‘Never get high on your own supply’
It seems that Silicon Valley has spawned a series of cyber-monkeys that not only threaten to clamber onto the backs of their target audiences but also assault their creators. In his Guardian article ‘Our minds can be hacked’: the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia, Paul Lewis[1] considers it:
[…] revealing that many […] young technologists are weaning themselves off their own products, sending their children to elite Silicon Valley schools where iPhones, iPads and even laptops are banned. They appear to be abiding by a Biggie Smalls[2] lyric from their own youth about the perils of dealing crack cocaine: never get high on your own supply.[3]
The article opens by outlining the digital detox of Justin Rosenstein who wrote the original code for Facebook’s ‘Like’ button. It describes how the software engineer devised strategies for putting social media beyond his reach, eschewing especially Facebook ‘likes’, the receiving of which he sees as yielding ‘“bright dings of pseudo-pleasure” that can be as hollow as they are seductive.’
As I explored in the previous post, the pleasure of Facebook ‘likes’ is genuine insofar as they trigger the release of dopamine in the brains of their recipients. Where this neurochemical reaction is set off by social media, though, it is unaccompanied by the corporeal actions it evolved to reinforce — taking a drink when thirsty or seeking warmth when cold to use Adam Alter’s[4] examples.
Jouissance
Rosenstein’s ‘bright dings of pseudo-pleasure’ recall the French Freudian psychonalyst Jacques Lacan’s[5] concept of jouissance. As Slavoj Žižek[6] explains, ‘Although jouissance can be translated as “enjoyment”, translators of Lacan often leave it in French in order to render palpable its excessive, properly traumatic character: we are not dealing with simple pleasure, but with a violent intrusion that brings more pain than pleasure.’ Jouissance is a symptom of our lacking the means by which to give our desires full expresiion, a lack that results in our often being able only to attain ‘pseudo-pleasure’.
Oliver Mannion[7] makes the salient initial point that, ‘Just as Lacan can help us understand Facebook, Facebook itself can provide an understanding of Lacan’s theories of subjectivity.’ He begins making this case by describing the anxiety arising from what Lacan identified as the ‘mirror stage’ of psychological development. This occurs in early infancy when the developing child first recognises its reflection in a mirror. Lacan[8] notes that he often reflected on:
[…] the startling spectacle of the infant in front of the mirror. Unable as yet to walk, or even to stand up, and held tightly as he is by some support, human or artificial (what, in France, we call a “trottebébé”), he nevertheless overcomes, in a flutter of jubilant activity, the obstructions of his support and, fixing his attitude in a slightly leaning forward position, in order to hold it in his gaze, brings back an instantaneous aspect of the image.[9]
The reason for this infantile excitement, Lacan concludes, is that the child is for the first time able to identify itself as a unified whole via its mirror image. Up to the point of reflection recognition, human experience is fractured, fragmentary and volatile because we have no way of drawing our identities together as, from our individual viewpoints, we cannot see our whole selves. Steven Johnson[10] sees that the invention of mirrors was a ‘revelation on the most intimate of levels’, noting that before they became commonplace, ‘the average person went through life without ever seeing a truly accurate representation of his or her face, just fragmentary, distorted glances in pools of water or polished metals.’ Lacan’s mirror stage is thus the product of technological innovation — albeit now a centuries-old one — and prior to the introduction of the looking glass the formation of identity through visual self-recognition would have been less stable than it was subsequently.
Despite the fidelity of reflection provided by the modern mirror, though, the ‘instantaneous aspect of the image’ attained by the infant remains fleeting, offering only a glimpse of craved integrity. This impermanence is compounded by the ensuing unconscious recognition that the image exists outside of the individual — while it is necessary for the child to be present to produce an image of itself, the image and the child are not one and the same, and the image is a symbolic representation of the child. Lacan refers to the relationship of image and ego as ‘The Imaginary’[11] and the disconnect between image and ego pressages the alienating experience of Lacan’s ensuing order, ‘The Symbolic’.[12] The ‘flutter of jubilant activity’ Lacan observed in infants’ encounters with their own reflections is a primal form of jouissance — it is enjoyment based on an illusion of individual integrity that ultimately has neither substance nor sustainability.
