Interpassivity

Interpassivity August 8, 2014

Every spring, basketball takes over my life for several weeks. I still function: I continue to do those things I tell my kids constitutes my “work.” I eat, sleep, talk, teach, write. But for a few weeks baseketball is my life. A Brazilian friend went through something similar recently – something about another game that uses a round ball, a net, and requires quick footwork.

If you asked me, even during an NBA finals game, “Is basketball really that important,” I would say, “No, of course not. It’s just a game.” I know how trivial it is. I can detach myself from my obsession, and evaluate it objectively – as I’m doing here. It doesn’t seem quite my obsession, and yet it takes over my life.

Robert Pfaller begins On the Pleasure Principle in Culture by exploring psychological oddities like this, which he describes as “illusions without subjects” (2). Such illusions (1) seem to have no bearer; (2) are not dismissed by knowing better, but instead even seem to be strengthened by it; (3) exert themselves in the form of a compulsion, albeit foreign and kept at a distance through knowledge; (4) often remain unnoticed; and (5) appear to be without content” (5). That last point requires some elaboration: We have, we claim “an adequate picture of reality” but in fact we have another picture that includes things that we don’t acknowledge as important (basketball). This doesn’t add anything to our picture of reality; in fact, we say we could dispense with the obsession and life would go on. It appears to be a nothing, and yet, it becomes all in all.

Pfaller cites Zizek’s analysis of sitcom laugh tracks to make a similar point. Laugh tracks are not prompts; we in fact rarely laugh along. The laugh track is a Chorus, which substitutes for us, and makes it possible for us to (in Zizek’s words) “gaze drowsily into the television screen” and yet “say afterwards that, objectively, through the medium of the other, we had a really good time” (quoted on 16). Enjoyment through a substitute; entertainment by proxy, like the obsessive who records TV programs but never watches.

Pfaller brings these disparate phenomena together under the heading of what he calls “interpassivity.” We are familiar with inter-action, but rarely recognize that we respond to, mimic, and pick up others’ passions as much as their actions. Their mood can become ours. Interpassivity includes “delegated enjoyment” (18). It also includes our tendency to place mediums and technologies between ourselves and others. “isn’t there a stead stream of new forms of actors and avatars constantly turning up in place of people – for example, in chat rooms, on Facebook, Twitter, and other ‘second lives’” (18).

Interpassivity raises large epistemological questions, focusing on the double-mindedness inherent in being obsessed with something we know to be trivial. It also, Pfaller says, raises some large historical questions, and breaks down the context-boundedness that is assumed everywhere. Pfaller (with some irony) cites Engels saying that nineteenth-century classics scholars believed in the Furies, Athena, and Apollo “at least as much as Aeschylus did” (quoted p. 7). That suggests that the scholar might actually have believed more passionately in the Greek gods than the Greeks themselves did, who frequently regarded traditional religion with some skeptical detachment. 

As Pfaller puts it, Greek myths “appeared perhaps even more plausible to the nineteenth-century scholars than they had to the Greeks themselves. . . . The error is not made in considering one’s own culture as justified and the other as absurd; instead, it involves granting the foreign culture more plausibility and showing it less scepticism than that culture itself would have done. The scholar pursues an exaggerated appropriation. He assigns the foreign culture a form of belief that is entirely foreign to it.” Beliefs are not wholly culture-dependent; what changes as cultures change is not the content of belief but “only the form” (8). And this again betrays a double-mindedness, because the scholar who believes in the Furies will hop on a train when he goes on holiday.

Interpassivity is a powerful concept to describe a mysterious reality, and Pfaller explores it as he examines the work of Huizinga, Freud, Lacan, Zizek, and others.


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