This is KZSU, Stanford.
Echo, our theme song, returns to us from her dreams.
Sounds like a birdie to me.
Echo's high avian notes ringing through the dale of entitled opinions.
But why the urgency?
Why the desperation?
Well, what we have here is a highly unusual case of what is known as obstacle love.
Echo wants narcissists, but narcissists wants narcissists too.
Yet neither of them can have him.
Every time Echo tries to embrace narcissists, he pushes her away.
And every time he tries to embrace the boy who looks back at him from the water,
he comes up empty handed.
Echo's object of love has a body, while his object of love belongs to the crystal pond
that keeps him enthralled to the siren song of his mirrored image.
Echo tries to tell narcissists to look away, to look at her,
but her entreaties are in vain.
Narcissists is mesmerized.
The reflection wins out over the real.
The virtual wins out over the actual, as narcissists comes to Narcay.
Narcay, the Greek word for numbness or stupor.
Take note, his narcosis is already signaled by his name, Narcysos.
And we all share in his stupor.
In title opinions, coming to you from the well springs of KZSU.
The narcotic of our age, Narcissism.
It looks so good, it looks so cool, you plunge your lips into the pool,
but don't give in, don't be a fool, I tell you boy that water is cool.
In his transfix posture, staring into the pool's visual display,
Narcissists mirrors our own ensnarement by the images, echoes and disembodied allurements
that come to us from the internet, the media, and our high-tech gadgetry.
We are all being numbed by the reflective screens we can't turn away from.
The stupor today is technical, not erotic.
In the myth, Narcissists dies a tragic death because he could not take hold of.
He could not render actual his insubstantial image.
We instead lead ongoing zombie lives in the technonarcissism of the times,
which is the generic drug of our post-psychodelic age.
As we stare into our magic boxes, reality slips away into the numbness of the virtual.
I've just used three loaded terms, the real, the actual, and the virtual.
That happens to be the working title of a book that the guests who joins me today is currently writing.
His name is Jan Sofner, a longtime devotee of entitled opinions
who is particularly fond of the theme song we started out with.
Jan Sofner is the Gurdha Henkel visiting professor in Stanford's Department of German Studies this fall.
Back in Germany, Jan holds the chair for Cultural Theory and Cultural Analysis at Zeppelin University.
He is the author of several books and he joins me today to discuss what he calls the triangulation of the real, the actual, and the virtual.
Jan, welcome to entitled opinions.
Thank you so much. It's so great to be here.
Yeah, I know you've been listening to us for a long time and it's a real pleasure to have you joining in the beginning.
Yes, right from the beginning, exactly.
So speaking of beginnings, why don't I begin by quoting the opening paragraph of a proposal that you wrote for the new book that you're working on?
I quote, "Things are getting more and more unreal, the economy increasingly virtualizes its values and currencies, markets turn towards behavioral prediction of users and thus away from realist subjects deciding upon facts, avatars or filters help users find true ourselves than they would in real life, behavioral prediction and manipulation of opinions,
create bubbles and dismantle the public sphere, while fact-checking can barely dissimulate the decline of a shared political reality.
Our everyday lives are evolving in co-presence of user interfaces and makes us interact with things that are there and are not there and increasingly with persons who do not exist as humans.
The automation of intelligence starts to pervade communication, knowledge, insights so that even the reflection on these developments gradually emancipates from realist subjects, it is not helpful to adjust to this situation as a new reality because it is not reality.
It is more virtual than real, we are witnessing today a collapse of reality."
That's a loaded paragraph to say the least and shortly we'll be discussing some of those provocative claims that you make.
But first let me ask you, going back to the myth of Narcissus, do you think that that story of Narcissus and Echo has any direct or tangential relevance to this wholesale collapse of reality as you call it?
It absolutely does. Very grateful that you played this song because I hadn't thought about Narcissus before.
Narcissus is a great kind of icon for what is actually going on.
I love the song too also because it lands Echo a voice, Echo can only speak what other people have already said and the tragedy of hers is that Narcissus will only hear himself through her.
You will not hear what she tries to utter and landing her a voice is therefore what this character deserves.
