually plural in this interpretation, but rather coalesce into one wolf: the father. The entire pack is the father. There’s an echo of the prepper here, as the wife and child really are just extensions of the father in the patriarchy of familial law. It turns out that the prepper who sees himself as a lone wolf and the prepper who sees himself as a member of the pack are actually seeing the same thing: one wolf, and that wolf is the father. Wolf Man’s childlike scream, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is “[a] cry of anguish, the only one Freud hears: Help me not become wolf (or the opposite, Help me not fail in this becoming).” In either case, let me not be a disappointment, let me appear as I ought to when I ought to.
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Returning to Fludd’s depiction of infinite hyle, we can see just how tenuous it is to wish for the appearance of someone or something at a specific time and place. It returns us to a version of childhood: hoping, wishing, and dreaming about the prized appearance of infinity. The more we attempt to bring it about, the further we get from its appearance, and the stronger the likelihood of disappointment. Lacan’s conception of “phallic jouissance” can help us to understand how our wishes generate fears that they will not be achieved. Afraid that our expectations will not be met, we come to desire the failure of their fulfillment or else we have to deal with disappointment and its associated negative affects. If Fludd had not tried to meet the expectation of representing infinity, his work would disappoint less. He would not have failed as spectacularly as he did.
Jouissance itself can be understood as the pleasure of desire. We don’t simply seek to satisfy our desires, but we also enjoy having them. It’s through this that Lacan connects jouissance to repetition: we cannot truly satisfy our desires once and for all, so we keep returning to the enjoyment of desire itself. Phallic jouissance is alternately called the “jouissance of an idiot.” It belongs to an idiot because he cannot actually determine where satisfaction comes from. Both men and women can suffer from this mistake based on a belief that the other can fully satisfy their desires. Phallic jouissance happens when one’s expectation of satisfaction is disappointed: when one desires the other but doesn’t quite get them. It is a pleasure based on the failure of satisfaction, rather than on its success. We should think of Fludd’s “And so on to infinity” as generating phallic jouissance. Even though the image does not generate nothing (and instead generates many somethings, including physical materials), he includes it in the text anyway. The image is unsatisfying; we feel no more attuned to the void than we did before. To look at it is to be disappointed with it as a representation. One may even look back at it, trying again and again to “see” what Fludd saw in it. The prepper, the man in a midlife crisis, and the Wolf Man are all looking disappointedly at a representation of society, of their life, of their self. In order to stave off the future inevitability that society, lives, and selves will fail to satisfy again, they turn that disappointment into a new wish: to simply be disappointed.
What would it be like to expect that disappointment? Or even to yearn for it? In our persistent failure to see our wishes fulfilled, we can come to desire failure. When we desire failure, then we believe we can stop the cycle of dissatisfaction and its affects. A desire for failure preempts the negative affects of disappointment by trying to outwit our own feelings. It’s as if we believe that we can trap our feelings in a contradiction: if I want to fail, I succeed when I fail. This helps to demonstrate how disappointment is not simply the affect of failure. We can and will be disappointed by both successes and by failures.
Failure is just loss simpliciter. It gives up on the idea that the wished-for object will one day come. In failure, there is no need to be frustrated or angry, no attempt to retrace or rectify. If one can get over these failures by fulfilling a negative desire to not get what one wishes, there is no anxiety about when failure will appear, only the resigned expectation that it will—the midlife crisis enacted as a way of living. When we expect something to fail to appear, it begins to feel less like disappointment and more like resignation.
Resigned to the midlife crisis as a way of being, we forfeit all manner of wishes for a better future, in order to guard against unpredictable events. Utopian hopes must be set aside: what’s more childish than wishing the world were perfect? All demands for the impossible are abandoned to reality. Lacking the wish for a future that could be radically different and radically better than the present, the best we can do is status quo apologetics. Accepting these lowered expectations (an expectation for nothing) also acclimates one to accepting the way things are now: arranged to increase injustice, domination, exploitation, and extraction. We reconcile ourselves to reality by hoping we can change our affects rather than the objective conditions that cause them. Fludd reconciles himself to reality in resorting to language rather than portraiture, admitting the portrait is an “imaginary picture.” The prepper swaps his fear of the unpredictable real future for an obsession with a fantasied future: he focuses his entire life around what he supposedly hopes will never happen. Wolf Man cannot be disappointed with his presents under the tree: he is what is under the tree, waiting to be devoured. In the contradiction of expecting a failure to appear, when nothing arrives, we get exactly what we expected.
