The concept of interpassivity plays an important role in understanding the interaction of contemporary human and media; this explains the growth of its usage in the last two decades. However, popularization leads to a transformation in the understanding of this concept or its confusion with others. In our opinion, it is important to preserve the original meaning of this issue. An analysis of the main elements of the concept by R. Pfaller and S. Zizek demonstrates the heuristic value of (...) such “conservatism”, which limits the shift in thematic emphasis. The influence of other concepts (authenticity and alienation) leads to a simplification of the interpassivity, since in this case this concept no longer draws our attention to those aspects that are poorly distinguishable in the optics of humanistic discourse and social criticism. On the contrary, the preservation of the original interpretation makes it possible to include issues of pleasure, unconscious fantasies and beliefs in the consideration of a number of problems of human relations with contemporary media. (shrink)

The concept of interpassivity, coined by Žižek and Robert Pfaller in the nineties, delineates an original and fruitful field of research that deserves to be developed further. First, interpassivity should be understood in a historical way, as originating with modernity. Second, interpassivity should thus be identified with modernity, in that it expresses modernity’s preoccuption with activity. This explains why interpassivity should be understood as the delegation or ‘outsourcing’ of passivity, in order to become even more active, (...) as Pfaller and Žižek claim. But thirdly, the occupations of late or post-modernity invite us to understand interpassivity still differently: as the outsourcing of activity, not passivity. (shrink)

Fetishism and Interpassive Subjectification What happens when, in the face of postmodern capitalism, the subject watches as its activity falls prey to the strange forces embodied in the objects present in its immediate environment ? To answer this question, we must take up again the Marxian notion of commodity fetishism. In doing so, we must combine a structural approach with the more traditional approach drawing on the category of reification. The phenomenon of interpassive subjectification, like the omnipresent imperative of frenzied (...) activity, can thus be shown to be one of the emblematic traits of the contemporary versions of our fetishised universe. (shrink)

According to the 2020 docudrama, The Social Dilemma, our very addiction to “social media” has, today, become encapsulated in the tensions between its facilitation as a mode of interpersonal communication and as an insidious conduit for machine learning, surveillance capitalism and manipulation. Amidst a variety of interviewees – many of whom are former employees of social media companies – the documentary finishes on a unanimous conclusion: something must change. By using the docudrama as a pertinent example of our “social media (...) malaise,” and while remaining aware of the problems and unethical practices encompassing international digital/social media companies, this paper will argue that we continually refrain from the very question(ing) that would call these companies to account: what does the algorithm desire? In approaching this question, this article will draw from Lacan’s ‘hysterical’ position in accordance with Robert Pfaller’s notion of interpassivity. Together, these concepts will be used to provide a psychoanalytic account of how our subjectivization in social media renders an unconscious endorsement that both frames our awareness of the dilemmas encompassing social media, while also positing an inherent limitation that may offer a possible path out of its impeding affects. This subjective ambivalence – delegated yet reluctantly disavowed – offers an opportunity to realign discussions on the lost object of desire (objet a) and its reproduction in social media algorithms. In so doing, the case will be made that an account of interpassivity can help lay bare the hysterical significance underscoring our digital subjectivization. (shrink)

The article re-examines the concepts of interpassivity with Pfaller and van Oenen in order to clarify conceptual difficulties and to develop a specific understanding of interpassivity and its counterpart interactivity. Contrary to the philosophers of interpassivity, it is argued that interactivity does not encompass any form of participation. Instead, the current culture of participation and the interpassive retreat are discussed as elements of a specific circular association connecting humans and other entities, or as a form of (quasi-cybernetic) (...) control mechanism in relation to which the occurrences of interpassivity turn out to be different ways to drop out. (shrink)

Impostors, confidence artists, and artful deceivers seem to have achieved a strange kind of popularity and even prestige in our contemporary political landscape, for reasons that remain elusive, especially given how harmful and socially unwanted such behaviors ostensibly are. Herman Melville’s 1857 novel, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, helps us shift our perspective on this seemingly irrational phenomenon because it points out how being susceptible to dupery is linked to the enjoyment of fiction itself. This insight also highlights the importance of (...) epistemological failure in the recent “return to aesthetics” in literary studies, where the positive dimension of unconsciously “willing one’s dupery” directly links aesthetic form to politics. The logic that connects aesthetics to unconscious enjoyment is then elaborated in the work of psychoanalytic thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Helene Deutsch and others to raise particular questions about how and why the enjoyment of being duped has been associated with feminine sexuality. Reading Melville’s novel while considering psychoanalytic concepts such as the “as if” personality, imposture, and interpassivity illuminates how confidence games play upon the ruses of sexuality, which have profound implications for why the public remains in thrall to the workings of known deceivers. (shrink)

