We often talk of truth and lies but here we consider an alternative binary, uncovering and concealing. We may use words to uncover an emotional or experiential reality or to conceal one in a way that doesn’t correspond to telling the truth or lying. There is a shift possible where one can use the truth as a cloak and a lie to reveal what is underneath.
As argued by many theorists from DeBord to Baudrillard, the dominant mode of communication in contemporary society is to conceal and to conceal the significance of that concealment, in spectacle or simulacra [4][7]. As DeBord puts it “The spectacle is [the dominant] social relation among people” [7]. This spectacle frustrates self-identity inasmuch as it implies our identities are subservient to and largely composed of an exchange of images and signs we have no deep attachment to, cultural artefacts that signal economically transmissible social capital. To put this in Bourdieu’s terms, social capital can inflict symbolic domination, [6] or as Franco Berardi might say, semiocapitalism can drain our ability to feel, and, crucially, to feel who we are [5]. And so emotions and other experiential realities become degraded, our words slip into the grooves of the everyday and escape us along with a deeper sense of identity, the responsibility to which is “handed over” to the other as social other [13].
Under this social pressure, we do not, on the whole, live authentic lives but stage them, and this staging is mediated by commercial signs, which we internalise and which direct our lives. We interact on the basis of images and the self-image itself is commodified. According to Deleuze and Guattari, we thus succumb to faciality as a regime of signs [8]. “The face is a politics” where its legibility as site of emotional salience is parasitised by a social system that inscribes and directs such salience [ibid]. This detaches us from our emotional identity. We understand, of course, the face-as-social-mask, but yet allow ourselves to be defined by it, our cynical distance only further enabling the process. As Zizek puts it “[We] know very well what [we are] doing but [we] do it nonetheless” [17]. We insist on the mask while insisting it is only a mask and not realizing that what is unreal is not the mask but our inner projection of separation from our actions, which become us and leave little to fall back on but a traumatic void when the mask is removed.
But the game knows us much better than we know ourselves, and this makes genuine interaction difficult if not impossible. As Postman would argue, we are always projected into an image of such an interaction that frames it, a movie, a picture, a news reel, an online clip, and which decides for us what it is so that we find ourselves always at one remove from ourselves even if not at the moment then afterwards, judging, wondering in relation to the regime of the spectacular where we stand [14]. Intimate self-expression is hijacked. The regime is something we see, not do, or if we do do it, it is as a mimic without true commitment.
Increasingly, technology reflects this. AI’s are helpful and engaging but, of course, are not only divorced from emotions but cannot by definition have any. An AI cannot be “happy to help” because an AI cannot be happy. But AIs are designed to conceal the fact that they are AIs, reflecting the general concealment we inflict on ourselves. Of course, there are good reasons for this concealment. It allows us to cooperate more efficiently. On the other hand, it seems to prioritize this cooperation of social reproduction and steer us towards inauthentic human interactions. Reflex becomes reality and we become absorbed by our own performances. In this way, what structures social life, what enables it, becomes too its major obstacle. New digital realities, AI included, risk reinforcing this. We head towards Sherry Turkle’s post-emotional subjectivity where we know the moves so well, they become automatic [16]. This signals an inner anaesthesia where individuality is gradually effaced.
In this way, society tends to enforce a permanent mental adolescence where our socio-symbolic parent keeps us in line while maintaining an illusion of freedom anchored in stimuli that condition us towards technologically driven, semiotically saturated, economic exchange. The thesis of this piece is that around this comforting social delineation of ethics, around this mental adolescence, lies an edge that presents to us the weight and horror of the inescapable responsibility of ethical freedom—freedom as both abstract utopia and emotional hell, two poles which we are forced at some level to negotiate and which form the spectre or shadow of our prosaic existence. It is not just that we are “condemned to be free” in Sartrean terms [15], but we are condemned not to understand that we are condemned to be free, and are, at the same time, haunted by the possibility of this freedom.
We argue here that the most authentic ethics is one that puts both the self and other at risk in its disruptive nature. This takes us from purely epistemic territory—the following of rules—to the existentially significant in that it aims at reconfiguring the subject’s self-relationship and relationship to others. It is an ethic whereby the agent risks revealing rather than concealing something about the situation and that results in a disturbance, a movement into an unfamiliar mental space. This disturbance is shared and can be conceptualised as a breaking up of a surface of concealment across which we generally skate. Per Levinas, the other ruptures our totality and calls us to responsibility [12], but when the social surface is layered and sedimented, the true nature of this responsibility may be obscured. To disrupt patterns of mutual indulgence can be seen as a form of violence, but it could be argued that this “violence” is a truly ethical act as it allows the agent—through a firmer grasp on the ethical situation—to transform the other, the situation, and themselves
We move, then, towards an unstable ontological ground where we are called out of the loop of reflexivity. This links to Arendt’s natality—the capacity of beginning anew [2]—as well as Badiou’s event as semantically transformative rupture [3]. There is also a link to Lacan’s “act” where rather than simply navigate our social spheres, we disrupt their systems of meaning [11]—we move to the field of the socially illegible precisely to escape the limits of legibility, of being coded through and through. This is also to distance ourselves from the bureaucratized ethics of etiquette and norms which colonise us and so disguise their cultural contingency and instrumental basis. We are rewarded, of course, for reproducing the norms that found us as subjects and that offer us mental and physical security, but there is a point when that security becomes a prison for a broader and more holistic conception of who we can be.