LIKELY F. C. S. SCHILLER, “PORTRAIT OF ITS IMMANENCE THE ABSOLUTE,” MIND! A UNIQUE REVIEW OF ANCIENT AND MODERN PHILOSOPHY (1901)
In “Portrait of Its Immanence the Absolute,” we get a kind of ironic reversal of Fludd’s “And so on to infinity.” The image appears in a parody of the academic journal Mind. The parody, titled Mind!, is attributed to F. C. S. Schiller, though the text itself lacks authorial attribution. Here we are again presented with a rectangular, bounded image. This time, the image appears as just a sheet of paper. The reader is given instructions. First, we’re told the orientation of the image. Then, we are instructed to “turn the eye of faith, fondly but firmly, on the center of the page,” then wink with our other eye. Lastly, we must “gaze fixedly until you see It.” The instructions have put the failure onto the viewer, rather than the composer of the image. If we haven’t seen the Absolute, it is because we have failed to follow the instructions.
The image is also a kind of joke. You can look forever, but you’ll only see what you have placed there, the image being empty as it is. The materiality of the Absolute, which we can think of as god for simplicity’s sake, does not exist. The contradiction here is made plain: you cannot see what is not there, you can only see what is there. This staves off dis-appointment because we aren’t looking to the image to give us something. And it gestures toward the almost comic relief that receiving a disappointment one wants or expects can provide.
When someone or something wished for fails to appear, as all things wished for do, we might be able to let out a sigh and give up hope. Hope for something or someone to appear only sets us up for the inevitable loss, anger, and frustration we feel when a wish isn’t fulfilled. There are two ways that we can guard ourselves from disappointment. First, we may try to have no expectations, no sense that we hope for anything at all. This will not only lead us to disappointment, it will also likely lead to the unrecognized expectations becoming symptomatic. If we expect the Absolute to actually appear in the above image, we will become obsessive about our fixed gaze.
Just as someone who claims that they don’t care where we go out to eat, but suddenly is hit with the desire to not go to the chosen restaurant, we may think we have no expectations, but they will bubble up to consciousness somehow. Upon seeing Schiller’s portrait for the first time, I unthinkingly followed the instructions, and likely you did as well. Seeing it here once more, I feel compelled to “try” again. Similarly, those who try to lead expectation-less lives will often be forced to confront the reality of their unconscious expectations. In this type of case, the person will not get what they want because they’ve convinced themselves out of exploring what their desires might be. They will only discover that they do not want something in retrospect, when they are presented with what they actually get. In a sense, trying to avoid disappointment through having no expectations will lead us back into disappointment more often than if we were simply able to consciously identify our hopes and dreams.
In this way, our hopes can be transmuted into fears and our fears into our hopes. Eventually, we find ourselves yearning for the object of our anxieties, because then we can finally be relieved of the expectation. As with doomsday cults, when the predictions about doomsday do not come about, leaders will often bring about the doomsday through the encouragement of a group suicide. After all, why waste all that material and psychic preparation on an event that never comes? Why stare at an image that doesn’t contain either the void or the Absolute? Maybe when the objects of our fears actually appear, then we can feel the relief that we don’t need to continue anxiously awaiting the worst.
[1] The title is translated from the much wordier Utriusque Cosmi, Maioris scilicet et Minoris, metaphysica, physica, atque technica Historia (The metaphysical, physical, and technical history of the two worlds, namely the greater and the lesser).
[2] Curt Cloninger, Some Ways of Making Nothing: Apophatic Apparatuses in Contemporary Art (Santa Barbara, CA: Punctum Books: 2021), 214–226.
[3] Cited in Cloninger, Some Ways of Making Nothing, 215. Robert Fludd, The Origin of and Structure of the Cosmos, trans. Patricia Tahil (Edinburgh: Magnum Opus Hermetic Sourceworks, 1982), 21.
[4] Max Pensky, “Critique and Disappointment,” in A Companion to Adorno, edited by Peter Gordon, Espen Hammer, and Max Pensky (Wiley Blackwell: 2020), 508.