Extimacy, and the Disappearance of Reality: Why It's No Longer Possible to "Touch Grass"

 

 

            What does it mean to “touch grass” or to “get back in touch with reality”? Obviously, the word ‘reality’ here is used in a metaphorical sense, because one is always engaged with physical objects in some sense, even when online. In practice, it assumes that the person who cannot “touch grass” is somehow removed from a central social reality, having their head way too up in the clouds to accurately represent it. In other words, it relies on an inside/outside distinction that is no longer viable.

            Today, the “inside/outside” (or “private/public”) distinction has become outdated. As such, we can no longer speak of a “reality” to be in touch with (in the social sense). The idea of “society” as a whole has been broken into atomized parts by the globalization of capital. The set of social norms and cultural practices inherent to a society was called “the big Other” by Jacques Lacan. In any social interaction, we act as if there was an invisible presence always watching us that actually never existed: this big Other never existed in this material sense, but only today it is becoming more and more visible how it has always already been divided. Today, the big Other of society is being replaced by multiple, smaller big Others, each interacting with each other indirectly, all these social contexts being connected to each other like a rhizome.

As such, we can no longer speak of being in touch with “reality” in this strict social sense, since society has mostly disappeared, being replaced by online cultures. Each online platform has its own culture, set of social norms, unwritten rules and codes that separate insiders from outsiders depending on who “gets” them. Even when you physically leave your house in our digitally connected world, you aren’t being exposed to such a different quality of information than the one you were already engaged in when physically inside your house. Is there such a thing as being “outside” social media? Inside the house, we see ads and Facebook posts on our PC or Laptop. Outside the house, we check Facebook on our phone and see ads everywhere. Both the silence of the private and the society of the public are being replaced by the “private-public self” of extimacy. Reality itself is being replaced by the hyperreal spectacle that Baudrillard and Guy Debord extensively wrote about.

Privacy and intimacy are both slowly disappearing, giving rise to what Lacan may have called “extimacy” or alienation – a way of keeping in touch “at a distance”, a way of sharing more information with strangers than with people who you are truly intimate with, but only at a superficial level. The ultimate experience of extimacy in the 21^st century is feeling lonely in a crowd full of people.

“Culture” is also an outdated category. Culture implies a more or less united ‘big Other’ of social norms, cultural practices and unwritten social rules of social interaction that everyone implicitly accepts by participating in it. Today, the big Other is being removed from physical spaces, such as the imaginary borders drawn around maps that we call “countries”. The social norms between countries are getting more and more similar due to globalization. On the other hand, the social norms between digital platforms are getting more and more different due to tribalization.

Even the infamous “gender wars” between radical feminists and “red pill alpha males” are products of the globalization of capital, of the material conditions we live in. It’s often said that men no longer know how to “talk to women” by one side or that women are becoming too sensitive to being approached by the other side. But the situation is more radical, we can no longer even speak of a united concept of “talking to women” since the concept of ‘society’ has basically disappeared. In early capitalism, you could have made the argument that there’s a way to approach people in Japan, a way to approach people in the US, a way to approach people in Germany, etc. Now, globalization is a double-edged sword: all the countries are becoming more culturally similar, but there’s a way to approach people on Facebook, a way to approach people on Tinder, a way to talk to people on Discord… The contexts still exist, but they are becoming removed from their physical space. In one single second, one can switch the website and have a drastically larger cultural shift than they would if they were to travel across the globe. The social norms and unwritten rules of “going outside” are also being replaced by platforms. The context of “meeting someone from Tinder in real-life” and the context of “meeting someone from Facebook in real-life” may happen in the exact same physical space and yet still function somewhat differently at the social level of the big Other, due to the contextual history it carries with it. Slavoj Zizek and Alenka Zupancic have a joke about this: a man enters a coffee shop and orders a cup of coffee but without cream. The waiter replies “Sorry, but we’ve run out of cream. Would you like a cup of coffee without milk instead?”. Even though two social interactions may happen in the same physical space, they are like “coffee without cream” vs. “coffee without milk” due to each having a different history, each starting from a different virtual space.

This is why it’s impossible to “get off of the internet and go outside”. Outside of what, outside of cloud capitalism? Today, extremely few real-life social interactions are removed from a certain online culture. Real-life interactions are planned or organized digitally in an online platform that indirectly shapes our personalities and the way we talk in that digital space. That online personality partially carries into the real-life world. More than this, real-life social interactions make use of digital platforms which themselves indirectly shape our personalities and the unwritten rules of social interaction that we unconsciously process. An online drama or culture war may be referenced in the real-world, and the psyche has to find a compromise between “How I would respond if this were said to me online” vs. “How I would respond if this drama never existed online in the first place”. Even concerts are viewed from a phone screen. You may leave the house, hoping to escape the digital space of online platforms, and what you are met with are the same online platforms.