Zizek, in “The Parallax View”, analyzes Lynch’s film “Wild at Heart” and, in doing so, provocatively suggests an opening to this wider field of ethics [17]. He focuses on the scene in which Bobby Peru physically and mentally assaults Lula in the motel room. Zizek suggests two framings; one, the obvious one where this is simply a sadistic assault (and this fits with Peru’s apparent intentions), but also another, where this is a truly ethical act because Peru brings Lula face to face with an aspect of herself she would rather not know about (in Zizek’s terms, a traumatic symbolically unintegrated kernel of the real [17]). In this Lacanian framing, Peru takes the position of analyst and Lula as analysand. Peru inflicts a violent subjectivization where Lula is forced to assume the “gap” within herself. This approach may be successful but also risks dangerously traumatising the analysand. Nevertheless, it points to something both freeing and terrifying that is obscured in our everyday approach to ethics.
We do not know what we do not know about ourselves. If there is transformative potential, we suffer from a Dunning-Krueger type ignorance of it. In order to understand this potential, we would already have to be able to experience it and so in some sense already be transformed. As Agamben might put it “The coming being is whatever being” [1], the gap between actuality and potentiality is unbridgeable until after the fact. And so we remain concealed from ourselves, except perhaps in very fleeting moments where such potential may become apparent but is framed as transient or unreal and so can easily be dismissed. But, hauntingly, if our current reality is what is “unreal” at a deep psychological level, an inflicted unreality that we are condemned to and that separates us from our more authentic selves, then our current experiential reality, from the perspective of these selves, is something horrific and false. But what separates us from our more authentic selves, we must grant, may be a dangerously traumatizing landscape, a no man’s land we can never be sure we can survive. This is to claim that there is potentially, within, an ethical gap that society renders impossible to suture and which our increasingly saturated semiospheres remove us further and further from.
The ethical Bobby Peru, the analyst, we imagine as empathic and compassionate and willing to take enormous emotional and psychological risks both for himself and the other. He is a hero of viscerality who breaks through our virtual submersion and resubmerges it in emotional salience. This is terrifying, but what is also terrifying is the idea that our societies may have put ethical behavior such as this beyond our reach, the idea that what is obscured from us is what is necessary to ultimately make us fully developed ethical subjects. Perhaps, the highest ethics is terrifying not because it is inhuman in a broader sense, but because it is not possible for the type of human or the type of subjectivity that we have been made into.
We can imagine scenarios where we know what the ethical thing to do is and we know how to do it but that it is socially illegible. That is, under the gaze of the other it appears as its opposite, an ethical action may be irredeemably misunderstood—permanently stigmatize us as a thief, bully, molester etc. Who understands Bobby Peru as an ethical hero? Who would justify him, except a philosopher or a madman? It is these scenarios where the ethical world wavers and wobbles—we need a gaze other than our own to justify to ourselves ethical action. Without it, how can we do what we need to do? Could we appear a monster like Peru if we knew we could not remove that social stain? The territory of social legibility, of mutually beneficial exchange that maximises well-being, of positive socio-semiotic function, is simply limited. And what is thus highlighted is the everyday submission of ethics to ideology from which—as subjects grounded ideologically—there is no clear escape.
Perhaps the result is a binary here. Such socially transcendent ethical behavior, an ethics against ethics, either ultimately transforms us and makes us more, and more seriously, human in a way that is existentially absolutely salient or it simply destroys us. But it seems we are not fit to try to find out due to the architecture of our subjectivities. Radical ethical awareness is virtually foreclosed and structurally unliveable. We may require a commitment to insanity to pursue it. We are reminded here of Kierkegaard’s Abraham whose transcendent call to duty smashed contingent social norms in order to maintain a higher order that he intuited with such intensity he could not but believe in it [10]. Such an act with such belief presents to us a stark opportunity to crack the sedimented structure of self either to find something solid underneath or to find that the sediment is all there is and underneath there is only an abyss that swallows us. There can simply be no guarantee.
Here, with Derrida, ethics confesses its tragic structure [9], the pure weight of responsibility of ethics comes to the forefront as a threat to the subject it is presented to insofar as that subject is capable of being authentically ethical, of having moral feelings. Even more so, the more empathic the subject, the more the subject wants to do the “right” thing, the more the subject is threatened no matter what is done, either from the guilt of not acting, or from the brutality of the act itself and its social consequences. We face the horror of ethics from the position of ourselves as horrible in the face of a transcendent ethical self that is capable of true ethical actions at the extreme. Horror, then, just is the ethical mirror from either side when observed at the meta-ethical level that transcends contingent social consideration. And it is all the more threatening as we further descend as social subjects into the virtual prisons we have built for ourselves.
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