Change Today: Why Both Stability and the Radically Different are Disappearing | The Crisis of the Atopic Other

 

 

            I have previously announced the presence of the “Meta” age. We live in the age of meta-jokes, meta-sarcasm, meta-language and meta-capitalism^{1, 2}. In the most “meta” way, change itself is going through various changes today. The 21^st century neoliberal order manages the seemingly paradoxical state to put everything into a state of perpetual change, while on the other hand, all these changes being superficially different, a simple reiteration or permutation of the old. In late capitalism, everything changes, but changes in the same way. Everyone is different, but no one is different from all the ways in which everyone else is different. On one hand, we live in a fast-paced consumerist culture geared on short-term gratification where nothing lasts permanently. On the other hand, everything is comparable, leading to an inferno of the same. In this way, both stability and radical change are sacrificed. Nothing is stable and permanent, meaning that one has to constantly change to adapt and survive, but at the same time, not much is truly shockingly new either.

            Capitalism is not a system that promotes individuality, like libertarians say. The opposition between individualism and collectivism is a false one, they are not inversely proportional because every individual identity is a trait or propriety that you share with others, leading to a group. In actuality, capitalism promotes neither collectivist conformity, nor individualism, but superficial diversity. In our current neoliberal order, everyone is different in the same way: everyone stands out, but no one stands out from others in how they stand out. We have so many choices, but they all amount to the same in the end. We can choose between Coca Cola and Pepsi, between a corrupt political party and an even more corrupt political party, between 20 brands of shampoo that are only slightly different from each other. Late capitalism gives the illusion of freedom of choice by taking the one and turning it into a multiple of superficial differences. Hence, we have one single brand of shampoo, but we are given the illusion that we have 20. We have one single political party, but we are given the illusion that are have more.

            Socrates as a professor and as a lover was named “atopic”. In Greek, atopia refers to something so radically different, so radically Other, that it is incomparable. An event that is atopic has no place in the previous order, and therefore, it is a violent encounter, it shakes up the system of how to compare things in general. The atopic is whatever is placeless, mysterious, one cannot talk about it without having to change the entire way we talk about things in general. It is not something that’s simply new, it’s something that’s meta-new, it is so new that the way in which it is new is also new. It’s different from all the ways in which everything else is different. Capitalism loves superficial diversity, but hates atopia. The globalization of capital turns everything into a commodity, making everything comparable through price. The atopic stands outside the order of capitalist production. Jean Baudrillard warned us more than three decades ago about this, calling it “the expulsion of the Other”³.

            A political party that is different is not simply a "centrist" compromise between the mainstream left-wing and right-wing establishment in that respective country. An atopic political party challenges the entire way we classify parties in general, in order for us to even talk about the atopic party, we must rethink our entire political compass. An atopic politician is placeless under the previous system of how to compare politicians, forcing us to create an altogether new political compass just to accommodate for this new one.

            Most importantly, the way we talk of personal change is most alarming. Today, everyone wants to change themselves. However, this change is not an atopic one, it is simply a re-permutation of the old, a superficial change. Personal change no longer represents a violent encounter that “shakes you up”, forcing you to change your entire worldview. Instead, change is talked about in popular discourse as a rational, calculated, planned-out investment. Today, we no longer treat ourselves as subjects, but as projects. As such, our very subjectivity and identity is viewed as an investment, as a personal project that must be measured for cost-benefit analysis, for the maximization of profit and the minimization of risk. Chance encounters are to be avoided. Nowadays, everyone wants to “work on themselves”. Everyone talks about “self-management” and how to “optimize” their self. Everyone wants to develop their skills, to ‘actualize their true potential’, to invest in themselves. The true re-invention of the “I” never takes place, since change today is talked about as your old self changing your new self.

But true personal change does not work like that. The self cannot truly transcend or overcome its own condition without a psychologically violent encounter with the Other that forces it out of its narcissistic shell. True, radical change is as an accidental, contingent encounter that is retroactively perceived as necessity or fate (“I have been waiting all my life for this moment without knowing”). True change is an unexpected encounter, it’s a leap of faith into the unknown, it takes you by surprise, it’s forces you to view things in a new light, and as such, it involves taking risks. To transform yourself means to go through a metaphorical death, not to calculate for a pre-determined outcome how you shall optimize your personality and body. Alain Badiou says this of the new:

 

“I think that all creation, all truth with any real significance is always linked to an event. Anything else is just a normal consequence of everyday world. It is neither a creation nor an invention, just a continuation. What does it mean to start something? If you want to consider something beginning, you have to consider there is an element of chance. If there isn't a chance involved then it’s not a start because it's something that already exists and is predetermined.”⁴

 

If I want to change, I have to get out of my narcissistic shell and become vulnerable, opening myself up to a risky intervention from the atopic, placeless Other, with a capital ‘O’. Most people who have gone through such a personal transformation have never intentionally looked out for it, you do not choose to change, in a way, you are chosen. For example, they may tell how they naturally went about their day, encountered a homeless person who told them something, and everything clicked and suddenly they saw things in a new light after that epiphany. Radical change is psychically violent insofar as it is unexpected, it kills your ego, forcing the creation of a new one.