And on the other hand, listening only to what you say yourselves is exactly the definition that makes the echo chambers of today their name.
But maybe for this myth it's more important is the image of the mirror, actually image is almost the wrong term for that.
Because the mirror makes you interact with that image and this is exactly what an image would not be.
It moves with you, it reacts to you, you can react to it, it gives you feedback, so you are again to turn to our day and age.
We are in a constant feedback loop with a mirror already at that time, but still there is nothing behind the surface.
And Narcissus falls for this virtuality and what you called his narcosis, we can also call it immersion.
It is highly immersive which also resonates with what we experience right now and this immersion makes him lose the distance that he would need to understand his reality.
He is immersed in his love with himself, he is immersed in the immediate feedback of interaction.
And at the same time therefore loses the step back that he should take in order to refer to this reality as a reality and understand what is going on.
And at the same time so he loses his reality but at the same time as he said in the intro he also loses the actuality because there is nothing behind that mirror.
And he cannot actualize his love.
It is there calling for an actual experience but it is blocked at the same time.
So what I view as the virtual is actually wrong time, I should be more careful with that.
What I call the virtual means that it is a potency that is at the same time the act and not the act.
A possibility that is at the same time its realization and not its realization.
So we are blocked in a state of becoming without having the real or the actual thing in the end.
Can we get a concrete example of how that might work?
I mean our system is coming to us from antiquity but in our own day and age is when we say the word virtual a lot of people will think of chatbots and virtual friendships or virtual love affairs.
And you say that this is a potency where it is on the one hand both possible and real.
Yes, exactly.
There are people falling in love with chatbots for example.
The movie Her had that already over 10 years ago now, 11 years ago now.
And what are these experiences like?
And I think maybe it is important to think back of narcissist there because narcissist tries to actualize that very love.
And his tragedy is that he can't and he is then thereby transformed into a flower.
This is more or less what is happening still today.
And recently there has been the example of that teenage boy who fell in love with a character I often are a Targaryen.
And he killed himself actually to be with her.
Because of an impossibility to be with her in real life.
And that's exactly the question.
I think narcissists transformed himself because of the impossibility to be with himself in the real life in the actual life.
But here we are turning around the picture I think you want to move over to virtuality and leave your actuality and your reality behind.
So Jan, where is the body? What is the role of the body in this? Because with narcissists clearly the tragedy, the paradox of the situation is that he cannot, his image doesn't have a body.
You mentioned the movie Her there to the voice that speaks to him that has enthralled him, even tries to set up some sort of avatar, a real body to come in.
So he can have sex with her as if that person with the real body is the one that he's speaking to all the time in this thing.
So does it require a body, both in the literal sense of body and in the larger sense of body politics and human relations with real people that have embodied being?
Is that kind of necessary condition for actuality and perhaps also even reality, while it's not a necessary condition for virtuality?
Yes, in a way we might think of Emmanuelle living us here, if behind the face of the other human body there is also the transcendence of the other human body.
This transcendence is something you have to refer to. Always where there is a reference, I would say there is a reality because there is a difference between what you think about something and the thing itself, and you have to work on how this reference works.
So this part is a reference, but the presence of the other human being is actual.
And the chatbot has neither. There is neither the body nor the embodiment of a transcendental self because in the place of the transcendental self there is no experience, but there is only immediate feedback loops reacting to what you're saying and transforming data.
So this is exactly the case here.
So Jan, you talked about living us and this transcendence self behind the face of the other and so forth. It reminds me very much of the traditional, well, let's say Christian idea of the soul, which is conceived of as primarily like a disembodied soul, it's connected to the personhood of a person.
And yet it's distinguished from the body itself. We have a long tradition of condemning the reification of a person by just objectifying that person as only a body and taking into account, not taking into account what we would call.
And the Christian era we would call it a soul in our own day and age, we call it who I am. Is there a way in which this soul is a virtual entity?
I would say so, but the difference is between the different kinds of virtuality. If you're going for the modern days and you have this virtual self in a way, this makes me think of, for example, transitioning people who experience to be born into a wrong actual body, they cannot behave and be what they want to be and the one hand.
On the other hand, they are forced to play a role in reality, people will refer to them in a way that they won't accept and they want to be that self.
That means we have a virtuality that calls for being actualized and realized and those people really go for this.
And this is completely different from, for example, the virtual existence of an avatar in a VR chat, because there you just form and you think, well, that's me and I'm there.
There's no imperative to actualize. There is no imperative to virtualize, you remain stuck in a game and a game, it has always suspended something, a suspended reality, a suspended consequence, a suspended actuality, a suspended embodiment.
A game always suspends and so it is stuck in the virtual and never gets to the actual audio completely.
Which is very bizarre, you would think that the urge to render real or to actualize something is unavoidable.
That's the story of Narcissus, the story of her, it's a story of anyone who, well, I can imagine when a boy can dream about being a big hero in a war or coming to the rescue of a girl in his fantasies.
And of course, fantasies are what they are, but eventually there has to be negotiation with reality.
But I take you to be saying that we are in a situation where they're perfectly happy to put a bracket around the virtual and just endure in the virtual without any of the friction that comes from the need to actualize.
Yes, I don't want to fertilize that because I think the problem here is not just of people who don't want to inhabit reality any longer, by the way, that wouldn't be anything new.
No, there is a huge tradition for that.
What I would argue for is that reality itself is somewhat getting unreal.
And to make this point, I want to, well, think about the age that we had before in my book, I will make the claim that the thing that really mattered until the middle ages or in the middle ages were more actual than real.
But in the last centuries, the reality took over.
Like reality, I think you mean if I get you correctly that it's based on the possibility of reference.
Yes. You can refer to a world. Exactly.
Whereas the actual is more about acts rather than reference. Yes.
So in actual world, things that happen and things are done are the actual thing.
Has it had to say the real thing because that's how we would frame it.
Right.
And actually, when going for the word itself in German, the term 'verclich kite' made that very change.
It meant the actual things that have effects and then has turned into a word for reality in modern German.
So the real thing in actuality is what happens in takes place.
If you want to realize something, that means on the one hand understanding by reference, making true or false statements, making good references in terms of models of the reality and then implement them,
realize in the sense of implementing a reality.
But in the historical perspective that you're bringing to bear, their actuality was more important than reality, if you can say.
But virtuality had a strong role to play in the Middle Ages, for example.
I know that you devote some time in your book to magic.
How does magic fit into this equation? Yes.
Well, the term virtual comes from vertices and I read this at the false and not only the valor.
So the virtual is as sad, a potency in the state of realization and not realization, in the state of actualization and not actualization.
So it is a force.
So magic, actually natural magic, is a work on the forces of nature.
And this means, well, in this time, I never claimed that there was any society ever having just one of these dimensions.
And in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance especially, the virtual had a certain power, natural philosophy and natural magic, cared about that and tried to influence these forces.
And that worked in a different way than realist reference would do in terms of the sciences that came afterwards.
Because if you have these forces, you have to work from within them.
And you understand these forces like the force of life, for example, as something that is building by itself from within, and you can only influence that.
In a way, this holds true still today. Even if we are working on a genome, we have to take life for granted. Life has to do its job.
So we are still working on the outside to change the thing that are working for themselves from the inside.
But of course, there's a difference between modern science and genetics where the intervention into nature is based on empirical knowledge of the actual functioning of nature.
Whereas with the case of magic, let's say alchemy versus chemistry is that it's almost positing a spiritual agency rather than material agency at work.
Exactly, absolutely. And we had that concept of a microcosm and a microcosm, the microcosm, both the human being of body and so, driven by forces and driven by spirits.
And the microcosm was also the body and the soul of the cosmos. You had the material earth and then the ethereal heavens.
Which had the same substance, were supposed to have the same substance that you also would have in your mind, the same spirit.
And so, it was not just a microcosm making thought about a microcosm, but understanding that microcosm from within.
For example, there was this notion of the cosmic harmonies that the celestial bodies by their proportion, by their mathematical order, were playing music, actually.
But the music that our material ears could not hurt here because it was completely spiritual. But you could be attuned to that.
Even though John was demoing attuned, man comes as that background, as that cosmic background.
