In a society of transparency, there’s a common trend to encourage various signals of solidarity. I use the word ‘encourage,’ but that’s probably putting it too mildly. Get that hashtag ready, put on that armband, take a knee, alter your bio and email signature, and attend that compulsory ideology-synchronization training seminar. I have specific examples of where I’ve seen such things in mind, but you can supply your own.
It seems almost every major global news event or viral phenomenon will inevitably arrive with an entourage of social pressure. Conformity is not enough. You ‘must’ also demonstrate your conformity as visibly and proudly as possible. In our liberal, permissive society, rules multiply endlessly until freedom itself hardly feels like an option. Get your semiotics in order, endorse everything wholesale, no questions asked. Arguably the cardinal sin in this empire of signs is thinking for yourself, figuring things out within your own sphere of experience and understanding, and adopting heuristics determined by incarnate materiality and negotiated relationships rather than by adopting someone else’s readymade opinions. Once, teenagers were warned about peer pressure; now, peer pressure is actively encouraged.
What must a person actually believe to find such mind-numbing, semiotically-driven ideology-synchronization tolerable? I ask this question because I find the idea so clearly intolerable. I have a few speculations, and here they are.
For starters, you would have to be mad. I mean, you would have to adopt an essentially paranoid posture towards the world. You’d have to believe that everyone who doesn’t agree with you is out to get you. That’s crazy, of course, but crazy is the new normal. It’s only a society pervaded by distrust that would demand such total transparency, such total solidarity, agreement, and semiotic clarity. Trouble is telling the paranoid delusional that no one is out to get them is enough to confirm their original belief. That’s exactly what someone would say if they were out to get you! Ideology-synchronization is structured like a Kafka trap.
In Orthodoxy (1908), G. K. Chesterton sets up a metaphysical (rather than clinical) distinction between the maniac and the poet, and I think it’s worth noting here. Chesterton’s point is larger than what I’ll deal with—modernity promotes something like the normalization of madness, in that narcissistic self-enclosure is taken as a given. More simply, the maniac’s (or ideologue’s) explanation of anything is always complete and often pretty close to satisfactory, at least according to some abstract, gnostic rationality. Put otherwise, the insane explanation is simply unanswerable. As I suggested above, the very points you might supply to contradict the madman’s kafkatrapesque claim will be used to support it. But, as Chesterton goes on to point out, the madman is nevertheless wrong:
But if we attempt to trace his error in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed. Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large. A bullet is quite as round as the world, but it is not the world. There is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many modern religions. Now, speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable mark of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatic’s theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way.
The lunatic is, we might say, concerned not with reality but with the simulacrum. His interest is not in the connection between any sign and what it refers to but in the connection between the sign and other signs within a very specific ideological enclosure. There is a picture, but it does not refer to anything outside of itself. This is the realm of pure semiotics. This is how ideology-synchronization works. The aim is precisely to create a picture, not to ask questions about the reality beyond it. The aim is to endorse hand-me-down opinions, not to come up with and test opinions of your own. Not only is crazy now the new normal, but fake is also the new reality.
Once upon a time, pictures were used to frame reality. Now they are used to help us to avoid it. I’m not saying, of course, that the paranoid beliefs of ideology-synchronizers are spelled out or totally conscious. They probably aren’t. But they are enacted. I take it that belief is not so much what you utter with your lips as what you live out with your whole life.
There is an irony in narcissistic, semiotic self-enclosure, and it is one that the maniac will be forced to contend with at some point. I can tell you, for instance, that I am in solidarity with you and your feeble cause; but I may very well be lying. My lips may utter what my heart denies. Virtue-signalling may really be lying but proponents of ideology-synchronization don’t allow for this possibility. This is part and parcel of the belief system: words are, apparently, enough—even when they aren’t. Labels are of utmost importance; realities, not so much.
The social pressure is severe enough nowadays in some quarters that your very career may depend on your ability to lie about your allegiances. Again, it doesn’t seem to me that truth and lies are really at issue in ideology-synchronization. Consensus (semiotic agreement) is the entire point—as if all of us agreeing that something is true makes it so. Consensus sets up a Temporary Autonomous Zone, a shield against the disquieting possibility of the Actual. Mere consensus never wins, mind you; at least, not in the end.
So that about covers the first thing you have to believe to comfortably buy into the whole solidarity-through-semiotics thing. Reality itself must be distrusted; people, even more so. And the corollary is this: signs must be trusted above all else. If it is memeable, it is consumable.
Another thing you’d have to believe in endorsing such ideology-synchronization and in finding it tolerable to do so is that all ambiguities can really be done away with merely through consensus and labeling. However, it seems to me that ideology-synchronization intensifies under at least two conditions. The first is the multiplying of ambiguities. The more ambiguous any given issue is, the more it ‘must’ be tamed by univocal determinations. Certainty becomes less about knowledge than about a reaction against anxiety. The second is linked to the first: increasing disbelief. The more the choir starts to disbelieve what is being preached to them, the louder they end up singing. Fundamentalism is closer to atheism than mysticism precisely because it doesn’t allow for atheism—while mysticism does.
