Spreading meaningless love in an age without a world.
Translator’s note: “Net Depression Cloud” (网抑云) is a mocking nickname for NetEase Cloud Music. It replaces a character in the platform’s Chinese name with an identically pronounced character from the word for depression. The joke targets the melancholy personal stories in its song-comment sections, treating them as exaggerated or fabricated. The essay also uses the nickname to refer to people who post such comments. See this contemporary account.
1
Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor could hardly be better suited to explaining the “Net Depression Cloud” phenomenon. Sontag examines tuberculosis in the nineteenth century. Although tuberculosis was widespread at the time, what spread was not so much the illness as its meaning. Put simply, tuberculosis was like an ornament: people thought having it was “romantic” or “cool.” In this context, Sontag writes: “Health becomes banal, even vulgar.”1
If we replace tuberculosis above with depression today, we find that nothing feels out of place. Today, many people think depression is cool, something that can set them apart. People with depression will long to kill themselves. Sontag writes: “The usual depictions of death from tuberculosis emphasize the perfected sublimation of feeling, suggesting that tuberculosis was also regarded as an illness that made its sufferers sexy.”2
Sontag points out that tuberculosis contains a wealth of metaphors. Depression, of course, has at least as many: depression, Osamu Dazai, “I’m sorry for being human,” wanting to kill yourself, being oppressed, being bullied, and on and on.
In the introduction to Illness as Metaphor, Sontag tells us that on the one hand, one healthy way of looking at illness is to resist metaphorical thinking about it; on the other, metaphorical thinking about illness is largely imposed by society—I cannot avoid thinking this way even if I want to.
But separating depression from its metaphors is impossible, because depression is itself a metaphor. We can reverse Sontag’s title to describe it: Metaphor as Illness.
2
So here is the question: what is depression? Depression is not an illness that can be identified by clear-cut indicators; the condition itself is very ill-defined. In the introduction to Moody Minds Distempered: Essays on Melancholy and Depression, Jennifer Radden tells us that the definition of depression remains unclear, with many questions lacking definite answers: “And these fundamental conceptual uncertainties represent a serious deficit at the base of contemporary understanding and research.”3
She also states explicitly that “these two central constituents of much twentieth-century thinking about depression, loss and low self-esteem, originate more as implications of Freud’s theorizing than as clinical observations.”
So the view that depression is like a cold, an illness that can be cured simply by taking medication, is inappropriate in a discussion of depression—and still more inappropriate in a discussion of “Net Depression Cloud.” Illness in Freud’s framework and illness in conventional medicine are two entirely different concepts.
Moaning online without being ill may be a kind of illness.4 But to criticize this moaning from a safe distance, to think that people with real depression must receive treatment immediately and must be cured immediately—that is hardly a normal idea either. What sort of person thinks depression needs to be eradicated immediately? Take Kramer, the author of Against Depression: he envisages a utopian age in which, through genetic engineering and the efforts of social engineers, depression will disappear like leprosy and the Black Death. Frankly, the most terrifying part of this Brave New World-style idea of his is precisely that it treats depression as the same kind of illness as the Black Death and leprosy. This is also exactly how many of today’s “positive energy” internet users who oppose “Net Depression Cloud” see it.5 They have no idea that their logic will ultimately lead us into a Psycho-Pass-style dystopia where your “Hue” has to be measured—in other words, where you must have “normal feelings,” or else be excluded.
3
But mood is never entirely under our control. Heidegger says that mood does not belong to us: it is something external to us, yet everywhere. In the context of Net Depression Cloud, we can think about it this way: even if a Net Depression Cloud poster can pretend to be depressed, their “real” feelings will still be affected in some irreversible way as they pretend.
I have said before that Net Depression Cloud is a kind of deconstruction of illness as it is usually understood. Let us imagine a Net Depression Cloud poster moaning without being ill. On the one hand, they have no illness; on the other, their moaning without being ill is not normal behavior either. In other words, moaning without being ill is itself a kind of illness. Here, what spreads is not a physical illness but an illness in the metaphorical sense. And there is a dialectical reversal: as illness in the metaphorical sense spreads, illness in the physical sense will be born from it.
We can say that there is no purely physical illness, because people always confer “meaning” on it from outside. Nor is there any purely metaphorical illness, because metaphor, meaning, and mood are connected to physical states. This, I believe, is something any earthling who can use language can feel, because we are not robots.
So rather than insulting and mocking Net Depression Cloud, we should investigate the structures that give rise to it: clearly, it was not born out of a void. Besides, in the course of insulting and mocking Net Depression Cloud, many real Net Depression Cloud posters may be born from that abuse.
3.5
The imagination of “normal people” is, by definition, pitiful. Ignorance is one of the necessary ingredients of being a normal person. Put simply: they’re stupid. Depression is not necessarily a psychological state that already exists. Saying things that sound depressed, even just to show off, may lead to “real” depression. Wittgenstein says that people do not think and then speak; they simply speak. Speaking itself makes people think. The same reasoning can be applied to depression. People do not necessarily have depression first and then put it into words. They can also simply say they have depression, and become depressed through saying it. The mere act of speaking has a performative—that is, creative—effect. The question is not what they are trying to do by saying these things, but what leads them to speak this way in the first place.
To put it bluntly, normal people want to normalize “depression”: establish a standard by which to judge it, then use treatment to remake depressed people as “normal people.” If you’re ill, get treated; if you’re not, shut up. Their impoverished minds have no room for any “other.” So when Net Depression Cloud posters appear, neither entirely normal nor entirely depressed, they touch a nerve. Why does Net Depression Cloud get to them so much? Because, on the one hand, these posters do not need treatment, while on the other, they do not seem to count as entirely “normal” either. This deconstructs the binary opposition ordinary people draw between being ill (= should get treatment) and not being ill (= a normal person). They have to put these people into some category—pretentious artsy types, for instance—and then give them a few kicks.
4
As for why Net Depression Cloud has developed into a social phenomenon, this has much to do with people’s atomization. That is, as society develops, people actually interact less offline. And Chinese culture, like Japanese culture, has a sense of melancholy about it (look at our ancient poetry and literature; look at Dazai’s popularity in China). People interact less offline and more online. What emerges, then, is a kind of negative-energy communication. Communication in a negative mode, people pouring out their troubles to one another: we should think about the development of Net Depression Cloud as an extension of this.
Rather than suppressing these exchanges, we should give them more room. As one scholar has said, “No one can avoid depression.” In a certain sense, depression is the spirit of the age. In The Lonely Crowd, Riesman tells us about a pervasive, American-style depression: we lack the firm sense of security we once had; there is no longer an all-powerful father or god to sustain us.
Of course, calling depression the spirit of the age is not to say that depression is “right.” It is, rather, to ask anyone who laughs at depression: can you really be sure you will not become depressed yourself? Do the people around you really all seem happy? A clown’s feigned madness and foolishness are often far more real and useful than a fool’s smug cleverness.