In this text, we devise a new approach to the joke from Ninotchka (1939) [1]:

— Waiter! Get me a cup of coffee without cream!
— I’m sorry, sir, we have no cream, but I can get you a coffee without milk!

First of all, what is coffee-with-milk? Recall Lacan’s formula of desire presented in “The Signification of the Phallus” [2]:

Desire = Demand – Need

Desire is what remains after subtracting the appetite for satisfaction (need) from the demand for love; it’s the difference between these two terms. We can accordingly disassemble coffee-with-milk as follows: Coffee stands for the need to be satisfied, and milk stands for the demand to be loved, in reference to the breast as the oral object.

Lacan’s formula would articulate desire explicitly as ‘milk-without-coffee’ (demand minus need). But what we have in the joke is the inverted formula ‘coffee-without-milk’ (need minus demand) which is a version of the same formula whose demand for love is implicit and therefore not as embarrassing for the customer.

The customer’s enjoyment of being served by the waiter combines two contradictory fantasies:
1) The waiter is subservient with respect to the customer.
2) The customer is infantilized with respect to the waiter.
This is why it would be uncivilized and immature for the customer to openly announce his/her demand to be loved and expose his/her contradictory fantasies.

Instead, the customer makes a payment for the coffee, which relieves him/her from the obscene burden of these fantasies. This gesture functions just like the analysand’s payment to the psychoanalyst. This is why it is more appropriate to demand coffee-without-milk than coffee-with-milk [3]. Subtracting the ‘milk’ (demand for love) conserves the social distance.

Now we come to the main issue: How is coffee-without-cream any different from coffee-without-milk? Why does the waiter inform the customer that the first option is unavailable and offers the second option instead?

First a simple explanation: Recall that we associated ‘without-milk’ with the monetary payment. Demanding coffee-without-cream is like offering a foreign currency (say yens instead of euros) that the waiter is unable to accept due to the rules of the establishment (café). Here ‘without-cream’ is like a strange and unwelcome culture that annoys the waiter, and he simply asserts the familiarity of his/her own local culture by politely refusing coffee-without-cream and offering coffee-without-milk instead.

For a better but more complicated explanation, consider two varieties of demands for love:
1) On the one hand, there are more graceful and polite demands for love. Associate this variety with “milk”. More refined and tactful people demand love like “milk”.
2) On the other hand, there are more intense and insistent demands for love that provoke the superego injunction to “Enjoy!” Associate this variety with “cream” due to its excessive superego density. More dense and insufferable people demand love like “cream”.

In the society, demands with extra superego density tend to have the upper hand. So let’s imagine society as a centrifuge that:
1) Separates the cream from the milk.
2) Privileges the former while wasting the latter.
Even after the “cream” is desubstantialized and reduced to “creamer” (fake cream, powdery milk substitute), the superego centrifuge continues to privilege the creamer and waste the milk.

Social media is the perfect technical embodiment of the superego centrifuge. In the present corporate neofeudalism, there is no longer “user”, there is only “you-serve”: People are reduced to “data breasts” milked like cows by the neofeudal virtual lords. The superego centrifuge of social media always isolates and privileges the popular “creamer-posturing-as-cream” of dense masses and wastes the unpopular “milk” of intellectual workers.

This is why the waiter’s response in Ninotchka (1939) remains perfectly appropriate and tactful after 82 years.

(Turkish)

Işık Barış Fidaner is a computer scientist with a PhD from Boğaziçi University, İstanbul. Admin of Yersiz Şeyler, Editor of Žižekian Analysis, Curator of Görce Writings. Twitter: @BarisFidaner

Notes:

[1] See “From Milk to cream: Registering a difference of quality”

[2] See “Dünya Talebi ve Dünyadan Talep”

[3] In Turkey, for the same reasons, it is more appropriate and respectable to drink tea-without-sugar instead of tea-with-sugar. The rumor is that the sugar kills the taste of tea.

Image source.