So, a mood of a situation, if we refer to a mood of a situation in German, we still think of the cosmic harmonies playing through the cosmos and us being part of them.
You're helping me to understand why the virtual can have such an allure for us, all of us, because there is a long history of it being an integral part of this triangle that your book is about.
And if I understand you correctly, you think that these three categories are the actual, the virtual and the real have always been in particular constellations.
That's one predominating perhaps over the others and in another age, different and that you are proposing that we have to rethink the constellation of this triangle in our own day and age when the relations between these three have changed dramatically, you know?
Exactly. In what the last few decades. Yes, they have changed again and they have changed before because what has happened before was a reality taking over all the functions.
So, you no longer have the celestial harmonies, but you had measurements of the stars and theories.
You had Cartesianism, you had Cartesianism, you had reference and that means making a true or false statements depends on the methods of how you refer to that.
And also, in the everyday life and institutions for example, we build up and that time functioning realist bureaucracies, implementing models of reality, upon that reality, we have systems of education trying to make realist subjects of us all being able to make the relative references think methodically in the right way.
And to become citizens and responsible citizens and we have representational democracies, the world representation already means that there is a reference between the government and the people and that this reference has to work and so on.
And nowadays, in the last decades, maybe even the last decade, we face a situation in which all these institutions press as another one, may affect tracking everything.
All these institutions seem to be a little analog in a digital world and by the digital world I mean that immediate feedback and algorithmic governance has taken over, it is much faster.
But it no longer needs that reference, it is more efficient in a way and we are no longer living in that reality that these institutions are trying to implement.
So, a certain tiredness with these institutions can be sensed all over the place because our whole existence has virtualized in a way.
Not completely, but this is what I meant by the uncanny situation that people do not long just to be virtualized and becoming virtual, but their reality has virtualized that much that they cannot help.
Well, in fact, I have to say that for me personally, my allegiance is to that modern era that you described where the real has a very strong center of gravity, there is reference, there is a possibility of distinguishing between truth and falsehood, there is a certain kind of sovereignty of facts and where facts matter.
And a politics of representation and politics of maturity, I worry that as you call it the fatigue because that seems to be stagnating, it seems to not have the same sort of purchase that it once had and that the recent elections here at least in the United States were a revelation of the fact that reference
was secondary. Yes, fact checking had no real effective power over things that it was almost as if the mantras, you know, of one party just had a kind of magical effect of mesmerization of enthrlement of this narcissist effect that I spoke about it in the in the intro.
I find that altogether worrisome, yes, but perhaps you have a more optimistic or less, let's say less apocalyptic view of this.
I think I have a quite similarly apocalyptic view of this, but maybe I have more hope for a different development that because I don't, I'm not optimistic in the terms that we can return to good old fashioned reality. I think that is over.
We can't think about what might be a solution that would be better than what we witnessed, but talking about the elections in simplifying terms.
We had one party making the claim to protect this good old fashioned democracy, there's a representative democracy against fascism and also old fashioned fascism.
And that was the party that failed to get the voters to the ballots. I don't think that this election has so much been decided by swing voters, but it has been decided by voters not by water turnout anyway.
And there was another party that had a candidate who worked like an algorithm reinforcing anything that is provocative that creates attention, being an immediate feedback with the reactions, customizing the messages to the movement and not very much caring about referential truth.
And with the media, even the hostile media feeding right into the feedback loop by being obsessed and mesmerized by the figure himself and not being able to take its eyes off of Donald Trump.
Exactly. Exactly. Also, the media played that game. So there was not really a chance for that good old fashioned democracy to have the same attention.
And I think, well, now the problem is what to do with that, as you said, fact checking no longer work. And I would even go as far as to say that the claim of bullshit, which Harry Frankfurt made for every kind of statement that has suspended the question between true or false is not really what is going on there.
If we go for the branding of truth social, for example, truth does play a huge role, but we must understand what kind of truth that is. And it is certainly not the truth of the facts, not even of the alternative facts, but it is the truth that is conjured up for the movement, the truth of a movement more or less.