We have a shift from first-order observation to second-order observation: We no longer compare paintings based on how well they match the real world. We compare the real world based on how well it matches the pictures. When we travel to a place, we compare the real-world based on how well it matches what we’ve seen in pictures. We compare the real-life faces of people to how well they match their social media profiles, or to expectations created by other social media profiles, and we compare McDonald’s burgers to how well they match their pictures. It is thus next-to-impossible to find a “real world” that is not already mediated by images or digital media somehow.

The ”disciplinary society” is an outdated concept. Michel Foucault came up with the concept of disciplinary societies to describe a social order in which those who do not conform with the centrally-imposed unwritten rules and social norms naturally end up isolated from the world: sexual minorities, those diagnosed with a mental illness, etc. Hence, Foucault describes the birth of prison systems and psych wards as ways to isolate the non-conformists from society. Today, we no longer live in a society, but in a “cloud-capital” hyperreality where everything is connected rhizomatically. There is no central set of social norms to conform to in the first place – a group of people that would normally be labelled as obscene, insane or dangerous (ex: alt-right conspiracy theorists) can very easily create an online space with its own set of social norms, codes and unwritten rules, and after that even meet up in real life. The (hyper-)”real world” in which they meet up will partially carry on the rules created online. As such, even a concept like “social skills” loses its meaning. Having a set of social skills or (not) being ‘socially inept’ implies a certain relation to a central big Other of society. Today, it is perfectly possible to be socially adapted and functioning in one digital context and completely inept in another digital context, with the skills carrying over from one context to another very little, due to the contexts themselves being more and more alienated from each other.

In the hyperreal order, everyone feels disconnected from reality because of its disappearance. Everyone gains the illusion of feeling isolated when in reality, we aren’t isolated from anything since there is no central thing to be isolated from. We are all alienated. Alienation is closeness in distance and distance in closeness. We can keep in touch at large physical distances with the cost of making each face-to-face interaction more superficial, because today even “real-life” interactions happen through the lens of a (metaphorical or literal) screen.

Thus, it is not enough to say that the reality of social media does not match “reality”, that how people present themselves online does not match who they “really are”. Reality as a whole has mostly disappeared. Hyperreality is “more real than real”, as per Baudrillard. Slavoj Zizek had an interesting thought about this in his movie “The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema”: we usually say that people online, in video games or anonymous platforms, are free to create a fake image of themselves because their actions lack consequences. But, Zizek argues, what if it’s the other way around? What if it’s in reality that we repress our unconscious impulses and only online where we show who we “truly are”? What if the fiction is more real than reality itself?

Even language or the general semiotics of communication are going through major transformations that go unnoticed. Today, online discourse is slowly taking over real-life contexts, which increasingly rely on “meta” communication. On the surface-level, it seems like everything is getting decoded. In the name of transparency, communication, clarity and mutual understanding, we decode the ‘hidden meaning’ behind every message. There is no more reading between the lines, everything is said explicitly, and an autistic relationship to language is idealized. In actuality, things are the opposite of what they seem. Decoding a message is itself a code. Explaining the implications behind people’s speech itself has implications. Direct communication is not a false ideal, it’s simply an impossible ideal.

The ”/s” we add online is the best example of this. If I am sarcastic and right after that explain to you that I’m sarcastic, this can often times be an indirect way of calling you an idiot (“you’re the kind of person that does not understand sarcasm, so it needs to be explained to you”). So, the “/s” actually adds an extra-layer of sarcasm. In other words, the “/s” does not remove the need to understand sarcasm, quite the opposite, it makes sarcasm less visible.

“Consenticorns” are another example of this. In an article written by Slavoj Zizek, he describes an exhibitionist sex club in America in which a person wearing a unicorn hat has to monitor everyone to make sure that all sexual relations had there are strictly consensual. This social context presents itself as literal, explicit or even ‘autistic’: you no longer need to read people’s minds, there is no more subtext, now you need to ask the person for consent before each and every move you do. A purely bureaucratic and controlled relationship to sex: a contractual business-like relationship where everything is monitored and organized, where you can no longer “lose yourself” in sex – can you imagine a context with more subtext than this? There are still implications and allusions, there are still facial expressions and body language to read, actually more than ever before, because of the censorship and constant monitoring of the consenticorn. Now, you have to interpret the hidden meaning behind the explanation of the hidden meaning, because people are only allowed to express their desires as long as they satisfy the rules of political correctness present at the club. Again, just like the “/s”, the consenticorn does not remove abuse, it just hides it, making it less invisible.

In the name of protecting the feelings of transgender people, many American universities are implementing rules that professors should ask student’s pronouns in the beginning of their first course and respect them throughout. The mainstream, politicized LGBT movement would support a society in which it became normalized to ask people’s pronouns in order to not get them wrong. But is the LGBT movement representative of the needs of transgender people at large, or are they just a vocal minority manipulated for political agendas? A transgender Youtuber I once watched (can’t remember if it was Contrapoints or Blaire White) once said “I didn’t spend all this time into getting surgeries to pass as a woman in order to have everyone ask my gender. I want to walk into a room and for people to assume I am a woman because of how I look, even if I was born male”. Again, just like the “/s” or the consent fetishists, the ideology pushed by the liberal left advocates for transparency and decoding of all hidden meanings, where everything has to be explained and made explicit. And just like with the previous two examples, this does not remove abuse, it just makes it less visible. If the “/s” just allows you subtler ways of making fun of idiots, so do asking people their pronouns. In a society in which everyone is asking everyone’s pronouns, you can easily use that as a weapon to call cisgender people ugly without them realizing.

