Click here to discover your fantasy and fill hole again (fantasy is no coincidence, two of three)
I want to satisfy this empty feeling; we all got a space to fill; What I got you gotta get it put it in you; nothing’s as precious – as a hole in the ground
Hello my dear readers. Well, last week, I promised a follow up post on Friday, where I was going to explore ‘the heavy materiality of all this, the weather it’s producing and entrenching, and what we’re going to do when, suddenly, the diesel engine cuts out on us’. I will get there, but as often of late, there’s a wild yeast in the sourdough of my mind on many of these topics, and given this blog’s commitment to writing fast and loose and then hitting publish before I feel quite ready to let go, I’m just going to keep letting myself be led around by the nose of my unconscious.
In *this* case, what it meant was that the post hit 4k words… and to keep things readable and navigable, I’ve decided to ‘cleave it in twain’ and come back for the conclusion (already written) on Friday. So what you’re about to read is now part two of three.
Adjacently on this ‘nose’: I recently gave my students an assessment where they were using GPT 3. Among other things, what was very noticeable was that the AI tended to ‘converge back’ into a generic response: no matter what you fed it, it would combine it into smooth, generic boilerplate – effectively ‘smoothed’ generative WikiPedia made of a bunch of stuff stolen from the internet (GPT 3 really does activate a lot of ItaloMarxist conversations about the general intellect and its theft… ). However, of the 15 students I marked, not one of the students’ responses ‘converged’ in this way. What was remarkable was the contrary – they all diverged, they all individuated. This might speak to the difference between Weiner’s cybernetics and Simondon’s… but I’m not sure just yet, I’ll come back to that… key point: human intelligence is a difference engine. Ergo, as I try as much as possible for free association here as an antidote to the repressive tendencies induced by the political economy of my professional writing practice: let a thousand dubious fastblossom flowers bloom.
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I want to buy
(Have you been affected?)
I need consoling
(You could be addicted)
I need something new
Something trivial would do
I want to satisfy this empty feeling
– Slits, ‘Spend Spend Spend’, 1979
Last week I began trying to bring the role of fantasy into focus for thinking about the involutions and excrescences of our lives now. Fantasy is hugely important, especially to the extent it’s been made into an effective and implacable engine of the overconsumption that’s fucking us, but that we recognise as ‘ours’ (to own).
And it’s interesting to keep noticing: the content and expression of our fantasies are no coincidence. One more pull please, Ms Mary Douglas:
‘‘It seems that our deepest fears and desires take expression with a kind of witty aptness”.
Fears and desires; desires and fears. A desire can be generated from the fear of something else (or a fear ‘for’ something else [cf. horror, Candyman]); we can desire what we fear; we can make desire by playing with our fear; we can desire certain feelings of fears, which can be thrilling fulfilments, dreams as well as nightmares. Desire and fear are next door neighbours, just ask the ghoul next door. She can teach you, but she’ll have to charge.
Another plug I tried to pull pertains to the implacability of unpluggability.
In other alliterations, we want what we want, or what our Wanty wants (in spite of what our reason ‘knows’), or what Wotan wants (in which case, whose want is it?, and is the want ‘inside’ us or ‘outside’ us, or is Wotan ‘inside’ us?), with an incredible stubbornness.
If there is a philosophical anthropology I would subscribe to1, it would also say that we are stubbornly wanty creatures. We of the wanty wanty. Human nature: cultural, adaptable, intransigent2.
Thus to unpluggability as we plug in to global capitalism with our phones.
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Pop life
Everybody needs a thrill
Pop life
We all got a space to fill
Pop life
Everybody can't be on top
But life it ain't real funky
Unless it's got that pop
Dig it
– Prince, ‘Pop Life’, 1985
Among the magic of the phone is this ‘holding power’ (Turkle) to bring forth a desire with a tap. We may have two left feet or be ‘all thumbs’, but as we have them (unlike cats [in the double sense that cats don't have thumbs and that we don't have cats, but they us]), so we can have what we want. If we have a lack, if we have a space to fill, if we have a hole in our hearts and our lives that just keeps needing filling, but won’t be filled with any amount of plugging and pounding we’ve bought for and brought into ourselves so far, it’s also ‘cos we have installed that lack in ourselves3.