And I would say just also again to simplify, it works a bit like a national anthem. You have this star spangled banner here, beautiful song, but nobody would think that it is describing a realist historical situation.
And in the refers to that, and that is its truth. Now the truth that it has is a truth conjured up in the beginning of any football game, the truth of the nation that is there.
It is an idea that is evoked and making America great again, America first and a truth social and this anti woke truth that Trump evoked in a way, was that kind of truth that social is about. I don't think, for example, that people really even at his rallies really believed that there were schools where children were forced into gender operations with that kind of truth.
I don't think that people really realistically believed that, but it rang true to them in the other sense.
So here, let me play the devil's ad, if I were James Carville, he's a Democrat advisor and very pragmatic guy, he's always the critic of his own fellow Democrats for being out of touch with reality.
What if I were to say that it's not because of all the virtuality and feedback loop in the echo chambers, I'm sure that there's a hardcore MAGA group for which all this conservation works magic.
But that there was an essential denial of the actual on the other side that the actual being inflation, the difficulty people have paying their bills, the fact that there's a lot of struggling all across the working class and then that all of this was had nothing to do with virtuality had only to do with the actual experience of going into the supermarket and finding that you could not afford what you could afford four years ago.
But perhaps they just ignored all the magic control tricks and just voted in the name of reality or actuality.
I would make that exactly that difference because the reality would be the economy in terms of numbers referring to the working infrastructure bill, dominated inflation and all these referring numbers, probably also in terms of what most people had to spend, this reality did not work.
But what worked was you say the actuality, the moment of doing something going to the grocery and seeing the process there and it upsets even me, I think it is extremely expensive if I go there and this is an actual experience.
So as I like in the tragedy of narcissists, it is the actual that wins in the end.
But it is now here, it is a connection between the actual and the virtual without the detail of the real in the Trump campaign.
And I think that therefore if this actual experience rings true to somebody this enforces the virtualist truth and it is enforces in a way that some people might even believe in wrong things that are contrary to the fact but they will believe it in a way like if you stop smoking and the lack of nicotine makes you think that the next cigarette would be actually healthy.
You will think that really, but it is there is a different force, a different power, virtual power pushing you into that thought that is nevertheless absurd and you will know after five minutes.
So if we are talking about actuality and reality and something like the elections and the economy, we can't discount the role that virtuality plays in the advanced capitalist economic system where we have also experienced a transition from what used to be known as real value to a completely kind of abstract virtualized economy.
Can you say something about that? I mean, I read that paragraph for a proposal where you talk about the virtualization of economic values and so forth.
Now, more stories than just two, but I think two will do the job. One would be the story of Bretton Woods economies where you still had the gold standard.
That reference was never really worked. It was a kind of a fictional reference to something real down there.
You talked about alchemy in that very moment that you were able to create gold and Spaniards were in a way when they colonized America and you had an inflation there in Europe because there was too much gold there so there is no real value of gold there.
But you made the fictional reference to that. Then you gave up this reference and now we're even beyond the moment where you then have a realist institution like the Federal Reserve Bank making decisions.
But you go for cryptocurrencies and the cryptocurrencies work just by the algorithms run and the counter value is energy, not the best idea for climate change planet, but it is completely different than the gold standard because it is the consumption of energy, not the stable value that makes the reference there.
So it is completely virtualizing from the reference to the thing over the reference of an institution to something that is literally burned into the air.
And on the other hand you have the financialization of the markets from the late 1970s onwards where the shareholder value became more prominent than the investment values.
Now the only thing that matters is now the only thing that matters. And we have to remind listeners to the fact that there was a realist equivalent once that was you gave money into a realist possibility of development and you would get the revenue if that realist possibility was realized.
Now you just bet on other people betting. And I'm so, I don't know what the right word is, but when I think of how much money a bunch of people made on the investment in Tesla stocks, which is obscene and the increase in the value of that stock was completely disconnected.
Not completely disconnected, obviously Tesla is selling real cars to real people, but that's one example of a kind of economy which has been divorced or rented away from a foundation in real value.
