Huw Lemmey’s review of my book Joyspace (“Joyschtick,” #46/47) is a dazzling performance—clever, acerbic, and written with undeniable style. But, reader beware, its brilliance is bound up in a particular critical stance that privileges suspicion over possibility.
The influential queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in her essay “Paranoid Reading,” analyzed this anxious mode as an Achilles’ heel of contemporary criticism that confuses bad news as consistently more rigorous than good, that vigilance and negation are themselves mistaken for critique. Paranoia, in the Freudian sense, where repression returns in the form of nervous anxiety, which, in the case of this review, buttresses its negativity and self-described confusion about Joyspace’s tone and content.
Joyspace, by contrast, is committed to what Sedgwick described as “reparative criticism”: making use of what is nourishing, artful, and even playful or provocative by experimenting with possibility amid crisis. Joyspace does not deny capital’s destructive pervasiveness—it begins with a Dickensian “best of times, worst of times” precisely to mark that contradiction. But from there it insists that designers possess particular assets for resistance that can be enacted locally, tactically, and peripatetically.
Cruising Utopia (2009), another icon of queer theory, argued that hope and joy are not naive delusions (“delulu” in the parlance of Lemmey’s review) but critical resources that can facilitate glimpses of a “then and there” giving shape to the possibility of collective action. Readers of Joyspace, particularly design practitioners, will hopefully see the book in that spirit. It is maximalist, camp, even baroque, but intentionally so, a manifesto drag act that stakes out joy as a form of resistance against the grinding sameness of technocapitalist fascism. The politics of the book could not be clearer.
Yet the review leans into a rococo antisemitic dog whistle in its title, reducing joy to Jewish “shtick.” Then, with ultra-maximalist political piety, the review goes on to distort a metaphor of war used in the book by framing it as indifference to the Palestinian genocide. Ironically, the metaphor was presented to name how capital wages its quiet war on everything from human life to dignity and joy.
What the review misses is that Joyspace is not a denial of reality but an insistence that negativity alone cannot guide us. If crisis-journalism has become transactionally invested in negation as its marketable and meme-able currency, then perhaps we need to remind ourselves that abundance—and joy—are also forms of knowledge, and necessary ones. Joy is Power. Long live joy.