The present in the age of social media

Gerd Altmann – Pixabay / https://pixabay.com/es/users/geralt-9301/

License Creative Commons

Alfonso A. Gracia Gómez

I confess that for some time now I have felt a terrible reluctance to talk about matters considered to be “current affairs”. We live in a kind of publishing frenzy in which everyone feels called upon – and even obliged – to express an opinion on topics very different from those traditionally discussed. The fear of death, the transience of life, the spirituality of love, and so on have given way to a series of topics of discussion which, unlike those of old, no longer possess a transcendent quality, a meaning that seeks to go “beyond” their present-day expression and might reach into the intimate realm of what is specifically and distinctively human.

On the contrary, partly because of the compulsive character that social media impose on our relationship with the news, the news seems to be imbued with a kind of “chronicler’s spirit” which, in my view, has stripped much of the lustre from everything that is said, discussed and commented upon. There is no shortage of those who, in this situation, proclaim that we are living in a kind of “golden age of journalism”; yet we know that, by its own inertia, journalism can do nothing but flatten what is diverse and level out what is different, in pursuit of a version of events supposedly capable of concealing and overriding the facts themselves (Gracia Gómez, 2024).

The obsession with the present thus impoverishes the present itself, turning it into its own point of reference and thereby concealing its possible external references, “transcendent” in the broadest sense, inherited from an entire tradition that we dismiss with proud haste (precisely because we no longer consider its contributions sufficiently “current”). The result is an ontological condition that even has medical, more specifically neurological, implications. I do not know which group of researchers has recently “demonstrated” that the memory of most of the population has been greatly impoverished since the Covid crisis of 2020. Why? Because, owing to the rise of social media as the dominant form of communication, most of us live in a kind of continuous present in which we almost instantly forget what we say as well as what we read or hear. This had already been theorised under the name of the “Google effect”: that is, the tendency to forget anything that can be found again easily and quickly on the Internet (Sparrow et al., 2011).

Although this may seem paradoxical (or perhaps precisely because of that), this is a situation once cherished by more than one philosopher in the post-structuralist tradition. I am thinking of Gilles Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense, in which he contrasts two radically different ways of understanding temporality: Chronos and Aion. The first refers to the traditional or, for that very reason, “chronological” conception: the temporality of past-present-future, in which the present – as the author argues – exists only derivatively in relation to that which transcends it, namely its meaning. By contrast, the second conception of time, which Deleuze identifies with the Hellenistic god Aion (or Aeon, the god of eternity), reverses the transcendent subordination characteristic of chronological time and foregrounds the continuity of the present, understood as the manifestation of a flow that has neither beginning nor end:

This present of the Aion representing the instant is not at all like the vast and deep present of Chronos: it is the present without thickness, the present of the actor, dancer, or mime- the pure perverse “moment. ” It is the present of the pure operation, not of the incorporation. It is not the present of subversion or actualization, but that of the counter-actualization, which keeps the former from overturning the latter, and the latter from being confused with the former, and which comes to duplicate the lining (redoubler la doublure). (Deleuze, 2005: 168).

This reciprocal relationship between eternity and the instant represents the clearest influence of Nietzsche’s philosophy on Deleuze’s work. Nietzsche, however, was grounded in a physical-ontological conception of Heraclitean descent. In it, struggle or opposition, and even contradiction, function as a space opening onto a being that seems to exist only at the very edge of its finitude: “These paths contradict each other; they collide head-on: –and here, at this gateway, is where they meet. The name of the gateway is written above: ‘Instant’” (Nietzsche, 2009: 230). Deleuze, by contrast, turns this instant into a “becoming” that is no longer conflictual but “pure”, and thus into a kind of haven of peace, capable of overcoming contradictions not through a Hegelian Aufhebung, but through the very inertia of the logical play of paradoxes, which, in the case of temporality, reveals the impossibility of grasping that in which one de facto finds oneself; in other words, the continuous present that is the Deleuzian Aion “evades the present”, insofar as it is not “what is”, not a Parmenidean present, but precisely that which “is not”: its possibilities, its options for being, which are revealed only in the specific “non-being” of the present, that is, in its past and future:

[…] This is the simultaneity of a becoming whose characteristic is to elude the present. Insofar as it eludes the present, becoming does not tolerate the separation or the distinction of before

and after, or of past and future. It pertains to the essence of becoming to move and to pull in both directions at once: Alice does not grow without shrinking, and vice versa. Good sense affirms that in all things there is a determinable sense or direction (sens); but paradox is the affirmation of both senses or directions at the same time.  (Deleuze, 2005: 1).

This is why, in the Deleuzian formulation, Chronos is identified with the opposite extreme: with that “determinable sense” which apparently “devours” its children (the “events”, that “pure becoming”) for the sake of a vicarious existence and, therefore, an apparently inauthentic, even illegitimate one. In this context, everything that is current would be condemned to being understood as mere “actualisation”, that is, as the act of bringing the eternal into our everyday lives, incorporating into our day-to-day existence that which belongs to every human being – indeed, to every way of being in the world, simply by virtue of existing – beyond and at the expense of the concrete circumstances that determine this or that existence.