In this reply to Robrecht Vanderbeeken’s essay ‘The Screen as an In-Between’ questions are raised concerning the three distinctive effects the authors attributes to contemporary audiovisual media—eclipsing, interpassivity and truth procedure—and argued that they fail to highlight the specificity of the new media referred to.

In his book, On the Pleasure Principle in Culture (2014), Robert Pfaller argued that our relationship to sport is one grounded in “illusion”. Simply put, our interest in and enjoyment of sport occurs through a process of “knowing better”. Here, one’s knowledge of the unimportance of sport is achieved by associating the illusion of sport with a naïve observer – i.e. someone who does believe in sport’s importance. In the wake of the global pandemic, COVID-19, it would seem that Pfaller’s (...) remarks have taken on an added significance. With major sporting events and domestic competitions being indefinitely postponed or canceled, Liverpool manager, Jurgen Klopp, commented that football was “the most important of the least important things”. In light of these remarks, this paper will critically locate sport’s sudden unimportance in relation to Pfaller’s contention that sport reflects an “illusion without owner”. (shrink)

This article refutes the apparently innocent, common sense idea that the audiovisual screen is just a window to the world that displays an extra set of sensual data alongside and independent of our personal, unmediated experience of reality. On the contrary, the screen as an in-between is both a mediator and generator of reality that eventually compromises the distinction between us and our environment. Part 1 discusses three examples of mediation: eclipsing, interpassivity and audiovisual media as a truth-procedure. Part (...) 2 discusses three examples of generation: the production of simulacra, hyperreality and the emergence of a mixed reality. (shrink)

This contribution focuses on one member in particular of the anthropocenic triad Earth – technology – humankind, namely the current form of human subjectivity that characterizes humankind in the Anthropocene. Because knowledge, desire and behavior are always embedded in a particular form of subjectivity, it makes sense to look at the current subjective structure that embeds knowledge, desire and behavior. We want to move beyond the common psychological explanations that subjects are unable to correctly assess the consequences of their current (...) technological lifestyle or unable to change their lifestyle because well-intended behavior is modified by factors such as laziness, lack of knowledge, seduction by convenience, etc. Instead, we will argue from a philosophical point of view that transcendental illusions play a central role in a contemporary account of subjectivity. Consumerism is considered as a means of not becoming a subject and framed in a profound ambivalence at the heart of our acting against better knowledge. We appeal to collective transcendental conditions of subjectivity in the Anthropocene in terms of illusions without owners – a term borrowed from Robert Pfaller’s work on interpassivity. Central in our account is the idea that illusions without owners are the conditions of possibility for the disconnection between knowledge and behavior – the characteristic par excellence of the Anthropocene. (shrink)

Zygmunt Bauman tells us that liquid modernity is an age of both chances and dangers. It is a paradoxical age in which our attempts ‘to relate’ to each other are thwarted by the threat of ‘being related’, our hope for collective security and togetherness at odds with our desire for individual freedom and choice. As such, it is an age in which we prefer to roam freely in virtual networks, choosing when and how to connect with others. Facilitating this form (...) of liquid life is the growing consumption and usage of new communications technology. As the starting point for a new programme of research at the Bauman Institute, this article provides a critical evaluation of the role of new technology in liquid modernity with a particular focus upon its impact upon our perception of time. Presented here as two dialectical relationships, I argue that the professed capacity of new technology to ‘connect people’ and to ‘save time’ actually result in their opposites, namely: a curiously ‘hurried life’ in which we spend much of our waking lives interacting with digital screens rather than engaging in human face-to-face contact, and in which, for all of our frenetic productivity, we are perhaps becoming more and more ‘interpassive’, running the risk of losing basic social skills in the process. (shrink)

Helena De Preester’s “Subjectivity and Transcendental Illusions in the Anthropocene” aims to rethink fundamentally the human–technology relationship against the backdrop of the Anthropocene. Essentially, the essay is concerned with the current form of subjectivity that characterizes humankind in the Anthropocene, and analyzes how it embeds knowledge, desire and behavior. De Preester indeed succeeds in creating a potent and engaging reflection on the current form of human subjectivity characteristic for the age of the Anthropocene, by referring to Vilém Flusser’s apparatuses, McKenzie (...) Wark’s vectoralist class, Stiegler’s savoir-vivre and object of addiction, Robert Pfaller’s notion of interpassivity; Williams’ attention economy, etc. However, De Preester throughout her essay, although discussing thoroughly the aforementioned ideas of subjectivity and transcendental illusions in the Anthropocene, falls short in her ambitious aspiration to rethink fundamentally the human–technology relationship against the backdrop of the Anthropocene. Although De Preester provides excellent examples, they do not seem cohesive enough to support this conclusion, primarily as the analysis of the Anthropocene’s triad, as pointed out in the introduction, requires a thorough insight into the role that Technology plays in its constitution. (shrink)

Zygmunt Bauman tells us that liquid modernity is an age of both chances and dangers. It is a paradoxical age in which our attempts ‘to relate’ to each other are thwarted by the threat of ‘being related’, our hope for collective security and togetherness at odds with our desire for individual freedom and choice. As such, it is an age in which we prefer to roam freely in virtual networks, choosing when and how to connect with others. Facilitating this form (...) of liquid life is the growing consumption and usage of new communications technology. As the starting point for a new programme of research at the Bauman Institute, this article provides a critical evaluation of the role of new technology in liquid modernity with a particular focus upon its impact upon our perception of time. Presented here as two dialectical relationships, I argue that the professed capacity of new technology to ‘connect people’ and to ‘save time’ actually result in their opposites, namely: a curiously ‘hurried life’ in which we spend much of our waking lives interacting with digital screens rather than engaging in human face-to-face contact, and in which, for all of our frenetic productivity, we are perhaps becoming more and more ‘interpassive’, running the risk of losing basic social skills in the process. (shrink)

Recent theory of ideology and art has focused on the strange phenomenon of interpassivity – a phenomenon that is the exact obverse of ‘interactivity’ in the sense of being active through another subject who does the job for me, like the Hegelian Idea manipulating human passions to achieve its goals.

The question I address in the paper is “What is the ideal of MacIntyre’s moral philosophy? What is the telos of human nature?” Considering MacIntyre’s critique of modern culture, politics and philosophy, anti-intellectualism emerges as the main reason for his refutation of these values. So is it a reason for moral and political distortion that leads to the interpassivity of the modern self. Taking into account MacIntyre’s idea of characters I pinpoint the character of the philosopher as a moral (...) ideal of MacIntyre’s thought. For it is not only intellectual activity within any practice that enables us to develop our distinctively human nature but also philosophy that is the highest form of that kind of activity. From this point of view, it is crucial to grasp philosophy as a required way of life and the craft that enables us to be moral and political agents. (shrink)

In this article the causes and features of a shift from neurosis to narcissism and then autism were investigated. Moreover, special attention is paid not so much to the psychological or even psychiatric aspects of the problem, but to changes in the general features of a human being. Thus, when speaking of the transition from narcissism to autism, one is focusing on true autism, which is characterized by veracity, sincerity and authencity, which reveal themselves in the form of a special (...) kind of infantility, a kind of mature infantility. A suitable example of such infantility is found in the animated film Shrek, a certain barbarism of which is not so ironic or even knowing ironic, but to a greater extent it is warm, earnest and serious although childish. Among other infantile practices, it is worth noting the situationalist-lettrist practice of organizing a text in the form of an ABC alphabet book, a hornbook, which is actualized in a digimodern context. True autism and to some extent pseudoautism in a certain sense become a way to cope with the trance and amnesia of pseudomodernism and leave a hope for the future. Thus, paradoxically, wholeness that was lost is restored through desocialization and sociopathy. This article also draws parallels between digimodernism and speculative realism, conceptualization of interpassivity as well as automodernity. It is emphasized that personal autonomy and automation can be achieved through the use of devices as a means of achieving productive loneliness, which should be distinguished from alienation. In this case, the widespread use of sensory experience as a way of communication is especially important, as an example of which Hope Sandoval’s mode of being and work are considered. It suggests that the high-tech / high-touch approach is best released in DIY activities. The above considerations allow to conclude that true autism is one of the most actual post-postmodern modes of subjectivation. (shrink)