As far as I can tell, ideology-synchronization is already in a state of decay when it has become the bureaucratic norm. The ideologically synchronized don’t explicitly believe this, but they probably do suspect it on some level. Power is strongest when it is simply taken for granted as part of the general scenography, as an implicit reality. You can tell it is weakening when it starts drawing attention to itself, preaching to the choir. Then, despite what is openly claimed, and no matter how loud it sings, not even the choir believes. The emperor has no clothes on, and everyone can see this, but they keep canceling the little kid who is brave enough to note the obvious.
Cancel culture, by the way, plays into the also-insane idea that what you see is all there is (aka. WYSIATI). More or less, if all the signs agree, then everyone actually agrees. Again, the aim is to maintain the simulacrum, not to be annoyed by something as offensive as Reality.
And then, there’s another thing you must believe to comfortably buy into the hype of ideology-synchronization. You must believe that the point is not to persuade people but to create clones. This is life functioning as a production line. The focus is not reproduction, with its themes and variations, but replication, with its endless hellish sameness. This fits with a trend you may have seen in the above: the trend to believe that reality is flat, that there is no unconscious, that the psyche has no depths; and that surfaces are all that matter. Proselytization is key to the whole enterprise, probably because of the disavowed unconscious disbelief of the ideologue. The number one way to prove to yourself that your bullshit is worth buying is to convince others actually to buy it. If others do buy it, you can keep your feeble beliefs a moment longer.
So now we live in an aperspectival panopticon. There is no Benthamian authority watching us. There is no Big Brother. There is just us. Even big tech is just another name for the democratization of totalitarianism. Surveillance isn’t conducted from a lofty central point but from everywhere, through your eyes and mine. We’re alone, each of us in our own cages, caught up in an environment of hypercommunication, and in this environment, secrets are simply intolerable. At least, that’s what it can feel like. The public arena has been obliterated, so the private spills into the void left by it. Exhibitionism takes center stage. We don’t need anyone to spy on us because we’re too busy spying on each other. We ‘must’ spy on each other. We feel compelled to.
This reduction of life to semiotics is about control. And that’s another thing that has to be believed for the solidarity-through-semiotics thing to be sustained and endorsed without disquiet. The aim of life becomes controlling life rather than producing it. Life is no longer the point in a totally semiotic universe; it is too unruly and unpredictable and laced with mystery. The point is no longer the deep mysticism of the erotic but rather the shallow replications of the pornographic. The poetic is no longer the point either. What people want is mere information. Oddly enough, this removes from the simulacrum-world the possibility of humor, with its equivocal posture towards being. Humor relies, among other things, on intertextual contaminations, of the porosity between different provinces of meaning. If there is only one province of meaning, bounded off from any other province of meaning, there’s no space for laughter. Thus, why ideology-synchronization cannot take a joke.
Ideology-synchronization isn’t about understanding in the end but about manipulation. The maniacal ideologue has to become like the sophists: treating others like particles to be shoved around rather than spiritual beings to be known and loved. There is no love in ideology-synchronization environments, despite what Winston Smith thinks—which is why at some point, someone in the in-crowd will be chucked out and canceled. Anyone who demonstrates any outward sign of intelligence or soul cannot be tolerated in a purely semiotic universe. In fact, it seems that the whole aim of total transparency in solidarity is precisely this: the mob wants to know who to target. The nail that sticks out, as the Japanese proverb says, will be hammered down—or, perhaps, discarded. It’s a pity that the nail is Reality itself.
And that brings me to the last belief that would sustain ideology-synchronization (at least, the last one I care to mention here). It is the belief that the one who casts the stone will not have stones cast back at him. It is the belief, in other words, that doing violence to the Real will have no repercussions. Throwing stones acts, mostly, as a defense against having stones thrown back. It’s a stupid defense in the end. The empire of signs is also an empire of illusions, and illusions cannot last. They are not strong enough to sustain themselves. Truth is, those who live by their semiotic enclosures will die by them too.
If you live by the simulacrum, you will die by the simulacrum.
This is why Chesterton suggests an alternative to the maniac who believes that his beliefs are sufficient to account for the world. The alternative is the poet, who knows that there is no redemption in that empire of illusions. The poet knows he cannot save himself by his words, and he knows that his words are insufficient to account for what he has encountered. That said, he is more than capable of using his words to seek out what is true. The truth will speak, of course, as it is: not in one voice, but in a polyphony of plurivocal paradoxes. Here, then, is what Chesterton has to say about this, and it is with this final thought that I will leave you:
Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion … To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the [lunatic] who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.
