Onanistic Subject’s Death

Posted: April 17th, 2020 | Author: | Filed under: decategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Onanistic Subject’s Death

In his book Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, the German philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues, that the new surveillance society that has arisen since 1984 is more “elegantly totalitarian and oppressive than anything described by Orwell or Bentham”. According to him, the neoliberal era made capitalism realise that seduction is a better way of dealing with its subjects than toughness. He calls this “smartpolitics”. I would call it seductivepolitics and understood it as an exterior and distinct feature of his concept of psychopolitics. As opposition to the toughpolitics of classical totalitarian “no”, which was more or less inherent in the political logic of the market in the times of biopolitics hegemony, psychopolitics embodies its opposite, a yes-ness of governmentality absolutely incapable of refuting. It’s based on the immediate gratification of all needs and desires that every single subject could dream of:

Instead of forbidding and depriving it works through pleasing and fulfilling. Instead of making people compliant, it seeks to make them dependent.

Being-dependent became, according to Han, a constitutional element of neoliberal subject’s existence. Be they useless objects, redundant services, impotent ideas, capitalism somehow succeeds to present its products—through sophisticated portrayals and garish slogans—as revolutionary achievements of mankind. It’s obvious, however, that the market endured colonizing our psyche mostly through the abstract concreteness of our desires and sexuality. Edward Bernays legacy is still upon us, as a sticky tar thrown from enemy walls, which means that the system was well-trained long before Han’s point of departure—1984. Nevertheless, it surely developed further, turning the field of study of our psyche as consumers into a multibillion-dollar industry. This industry plunged so deep into our consciousness, so that achieved to create the false sense of self-determination of those desires that rule our lives. Like an onanistic teenager, the late-capitalist subject is feeling freer than ever before, while at the same time he’s self-exploitative and self-enslaved like never before. Our modern selves are slaves in consequence of the diffused attention and constant longing for more of anything, all of which shall be granted. We are, in some sense, entirely incapable of comprehending the multidimensional realm of self-exploitation in which we are. Such a situation breaks down attention and its ability to be precisely aimed. Yet, the diffused attention unfolded by our constant self-monitoring and self-control, embodied by our technological extensions, is ineffective in forming a lasting image of the self.

Consequently, nothing is persistent, and what doesn’t last cannot be presented and given to the Other. Psychopolitics and its seductive manifestation are destroying the very foundation of intimate associations, by creating what I call the onanistic subject. This conceptualization shouldn’t be taken literally—though masturbation, and self-satisfaction in general, are surely present—but rather as a specific way of relating with the world and the things in it, especially towards other people. By constantly shaping and reshaping the onanistic subject according to the market leads, psychopolitics entwines the mere tissue of our social existence. It’s not that the onanistic subject is just some oriented towards self-satisfaction individual. No, it’s more the other way around—he’s enterily incapable of being satisfied at all. The onanistic subject is fully engulfed and torn by his strive for satisfaction—his appeal, which was once a promise for completeness through the Other, is now entirely directed towards himself. The social media’s cruel promise—of finding oneself wherever one looks at—transmits from the virtual and obscures the integrity of the social world and its essential reciprocity. Fisher’s capitalist realism is entirely in line with Han’s psychopolitics. We are witnessing what the former calls detached spectatorialism, possible solely in an era in which the Ego faces only itself.

But how the COVID-19 pandemics correct this? Often too lonely and isolated, the onanistic subject is, as it’s evident, finally granted its long longing solitude in these times of quarantine. But it seems to me that it’s now at last possible to break with the false image of self-sufficiency. The virtual reality is irrevocably exposing itself for what it is—ineffectual. We are more or less witnessing the gradual disintegration, the becoming-insufficient of virtuality’s tools and their most prominent creation—the onanistic subject. The sense of lasting universality attained through them is now decaying, and a new, entirely old in its core, desire for universality’s concrete personifications—for the concrete Other—awakens.

What would be the longterm outcomes of this? Who knows. Perhaps, as Bifo noted, we might tend to link our online life with the disease and these times of complete solitude and already revealed as self-insufficiency existence. We may even be able, on this basis, to create new, lasting bonds, capable of promptly obliterating the memory of those unfortunate times in which the onanistic subject reached its lone peak.

Buen Řavov

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