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Dark Interface and the infinitely

Grand Objet a

Johanna Drucker

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Dark interfaceDark matter, invisible mass, responsible for activities in the universe that we cannot see, is being modelled in computer simulations that give it a visible, tractable form. The scopophilic drive of science seeks to satisfy its insatiable desire by bringing that mysteriously forceful stuff into the regime of vision, subjecting it to the rules of sight. Taming the unknown by rendering it in a simulation is a phantas-matic form of control, an illusion of knowledge, based on the belief that a model is more than the expression of the terms on which it is conceived—that it might be or approach the thing itself. Within the frameworks of scientific epistemologies, such models are the output of computa-tional protocols whose boundaries exist at the limit state of current engineering imagination. The images they fashion are special effects visualisations, as fictionally satisfying to the ego-ideal as realisations as any mirror stage reflection, though these scientific practitioners are likely unaware of the relevance of precepts of Lacanian psychoanalysis for their work. Precisely where the image is, knowledge is not, and the desiring engines of scientific inquiry press on, ever eager to find the empty spot, the lack, at the centre of the universe’s elusive gaze. What better other than dark matter?

The world of empirical science, therefore, stretches its capacities, engaging the heavy machinery of xenon time-projection chambers and photomultiplier tubes. Such machinery is housed in water tanks and layers of metal and shields that keep cosmic rays from interfering with the detection of those shy and fugitive particles that are constantly moving through us and our physical universe, even if we cannot perceive them. The technical apparatus is its own fetish, but it also fetishises the darkness of that invisible matter, its uncanny un-presence and effects, so the

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Johanna Druckerdimensions of the imaginary expand exponentially like any well-constructed lack. Dark matter takes on a shape and form that is the result of projection—of one asymptotic line of conception after another defining the empty space at the centre of the accumulated field of those projections, each sketching the place at which the matter cannot be seen, touched or known, only imagined. The French psycho-analysts would have revelled in the constructs of such elusions.

The ability to imagine what is other is crucial to science and discovery. Modelling what is unknown to test hypotheses of knowledge never exhausts that which is by definition unknowable, not ineffable, but merely outside the reach of discourses and their delusions of knowledge. The codification of knowledge only expands the limits of ignorance, the infinitely expanding horizon of which will always exceed the closed circle of the known.

Limited and bound by our perception, fixed in our few dimensions, we are unable to see our way towards motion through walls and across spaces, believing in the speed of light as a non-traversable demarcation between one state and another. Our puny temporalities and literal notions of space exclude most of the potential world. Its possibilities and actualities exceed our grasp. With the pathetic reach of technical apparatuses, we attempt to capture the escaping features of the multi-dimensional worlds, of which we are one pale precipitate projection on a single plane of meagre notational coordinates. Faced with the infinite unknown, these attempts are laughable, however (admirably) earnest. The scientific quest enacts a paleo-futuristic anachronism by seeking an object whose very shape, form, and function are doomed to obsolescence in advance, because these

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Dark interfaceproperties emerge from the technologies of the known and knowable, not what always exceeds their/our conceptual imagination. Even the shape of what we cannot know is defined by our current state of knowing. We only find what we know to look for in advance. A dark matter detector might as well be built from a vacuum cleaner and used to suck invisible particles into a bag. Knowledge design defines its own limit, the sadly inadequate attempt at what has to be a failure, always, by definition. We know what we can know, not what there is—an ancient truism among theorists of epistemology. Yet our desires leap forward across that structuring lack, as with all other human psychic undertakings.

So what is the connection between this ineffectual, aspirational, grasping after knowledge of the universe’s intractable energy and the social world of the endless engagement with our devices, the phones, pads, pods, and palm-sized electronic instruments? What illusions are fostered in the non-stop play with the machines on our persons, in our pockets, our purses, our belts and in constant reach and range, where the inverse proportion between quest and satisfaction at first appears to be the case? In the point-click-swipe addictive engagement, the self and other seem to enact a closed circuit rather than an open one. Yet, the insatiable desire in lack is structural, and the never-enough-ness of the pseudo-communication devices, with their interface sinkholes, turn out to mimic the structure of model and knowledge; acting as the seeking scientist, lacking an always-elusive concept that covers the not-being-there of the world. Like the scientist fetishising the model made to cover this incurable lack, the interface user pursues an ever-elusive other whose desire by

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Johanna Druckerdefinition will never be returned.

