antagonist

At age 25, the then young sociologist Richard Sennett describes the genesis of what he calls the purified identity. This identity is the direct result of a defensive measure again the raw reality of diversified human experiences. Brilliantly using Marlaux’s novel The Conquerors, Sennett shows how we pre-advance a fully constituted, rigid or inert identity in order to tackle the pressure rising from the constant possibility of ending up in difficult, novel, or unknown social situations.

In other words: we reify or objectify ourselves in advance in social relations. So, to perversely rewrite Rimbaud: I is not an Other. There is an I before there even exists an I:  We fixate our Selves, we are self-objectified images in order to project and protect ourselves against others.

Is fear then is the single most prevalent identity-shaping force in a human life?

Not suprisingly perhaps Sennett traces this force to a particular period in a human life in which it is most potent: adolescence. He describes how modern adolescents, the like of which roamed the university he was attending at his own age I imagine, willfully submit to what we could simply call stereotypical pre-constituted images (or as Sennett puts: collectively shared traits). One is a geek, a Goth, punk,  a yuppie, part of a student dispute etc. Some already wear the business suit fulltime that they will wear once graduated. Others wear dreads to show they will never wear the suit. Some create communities of two: couples, high school or university sweethearts who in every way act as idealized married couples, craving the same longevity of their relation: ‘till death do us part without realizing to paraphrase mr Smith that: ‘They are dead already’.

I can be less dramatic of course. So: in other words and in all the above examples: the self-objectified, auto-reified self locks itself up in an intimate community.

These communities are celebrations of radically reified identies. I say radical because these identities are at root (radix) fixed, objectified. This is why I like this term: radical reification. It signals the immobile rooting of, in this case, identity.

Individual emotional experiences  in these communities are undergone in a passive manner (simply follow the rules as to what to wear, how to speak, what to read, what to listen to etc.). However passive though, it is passionately passive. Ask any graduate about his university time and you’ll see what I mean. (And to be fair the same goes for adolescents entering the draft or joining a political youth party etc. etc.).

In a much later published book (The Fall of Public Man), the older Sennett elaborates on the logic behind the purified identity in a way by speaking of the tyranny of intimacy. Since it is a logic, there are measurable entities to found. Take the example above of the high school sweethearts: the duration of their relation becomes the single principle governing the relation. They are seduced  (I use the term in Sennett’s sense which will become clear in a minute) by this measure of their relationship. They can ‘objectively’ measure their relation’s ‘succes’  in units of discrete time. But what makes their relation succesful? Ten years? Twenty? The longer the measure becomes, the harder the seductive spell emanating from it is to break. The measure acts in every way as a sovereign principle, tyrannically both measuring and driving the relation forwards in a purely passive manner: simply accumulate units of time.

This is what Sennett means with seductive: it is sovereign and in this sense and in our example a lovers’  Leviathan: two people willfully submit to its seductive power, two people willfully subject themselves to the ‘claustrophobia’ (Sennett’s typification) of intimate tyranny.

The result? A subjectivity stultified by fear.

I know that I would be more productive (and less twitchily dissatisfied) if I could partially withdraw from cyberspace , where much of my activitity – or rather interpassivity – involves opening up multiple windows and pathetically cycling through twitter and email for updates, like a lab rat waiting for another hit. (The rat analogy is not idle: there’s an argument that rats become more quickly addicted when they are given stimuli randomly; email is similarly random, sometimes providing massive satisfaction, often thin pickings.) The same goes for politics – a politics entirely contained within cyberspace would be locked into its interpassive circuits; but a politics that cannot make cyberspace one of its crucial terrains would be useless.

As usual Mark is an astute observer of interpassive behaviour including his own. I think the role of interpassivity in addiction (the rat story) is particulary interesting here. In my thinking about interpassivity I take on this addictive nature of interpassivity-inducing media as ‘flow’. Two effects of flow are ‘the loss of reflexive self-consciousness’ and the ‘distortion of temporal experience’ (I draw from L. Sherry’s influential research regarding flow in media enjoyment).The first effect, leading to reflexive impotency to borrow a phrase form Mark, is called Selbstvergessenheit bij Robert Pfaller (the original ‘discoverer’ of interpassivity which was then picked up almost instantaneously by Zizek). For instance in video game play we are anything but passive, rather we are hyperactive and as many video game player will know, this is quite enjoyable.

But why does interpassivity lead to Selbstvergessenheit? Part of my thesis is that it does so partly because interpassivity is a thoroughly modern phenomenon and typical to modernity (or what is left of it) is the demand and obligation of speed coupled with an equally oppressive demand for mobility.

Speed and mobility and the strange dialectic thereof create an apparent inversion of mobility into a state where everything will happen ‘without us moving, without us having to set out’. Virillio is refering to what he calls the ‘obligation of mobility’ and how it constrains us, spatially speaking, into a perpetual state of atopia; a state in which our spatial perspective is foreclosed blocking any cognitive mapping.

As Mark writes, the internet, or any network technology, has an uncanny power to draw interpassivity from us. In the network, an instance of what Castells calls ‘real virtuality’ I find these two paradigmatic constituents of modernity (speed and mobility) at work in tandem. Castells in The Rise of the Network Society observed that information and the flow of information is generating what he calls ‘spaces of flows’ in addition to ‘timeless time’. Both are useful to gain an understanding of interpassivity and in particular Selbstvergessenheit.

Spaces of flows, as we all have experienced by now, is the strange phenomenon that in the network people do not become more mobile, as Virillio already observed, but instead are rendered passive in a mobile sense: people become fixed noded, localised to the network, constantly accesible on demand by electronic impulses travelling the network at the speed of light. Your iPhone or Blackberry doesn’t make you more mobile, rather: it pins you down in a space of flow. To borrow a psychoanalytical term to say the same: one becomes fixated in a state of information induced inertia; the result is that you become a resource to be accessed by capital whenever it needs you. On an existential level, if you like, this is what I mean when I say that interpassivity forecloses reflection i.e. generates Selbstvergessenheit.

The second notion Castells describes is timeless time. With this he means that ‘the information paradigm and the network society induce systemic perturbation in the sequential order of phenomena’. Simply put this means that the ‘normal’ chronological order of time through network time or timeless time is obliterated. Time can be compressed into an instant, like in financial transactions or time can by stretched infinitely by randomly introducing discontinuity in the regular sequence of time which Castells rightly links to flextime or the flextime enterprise. The point here is that the variously fragmentic experience of dealing with timeless time (constantly cyling through twitter, email, text messages etc) is indeed a source of the kind of interpassive behaviour Mark is describing.

Consider interpassivity as a systemic response to what Lennard Davis in his highly recommended book “Obsession” calls “modern consciousness”: a consciousness built, so to speak from quantums (*) of anxiety, phobias and obsessions.

If modern consciousness can be best characterized as consisting of active anxieties (phobias and obsessions) perhaps then we can say that our past-modern (I don’t like the word post-modern) consciousness is interpassive.

Side stepping the obvious dialectical move here, an inter-passive consciousness, to keep with Davis’s vocabulary, is not simply passive, it is so only in relation to, or more exact: in-between, a perceived passivity and an active anxiety. Hence inter.

Interpassive consciousness, neither active nor passive, arises from the Zweispalt of our being, in the modern, or perhaps, but not quite, past-modern world.

(*) For use of the word “quantum”: see Davis’s wonderful recap of the origin of anxiety through Freud in medicine.