with a side of Byung-Chul Han:
There is much talk of authenticity today. Like all of neoliberalism’s advertisements, it appears in an emancipatory guise. To be authentic means to be free of pre-formed expressive and behavioural patterns dictated from the outside. It prescribes that one must equal only oneself and define oneself only through oneself – indeed, that one must be the author and creator of oneself. The imperative of authenticity develops a self-directed compulsion, a compulsion to constantly question oneself, eavesdrop on oneself, stalk and besiege oneself. It thus intensifies narcissistic self-reference.
The compulsion to authenticity forces the I to produce itself. Authenticity is ultimately the self’s neoliberal form of production; it makes every person the producer of themselves. The I as its own entrepreneur produces itself, performs itself and offers itself as a commodity. Authenticity is a selling point.
The striving for authenticity, the striving to equal only oneself, leads to a constant comparison with others. The logic of comparison transforms otherness into sameness, and thus the authenticity of otherness consolidates social conformity: it only permits system-compatible differences, namely diversity. ‘Diversity’ as a neoliberal term is a resource that can be exploited. Hence it contrasts with alterity, which eludes any economic utilization.
Today, everyone wants to be different from others. However, this will to be different enables a continuation of the Same; we are now dealing with a higher-order conformity. Sameness asserts itself by going through otherness; the authenticity of otherness even perpetuates conformity more efficiently than repressive equalization, which is far more fragile.
Socrates as a beloved person is called atopos by his students. The Other whom I desire is placeless; they elude all comparisons. In A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, Roland Barthes writes the following about the atopia of the Other: ‘Being Atopic, the other makes language indecisive: one cannot speak of the other, about the other; every attribute is false, painful, erroneous, awkward […].’1 Socrates as an object of desire is incomparable and singular. Singularity is something entirely different from authenticity. Authenticity presupposes comparability; someone who is authentic is different from others. But Socrates is atopos, incomparable. He differs not only from other people, but also from everything else that is different from other people.
The culture of constant comparison does not allow the negativity of the atopos. It makes everything comparable, that is, the same. Thus it renders the experience of the atopic Other impossible. Consumer society strives to eliminate atopic otherness in favour of consumable, indeed heterotopic differences. In contrast to atopic otherness, difference is a positivity. The terror of authenticity as a neoliberal form of production and consumption does away with atopic otherness. The negativity of the entirely Other gives way to the positivity of the Same, in fact the same Other.
As a neoliberal production strategy, authenticity creates commodifiable differences. It thus increases the diversity of the commodities in which authenticity is materialized. Individuals express their authenticity primarily through consumption. The imperative of authenticity does not lead to the formation of an autonomous, self-possessed individual; rather, it is entirely co-opted by commerce.
The imperative of authenticity engenders a narcissistic compulsion. Narcissism is distinct from healthy self-love, which has nothing pathological about it; it does not rule out love for the Other. The narcissist, however, is blind to the Other. The Other is bent into shape until the ego recognizes itself in them. The narcissistic subject perceives the world only in shadings of itself. This results in a disastrous consequence: the Other disappears. The boundary between the self and the Other becomes blurred. The self diffuses and becomes diffuse. The I drowns in the self. For a stable self only comes about in the face of the Other; but excessive, narcissistic self-reference creates a feeling of emptiness.
Today, libidinous energies are invested primarily in the ego. The narcissistic accumulation of the ego-libido causes a depletion of the object-libido, that is, the libido that occupies the object. The object-libido creates an object attachment that conversely stabilizes the ego. An excessive narcissistic build-up of the ego-libido causes illness. It produces negative feelings such as fear, shame, guilt and emptiness:
But it is quite a different thing when a particular, very energetic process forces a withdrawal of libido from objects. Here the libido that has become narcissistic cannot find its way back to objects, and this interference with the libido’s mobility certainly becomes pathogenic. It seems that an accumulation of narcissistic libido beyond a certain amount is not tolerated.2
Fear results when there is no longer any object charged with libido. The world thus becomes empty and senseless. Owing to the lack of object attachment, the ego is thrown back on itself and broken by itself. Depression is attributable to a narcissistic accumulation of ego-libido.
Freud even applies his libido theory to biology. Cells that only behave narcissistically, that lack eros, endanger the organism’s survival. The survival of the cells also requires those cells that behave altruistically, or even sacrifice themselves for others:
(Perhaps we may also use the term ‘narcissistic’ in the same sense to describe the cells of malignant neoplasms that destroy the organism. After all, pathologists are prepared to accept that the seeds of these growths are present at birth, and to concede that they display features characteristic of embryos.) All of this being so, it would appear that the libido of our sexual drives is one and the same thing as the Eros evoked by poets and philosophers, the binding force within each and every living thing.3
Eros alone animates the organism. The same applies to society; excessive narcissism de-stabilizes it.
