Making a World by “Doom-scrolling”
Natalie Wülfing
Doom-scrolling is the name of the practice of excessively scrolling through the newsfeeds and social media on one’s smartphone. The term is used ironically to reflect the fact that this practice is done despite oneself, in the full knowledge that it does not do us any good. An enjoyment of the doom in the world, while being doomed to the deadening effect of the practice itself. In this regard there is a subject and a symptom in the account given of this doomed practice.
Analysands come with the vast burden of the super-egoic demands of the “world.” Which “world” is this? It is “their world.” And the question is, how do we make a world, which is always our world? Lacan often referred to this problem of a supposed world. In Seminar XI,[1] he questions the Freudian term Vorstellung by referring it to a Weltanschauung that has no totalising possibility. Later, Lacan speaks about it in terms of the image of the body: “The body is a hole, outside of it, there’s an image. And with this image, he makes the world.”[2]
The “world” reflected in the images of the virtual scenes, in a permanent “connection” that is lived as addiction, is a jouissance programme that the market has given us. “It seems that in spite of the so-called impossibility of accessing the real of things, we’ve had […] access to something that, from this real, gives us […] gadgets.”[3] The signifiers, objects a, and ready-made objects of consumption, make a world.
There are two sides of the same coin in this experience of doom via the images. There is the world that is watching, that takes note, that judges and demands through its idealised perfection, portraying something whole, standing over the speaking being as a crushing reminder of its loneliness. And there is its opposite: the devastation of humanity, the wars. From actual wars between nations to wars of words; from wars between men and women to wars between individual bodies. Hate everywhere. One world is accessed by scrolling through the Instagram posts of those who present their “photoshopped,” perfect lives there, and the doom descends upon the speaking being as the waste of this particular world. The other world is made by scrolling through the violent images of all the waste objects presented there, and then the doom is “outside,” in the globalised “world.”
In the changes to our contemporary, virtual world, signifiers and objects are homogenised in the common discourse. A common discourse that is no longer common, but “pulverised”[4] and that the capitalist discourse, with its infinite command to enjoy, resorbs into the common.
What does not change, are the objects a as semblants. As plugs to the hole, they have their function, they are a necessary stopgap to the symptom. A symptom that allows each speaking being to make their world, for better “… or worse.”[5]
Références
[1] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. J-A Miller, tr. A. Sheridan, Hogarth Press Ltd, London, 1997, p. 221.
[2] Lacan, J., “The Lacanian Phenomenon”, The Lacanian Review, No. 9, 2020, p. 31.
[3] Ibid., p. 21.
[4] Miller, J.-A., “it is the discourse itself that appears pulverised”, in “L’Autre qui n’existe pas et ses comités d’éthique,” 1996-1997, L’orientation lacanienne, annual course delivered within the framework of the Department of Psychoanalysis, University Paris 8, lesson of 27 November 1996, unpublished.
[5] Lacan, J., … or Worse, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XIX, ed. J-A Miller, tr. A. R. Price, Polity, London, 2018.