This is what the Mahayanists teach us about the cycle of Samsara; it was we who put that hole inside ourselves. We who were born whole, we drilled ourselves full of holes, then we say we’re not enough. Then we intransigently go about seeking to plug up that empty feeling. Or we go to Bunnings, and buy ourselves a new drill.
By way of recognising something we don’t yet have as that which will fill our (empty) cup all the way up, we install within ourselves a subjectifying circuit of drilling and filling. First we drill ourselves a hole inside ourselves, then our hole needs drilling and filling, drilling and filling; then the culture, also by way of our phones, supplies our demand (maybe, if it’s a blow up doll who looks like your mum, both in loco parentis and also dolly incapax).
But it’s interesting, isn’t it: what’s on offer doesn’t quite fill up our cup. Even if we get it FAST.
It’s ‘as if’ what’s on offer (outside and around us) is an impossible fit for what needs filling (inside and within us). Have you ever noticed that in your experience?
Henry comes to Liza with a hole in his bucket.
Well, not so fast: who put it there, dear Henry, dear Henry?
What the song doesn’t say is that was he – Henry the secret bucket driller – who put it there off stage before the song started, in no small measure so he could appear on stage and on song, ready to collect his Tony, and address his desire that it be filled to her (by her?), repeatedly. First we install a lack in ourselves, then we address that lack to an Other, then we demand that they collude with us in the filling of the drilling.
In a sense this is all of musical theatre (where people break into song); but you can see where this goes with porno (where people break into fucking). Thus to porno.
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What I got you gotta get it put it in you
What I got you gotta get it put it in you
Red Hot Chili Peppers, ‘Give it Away’, 1991
In late 90s American culture, as DFW explores so beautifully (audio, pdf), the desire of one large group of male wankers went to a very dank, dark place, where women get turned over and turned into ‘nasty little fuckholes’. What happened there, in that late era of video, which turned out to be the final years in which the pros were still pros, when the vids were not even yet DVDs, let alone the digital data streams that millions of adults make do with? (again: in loco parentis and perhaps doli incapax, if you leave your pre-teen son alone with the internet of an afternoon... maybe while you’re scrolling downstairs).
Having turned their own masturbatory desire into some Thing like this (her-as-it), the men involved in those styles of porno then went and built a whole political economy: the Vegas of DFW’s visit, and an industry where billions (of pounds) were at stake, was a whole elaborated construction around male fantasy. Therein, by and large, the role of women consisted (but really, has it changed much since then, I don’t know, I guess not) in being penetrated in the many (but actually only very few) uncomfortable, improbable, intense, multiple, repetitive ways deemed ‘hot’ by those holding cameras and wads (it was pre wand, you might say… of the kind metaphorically being waved in this blog post).
Some of these scenes were worthy of awards: best multiple penetration, best anal, best newcomer, &c &c
With Mary D: it’s no coincidence that a group of men so enculturated had/have the precise pattern of desire of their group, that they ‘want it that way’, and that it took expression with that kind of ‘witty aptness’.
In the same way, it’s no coincidence that the demobilised German soldiers after WWI who got involved in the Freikorps shared and built fantasies about floods, nurses, mothers, sisters, sexualised murder, Jewish women &c &c; and that these protean proto-Nazis later became the most enthusiastic hardcore of the Nazi Party – once that became what Wotan wanted. You can read about it in Theweleit, here. We might look hard at postwar Germany or late 90s Vegas alike, in the light of male fantasy, without Othering those involved (which requires courage and compassion); and we should notice these Big Red Sons when we bump into ourselves in the hallways of our own personal dungeon.... and that it’s no coincidence. Anyway, I think I’ve pounded the point: fantasy is no coincidence.
What then of global capitalism on our phones now, where that commands the global supply chain to bring the she-as-it to ‘me’?
