Thoughts from the inside 00: time flows at the window of what it is real

(please note that these reflections and thoughts were originally written and shared during the forced isolation for the pandemic in April 2020)

The time we live in, and the things that happen, may appear different than we'd like them to be.

A little less real, at times. Other times, much more than real. Hyper-real.

The hyper-media dimension that many are experiencing in these days of forced isolation replaces direct relational contact, and has shattered many of the planes with which we usually interpret our contact with reality and with what we consider real. It might be the occasion to elaborate on what it is real in this reality is. How one can confront it.

It means questioning our position in a world that, forcibly confined to isolation, uses the virtual dimension as a representation of the majority of possible social contacts.

Until recently, and for some that meant a few months, few weeks, or even few days, the issue sounded as academical debate on social media, on a truly virtual world that for some (often the same ones as in the previous line) was the world allowing the full experience of the dimension that Lewis Carroll (1) defined as "being what one seems."

We've long been living in a "social" and virtual world, where, once content circulates, it goes viral. A familiar expression, it used to denote success, the contamination of many with a projected self-image, proposed and relaunched according to algorithms that push forward what's real into a hyper-representation.

Baudrillard wrote that "within modernity, we never stop accumulating, adding, relaunching; we have forgotten that it is subtraction that gives strength, that power is born from absence. And because we are no longer capable of dealing with the symbolic mastery of absence, today we are immersed in the opposite illusion, the disenchanted proliferation of screens and images." (2)

The time we inhabit flows like a river reflecting the images of this hyperreality, sometimes confusing the image with the reflection. A perfect breeding ground for narcissism.

In modern world, we have settled into a pervasive dimension of social media, further exacerbated by the forced and enforced isolation imposed by a virus that is, in fact, concretely viral.

Without another reality before us, isolation risks displacing the illusion that the hyper-representation of reproduced reality is an affirmation of what is real. A hyper-realization of oneself and one's reality.

Since the hypertrophy of the ego is a symptom of the perpetuation of an overly idealized and omnipotent image, perceived as the only "true self," one might be perplexed to understand how the hypertrophy of representation is sometimes sustained by little, or nothing at all.

Another passage from Lewis Carroll (3) comes to mind, a dialogue between Alice and the March Hare:

"Take some more tea," the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.

"I've had nothing yet," Alice replied in an offended tone, "so I can't take more."

"You mean you can't take less," said the Hatter: "it's very easy to take more than nothing."

As someone told me time ago, facing what's real is different that facing reality, and it is a complicated game, an experience in which one discovers all the powerful fragility of being the other before the other. Being the other of the other. 

The complex experience of being able to exist as the subject who is the object of the gaze of the other, the other who is at the same time also the object of the gaze of our eyes, in a perspective that allows for mirroring in which one is alternately and simultaneously source and reflection, subject and object.

There's a circularity in this image of the passing of glances. There's a full sense of the reciprocal, of what literally reciprocity is: something that "comes and goes, ebbs and flows, is behind (recus) and ahead (procus) at the same time."

The point is that while the social world allows for the possibility of reciprocity and circularity, the social-media universe is composed of a potentially limitless series of unidirectional movements, from one subject to all users, while any others-ness is undifferentiated.

What people do on the media, the media does on people. As Physics teaches us, it's a basic rule of reciprocity, pace McLuhan.

In this relational game, the question is what is taken, what is given, what is exchanged. To take, to give, to exchange—three magnificent verbs.

To take means originally a reduction in power, in which the meaning is linked to the variety of words it accompanies; it is a taking away, a seizing, an occupying.

To give means a transferring to and into another, which, with the accessory quality of spontaneity, also includes assigning, attributing, and granting.

To exchange means a permutation, a making appear of what belongs to one in a different form in the realm of the other, implying a backwards meaning. The meaning of the exchange is certified by the one who receives, not just by the one who gives. Again, circularity.

The question is: how do these apparently divergent discourses meet?

In our economically-driven world, people have moved from the dimension of production and exchange to the pretense that a form of mirroring is possible by freezing one part in giving and another in taking. 

People are lulled and lulled themselves in the illusion that there can be circularity in a dynamic made up of sequences of unidirectional movements.

Specifically, in a taking from others who give. Others who give, more or less. Moving from verb to noun. Giving more, less, or loss (noun) is not strictly speaking a giving, but a mark for something taken from others.

In the social-media representation in which we are forcibly confined by the pandemic (or in which one confines itself by any means), these others are an undifferentiated sum. No longer a sum of singularities, but a shared representation of an indistinct mass. If in the social dimension, the other is always the real other of a symbolic exchange, in the social-media mass, the other is a graphic sign, in which the value shifts from singularity to the overall number that makes the content "viral."

When one loses the ability to see materially, the dimension of relationship, encounter, and conflict disappears, and a pervasive anguish takes over in the face of the advancing nothingness. It shatters everything. By dematerializing lives, it hypertrophically brings back questions about the meaning of life, with all that living comprises: joy, pain, enjoyment, suffering, serenity, death.

A dramatic irony of a concretely viral period it has been, in which even the tragedy of deaths is translated by the media into an indistinct statistic.