‘The signifier over the signified’
Lacan also sees the Symbolic order as a realm in which individuals are unable to find a true place. His thinking here is predicated on the work of the structural linguist Ferdinand de Saussure[13] and points to the arbitrary relationship between language and its meaning. Language associates its signifiers (words) with signified objects and actions, but there is no concrete relationship between signifier and signified. The words ‘table’ and ‘chair’, for example, have particular associations assigned by the conventions of (in this case the English) language, but there is no reason why a ‘chair’ should not be what we recognise as a ‘table’ or vice versa. In fact, there is no reason why the signifiers ‘table’ and ‘chair’ should not be applied to any given meaning — the signifier ‘table’ might just as well be used to denote what we associate currently with the words ‘tree’, ‘walking’, ‘motorcycle’ or any other random example. Even where signifiers are applied conventionally their associations are absolutely unspecific. We apply the word ‘chair’ not just to a lone object but to similar items of all kinds — a sofa, a car seat, a park bench and a throne are all recognisable as different forms of ‘chair’. ‘Chair’ can also denote a person who leads meetings and so the multifarious uses of this word are not even restricted to inanimate items of furniture.
Lacan[14] expresses the relationship between signifier and signified in the formula:
S
—
s
‘which is read as: the signifier over the signified, “over” corresponding to the line separating the two levels.’ It is also correct to read ‘over’ to mean ‘most important’ as the signifier remains consistent regardless of what it is used to signify at any given time — the word ‘chair’ is used to signify myriad different objects and any number of people who lead meetings, but it remains unchanged. The slippage of signifieds beneath signifiers shows that language is a closed system of meaning that exists independently of what it is used to express. Language’s insularity is also shown by the fact that defining the meaning of a particular word requires other words — looking up a word in a dictionary discovers only more words. Lacan[15] captures this phenomenon in determining that a signifier ‘is characterized by the fact that it represents a subject to another signifier.’ This reduces the subject (as shown by the above formula) to ‘nothing other than what slides in a chain of signifiers, whether he [the subject] knows what signifier he is the effect of or not.’[16] Language is thus a self-referential loop that is indifferent to all it denotes.
The alienating effect of the Symbolic order
The significance of the disconnect between signifier and subject for Lacan is that language is, as a result, alienating. Just as an infant’s delight at discovering an apparently unified image of itself in a mirror is based on an apparition of reflected light, representations of self in language are similarly insubstantial. This is evident in the most essential way in which we are represented in language — our names. In the first post of this series, I discussed the adoption of pseudonyms by rock musicians and other performers, exploring David Hepworth’s[17] comment that The Rolling Stones’ founding member Brian Jones ‘really couldn’t be called Elmo Lewis because he came from Cheltenham.’ Although, as discussed, Hepworth is making an observation about cultural expectation, there is no linguistic reason why someone from Cheltenham should not be named Elmo Lewis nor why someone from Chicago should not be called Brian Jones — a Google search reveals a plethora of people with that name in the Windy City, although seeking an Elmo Lewis in Cheltenham turns up Brian Jones. While we identify intimately with our names, there is nothing in the structure of language that joins us immutably with them and nor are they unique to us — as shown by the multiple Brian Joneses Google discovers in Chicago and, although it returns few Elmo Lewises in Cheltenham, there is no reason why multiple individuals should not also bear that name. Lacan’s formula showing the slippage of signifieds beneath signifiers applies as much to proper nouns as to any other signifier and demonstrates that names are no more than placeholders within language. The total lack of opportunity for any genuine unique representation within the Symbolic order is the source of the alienation of its subjects.
The reason that we do not recognise the Symbolic order as alienating, Mannion[18] explains, is because our egos labour under the delusion that they are distinct, individual entities. This is similar to the illusion of wholeness experienced by an infant recognising itself in a mirror for the first time, except that here the illusion is one of having a unique place within the Symbolic order. Mannion writes that the ego ‘posits that I am myself and the other is the other. This gives the ego a sense of unity that it does not in fact possess.’ This is because ‘self’ and ‘other’ are codependent — it is not possible to have a sense of self without a corresponding sense of other. In essence this returns to Saussurian structural linguistic theory, which sees language as a system of bianary opposition.[19] While the application of signifiers is arbitrary — so that what we understand by the signifier ‘table’ could have been conveyed just as well by ‘chair’ — signifiers are also assigned in terms of what they are not — a chair is a chair because it is not a table or a soufflé or a wombat. To rephrase Mannion’s above statement of the ego’s reasoning, it posits that ‘I am me. You are you,’ whereas its true position is ‘I am me because I am not you. You are you because you are not me,‘ and furthermore, ‘I need you in order to be me. You need me in order to be you.’ There is no aspect of trite sentiment about these statements, they simply mark the logical relationship between self and other in the Symbolic order, which offers only empty indifference to the individuals it signifies.