The lack of self-esteem that underlies self-harm, the act of cutting oneself, points to a general crisis of gratification in our society. I cannot produce self-esteem myself; I must rely on the Other as a gratifying authority who loves, praises, acknowledges and appreciates me. The narcissistic isolation of human beings, the instrumentalization of the Other and total competition destroy the climate of gratification. To have a stable self-esteem, I am dependent on the notion that I am important for other people, that I am loved by them. It may be diffuse, but it is indispensable for the feeling of being important. It is precisely the insufficient sense of being that is responsible for self-harm. Cutting oneself is not only a ritual of selfpunishment for one’s own feelings of inadequacy that are typical of today’s performance- and optimization-oriented society, but also a cry for love.
The sense of emptiness is a basic symptom of depression and borderline personality disorder. Borderliners are often unable to feel themselves; only when they cut themselves do they feel anything. For the depressive performance subject, the self is a heavy burden. It is tired of itself. Entirely incapable of stepping outside itself, it becomes absorbed in itself, which paradoxically results in an emptying and erosion of the self. Isolated in its mental enclosure, trapped in itself, it loses any connection to the Other. I touch myself, but I only feel myself through the Other’s touch. The Other is instrumental in the formation of a stable self.
The elimination of all negativity is a hallmark of contemporary society. Everything is smoothed out. Communication, too, is smoothed out into an exchange of pleasantries; negative feelings such as sorrow are denied any language, any expression. Every form of injury by others is avoided, yet it rises again as self-harm. Here, too, we find a confirmation of the general logic that the expulsion of the Other results in a process of self-destruction.
According to Alain Ehrenberg, the success of depression is based on a lost connection to conflict. Today’s culture of performance and optimization does not allow us to work through conflicts, which is time-consuming. Today’s performance subject only knows two states: functioning or failing. In this, there is a resemblance to the condition of machines: machines also know no conflict. They either function correctly or are broken.
Conflicts are not destructive; they have a constructive side. It is only from conflicts that stable relationships and identities ensue. A person grows and matures by working through conflict. The seductive aspect of cutting oneself is that it quickly releases accumulated destructive tension without the time-consuming act of working through conflict. The fast relief of tension is handed over to chemical processes; endogenous drugs are released. It works in a comparable manner to antidepressants: these too suppress states of conflict and quickly restore the depressive performance subject to a functioning state.
The addiction to selfies also has little to do with self-love. It is nothing other than the idle motion of the lonely subject. Faced with one’s inner emptiness, one vainly attempts to produce oneself. The emptiness merely reproduces itself. Selfies are the self in empty forms; selfie addiction heightens the feeling of emptiness. It results not from self-love, but from narcissistic self-reference. Selfies are pretty, smooth surfaces of an empty, insecure self. To escape this torturous emptiness today, one reaches either for the razorblade or the smartphone. Selfies are smooth surfaces that hide the empty self for a short while. But if one turns them over one discovers their other side, covered in wounds and bleeding. Wounds are the flipsides of selfies.
Could suicide attacks be perverse attempts to feel oneself, to restore a destroyed self-esteem, to bomb or shoot away the burden of emptiness? Could one compare the psychology of terror to that of the selfie and self-harm, which also act against the empty ego? Might terrorists have the same psychological profile as the adolescents who harm themselves, who turn their aggression towards themselves? Unlike girls, boys are known to direct their aggression outwards, against others. The suicide attack would then be a paradoxical act in which auto-aggression and aggression towards others, self-production and self-destruction, become one: a higher-order aggression that is simultaneously imagined as the ultimate selfie. The push of the button that sets off the bomb is like the push of the camera button. Terrorists inhabit the imaginary because reality, which consists of discrimination and hopelessness, is no longer worth living. Reality denies them any gratification. Thus they invoke God as an imaginary gratifying authority, and can also be sure that their photograph will be all over the media like a form of selfie directly after the deed. The terrorist is a narcissist with an explosive belt that makes those who wear it especially authentic. Karl-Heinz Bohrer is not wrong when he notes in his essay ‘Authenticity and Terror’ that terrorism is the final act of authenticity.4
NotesRoland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, transl. Richard Howard (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 35. ↩︎
Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, transl. James Strachey (London: Penguin, 1990), pp. 470f. ↩︎
Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, transl. James Strachey, in The Penguin Freud Reader, ed. Adam Phillips (London: Penguin, 2006), p. 179. ↩︎
Karl-Heinz Bohrer, ‘Authentizität und Terror’, in Nach der Natur. Über Politik und Ästhetik (Munich and Vienna: Hanser, 1988), p. 259. ↩︎
Byung-Chul Han, The Expulsion of the Other – Society, Perception and Communication Today
No comments:
Post a Comment