The implicit quality of the "indistinct" as such is that it is not perceptible as part of humanity, but as a thing, a nothingness that, if not directly related, can slip into non-existence, denying the multiplicity of the interplay of the symbolic, representational, and real planes.

Denying these components is a bold exercise in denialism, it is existential colonialism: a movement that nullifies the dialectic of encounter with the other.

Without allowing oneself to inhabit the uniqueness of the encounter, the only reality left to inhabit is necessarily self-referential, self-centered. It is no longer an uncanny, to use Freud's expression, but a disturbance. A disturbance that itself becomes hyper-disturbed, and viral, that has materialized, even if it continues to be invisible.

Its status is no longer that of the hypertrophic success of virtual and social-media reality. This time, it is something that affects society, directly and profoundly. Now it is real. What comes, sooner or later, returns. As any process is naturally cyclical.

Thus it happens that the choice to build a delocalized and globalized world makes us discover that we are actually resoundingly structurally fragile, especially precisely in the face of the return of delocalization of what is global. A virus is not just a dramatic metaphor, but a concrete and real translation. A circulating virus has its own health relevance, as is evident. What appears hypertrophic and hyperbolic is the discipline with which it is narrated in a hyper-amplified dimension, which covers up necessary attention and health prophylaxis with apocalyptic tones, even making panic a primary consumer good.

Hence the raids on supermarkets, so different from the raids on bakeries and mills during the uprisings and the European bread riots of 1898, or in the Arab Spring of 2011. Or the offers of digital solidarity, which sadly are temporary solidarity, just a few weeks away, while waiting for management changes and new customers to arrive.

Similarly, the deserved praise for healthcare workers (the wonderful men and women who, to face a forewarned emergency, are doing their utmost, risking their lives, never protected by the institution they represent) is being paid by the same ruling class that has eroded public healthcare over the years, reducing beds, resources, and staff (4) and is now incapable of protecting them.

The drama results as hyper-amplified, shifting the responsibility for collective direction and management choices onto the individual dimension.

As if the common sense of taking a walk in the woods or sitting on a bench for a lonely elderly person is vastly more dangerous than not providing healthcare workers with the necessary protections to care for the sick without the risk of becoming infected, spreading the contagion, or dying from it.

As often happens, the extent of the fear of illness, and more profoundly, of suffering and death, is transformed by the mass effect into anguish, by multiplicative excess, in that mechanism by which, given that the potential limit is everywhere, and equally intangible, it is everywhere and nowhere.

In this, remembering the value of words becomes an exercise in resisting the viral drift, to help us root ourselves in the reality of life.

There is a substantial difference between a pandemic and a war. Between a war and a genocide. Between recognizing oneself as a citizen or a soldier; between being aware or being obedient subjects; between being in solidarity with humanity or being patriotic; between being responsible or hysterically confronting restrictions on individual freedoms. Even this simple exercise becomes a barrier to the spread of the virus, to foster the sense of humanity.

It' is a further image of how a virus is the perfectly and dramatically fitting representation of an escape from reality. Without an object, we become lost, absorbed by that voracious nothingness, the advancing nothingness of endless history, against which so many fret and run in search of something that struggles to sustain itself, in the confines of their rooms, their social-media networks, all compressed and encompassed by the dimension of domiciliary confinement. A world lived from the window.

So, the question that the people I work with sometimes ask becomes pertinent: How can one exist in all this?

A few afternoons ago, I was sitting in the room I use to give sessions. As if guided by common sense rather than authority obligations, I had opened the window between appointments with the people I worked with. It was a wonderful late winter afternoon, with spring revealing its first colors.

As in free association, I glanced at the bookshelf and my eye fell on "Windows" by Jean Bertrand Pontalis (5), a French analyst I greatly admire. I read and reread it:

"... I could represent the stages of my life as a succession of opening windows: outings with friends outside the neighborhood, away from family, learning foreign languages ​​for my final year, my travels abroad, my loves (not all of them...), reading and rereading, my analysis on the sofa, my analyses in the armchair. (...) My topic of open windows... an analogy between the timelessness of childhood and the timelessness of the unconscious..."

I open the window and allow myself a final thought. 

Who knows what it would be like if we inhabited Pontalis's words in the present, living and sharing a time in which, most often in silence, we felt and observed without the screen of knowledge and words, a time in which all our senses were awake, in which we could be sensual and visionary, in which we could invent the world and inhabit the reality of encounters with others, without delay, without delegating to the virtual, but as promise, power, commitment, dedication, and continuous generative birth?

...

references:

(1) Lewis Carroll, Through the looking-glass and what Alice found there, 1871

(2) Jean Baudrillard, The perfect crime, 1996

(3) Lewis Carroll, Alice's adventures in wonderland, 1865

(4) Data by the Italian National Health Minister:

• «1998: 311.000 hospital beds (5,8 every thousand inhabitants) in 1.381 hospitals, being 61,3% public and 38,7% private
• 2007: 225.000 hospital beds (4,3 every thousand inhabitants) in 1.197 hospitals, being 55% public and 45% private
• 2017: 191.000  hospital beds (3,6 very thousand inhabitants) in 1.000 hospitals, being 51,80% public e 48,20% private … »
• in the same period of time, Italian population grew from 57 millions in 2001 to 60,5 millions in 2017 (data by ISTAT). 
  

(5) Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, Windows, 2001