The big Other
The effect of needing to communicate via the Symbolic order is to add a virtual third party to the process, which Lacan terms the ‘big Other’. As with the alienating impact of the Symbolic order, the all-pervasive influence of the big Other is difficult to recognise. When we address a particular person or group of people, the dominant impression is one of communicating directly with them, disregarding the fact that we are doing so through the intermediary of language. The need to use language is so obvious that it goes almost unnoticed, leading to the misrecognition of our commonplace communication as a straightforward series of two-way exchanges.
The significance of the big Other is more evident in writings such as this one. If I ask myself, ‘To whom am I writing?’, the answer is unclear. I am, of course, writing to you, the reader, but, although I have some ideas about my target audience, I am writing to no one in particular. My use of the personal pronoun ‘you’ in the previous sentence may give the impression that I am addressing you specifically, but each reader of any text is a temporary fixture in relation to it, and — assuming a number of readers (which might well be an immodest assumption in this case!) — the person signified by ‘you’ will shift according to the present reader. This is a further example of Lacan’s signifier-over-signified formula in action, but it also indicates that the other to which our communications are addressed is the big Other.
Exploring Lacan’s[20] closing statement in his Seminar on “The Purloined Letter” that ‘a letter always arrives at its destination’ — one of the psychoanalyst’s best-known phrases — Slavoj Žižek[21] surmises:
[…] a letter reaches its true destination the moment it is delivered — its true addressee is not the empirical other who may receive it or not, but the big Other, the Symbolic Order itself, which receives it the moment the letter is put into circulation, i.e., the moment the sender externalizes his message, delivers it to the Other, the moment the Other takes cognizance of the letter, and thus disburdens the sender of responsibility for it.[22]
The communicative process requires that we express our thoughts symbolically and so our messages’ first destination is the Symbolic order, which, as Žižek explains, is the same as the big Other. Once expressed, therefore, thoughts find their immediate destination with the big Other — even if nobody ever reads these words, they have already been delivered.
‘I loff you’: The lack in the big Other
The outcome of our needing to communicate in this way is that we are forced to express ourselves within a system that is, as I have discussed, wholly indifferent to our existence. The big Other, though, as Mannion[23] puts it, ‘has holes’, which allow space for us to find apparent representation within it. These gaps are created by our ability to find tenuous signification within the big Other. Occupying these spaces, though, causes an underlying sense of lack because the representation we find is neither genuine nor permanent — again, if I use the personal pronoun ‘you’, you might feel that I am referring to you personally, but another reader of this text will have the same impression, so that, ultimately, ‘you’ is not you, but just an empty signifier.
Despite the impossibility of our ever finding full expression, the illusion that we might do so endures. In Annie Hall,[24] Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) declares his love for the eponymous Annie (Diane Keaton), effusing, ‘I—uh, love is, uh, is too weak a word for what— […] —I … I lerve you. […] You know I lo-ove you, I-I loff you. […] There are two fs. I-I have to invent— Of course I love you.’[25]
Even if Alvy was able to ‘invent’ terms that might give full vent to his feelings, these too would be part of the Symbolic order — yet more links in an infinite chain of signifiers. This means that every attempt to truly articulate feelings will fall short with the outcome, as Marcus Gilroy-Ware[27] explains, encapsulated:
[…] in the German adjective ersatz, meaning the inferiority of a replacement. An ersatz experience is chosen because it is the closest option to replace some superior, but unavailable experience. Along similar lines, […] Jacques Lacan wrote of “l’objet petit a,” something constantly sought after and desired, but which can never be obtained and enjoyed.[28]
In Annie Hall, Alvy is unsatisfied with the word ‘love’ as a substitute for what he is feeling. Despite his efforts, he is able to articulate only other ersatz expressions of his ardour and can only conclude, ‘Of course I love you.’ While Annie might be in little doubt about Alvy’s feelings for her, his words will prove a poor substitute for them — they are not his love itself but a ‘counterfeit presentment’[29] of it. The scene manifests the futility of trying to convey intense emotions with a ubiquitous word — what Philip Larkin[30] called ‘that much-mentioned brilliance, love’ — but the impulse to reach for the elusive articulation remains. As Gilroy-Ware points out, this urge is driven by l’objet petit a, in which a represents ‘autre’ — other.[31]
‘The relation of desire to desire’
Philip Hill[32] renders l’objet petit a as the ‘little object or little other’, placing it:
[…] somehow in no man’s land, between the subject and the big other of language. The little object is the demand or desire of the other as taken up by the subject. So examples of the little object include the voice and the gaze of the other. We make others aware of our desire through our gaze, and the sound or tone of our signifiers.[33]
The little object is both the object and cause of desire and the outcome of its pursuit is further desire. At the Brooklyn Bridge, Alvy coaxes Annie into admitting that she loves him — to reveal her desire — and she asks him if he loves her too — asking for his desire in return. Alvy’s inability to adequately express his desire shows that he is also unable to satisfy her desire for his desire by signifying it. Grasping at the little object will always fail because it ‘is a thing of nothing.’[34] Lacan[35] sees the closed circuit of the little object in terms of ‘the relation of desire to desire.’ ‘This relation is internal,’ he concludes. ‘Man’s desire is the desire of the Other.’