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Nothing’s as precious
– as a hole in the ground
Midnight Oil, ‘Blue Sky Mining’, 1990
As for global capitalism now, and its planetary-sized holes – drill baby, drill – I intimated that the core fantasy is one of control (which is not at all incompatible with the fantasies of the Freikorps of late 1910s Berlin or the ‘nasty little fuckholes’ of late 90s Vegas). For control, as Weiner noticed (not that Weiner), ‘is nothing but the sending of messages which effectively change the behavior of the recipient’ (Norbert Weiner, Human Uses… 8)
With our phones in our hands, we can see how the phone can function as a wand controlling presence and absence: you can cancel, ghost, like, follow, or deploy your capital to compel the presence of a meal or a fuck buddy or ‘almost anything’ (see below). You can void (but not avoid) your boredom by continuing to scroll scroll scroll. You can stream your life, as Wolfgang Tillman sung.
You can also compare yourself to other people who are cancelling, ghosting or compelling presence and absence in similar wand-wavy ways, intensifying a pernicious psychosocial self-sabotaging tendency already noticed by Rousseau4 and explored a lot by 19C authors like Balzac and Austen5.
Only now, with our control wands, we get almost instant and global feedback, the fulfilment of a cybernetic society: & if they’re doing it better than you, based on how this looks on Insta (or your group’s preferred platform), you can (immediately) feel bad about yourself, feel empty, then need more filling, and command that more fill, more landfill, be brought to you (im|mediately).
(mediation is thus a kind of immediation, no?… and maybe mobilisation is a kind of immobilisation, insofar as it pins us to our posts, sticks us to our scrolls)
Or when you feel that way in your self and your identity, if you’ve gone to your phone and waved it as a wand and solicited your own lack in a way that affects your ego in some destabilising way, you can then join an online group identity and share meanings together. Coalesce the meanings of your resentment as FML, or blame the Jews, or blame the nasty little fuck holes. A lot of the dank corners of the 2010s phonewand internet were, in complex senses, ways of sharing disquiet and discharging blame over who a group of men felt fear and loathing about who they were wanking about6.
As we know to our societal detriment, a lot of these phone-based online group identities provide a group ‘we’ held together by the discharge of ressentiment, fear and loathing onto a blameworthy Other or ‘bad object’. It’s no coincidence.
Consider the relentless misogyny of men’s rights groups, PUAs, and the writhing self-referential wallowing in humiliatio (it was a typo but actually it should be a concept, so I italicised it) and repetitive return to aggrieved entitlement of INCEL groups.
Likewise with Q and the internet conspiracy cults around plandemic/scamdemic, we can notice groups online holding their phone-wands to work in an escalatory way toward a very repetitive set of meanings in which there is a powerful story about wrongful, secret, incapacitating control. There is a group, the story says (who are external to the group doing the story building), who are secretly, nefariously organising in order to control ‘the world’ in order to keep life like this; FML! Fuck the Global Jew! Fuck the nasty little fuckhole! Fuck fuck fuck7. Such group identities provide a space beyond exposure and accountability for us to discharge our feelings over whoever we please. By way of control, we can then shame, cancel, ghost or dox anyone who creates cognitive dissonance in this space, who is outside the circle jerk of the phone-wand control device.
We’ve just lived through a decade in which this was a huge part of what happened to the internet, which in the 00s was supposed to be a force for democracy and enlightenment (lol). Here Comes Everybody. And we now know this suits the Tech Titans just fine, based on current algorithmic settings and how they’re tied to business and operating models. For it creates a magic money spigot made out of people’s anxiety, fear, ressentiment and horniness that renders whatever polarisation and psychosocial misery this generates as an externality and matter of moral indifference. Please listen to NY Times’ great podcast series, Rabbit Hole (what is it with holes already?), and read Zuboff (or listen to any of her many podcast appearances, which are all slightly different; and clock her hair, watch out DeBarge family).
