TL;DR: The Psychodynamics of Capitalism
We live in an age in which desiring bodies eagerly and hungrily latch on to the social media networks of attention and visibility. They hastily feed them with data that polarises, separates, and negates any contradiction. One’s love for the same may often be based on a violent hatred of others. The filter bubbles, echo chambers, and different groupings and communities online are not only situated in the attention economy — they also elevate attention for something to a new level. Often this attention is demanded (and provided) in relation to outrage, shock, anger, or the feeling of being offended. Such feelings are a manifest form of jouissance in the Lacanian sense, a kind of pleasure-pain. Shock, disgust, and offence are experienced as such, but also pleasurable at the same time. If social media has been good for one thing, it is for this: We can now all love to hate something — be it a person, an idea, or a group.
The more antagonistic the worldviews that are produced and circulated (particularly the case on Twitter and YouTube), the more attention will be rewarded. In other words, today’s capitalism functions on the valorisation of antagonism. The hatred of the different other is the engine of profit creation for the ruling class. For all their promise of authenticity and innovation — the ideology that gives rise to Silicon Valley’s god complex, something we explore in Chapter 1 of our book, social media and tech companies require a society to keep being divided and in conflict.
As we unpack in detail in the book, desiring bodies must continue to be produced and reproduced through a logic of dis/inhibition, where bodies simultaneously inhibit and disinhibit themself and each other. Such dynamics are coupled with a particular temporality of immediacy. Byung-Chul Han writes that ‘digital communication enables affective discharge right away. On the basis of its temporality alone, it conveys impulsive reactions more than analog communication does. In this respect, the digital medium is a medium of affect.’ (Han 2017, 3, italics in original). The online slang TL;DR summarises this: Too Long; Didn’t Read — there is no time to engage with anyone or anything meaningfully. Instead, we are powered by the jouissance that comes with the hatred of the other.
But don’t we live in a visual culture that is dominated by our own images that we narcissistically circulate ad nauseam? Yes and no. Much of the online communication today, as Jodi Dean (2010) and others have stressed, functions through the logic of the drive; an endless repetition of communication for communication’s sake, empty and meaningless exchanges of data. There is precisely a lack or halting of the creation of the Symbolic for many, and they subsequently turn to fantasmatic expressions online, where anything can be expressed and that which stops them from acting or talking beyond the internet is no longer in place as a barrier. The destruction of this barrier is both technologically and subjectively created and amplified. It is further exacerbated by the speed at which posts are circulated on social media and how a lot of people often do not pause to reflect before they post something.
Identity politics and the far right
There is no disinhibition without inhibition on another level — opening up the floodgates of Symbolic articulation to produce desire, after all, means that other kinds of articulation become blocked or dammed up to make way for this new plethora of desires. Valorising antagonism means that voices must be brought forth in their full particularity, erasing universality as such. But this is not a logic of repression — it is not, for example, an Orwellian police state where certain narratives are banned from entering public consciousness. Rather, such repression is avoided entirely, as all ideas of universality are made suspect, and thus already inhibited in their very appearance.
This is how, for example, narratives of the LGBTQIA+ movement are often perverted into a celebration of particular atomised identities instead of a universal struggle against the violence of gender essentialism. The universality of gender indeterminacy as such becomes inhibited as the fight turns into a disinhibited flood of new Symbolic articulations regarding gender and sexuality that carry with them potential antagonisms to be valorised further.
We can outline this more with a crass example. Steffen Königer, member of the German Far-Right extremist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, began a speech in the Brandenburg parliament in 2016 with the following greetings (lasting approximately 2 minutes 40 seconds). We transcribe the first minute from it here:
Dear Mr. President,
Ladies and gentlemen,
Dear gays,
Dear lesbians,
Dear androgynous,
Dear bigenders,
Dear female-to-males,
Dear male-to-females,
Dear gendervariables,
Dear genderqueers,
Dear intersexuals,
Dear neither-nor-genders,
Dear agenders,
Dear non-binaries,
Dear pangenders and pansexuals,
Dear transmales and transmen,
Dear transfemales and transwomen,
Dear transpeople,
Dear trans*,
Dear trans*female and trans*male
(YouTube, Königer 2016, our translation)
The greetings continue. The video has more than 400,000 views and over 2,000 comments. It was picked up by the Russian state channel RT, and also uploaded to YouTube with English subtitles. Most commenters find the video absolutely hilarious and say that a speech like this was bound to happen when the ‘gendershit’, as one user writes, has gotten so out of control. Of course, the extreme right has a particular investment in transphobia and the gender binary, but the fight over signification — and identity politics are, in a sense, nothing else — is particularly significant today.
Universality is renounced in favour of particular identity-based struggles where the identity of a group or an individual is pitted against another’s. A consideration of universality or shared struggles is often absent from contemporary identity politics. This has all sorts of political and socio-cultural reasons and implications that we cannot go into here. It also has technological reasons that relate to the structures of networks and the internet under capitalism, as we have indicated above. The more specific and particular identities can become online, the better it is for commercial platforms which can fine tune their algorithms and data analytics. Identity politics and debates around them are desired by big tech companies today — the more violent, the more profitable.
We do not mean to dismiss identity politics as such, or the particular struggles and desires that motivate them; we also cannot discuss the long tradition in Leftist as well as queer and cultural studies scholarship and activism that problematise identity politics from within. It also needs to be stressed that the White male Leftist thought in itself is often sexist, misogynist, ableist, and even racist at times. ‘Consequently, left-wing denunciations of identity politics yield a number of alarming consequences: they naturalise gendered and racialised hierarchies by casting White, male class politics as universal.’ (Dean 2016, online).
Rather, it is the powerful, obsessive status that identity politics has acquired online across the political spectrum that is problematic. There is an algorithmic interest in, firstly, creating particular identities through specific design mechanisms and, secondly, to arrange those identity positions in often antagonistic ways in networks. This became apparent, for example, in the Brexit vote in the UK and how Leave and Remain positions played out on social media. This narrative is further complicated if we consider the alleged attempts by Russia and other governments to influence online politics and debate, and quickly devolves into the strange and violent territory once we enter conspiracy circles, as we discuss in Chapter 1 of Event Horizon.
No time and space for alternatives
The strangeness of the TL;DR mindset is thus not simply a lack of time because something is too long, but rather that something is too singular, too monolithic, not exploding into enough fragments to be collected. We have all the time in the world to scroll endlessly through our Newsfeeds and timelines, to watch hours and hours of videos and instant stories, given that each of them is short enough so that we can move on to the next. What becomes important is not the individual posts, pictures, and videos, but the endless movement into the next. To consume is to collect, sometimes literally so — putting books, videos, or games on a list to be consumed later, even when we know full well we may never get to that point, is a big part of today’s media consumption. This is how ideology functions today — not by repressing alternatives, but by inhibiting their possibilities to appear in the first place, since alternatives are, by definition, too long to be read.
For a full development of the theories presented in this blog post, please consider pre-ordering our book! Click on the link below to learn more, or go to Books Depository to place your order. Additionally, it would mean so much to us if you shared this post and gave this publication a follow!
References
Dean, J. (2010). Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive. Cambridge: Polity.
Dean, J. (2016). Who’s Afraid of Identity Politics? British Politics and Policy at LSE. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/.
Han, B.-C. (2017). In the Swarm. Digital Prospects. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