Yes, absolutely. I think the election is a good example for that because I'm not an analyst of markets, but my uninformed perspective would be.
tariffs will be a huge problem for Tesla and also drill baby drill will be a huge problem for Tesla. So in terms of how many cars they will be able to sell the outcome of the election was maybe not the best result.
Sure, and that's on the mask was part of the team and so you had a virtual value of these people betting on the bets and that we have to hope that the real comes back to haunt the virtual because otherwise there's going to be no restraint of a system where an unelected person has not been elected by anyone, but he could be in doubt with so much institutional.
Institutional real power by virtue of his appointment by Trump where he can now decide who will be elected in future elections because of the money that he can put in there.
He can intervene in all sorts of ways where his own resources as an entrepreneur can inflict and hopefully something like reality, like what is the reality of tariffs?
Because it's one thing to go on and say we're going to put 100% tariffs on Mexico or any country that doesn't do this or that, but of course, the test is always how does it translate into the real.
So I guess someone who feels like a modern citizen, I'm hoping that the real will come to our rescue in one form or another, although I'm also pessimistic enough to agree with you that that kind of reality that we're talking about at least in the political sphere might have had its day and it's not going to come back at least not in the form that it was before.
And there might also be a reason for that that has to do with, well, in the last decades, I would say that realist reference had also displayed its weaknesses.
Everybody knew that the planet was in trouble in terms of climate change and the representational democracies after this so-called end of history were in charge, globally, and it didn't work.
Because that climate change had not actualized that enough.
So people were only referring to that and referring to something and knowing about something evidently is not enough for a democratic collective to really take action.
But even when it happens, it's not enough because it is happening.
Yes, no, it is. No, it is happening, but also maybe at the expenses of the conviction that democracy can really do something about that.
And so my guess would be that we have to reconnect to the consequences of our actions and if we are virtualized, that will be difficult.
Right, because the virtual doesn't have the same consequences. Exactly, it has suspended consequences and what is worse. Sometimes it has consequences and the consequences are not suspended, but they seem to be suspended.
You seem to act just virtually while your actions have real consequences.
And so we have to reconnect to the consequences and I guess that will only come from the actual, from really what happens.
This is what your proposal is in the end about when you say that we have to re-constulate the triangle of the actual, the virtual and the real, and that somehow it's the actual which has been most left out of the equation now has to become at the forefront.
I think this is half of the story. I think we need to reconsider the importance of the actual, even under the circumstances that real is referenced to these consequences will not work as well as it worked in a functioning reality.
On the other hand, I also think that we have to avoid category mistakes, mistaking the virtual for the real.
So there's no such thing as virtual reality. I wouldn't say that there is no such thing as virtual reality because virtual reality means exactly that suspension and it means exactly that not completely real, not completely actual, but half potency, half possibility.
And so if we think of that as a reality, we will then not act in the right way.
So my proposal would be to shift back a little, step back a little and to virtualize a virtual reality in a way that we cannot go back towards another kind of existence where virtual reality doesn't play an important role, but we have to be conscious that it is virtual and not real.
And so I would, my plea would be for virtualizing virtual reality and thereby recovering also a bit of reality.
That's for sure.
Well, in fact, I can wrap up with, I'm going to quote you back just what you said in something that you wrote, you say that it's this consciously living the virtual just as virtual in full knowledge that it is not a virtual reality, but only a virtual reality and that is such a tense difference.
That is such a tense to obscure actual consequences by gamification resonance feedback loops in a way we have to virtualize virtual reality making it count only as what it is.
So that's, I think, a very strong sort of message that you're forthcoming book.
I hope it's forthcoming soon, you know, has for us.
Thank you so much. There's was of evidently a realist message because what it is is you cannot say that only in reality.
That's right. Book itself is realist.
I want to see it as an actual object, you know, that's for me.
I don't want it to be a narcissist that exists only in its image.
Anyway, it's been a pleasure, Jan. Thanks for coming on to entitled opinions and I want to remind our listeners,
and so far as visiting here a Stanford in the Department of German Studies and he's finishing,
I think you're close to finishing a book on the real, the actual and the virtual,
and we're going to be looking forward to reading that one for sure.
So I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions.
Thanks again. Thanks for listening.
Thank you so much.
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