A female patient of Lacan said the following to her acquaintance [1]:

— I’ve just been to the butcher’s.

And she immediately hallucinated that the man insulted her in response:

— Sow!

Lacan interpreted this imaginary conversation as follows:

— I, the sow [female pig], have just been to the butcher’s, I am already disjointed, a fragmented body, membra disjecta, delusional, and my world is fragmenting, like me.

Now let’s reinterpret this anecdote for the current postmodern times:

1) This dialogue looks like a good model of current social media interactions: You “share” something about your life and you are immediately insulted for being too honest by someone who weaponizes the content of what you just said.

2) Lacan’s interpretation still holds too: The social media “user” is truly a disjointed, fragmented body, delusional for “sharing” stuff with strangers online and expecting them to show a little gratitude instead of envious attacks [2].

3) One could even say that the stranger’s insult is well-deserved insofar as the future seems bleak and the “users” don’t have the power to steer it in one way or another.

4) Still, let’s shift our perspective! Although the word is translated from French, let’s listen to the echoes:

— “Sew!” calls us to sew up the hole of symbolic order (however temporarily and fragilely).

— “Sow!” calls us to sow seeds in the social field (however unfavorable the conditions are).

Just shift your attention from how your future seems to what your suture seams. Futurology is divided between the optimism of Astrology and the pessimism of Disasterology. Instead of (or in addition to) looking up at the stars in the sky, we must look down at the symptom, which gives us Suturology [3].

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] Source: Seminar 3: The Psychoses.

[2] See “Make Gratitude Cool Again”

[3] See “Don’t Look Up to the Sky, Look Down at the Symptom”; Disasterology is a term from The Science of Sleep (2006) by Michel Gondry.