Owen Hewitson[36] explains that we can understand Lacan’s phrase ’man’s desire is the desire of the Other’ in ‘two relatively straightforward ways’:
Firstly, that desire is essentially a desire for recognition from this “Other”; secondly that desire is for the thing that we suppose the Other desires, which is to say, the thing that the Other lacks.[37]
It is important to identify that the ‘Other’ here is — as indicated by the capital O — the big Other. The big Other, of course, cannot recognise us nor does it desire anything from us because it is the Symbolic order, not another being. Hewitson uses the phrase ‘the thing that we suppose the Other desires’ advisedly because it is our suppositions that drive our desires. And plugging perceived gaps in the big Other is the way in which we pursue the desire, the objet petit a, that we crave.
Filling the void
Mannion[38] recognises that:
Facebook presents users with this lack in the Other to fill in throughout the site. This is a staging or filling in of what the subject thinks the Other wants. When first joining the site, Facebook presents you with the subject as void, an empty space for one’s profile picture, which used to be a question mark but is now a blank cut-out that invites completion. Activities, intersts, music, books, movies and television categories all allow selection from pre-existing items, but users can create their own item page if there is no existing entry. Finding and creating a niche Facebook Page that did not already exist allows one to experience jouissance, in the filling in of the lack, but also to receive recognition for a particular cause, product, or lifestyle choice through the number of people “liking” the page.[39]
Facebook and other social media platforms manifest the apparent lack in the big Other constantly by presenting users with repeated invitations to fill empty spaces. Once users have completed profile details such as those listed by Mannion, Facebook heads its default News Feed page with an unending call to ‘Create Post’ above a form field that, at the time of writing, reads ‘What’s on your mind, <user’s first name>?’ The ‘Create Post’ form field demonstrates the full extent of the gulf between the platform user’s perceived engagement with the big Other and the true circumstances. There is an implied intimacy in the question ‘What’s on your mind?’ and the appendation of the user’s first name that compounds the impression of its being personal. The truth, of course, is that Facebook asks the same question (or international variants of it) of all its 2.41 billion monthly active users[40] and each user’s first name is added by a variable in the News Feed’s source code that calls the relevant information from the database. Although such calls for social media users to respond are evidently entirely impersonal, the subjects nonetheless perceive a lack that they can fill. The pleasure derived from doing so is a hollow one because the lack it meets is illusory. The insubstantial rewards on offer here are jouissance.
Rosenstein’s[41] ‘bright dings of pseudo-pleasure’ owe their brilliance to both neurophysiological responses to stimuli that induce primal chemical rewards (dopamine) in the brain and to the neurolinguistic need to fill perceived incompletenesses in a symbolic order that is entire of itself and unconscious of all it signifies. While the indifferent fulfilment yielded by these (as Gilroy-Ware[42] describes them) ‘ersatz experiences’ may well be evident to many who seek them, they remain compelling enough to drive constant pusuit. This is why on arriving at a Rolling Stones concert my first impulse was to take out my smartphone and photograph the event to share on Facebook and why an invitation to post ten favourite album covers on the platform proved irresistible.
Notes and references