Just as Kierkegaard says, ‘If you judge me you negate me’, so too we could say ‘If you have an image of me you negate me’, and the funny thing about this is that no one in this world interacts with anyone else without having an image of them. We don’t do anything without images. Or – as we could also say – the bizarre thing about this is that we don’t really feel that we’re really there unless we are someone else’s (or society’s) image of us. If we’re not someone else’s image of us (or our own image of us) then we have no authentic existence; if we aren’t what we or somebody else says we are, what the introjected external authority defines us as being), then we aren’t anything. We carry no weight. We haven’t ‘made the grade’ and therefore we simply ‘don’t count’; we are irrelevant to what is going on…

 

 

Stuff has to be positively defined in order for it to be real – that is how thought works. Thought gives rise to society and society serves the function of providing us with an image to identify with (or hide behind). Society is ‘a machine for manufacturing and regulating images of who we are’ – it’s the Image Factory (or, as we could also say, it’s the Identity Factory. We all want an image of ourselves, we all want an identity of one sort or another, and so in this regard the ‘Group Reality’ is serving a useful function. Without an identity we aren’t anyone, we aren’t anything, and so we’re only too happy to avail of society’s kind offer of a freshly minted, fresh off-the-press identity. Terms and conditions apply to this offer however and the precise nature of these terms and conditions is something that we never actually look into – we never really look into it because – deep down – we really don’t want to know…

 

 

We never examined the small print on the bottom of the page because we were in much too much of a hurry to avail of the offer. Our haste is our downfall, therefore. One condition to the agreement we have just unwittingly entered into is that we have to jockey for position with all the other identities to see whether we can win a ‘High Value Identity’ for ourselves or whether we can’t. Having a ‘High Value Identity’ is only possible however if there is the counterbalance of other people having a ‘Low Value Identity’ – not everyone can be a winner, after all. It’s like the quaintly old-fashioned notion of such and such an individual being a ‘VIP’ and being due lots and lots of respect and veneration on this basis. This is all very well – and certainly no one seemed to see anything wrong with it at the time – but the point we’re deliberately missing here is that in order to have the possibility of having a VIP there needs to be very many un-important people to provide the necessary contrast. There needs to be very many people who are deserving of little (if any) respect; many have to be thrust down in order for a few to be exalted to the dizzy heights of being ‘a Very Important Person’.

 

 

The very same is true with regard to the social standing that comes with wealth, of course. It is said that everyone in the USA is an aspirational millionaire (or billionaire) – as is undoubtedly also the case in any capitalist society – but the flip side of this aspiration (which we don’t pay any attention to) is that every millionaire needs to have hundreds of thousands of underpaid workers in order to support them in the manner in which they have become accustomed. Every pyramid needs a base, after all. ‘The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor,’ says Voltaire. To aspire to be a millionaire is therefore not to care about all the people who are going to be hugely less well off than us, therefore – all those persons whose destiny is to support us in our lofty lifestyle. We can only be at the top of the pile if countless others are left languishing miserably at the bottom – an aristocrat (in order to be such) needs to have serfs, and lots of them! There can only be such a thing as an HV Identity if there is also such a thing as a LV Identity; there can only be such a thing as ‘a good image’ (which everyone will respect) if there is also such a thing as a ‘bad image’, a ‘tarnished or spoiled image’ that everyone is going to revile and despise. In short, we can’t have this thing called ‘looking up’ without also having ‘looking down’, and this is the point that – we in our hurry to get to the top, in our hurry to gain the approval and validation of the group – never stop to consider.

 

 

It’s not that we’re making the argument that ‘everyone should be the same’ (as in Kurt Vonnegut’s short story Harrison Bergerac) – ‘same’ and ‘different’ only have meaning within the context of a common overarching framework. Only generic human beings can compete, only generic human beings can compare themselves with a standard. It’s meaningless for individual human beings to compare themselves with anyone else and so it is also meaningless to say that one individual can have a ‘higher value’ then another; as we have just said, this sort of comparison can only be done with generic human beings, which is to say, human beings who are adapted to (and defined by) the same framework of meaning, the same system of governance . When we are all measured by the same measuring stick then there can be winners and losers, but the proviso that goes with this is that in any given population, there must always be the same amount of people under the median line as there are above it. Symmetry always has to be preserved – those who succeed must always be balanced out by those who fail.

 

 

This makes the whole exercise self-defeating however – we want to be winners rather than losers so that we can distinguish ourselves, so that we can set ourselves apart from the non-entity masses, so that we can actually be somebody, but in order to have a chance to do this we have to forsake our actual genuine individuality (which is – by its very nature – not capable of being compared) in favour of being what we have called ‘a generic human being’, which is to say, a human being who is interchangeable with every other, a human being who anyone can be… The best we can ever hope for to be under this regime is to be better than anyone else is at approximating the same standard therefore, and this just doesn’t distinguish us from anyone. We are trying to ‘stand out from the crow by getting better at being the same’ and this is the paradox we never spot. Today’s winners are tomorrow’s losers; the experience of succeeding is a generic one, just as the experience of being a failure is. This is what playing a game is all about; the whole damn thing is a ‘generic, one-size-fits-all experience’ – everything is coming from the outside rather than the inside, everything is extrinsic to us. Everything is a ‘foreign imposition’. The conditioned (or generic) self is driven by this burning need to prove itself, distinguish itself, say that there is something truly special about itself, and in order to do this it throws itself into the game. In order for us to be able to play the game however we first have to forsake our true individuality and become that nonentity that Jung calls Everyman.

 

 

This – via a somewhat circuitous route – is bringing us right back to what we started off talking about. Kierkegaard says, ‘If you judge me you negate me’, but society is – in essence – a Judging Machine – unless we are judged (and assigned some value or other in accordance with how well we have managed to adapt ourselves to the ruling authority) then we can’t play the game. We can’t even start – we’re not eligible to play the game if the game can’t define us, and we desperately want to play the game because that’s the only way we – as conditioned beings – can create meaning for ourselves. Playing the game is the only way the game player can get validated. The whole thing feeds on itself therefore – the player is painfully empty of inner reality (since we have been negated as a result of being judged, and being judged is what games are all about) and this is what gives rise to the mechanical motivation that drives us, this is what creates the Extrinsic Motivational System that acts upon us ‘from the outside’ and makes us do whichever it is we (mistakenly) think we ‘want’ to do. The player is compensating for its own nullity – which was imposed upon it as a prerequisite for being allowed to have access to the game – and the ongoing action of ‘compensating for its nullity’ (or ‘hollowness’) reinforces this nullity, perpetuates or extends this hollowness. Striving to win within the terms of the game (which is what a game is – a game is only a game when we try to win at it) perpetuates the nullity which is the game.

 

 

Society works by telling us who we are, by making an image of us, a picture or tokenization of us, a simulation of us… To be allocated a generic image that stands for who we really are, that tokenizes who we really are, is to lose the actual reality. This is Hyperreality, in other words – not content with symbolising the territory, the overvalent symbol becomes the territory and – thereby – it implicitly denies the existence of anything else, anything that ‘isn’t itself’. In order to be able to play the game that has been given to us to play we have to adapt, we have to conform and adapting / conforming means forgetting who we really are (which is not an image, which is not a token, which is not an identity). When we do this then this means that everything is ‘coming from the outside’, it means that everything is ‘being defined by the outside’, and this means that there simply is no more ‘inside’. This has been defined out of existence. This is all very well but what we are also forgetting is that the so-called ‘outside’ – which is to say, the framework which we are using to define ourselves – is merely a convention. There is no ‘outside’, there is no ‘framework’ – it’s a line we draw in the sand, and then forget that we drew it (at the same time as forgetting that there is anything on the other side of that imaginary line). It’s a device or protocol which we have put in place and then forgotten about, and at the same time as forgetting this we also forget that the device that we have put in place is ‘only a device’. We have in this way negated ourselves – we have ‘nullified ourselves by means of our own actions’ therefore, which is an act of the most extraordinary perversity…

 

 

 

Image credit – The Identity Factory, San Jose Museum of Art, newart.city