Reciprocation is absent on a device that serves solipsism so adroitly that it passes as a means of commun-ica tion with any and all others, even as it occupies the central place in the transacting system. The fiction of the mirror becomes multiplied a thousand-fold, million-times, n-dimensionally in the refracting non-gaze of the absorptive interface which returns—what? Our regressed infantile adult finds such an endless replication of reifications. The self creates an elaborate delusion through which it pretends to have some location in a world outside itself, in the myth-informed conviction that another’s desire directs a gaze through/from the screen. The spatial structure of illusion is embodied in the syntax, the prepositions that suggest positionality within a relation of self and other. Remove them, in a surgical strike on the construction, and the illusion drops away. These are self-phones, inner-faces, not portals or mirrors, and they escalate the latent capacity for absorption to unprecedented levels of addiction.

The perversity of this peculiar inversion of gaze and other, of inter-face as onanistic screen, collapses the equation—the basic matheme of Jacques Lacan’s psychic structure—into a closed system.1 The engagement of hands, eyes, mouth, scopic, haptic, oral fixations abounds, out of bounds, knows no limits except the exhaustion of the onanist, panting and wrung out, waiting to recharge. The other the self conjures to assure itself of its identity is actually a mechanical device, through which one is always endlessly transacting a relation with one’s self. The others, always an elusion, are excuses to enjoy the pleasures of swipe and click. The miniscule and insubstantial objet petit a has become the enormously absorbing and all-

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Dark interfaceencompassing objet infiniment grand. As if colonised by the infantile id-aspect of the culture, the new mode of reflection is all and only about le moi. Infinitely refracted over and over and over self to self and back again, the moi is happy to transact with itself, or, perhaps, better put, simply to transact its self in a sustained engagement. What better reflection, reinforcement, affirmation? The illusion of the other is now shifted, reframed, repositioned within the endless recycling of the moi. All redundancy is eliminated from the psychic system. Gone is the superfluity of otherness, with its disturbing dis-equilibriums and differentials, replaced by the all-absorbing object with its inexhaustible capacity for immediate, rather than deferred, satisfaction.

Lacan’s a is a sign for a construct, and like all Lacanian notions, most definitely not a thing, not a fixed or stable or graspable entity. It is rather a crucial device for producing a relationship between self and other in the cycles of impossible and elusive desire that drive the psyche in his analytic model. The a is not lack, and not phallus, but the lack of the phallus that must be covered, while also producing the dynamic of desire to know the desire of the other. Quintessential Lacan, the formulation is not about things, persons, selves, or even fictions or illusions. The a concerns generative principles of psychic energy, the desiring processes that animate our conscious and unconscious lives. The other, Lacan tells us, is what produces the subject’s illusion of wholeness and selfhood. Always a fiction, the compelling construct is constantly in shift. The French psychoanalyst understood full well the impossibilities built into the structuring activity of self and psyche, the addictive quality of illusion, and generative

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Johanna Druckercathexes of fictions. Lacan conceived of all human knowledge as a mediatisation, an engagement with the (elusive) desire of the other. Whether that other is the dark matter of the universe, or some fictive phantasmatic figure in the psyche, the operations are the same. As we seek to meet the universe halfway, to paraphrase Karen Barad,2 the desiring capacity we ascribe to it becomes imprinted with our psychic apparatus.

Here on the rather literal and reified Earth, in the networked wilderness of current communicative systems, a different alteration, this time in the structure of the social universe, is being enacted. Lacan’s a, in its elusive petite-ness, was unable to produce a stable fixation on its-self as an other because it was not possessed of a corporeal or actualised body. Even the feints and seductions of the mirror stage were not fixated on the mirror, but on the illusions it produced, the missing-ness at the core of the gaze returned. But, to repeat the refrain above, the haptic, aural, visual, graphic, gratifications of our current devices, with their absorbing focal points that swell the small screens in hand to fill the entire horizon of perception, produce a hyper-trophically exaggerated field of self-involvement. What appears at first as the scene of constant contact with the other, with the generative process of cultivating those desiring returns, turns out to be the complete opposite— the full exclusion of otherness entirely. Everywhere one looks, touches, reads, sees, every text and image, every Facebook page, iChat video and Instagram feed, the image of the moi is enlarged to a grim degree of omniscient inclusiveness. No other invades the totality of the infantile moi whose absence of boundaries is concealed by the minuteness of the object it mistakes for the other. The

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Dark interfacemistake is everywhere. The object precludes the formative and generative illusions, satisfying every impulse urge and drive with a narcotic satisfaction.