And for ‘us’, whenever we’re implicated in this lackfilling load dumping, the intensifying circuit of our ressentiment is being harnessed, as Joseph Vogl explores so perceptively (and in a podcast, here). All that dark filth we dump out, the sebaceous oil from the paws of our unconscious, becomes fuel for further platformisation and financialisation, because as a produser, even one who fancies themselves as prosumer, we’re being scraped as we scroll, pimped to as we’re pumped. As ye troll, so shall ye be reaped. Moreover, your new scroll role as the glum reapee means your eyeballs belong to the interface, for the time in which they long for the interface. This is the true economics of the information economy: attention the scarce resource that matters to it.
As our attention is captured, all our clicks and likes are collected, the better to entrench the asymmetry of power/ knowledge surveillance capitalism keeps over8 us, alongside an intensification of our feelings of ressentiment and emptiness (Vogl’s point, atop Zuboff’s). We feel worse and worse, dump those feelings out together, then feel worse and worse, then grab our control wand again, and go back online for more of same.
Well, it’s also no coincidence that this is very likely to be causing the worst societal mental health epidemic yet seen. This is another post for another time soon.
But, to bring all of this back to materiality… let’s glance at one place where our captivation by The Twittering Machine re-produces dynamics at planetary-ecological scale, by way of the global supply chain.
What is this producing, at scale, in the global supply chain?
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Interestingly, I was listening to two podcasts recently where people thinking about its discontents carefully described the global supply chain as a Rube Goldberg* machine…
TBC Friday!
eg for Hobbes we are competitive, diffident and seek glory; for Beccaria, it’s Hobbes +, including both that ‘every one of us would prefer that the compacts binding others did not bind us; every man tends to make himself the centre of his whole world’, such that ‘each of (us) ‘always tries not only to withdraw his own share but also to usurp for himself that of others, meaning that ‘tangible motives had to be introduced, therefore, to prevent the despotic spirit, which is in every man, from plunging the laws of society into its original chaos’. For Bentham, Spencer and Freud (and complexly Beccaria), we are pleasure seeking pain/punishment calculating-avoiding creatures… for Freud as we know this is overlaid both by the unconscious and by the inherently antisocial, sexual, violent, aggressive, destructive drives inside us, that we repress and cannot fully know. It’s a jungle in there.
A Lacanian view I would give a moment to but not entitle to the w|hole expression of desire [for the hole is not the whole, and we don’t feel whole, though we are]). In the Lacanians I’ve read and understood (not all of em, not all of it), one remains trapped both in lack and in the symbolic, and as language never coincides with the fantasy, which never coincides with the object with/through which we enact it, there’s always a nonfit, an asymptote and a symptom or three.. what I prefer in the Mahayanist account is the acknowledgment of a moment of lack (in samsara) then a really grounded skillset to get out of it, alongside an exploration of the truth outside language and inside silence. Lacanianism, being both French and Western, is trapped in the ‘blah blah blah’ of its own extramarital affairs and the weird notion that confessing it all will get it out (although we can't get out it). At this point a Lacanian will probably say I’ve misread them, but I say: doesn’t this just prove the Lacanian theory of language as continual misrecognition?
‘I could readily explain how, even without the intervention of government, inequality of credit and authority became unavoidable among private persons, as soon as their union in a single society made them compare themselves one with another, and take into account the differences which they found out from the continual intercourse every man had to have with his neighbours’, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, here.
So then, maybe we are cultural, adaptable, intransigent – and get into habits of comparing ourselves with one another to the extent we are anxious and insecure, because we’re worry we lack, that we are not (x) enough?
There are a lot of positive niche corners of the internet where people do group work that builds transformative meanings and identities: neurodivergent TikTok is surprisingly interesting, and I’ve seen interesting stuff done on Tumblr and Insta.... I’m not sure there was much good that came out of 8Chan....
Reading Van Badham’s great book on the ~gate conspiracies and how they led into Q, I was reminded by how regressively potty mouthed that whole space is. I’m reminded of a girl I overheard at an all ages gig, who said: ‘Yeah, I failed English. The cunt’s a fucking shit’. However, the pottiness, like the pettiness, is patterned, is no coincidence.
is that the correct preposition? Keeps ‘into’ us? Not sure.