<nettime> Locked Down / Charged Up - Trapped in the Somatic Deficit

There is this peculiar experience that we have all become increasingly aware of as our collective ‘screen time’, mobile and static, has expanded and inflected more and more aspects of daily life. It is rather obvious, and yet it requires an articulation to become fully aware of it and to be able to interrogate this experience critically, moving beyond the (apparently) obvious. The experience I am referring to here is the experiential and affective gap between embodied and mediated experience, which can be described as the ‘Somatic Deficit’.

We have become particularly aware and sensitised to this gap in experience because of the repeated lockdowns in response to the Covid-19 crisis that ‘referred’ us back to our electronic screens. At the screen, mediated from afar, we witness events as they unfold, linked up but disconnected and absent, out of touch. Especially when witnessing intense events from afar and in (near) real-time the experiential gap between that which is mediated to us through the screen and our inability to participate physically, trapped in involuntary lockdowns, quickly becomes overwhelming.

Still, this peculiar experience is certainly not limited to excessive screen time in the Covid-19 crisis. Long before I started to notice this curious tendency where people were desperately clinging to their screens (mobile, desktop, TV, whichever was in range) and at the same time frustrated by the denial of the physical, the body, the somatic. This tendency became most evident in situations of intense political strive and protest. The intense passions observed there, manifested time and time again in a move ‘beyond the screen’. Even if the potential reach of the streets was so much more limited than that of the electronic channels (not just so-called ‘social media’, but also radio, TV broadcast (local, regional, national, transnational and satellite transmissions), e-mail, sms and texting, and whatever else would make do), the streets and squares seemed to exert an irresistible attraction on people to go out and connect ‘in the flesh’. To establish, so it seemed to me, a more meaningful relationship.

We all know the list of events that could paradigmatically be cited as prime examples: the Green Revolution in Iran, the occupation of Tahrir Square in Cairo, the 15M movement in Spain and its occupation of Puerta del Sol in Madrid, the occupation of Syntagma Square in Athens, Occupy Wall Street in the US, Occupy Gezi in Istanbul, Occupy Central with Love and Peace in Hong Kong, Nuit Debout in France, very much so the Black Lives Matter protests of recent years, and the list goes on and on.

Beyond the screen

The condition of experiencing the somatic deficit is not specific to these eruptions of public protest. Rather it is the intensity of these events that brings out so clearly the dynamics of the somatic deficit. Trapped behind or at the screen (looking down on the phone in the latter case) the impotence of non-participation in mediated events becomes palpable. Exactly what urban sociologist Richard Sennett had identified as electronic isolation in his famous study The Fall of Public Man. What the ‘social’ media offer as a cure for this electronic isolation is little more than a simulation of reciprocity (via chats, likes, recommendations etc.), which ultimately remain unsatisfying without completion in a bodily act of encounter and exchange. Perhaps Georges Bataille was right after all that the only true communication between humans consists of the exchange of bodily fluids (a small provocation)..

The most remarkable case in point might be the germination of the #occupygezi protests in Turkey, June 2013. Media researcher and ‘technosociologist’ Zeynep Tufekci witnessed the unfolding of events on the screen on June 1 of that year.  A small protest [1] against the razing of an urban park (Gezi Park) next to Taksim Square in Istanbul, citizens attempting to stop the bulldozers from moving in, was brutally broken up by riot police with teargas and excessive violence. The protestors mainly came from a nearby architecture faculty and contested the megalomanic plans for a giant new mosque and shopping centre in this mostly secular part of the city. Tufekci saw that the proliferation of the images of police violence via online channels and the simultaneous suppression of the news on mainstream (state-controlled) media channels, produced such an outrage that solidarity protests erupted within hours across other cities in Turkey, while the protests in Istanbul quickly expanded exponentially. [2] The original issue at stake, the razing of the city park and the protest against the spatial politics of the reigning AK party, was quickly lost in a spilling over of intensity, beyond the screen and into the streets and squares (and parks!). The vitality of this moment, of the event, could apparently not be contained or properly expressed in an electronically mediated relation. It required a different form of relation and _expression_, one that foremost should be understood as somatic.

