Reality 2.0: When Loss Is Lost

Abstract

Cyberspace is provoking a dramatic shift in our cultural understanding of reality. A transition is taking place, from a reality marked by loss and limit to one experienced through infinite access. This paper begins to map Reality 2.0 with the conviction that we need to revisit traditional psychoanalytic concepts such as loss and fantasy within the framework of this new reality so that we may appreciate how online experience does and doesn't facilitate the formation of subjectivity and multiplicity. In Reality 2.0, access trumps the need to accept limits as a tool to self-discovery, and networking replaces containment as the bulwark of meaning. How then might we appreciate ways that online life turns what many see as a kind of psychic retreat into a generative space for psychoanalytic dialogue?

Notes

¹Reality, defined by loss in all the ways I have been describing, lent itself to a view of mental health as self-disciplined containment. An anecdote illustrates this. Back when I was in graduate school learning how to administer a mental status exam, my classmates and I were shown a graying video of a woman with schizophrenia being interviewed in a state hospital. The film was shot at about the same point in time as the sex education features that were screened, boys in one cafeteria, girls in another, when I was in the sixth grade. Her eyes blazing, our pockets swelling, all captured on celluloid to demonstrate something very finite about reality testing—the premise of which I take to be, “fantasize all you like, but don't lose your grip.”

The African American (then negro) woman is insisting that she has a firm grasp of reality and that the interviewer has no right to be holding her against her will. She argues, “I know it like Martin Luther King knew it. He k-knew it, knew it with a k, the kind of k you don't say, the kind of k that you don't say when you know what the white man don't want you to know. Martin Luther King knew. He k-knew it—knew it with a k. The k you're not allowed to say. And they got him.”

Then as now, I was amazed by the poetry of the truth she, however distraught and disorganized, had ripped from language: the silent k of discursive knowledge, the k you're not allowed to say. Not quite Bion's k, a k on the way to knowledge (Symington & Symington, 1996). Rather a lost k, silenced by the power aggregated in race and segregated from knowledge by the bars of reality testing. This k that you don't say holds the realities of racism that normal reality disavows. More akin to Bion's negative k, the silent k before NO evacuates insight to regulate knowledge. It dilutes and, perhaps, attacks our ability to link reality and authority. On screen, the interviewer nodded to the camera and a voice-over instructed us that the flight of ideas demonstrated in this woman's word salad was evidence of her failed reality testing.

²In a Lacanian mode, Nusselder (2008) wrote that “avatars on the Internet are still avatars of an invisible, transcendental Self” (p. 63). I see no value in arguing with this idea on philosophical grounds because it ultimately leads to an assessment of whether or not an avatar is a disavowed self or affect state and, therefore, perverse. I prefer to understand the emergent potential of an avatar as a representation of what reality might become.

³Since the time of writing, political uprisings in Iran and Egypt that took shape primarily on Facebook and Twitter demonstrate the Internet's power as a tool for collective action.

⁴ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/world/asia/12beast.html?scp=1&sq=Grass+Mud+Horse&st=nyt

⁵Second Life has since been outpaced by Zynga's territories in the race to capitalize on avatar-mania. At the same time, grass-roots blogspots increasingly create noncommercial, indentificatory spaces for experimentation.

⁶ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/23/online-divorcee-jailed-af_n_137211.html