Freud’s classical judging superego marked the discontent of modern civilization. With Lacan (and Žižek) this concept shifted towards the postmodern permissive superego injunction to “Enjoy!”:

The command to be happy is perhaps the ultimate superego injunction. (Interrogating the Real)

This obscene injunction is truly the soul that animates the superego. But it’s also worth keeping the classical Freudian link with the ego ideal. So let’s acknowledge that the superego has two sides:

1) The public superficial side of the superego can be either prohibitive or permissive.

2) The private obscene side of the superego is always ferocious and punitive.

The superego that appears permissive is truly passive-aggressive due to the hidden injunction that accompanies it. This passive-aggressive superego marked the passage from modernity to postmodernity by gaining dominance through a two-stage evolution:

1) Neoliberalism is the permissivity (injunction) to private pleasures.

2) Neofeudalism is the permissivity (injunction) to public violations.

Neoliberalism was a fraudulent claim to “empower” the ego and make it “master in its own house” when this was obviously impossible. This “fantastic” claim was able to prevail only because it was even more impossible to acknowledge that impossibility. This impasse was the essence of Thatcher’s slogan: “There is no alternative!”

Neofeudalism “upgraded” the neoliberal claim by “empowering” virtual lords who could only thrive through public violations, eventually bringing about the current reign of the virtual overlords of social media.

This whole business deserves to be called the conning of reason: Reason conned itself by the mirage of a novel (neo-) territory beyond understanding. In the end, it just fulfilled its inevitable destiny and revealed the obscene soul that animates the superego, which deserves to be called the hyperego. Here is its depiction in Freud’s diagram:

It was already Freud who said (as Žižek emphasized): The superego forces the ego to posture about fighting against the id, but the superego and the id are actually in a secret collusion. The conning of reason (from neoliberalism to neofeudalism) merely made this collusion explicit and instituted it in the form of the hyperego, which became the dominant drive of ego construction. This term echoes a number of things:

1) Hyper is just excessive unlike super which claims superiority.

2) Hype, hip, hipster, hippy, coolness, trends, fashion, etc.

3) Hypertext, World Wide Web, Internet, social media

4) Hyperactivity, distraction, ADHD, fear of missing out (FOMO)

5) Hypernarcissism elaborated by Bard & Söderqvist.

6) Hyperreality, simulacra and simulation (Baudrillard)

7) Hypernormalisation, Can’t Get You Out of My Head (Adam Curtis)

I typed the hyperego in neon lights in reference to these lines from a song:

But my words, like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells of silence
And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
(The Sound of Silence, Simon & Garfunkel)

And also to the neon lights from Vertigo (1958) as depicted in The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006):

When we see her face, it’s basically always the half of it. A subject is a partial something, a face, something we see. Behind it, there’s a void, a nothingness. And of course, we spontaneously tend to fill in that nothingness with our fantasies about the wealth of human personality and so on and so on. To see what is lacking in reality, to see it as that, there you see subjectivity. To confront subjectivity means to confront femininity. Woman is the subject. Masculinity is a fake. Masculinity is an escape from the most radical nightmarish dimension of subjectivity. (1:03)

(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

Neon light text generator.