Of course, the previous two are extreme examples that are not representative of most social world interactions, but it shows the direction in which society is moving towards. I kept mentioning “the material conditions of the relations of production”. To be more precise, the logic of capitalism has drastically changed through the introduction of the internet. Yanis Varoufakis even calls it “techno-feudalism”. We no longer live in a neutral capitalism in which private companies are operating in a market owned by nobody. Instead, we live in a cloud capitalism, a sort of “meta-capitalism” in which the entire market is owned by one single individual. Going on Amazon or Facebook in order to advertise your business is the metaphorical equivalent of stepping outside the house, looking around and seeing how all shops around you are owned by one single individual who decides who is able to buy, who is able to sell, what prices are charged and even what your eyes are able to see. Therefore, it is no wonder that one of the largest Big Tech giants has changed their name from “Facebook” to “Meta”. If there is a word for the society in which we live, it is absolutely “Meta”. We use meta-sarcasm, meta-irony, meta-jokes (memes) in order to have meta-social interactions in a hyperreal space (“meta-real”, more real than reality). Almost all social issues that US conservatives complain about are caused by the current stage in the development of capitalism, the system they are also paradoxically defending.

What about artificial intelligence? That would be the last addition to the hyperreal order. Chat-GPT is already automating certain real-world interactions: one can use it to aid one into being more socially persuasive or polite. When given an email at work, one can easily use Chat-GPT in order to generate a response that is polite and politically correct. And the other person can respond using Chat-GPT as well, and so on. Imagine a scene of AI seduction in which the two people fall in love by repeating a script given to them by an AI language model: I think I don’t know how to talk to women, so I ask Chat-GPT what to say, and she thinks she doesn’t know how to talk to men, so she responds to my Chat-GPT generated response also using Chat-GPT, and so on and so forth. Considering that the unwritten rules of politeness are withering away in the name of globalization to be replaced by the written and ‘explicit’ meta-rules of political correctness, will AI be the only way to remain nice to each other cross-culturally?

            It is less and less possible to touch grass, both in the metaphorical sense, because of the social changes I mentioned, and even in the physical sense, due to how climate change and the accumulation of capital are destroying nature. Considering that the very grass we were able to touch has pretty much disappeared, replaced by the “more real than real” digital space, one can only ask what is left to do.

In an article written in 1808, G.W.F. Hegel attempts to answer the question “Who thinks abstractly?”. He argues against the commonly-held view that philosophers think abstractly, removed from everyday real-life concerns which are “concrete”. Quite the opposite: it is philosophy which is concrete and only when we think we are in touch with reality we think abstractly. This is because the layman abstracts away unnecessary details about an object or situation in order to focus on the task at hand, which the philosopher tries to ignore less. To give an example different from Hegel: when I wash the dishes, I look at a plate and abstract away all the unnecessary details about the plate – the fact that it’s made up of molecules which are made up of atoms, the fact that I can wear it like a hat, the fact that I can throw it like a disc, etc. There is a chaotic multiplicity of information inherent in a single object that we must abstract away in order to remain in touch with (social) reality. The person who has their head in the clouds is, counter-intuitively, most in touch with what Lacan may have called the real, which is opposed to reality, making their thinking more concrete. When people say they are in touch with reality, what they often don’t realize is that they use the word ‘reality’ in a metaphorical sense, they are in touch with a certain social reality, a certain big Other. The reality of people living in New York is not the same as the reality of people living in Africa. Not even the realities of people living in different parts of New York match. This is also an argument against the false opposition created by the Big 5 personality test: that some people are “high” while others are “low” in openness. Each one of those extremes hides their own opposite inscribed within them. The thinking of people “low in openness” is both abstract and particular, focused on a small subset of social realities. The thinking of people “high in openness”, focused on ideas, is concrete and universal, since it is focused on principles about fundamental questions that are more generally applicable across contexts.

The disappearance of a central social reality forces us to think more and more concretely. As such, everyone is a philosopher today. Debates that were merely fun to have, like the mind-body problem, how to define a man/woman or “what is censorship?” are mainstream today. Even a trivial debate about abortion forces everyone to debate the big questions like “what is consciousness?”. The most common “disease” today is depression, which naturally forces one into a philosophical state of mind. The depressed person usually has their head in the clouds, asking themselves about the meaning(lessness) of life. Perhaps the atomization of society is simply one progression in the unfolding of the dialectical “world-spirit” that Hegel talked about, being closer and closer to its final state of absolute knowledge.