Locked down: a gradual crisis

Bruno Latour made this prescient observation that it is the things that divide us most that bring us together. However, under conditions of a general lockdown this coming together, as a public, is what is being denied or at the very least is complicated severely. In this uncharted territory of physical lockdowns and viral contamination the electronic media channels, especially online distributed (internet-based) media assume an ambivalent and paradoxical double role: On the one hand, our abilities to stay connected, at least online, have greatly expanded and enabled the online meeting rooms, the online classrooms, the online and live-streamed events that have all become daily realities for a large chunk of the population, even if unwarranted. So it seems at first that online connectivity is one of the lifelines that makes the lockdowns bearable.

However, this same mode of mediated connectivity without physical proximity and reciprocity seems to be responsible for a gradual build-up of somatic discomfort. Lacan’s famous dictum says that ‘desire is predicated on a lack’. The lack here is exactly this discrepancy of being able to ‘connect’, almost in real-time, across distance, safeguarded from potentially lethal contamination, to witness, to hear and see, to exchange information in various modalities, but simultaneous to be absent, to be without touch, without visceral sensation, without smell, without moist (if not Bataille’s bodily fluids then at least without the floating aerosols) – in short, an entirely impotent connection that attempts to hide the fundamental separation the lockdowns impose and ultimately fails to do so.

Thus it is the paradox of being locked down in online connectivity that the very medium that sustains these lockdowns is also the one that produces the very desires to transcend them. Ultimately people transcend the lockdown through a violation of the prescripts. Again in protest situations we witnessed such acts of transcendence of prohibition, most clearly in the Black Lives Matter protests that became massive events. Not just in the US, but also for instance here in The Netherlands where they completely violated the restrictions on physical gatherings in public space in place at the time (and slightly less strict still there). This transcendence of prohibition happened, accepting the risk of contamination even in the absence of a viable vaccine or treatment for the plague.

The Somatic Turn

In theory, there seems to be a parallel movement that appears to accompany the expansion of the electronic communication circuitry. It would be a mistake to simply call this a ‘product’ of the proliferation of the technological infrastructure. Technologies are always to some extent cultural and biased. Techno-determinism falsely ignores this component in human and technological development. However, it would be fair to say that there is something of a dialectic between the expansion of electronic mediation and the ‘Somatic Turn’ in theory – that is to say, the turn towards the body. Where before we ‘discovered’ that the sub-conscious was structured as a language (Lacan), we now ‘discover’ that the non-conscious is first of all physical, somatic, and that this bodily intensity and its vitalistic interactivity operates across all sensorial registers while preceding the cognitive processing and filtering of all this sensorial complexity – our connection to the world, to our bodies, and other bodies.

This does not imply that ‘language’, consciousness, cognition, semantics, meaning, are no longer important or relevant. The somatic turn simply redirects our attention back to the biological body, to the physical environment, to the networks of material associations, to reach a more complete picture (may we hope understanding?) of our connection to the world around and inside of us. It opens up the way also for the highly productive new forms of ecological thinking that have blossomed in recent years. It is certainly no coincidence that this turn towards the somatic happens exactly concurrent with the expansion of electronic mediation - it is a shift that was long overdue in any case.

References

1 - Tufekci refers to this Twitter post on June 1, 2013, 1.17 pm:
  https://twitter.com/aaronstein1/status/340789304806739969

2 - Zeynep Tufekci, “Is there a Social-Media-fuelled Protest Style? An Analysis From #jan25 to #geziparki”, posted June 1, 2013, at: https://technosociology.org/
https://technosociology.org/?p=1255  [accessed: February 7, 2022]

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Eric Kluitenberg
December 2021