This phenomenon quickly took over the culture at large, its stealth operations no doubt fully visible and in plain sight for those watching. I first observed it while waiting in an airport gate, watching a woman use her cell phone (self-phone) to put on her makeup. Of course. No mirror at hand, and where there was a mirror it was in the ladies’ room and thus a kind of onstage public space with watchers able to insert their multiple random gazes between her and the mirror. With a selfie, the physical distance is diminished so that it precludes any but an intimate from entering the frame. The entirety of her grooming perform-ance could be observed, but its closed circle was defined dimensionally, psychically, and affectively. And it all made sense. The self-phone is a fully replete system, closed, not open, its reassuring fullness ends the desiring cycle, does not sustain it.

The second example was a cell-phone shot of a newborn babe. Pretty shiny thing, a couple of days into the world, reaching towards recognition at the most basic level of I-am-here-ness, its moon round face and brightly lit eyes aimed at—what else—the camera eye of the proud father’s hypnotising phone. Baby’s face filled the frame, with the little onesie-clad, undeveloped body incapable of anything but basic functions trailing out towards the landscape of the bedclothes behind, within which reposed the exhausted new mother, her traumas too recently passed to be over. She is out of focus, defining the very horizon of view, the whole world of embrace and protection in the new family unit, and she is gazing with blurred but total absorption towards the

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Johanna Druckerinfant in the foreground. The Selfie Madonna. Encompassed in gazes, made at the centre of them through a single act of snapshot production, the infant is born into and as its own image. Too young to process, too small to see, too without visual and cognitive ability to know what is going on, the infant nonetheless understands the mediation of affect through the lens as a primary operation, a first day’s event, as a primary mode of being—and of coming into being. Not a reflection, but a refraction, a scattering of self into infinite moi in the ever-growing dark hole of the interface, which only grows larger with each interaction and the infinitely expanding appetite.

The adult-infantile cell phone user exists in a constant state of device addiction to solipsistic behaviour, to pinch-swipe-click screen onanism, to pleasure in the constant touch of the thing and its responses. Just one more. Just one endless stream of more that produces the tripping, the bumping into things, the wandering into traffic and getting caught in escalators, the problems with driving and the withdrawal of flying, the fantastical rudenesses to strangers and more radical violations of intimacy. Whose text, call, message matters more than being present when it is the case that engagement with the device, not the human sender, is the source of pleasure and irresistible desire. When the objet petit a could be conceived as a desire generator, as a stand-in surrogate and by-definition unobtainable and therefore ever-generative part of the psychic system, well, that meant one thing. But now the always-obtainable pleasure is a closed circuit of stimulus and response, self to self through mediation of an object, a device in fact, a trick mechanism with clicks and the de clic—the moment at which the mechanism lets go, but only instantaneously, in

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Dark interfaceorder to reengage. The moment of dynamism keeps the mechanism going, a kind of illusion of psychic escape without termination.

The fascination-addiction is fully designed into the interface and its operations. Where is the darkness produced? In a world where the engineers engage with the terms of transparency, user experience, satisfaction, where they test every instant of lag time and distraction, absorp-tion and attention, where is the metric for this hole in the fabric of the social that is increasingly concentrated in the zone of the self? Dark matter exists, it absorbs energy and space and has dimensions and properties just as the endless interface absorbs time and energy. The easily recognised limits of scientific inquiry pale beside the difficulty of recognising the lack of limits to the pseudo-communicative system colonising the psyche. Addicts of the symbolic, we will give up almost anything to get a fix, a text, a message, a posting. We seek these out not because they are signs indicating the other’s desire, but rather, because they are the means of avoiding its irrelevance while fulfilling the appetite-limits of the moi. Where is lack when we need it most? The dark interface grows larger with each encounter, finally blotting the field of view and vision from any possibility of actual exchange except with itself. The apparatus feeds off our gaze, fed into its interface in the sustaining signal of engagement, with the illusion that it mediates relations between self and other.

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Johanna Drucker Notes 1 Jacques Lacan, Four Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis (London:

Karnac Books, 2004) and Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection (London and New York: Routledge, 2001).

2 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway (Chapel Hill: Duke University Press, 2007).