Make Gratitude Cool Again — Işık Barış Fidaner

The ongoing devaluation of sex in favor of gender is a desperate coping mechanism against the loss of our future. Why would it remain “cool” to respect and celebrate the motherhood of women when the world no longer bears any hope to give its children? When the whole population is reduced to surrogate bodies impregnated on demand by virtuality, why would women have it any other way?

The present situation was prepared by two consecutive processes:

1) The classical penis envy of women was generalized into a universal phallus envy (envy for/against status) shared by every man and woman.

2) The ordinary breast envy was replaced with an omnipresent mamilla envy towards the virtual breast of the media (envy for/against value production) again shared by every man and woman.

Now the sole symbol of abundance and fertility is “the medium as the message” which has gleefully led the world into the mess-age (the age of entropy). Why would we then be surprised one bit when the virtual overlords of “social media” dare declare themselves the Masters of the Metaverse?

The fundamental fantasy of the “social media user” is that (s)he is at once the phallus and the mamilla:

1) When the “user” requites his/her daily frustrations by blocking/banning other “users”, (s)he denies their existence in his/her phallic fantasy, as a virtual-lord-wannabe.

2) When the “user” unfolds and lays out his/her being on the timeline, (s)he flaunts his/her own existence for the other’s gaze in his/her mamillary fantasy as the medium of abundance and fertility.

These two are respectively the negative and positive sides of the social media performance. I put scare quotes around “user” because what the “user” ultimately fails to do is precisely to “use” social media. What instead happens is the following:

1) All phallic claims of “users” cancel each other out and nobody can legitimately claim their virtual lordship.

2) The so-called “users” are all reduced to data breasts “milked like cows” by the virtual overlord.

This political result is the combined effect of the universal phallus envy and the omnipresent mamilla envy. Neither men or women, neither cis or trans, neither white or black are to be blamed. It’s just human nature. Envy is our greatest flaw and we have failed to contain it. We fought against our future and we won, except that we ultimately defeated ourselves.

There is only one way out of this deadlock: Make gratitude cool again.

But the gratitude to be redeemed is quite different from that of positive psychology (or that of “critical psychology” which amounts to the same thing). It’s not the usual ego defense, i.e. loving-to-hate the stain of the other, otherwise known as bashing the rival (cancel culture). We must instead learn hating-to-love the stain of ourselves, which is ultimately the envy that is universal and omnipresent in human nature.

Paradoxically, to be humble and responsible enough to own up one’s lack (Lacan = Lack-own) is more egotist (of the healthy and rational kind) than indulging in ego defense and criticism by projecting one’s lack onto the other, because:

1) The more you defend your ego against the other (even under a pretense of “self-criticism”) the more you are at the disposal of the virtual overlord.

2) The more you analyze your situation and invest your gratitude in the acknowledgement of your context, the more you liberate yourself from your own envy and thereby authorize your own future.

(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:

On mamilla envy: “The Artemis of Ephesus: Being Seized by Mamilla Envy and Being Turned into a Data Breast of the Virtual Lord”

On loving-to-hate and hating-to-love: “Three Lacanian True Choices”, “Around the Borromean Knot”

On the age of entropy: “The Opportunistic Media Ecology Has Supplanted The Law”

On virtual lordship: “An account is being blocked”

On “critical psychology”: “The Psychorevolt Liberration Manifesto: Žižek With A Human Face Or Scrubbing Intersectional Politics With The Psychoanalytic Detergent”

On Lacan = Lack-own: “Lack-own and Ideoanalysis”

On cancel culture: “Networking and Wetworking”, “Second Suture and the Žižekian Cause”

On sex vs. gender: “From Hogwarts to Slogwarts”, “The Conflict About Sex”

On self-authorization: “Symbolic Authorization of Fetishes and Real Authorization of Symptoms”