How ressentiment transpirals through enactments
a sketch note noticing ressentiment as *enacted*, and enactment as a parallel monologue spiralling recursively as 'we' defend against the disintegration of our ego and that of our 'endangered' group
So, what tends to happen when ressentiment is enacted?
I italicise enactment because, it strikes me, ressentiment does tend to play out as an enactment, in the sense relational analysts and therapists use the term (as far as I understand it).
What is an enactment?
Something happens which triggers a co-relation – or, we could say, a co-trigger – where both partners in the communication, rather than ‘really’ dealing with what the conversation is actually-apparently about (in terms of its substantive contents), are
‘reacting from a place of ([group1] existential) endangerment’,
rather than
‘responding from a place of the other’s good reason’.
Enactments then transpire and spiral: they are, if you will, transpirals.
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To the extent this is the case, it has huge implications from how we should read nearly all online discourse where produsers confect infopinion on/by/for the FAANG-owned surveillance capitalist platforms (as Vogl rightly draws our attention to, and as I’ll return to in a few posts time).
on a systems level, we are doing data entry so we can be tracked and have our behaviour manipulated by the FAANGs: we are just produsers ‘doing’ infopinion2.
On a group-subjective level, we are warding off disintegration by concretising our own frozen ‘position’ by exterminating the other by proving them wrong by attacking them until they are destroyed (and going back to our group to screendump and prove our enacted heroic virtue back to our own [“I showed them!”], in the way a cat brings a budgerigar to the front door to prove its hunter worth to its human family).
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“as beaudrilliard has said, socialization is measured according to the amount of exposure to information, specifically, exposure to media. the social itself is a dinosaur: people are withdrawing into activities that are more about consumption than anything else. even the Evil Newt says that. ( i watched his class.) so-called electronic communities encourage participation in fragmented, mostly silent, microgroups who are primarily engaged in dialogues of self-congratulation. in other words, most people lurk; and the ones who post, are pleased with themselves” – humdog
What then happens, what ‘goes on’ as the transpiral (passing itself off as political communication, engagement online with different ‘views’)… becomes the funeral pyre of love, solidarity, and shared-constructed meaning? How, in a little more detail, does it proceed?
Having felt attacked in its integration-guarding integrity-identity, ego moves to fighting against its (collective) disintegration, creating a frozen field of antithetical Others against whom hostility can be projected, and where (thus) ‘fighting to the death’ is demanded, something which the sympathetic nervous system and the app platforms are not only affording, but very actively inducing the heightening escalation of.
If a more traditional phrasing of enactment would stress its infantile-regressive aspects (fuck you, suck my dick motherfucker),
and the Kleinians would hew to splitting and projection (you’re either with us [all good], or you’re with the terrorists [all bad, irredeemable]),
relational analysis would keep drawing our attention to the recursion of transference and countertransference. This is where we can bring a little Luhmann in, and systemise the analytic insight…
As respondents drawn into the reactivity of an enactment, we are recursively reacting from the escalatory place of our respective ‘shit’, which we have not yet recognised and processed as our own, and which we fling, with increasing-desperate-certainty, against the face of the other.
Enactments are parallel monologues that inherently tend to escalate and produce semantic underlap while reinforcing each side’s sense of its own righteous certainty.
This is a part of what is happening everyday, and it is fucking corrosive; it is wrecking us for one another, it precludes living together.
What can we then take from enactments, in order to move back to and proceed with ressentiment (next post and on…)?
Noticing how the communication sketched here might be our own enactment means becoming more aware that what is actually playing out online is, more deeply, to do with unsymbolized and emotional experiences from our (identity group’s) formative past3 in which the ego is endangered but not master in its own house; the ego fights to the death, but the unconscious holds sway.
Thus: what we say when we attack to destroy the other (which we flatter ourselves we are just trying to persuade them or bring them over into our group) is – much more deeply – an internal-prior process where we feel into ourselves and the ‘past we share’ with our group, the group from which we are drawing the dividend of our own identity. This is powerful stuff, because this is where the meaning and solidarity dwell. This means most of online ‘political communication’ and social media use is parallel process all the way: it’s group narcissistic, and, as it transpirals, it entrenches semantic underlaps while hardening one’s position deeper into one’s group-feeling-meaning-truth-certainty4.
Enactment detonates a planetary-scale H bomb for collective solidarity, one post at at a time.
Seeing enactments transpiraling, and seeing how fucking destructive this process is, at scale, for all of us, enjoins us to think more critically and skeptically about what we should take from all online stoushes – not only (but also) where ressentiment fuels the enactment. And ressentiment is among the most powerful fuels of enactments.
If this is true, it also means we have strayed very, very, very far from Habermas’ consensus-oriented entelechy5: in other words, a world where everyone is (really) trying to say something about something, where words are (sincere) deeds, and where reason bows to the forceless force of the better argument. The further tragedy here is the self-mystified, ego-gratifying Habermas-y feeling we have about ourselves and our group, insofar as *we* proceed as if *we* (and only we) embody this high ideal of communication.
Every in-group thinks of itself as Habermasian. But as for the other party, to quote Brass Eye: ‘you’re a stupid idiot, and you’re wrong’.
And as for you: what are you actually reading, and why does it compel your posting; what are you actually seduced and captivated by; what do you actually mean, what meaning do you actually get, by participating in online conflicts? Are you actually trying to save your victim group from social injustice, or do you just want to destroy the stupid idiots, ‘cos they’re wrong?
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A lot of theorists and most of the trade authors who’ve had a crack at this tend to make it seem as if it’s only individuals here… everyone online is part of some group; this basal sociological observation should be returned to again and again. Incels is a plural; there is no incel, there ‘is’ only incels (in the same way there are only Zionists and Antisemites).
Something humdog saw-knew clearly by ‘94, but that 99% of us actively forget every fucking day whenever we engage on/with these corporate-owned platforms: “i have seen many people spill their guts on-line, and i did so myself until, at last, i began to see that i had commodified myself. commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money-value. in the nineteenth century, commodities were made in factories, which karl marx called “the means of production.” capitalists were people who owned the means of production, and the commodities were made by workers who were mostly exploited. i created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board i was posting to, and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment. that means that i sold my soul like a tennis shoe and i derived no profit from the sale of my soul. people who post frequently on boards appear to know that they are factory equipment and tennis shoes, and sometimes trade sends and email about how their contributions are not appreciated by management”.
Naomi Klein returns to Homi Bhabha’s interesting idea that ‘nations are narrations’. I would add that the inverse is also very true: narrations are nations, they can be inhabited as imaginary communities… and indeed, these self-referential group spaces of hyper agreement are what comprise many online-based pseudocommunities. It’s thus also very important that the formative past can and does deviate significantly and/or often have tenuous, strained or non relational relations to the ambiguous complexity of the empirical-actual past.
Nakba to the Gazans, Shoah to the Zionists, über alles and für immer. To see the perspective of the other side is to take their side – and in the zero sum logic that admits only of black/white split/projected certainty, this means betrayal, rendering oneself outcast, enemy: it means (eg) literally being called a Capo by one’s own Jewish family for expressing sympathy for the suffering of Gazans, &c &c. The group can always weaponise love in this way, and hold out the spectre of ostracism – one can always ‘be disfellowshipped’, as the Jehovah’s Witnesses would say, for speaking against one’s group.
The ‘always catchy’ phrasing is Luhmann’s, in his critical distillation of his 90s position vis Habermas’ 80s position (Theory of Communicative Action [aka Use Your Illusions, Volumes 1 and 2]). Have a read of Luhmann’s ‘What is Communication?’ here.