Even the way we talk about love is going through the same transformations. Love today is talked about as a business-like transaction, a pre-calculated investment that attempts to avoid risk and chance encounters. What is most important is that the Other does not take you by surprise. “Compatibility” is a common buzzword today. Compatibility is the logic of capital, of comparing and contrasting everything such that everything has a common exchange-value, and it is opposed to the logic of the atopic Other. In the past few decades, everyone wants to avoid risk and change by seeking out a partner that is compatible to their lifestyle and worldview. Whether good lovers have to be similar or whether opposites attract is a false debate. Two people that are similar in every way or two people that are opposites in every way are both two ways of comparing and contrasting superficial differences. The atopic Other is placeless, incomparable. It is neither “the same” nor “the opposite”, it is so different that it forces you to re-think the entire system of how to compare in the first place. An atopic lover is one that either changes what you want out of relationships in general, or if they don’t, they change the way in which you frame it, express it or think about it. Every system of comparing differences has some sort of exception or invisible gap that it cannot account for, but also cannot account for why it cannot account for it (like the eye’s blind spot or Achille’s Heel) – every system has such a hidden vulnerability. When a person views love through the logic of business (the dating “market”), where you compare multiple options, that person gains the illusion that their system of comparison can account for every person on earth, that everyone can be a cog in this machine: they are either the same as me, or the opposite, or they stand in some sort of relationship to this frame of comparison. The atopic Other shakes up the entire system of how to compare people in general, forcing you to realize that your system did not in fact account for everyone, they are the “glitch in the matrix”. As such, they will force you to create an altogether new system of how to compare people just to account for this new “exception to the rule”, because they are neither the same as you, nor your opposite, nor slightly different, they are simply placeless in your worldview.

In our age, “self-love” and “self-care” are common buzzwords too, but they are simulacrums to hide the fact that love for both the Other and the self have mostly disappeared. Self-love is not the same as narcissistic, selfish “therapy speak”.

 

“The subject of self-love draws a negative boundary between him- or herself and the Other. The narcissistic subject, on the other hand, never manages to set any clear boundaries. In consequence, the border between the narcissist and the Other becomes blurry. The world appears only as adumbrations of the narcissist’s self, which is incapable of recognizing the Other in his or her otherness—much less acknowledging this otherness for what it is. Meaning can exist for the narcissistic self only when it somehow catches sight of itself. It wallows in its own shadow everywhere until it drowns— in itself.”⁵

 

The narcissistic subject is not capable of true personal change either, because they view not only other people as extension of their own ego, but the future versions of themselves as extensions of their current self. 21^st century late-stage capitalism has transformed society into an interconnected rhizome of self-contained bubbles, where everyone is quite paradoxically aware and conscious of what is going on in other people’s “bubbles”, while also never managing to get out of their bubble. Echo chambers are the prime example of this: in an echo chamber, you are constantly exposed to the political views of the ‘opposite tribe’, but only after they’ve been filtered through your own ideology (reviewed by a commentator from your tribe, for instance). One views everything and yet stays in the same place.

This new order turns everyone into narcissistic subjects alienated from everyone else, lonely in a crowd full of people. As such, personal transformation turns into “self-management” and “optimization” of skills as well. We talk about ourselves in a narcissistic way insofar as we only want to change ourselves in relationship to how we currently are. As long as this change is a change that can be compared to our previous self, it is not a risky business endeavor. This is why today’s “self-love” is a fake. True self-love is a treatment of one’s own ego in the same way that love for the atopic Other is a violent, even traumatic encounter with the radically different. The narcissistic subject does not love themselves because they cannot view their future self as radically Other, they are not capable of a personal change so placeless that they have to rethink the entire way that they tend to change in general.

The constant chase for happiness, success and achievement is also characteristic of the current material conditions that we live in, because late capitalism seeks to satisfy people’s needs, leading them to live a bare life that is “just okay”. Social media addiction represents a brain that has been numbed out, that is geared towards short-term gratification, leading a life that is “just fine”. Our current order is more reminiscent of Huxley’s “Brave New World” than Orwell’s “1984”. Yanis Varoufakis says of personal change:

 

“You see, looking for happiness is not like digging for gold. Gold is defined independently of who we are or, more importantly, who we are becoming by digging for it. And yet living a successful life, a life in which authentic happiness is a possibility, is a process of becoming, in which our character and our thoughts, and thus our preferences and desires, constantly evolve.

Looking at photographs of myself when I was in my late teens or early twenties, I remember the things that I obsessed about then, my preferences and preoccupations, and I cringe. Would I want to live in a universe that constantly served those preferences and preoccupations? You bet I wouldn’t. But to what do we owe the evolution of our character and our desires? Conflict is the short answer. Yes, we owe our character to our confrontation with the world and its refusal to grant us all our wishes at once, as well as to the conflict within us made possible by our capacity to think to ourselves, I want X, but should I want X? We loathe constraints but at the same time understand that they liberate us, if only by helping us question our own motives. Authentic happiness is impossible, in other words, without dissatisfaction as well as satisfaction. Rather than being enslaved by satisfaction, we need the liberty to be dissatisfied.

What is the point of any of this in the context of a book on the economy? It is that HALPEVAM is designed to do that which market society strives to accomplish: to satisfy your preferences. Judging by the wholesale unhappiness around us, market society does so terribly incompetently, but the point is that you live in a type of economy that is not only terrible at achieving the goals it sets itself but, far worse, an economy whose goals should never be met.”⁶

 

The avoidance of all risk and pain today weakens everyone’s “psychological immune system” into a hyper-sensitive subject who is incapable of painful changes. Depression is so prevalent today because it is characteristic of the cold, lifeless subject without passion, without adventure. But there is no eros without bleeding, without risk.

 

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NOTES:

1: https://lastreviotheory.blogspot.com/2023/05/cloud-capitalism-network-effect-and.html

2: https://lastreviotheory.blogspot.com/2023/06/extimacy-and-disappearance-of-reality.html

3: Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil (1993), Chapter 21: The Declination of Wills

4: Romantic advice from French philosopher Alain Badiou: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CytC6A-K8c4

5: Byung-Chul Han, The Agony of Eros, Chapter 1: Melancholia

6: Yanis Varoufakis, Talking to my daughter about the economy, Epilogue