To put it simply, Chronos consists, for Deleuze, in the way we actually tend to understand all those events that have some kind of meaning for us, that is, which fit within some kind of historical framework: they are subordinated to the reference point that gives them meaning; hence we tend to approve of the use of the guillotine by the French revolutionaries while demonising the Stalinist gulags. This explains why Deleuze referred above to the chrono-logical as “vast and profound”, because it in fact consists of a kind of “density” or “thickness”, like that of a fabric, whose surface is only apparently flat, only apparently superficial. Conditioned by a meaning that transcends it, the chronological present necessarily refers back to a past, but here there is no longer any room for paradox, let alone contradiction: for this is a past that is memory in action, which “condemns” the future as an uncertain possibility, while at the same time limiting it through what-has-already-been. The current and the possible are thus interrelated according to the rules Aristotle established to explain motion in his Metafísica:

[…] matter is “potentiality”, that is, potentiality in the sense that it is capable of taking on or receiving form […]. Form, by contrast, is configured as the act or actualisation of that capacity. The compound or combination of matter and form, considered as such, will preferably be act; but if considered in terms of its form, it will simply be act or entelechy, while if contemplated in its materiality it will instead be a mixture of potentiality and act. Consequently, all things that possess matter always possess, insofar as they are such, a greater or lesser degree of potentiality (Reale, 1992: 59–60).

By contrast, the pure present that is the Deleuzian Aion translates into a compulsive drive that cannot break free from what circumstances label “current”. And in practice this has dramatic consequences, some of them contrary to what Deleuze might have expected: for in his conception, human beings, as the subjects of communication and desire that we are, are reduced to “what happens” in a sense that is far removed from the “opening of possibilities” that the concept of “becoming” was intended to capture. In the actuality of what happens, any possible transcendence capable of giving it meaning disappears, and with it our memory and even subjectivity itself become “eclipsed” by the veil of an irresolvable suspicion and, consequently, by a question that cannot be “actualised”.

Read carefully: it is no longer the case that, as Deleuze intended, past and future overlap in this concept of becoming understood as a continuous present. Quite differently, the continuous present of social media places us in a pure Aion devoid of density, in which our stories appear, at most, as failed eruptions or collapses: “redoubler la doublure”, as Deleuze puts it, without ever forming any kind of narrative. Images overlap, replace and exchange one another… without ever forming a story or, above all, even aspiring to be reflected within a properly extra-temporal framework of meaning (insofar as it is transcendent). In short, what is missing is what Ray Bradbury, in his sadly “current” Fahrenheit 451, called “texture”:

Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are. That’s my definition, anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail […] (Bradbury, 2006: 81).

Perhaps this is the greatest paradox into which our present has fallen, alongside and probably despite Deleuze’s theoretical claims: in pure Aion, one can speak only of a rigidly Parmenidean “what is”, which ends up taking away the space belonging both to “what has been” and to “what is wanted”. We have thus lost our taste for the “texture” that, according to Bradbury, is characteristic of the literary, absorbed by the beguiling frenzy of social media (Gracia Gómez, 2022), which “redeems” us from the meaning and guilt, as Nietzsche might have put it, concomitant with the human longing for transcendence.

However, this “redemption of the present” comes at a price: being trapped in a mere abstract continuity which, as Deleuze proposed, is pure potentiality and therefore pure Aristotelian dýnamis, which ultimately amounts to saying that it lacks any enérgeia (act), since it has forbidden itself any kind of actualisation on the grounds that it is limiting and thus reproduces itself in a tedious flow that is timeless (anachronistic) as well as sterile and eternally self-mimetic, like a true digital autómaton in which the compulsive takes hold of the subject until complete exhaustion. “It is not the present of subversion”, Deleuze said (supra). That is what “current affairs” have become for us: a sterile desert of indifference in which “reactions” compulsively feed on one another without ever producing any kind of meaning, purpose or space for subjectivity, reflection or thought.

Bibliography:

Bradbury, Ray (2006): Fahrenheit 451. Almería: Ediciones Perdidas.

Gracia Gómez, Alfonso A. (2022): “Posverdad y propaganda en Fahrenheit 451 de Ray Bradbury: sobre la constitución ‘informativa’ de un sujeto manipulable”, Badebec, vol. 1, no. 22, 1–21. https://doi.org/10.35305/b.v11i22.537.

Gracia Gómez, Alfonso A. (2024): “Información para moldear la mente de las masas: el monismo propagandístico de Edward L. Bernays”, Agora, vol. 43, no. 1, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.15304/ag.43.1.8790.

Deleuze, Gilles (2005): Lógica del sentido, Barcelona: Paidós.

Nietzsche, Friedrich (2009): Así habló Zaratustra, Madrid: Alianza.

Reale, Giovanni (1992): Introducción a Aristóteles, Barcelona: Herder.

Sparrow, Betsy et al. (2011): “Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips”, Science, Vol. 333, Issue 6043, pp. 776–778.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons