Continuing the conversation with Pete Chambers, in late 2023, in which late-ness is deep with connotations. Our dialogue was partly prompted by Naomi Klein’s thought-provoking new book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. Using frames of mirrors, shadows and others, Klein manages to capture something about the deeply weird and warped relations that now prevail between online and the real / ‘real’ world. She explains the significance of the figure of the doppelganger:
For centuries, doubles have been understood as warnings or harbingers. When reality starts doubling, refracting off itself, it often means that something important is being ignored or denied—a part of ourselves and our world we do not want to see—and that further danger awaits if the warning is not heeded. That applies to the individual but also to entire societies that are divided, doubled, polarized, or partitioned into various warring, seemingly unknowable camps. Societies like ours.
A useful concept she introduces is ‘pipikism’, which she takes from Philip Roth’s, Operation Shylock, one of the texts about doppelgangers that Klein engages with. She quote’s Roth’s description of ‘pipikism’ as ‘the antitragic force that inconsequencializes everything—farcicalizes everything, trivializes everything, superficializes everything.’ This captures the way in which the concepts and frames we use to help understand our world are rendered useless by bad actors and bad faith, caught in ‘a knot of seriousness and ridiculousness that would never be untangled.’
Klein’s explorations echo and amplify certain ideas I have developed previously about living in a world marked by bad faith:
Like putting colours into a white wash, means bleed into ends, truth and fiction blur together, and what is ultimately lost is confidence in the world. Everything is serious, and nothing matters. The corrosive and distorting logic of social media hypercharges these corrosive tendencies.
More recently, I considered this in reference to the ‘meaning grinder’, in which conflict is turned into content, suffering thinned out and rendered banal. That note was developed through this conversation with Pete, and our thinking through what a world of bad faith and pipiking means.
Given these themes we explore, it is perhaps unsurprising that another thinker we engage with is Jean Baudrillard, who foresaw powerful features of this absurdly serious and seriously absurd set of conditions we now find ourselves in. Pete introduces the following quote from Baudrillard’s 1970 work, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures:
The consumer society is at one and the same time a society of solicitude and a society of repression, a pacified society and a society of violence. We have seen that 'pacified' daily life thrives on a daily diet of consumed violence, 'allusive' violence: news reports of accidents, murders, revolutions, the atomic or bacteriological threat - the whole apocalyptic stock in-trade of the mass media. We have seen that the affinity between violence and the obsession with security and well-being is not accidental: ‘spectacular’ violence and the pacification of daily life are homogeneous, because they are each equally abstract and each is a thing of myths and signs. We might also add that violence is nowadays inoculated into daily life in homoeopathic doses - a vaccine against fatality - to ward off the spectre of the real fragility of that pacified life. For it is no longer the spectre of scarcity which haunts the civilization of affluence, but the spectre of fragility. And that spectre, which is much more menacing because it concerns the very equilibrium of individual and collective structures, and which has to be warded off at all costs, is in fact kept at bay by this roundabout solution of consumed, packaged, homogenized violence. This violence is not dangerous violence: blood on the front page no more compromises the social and moral order than does sex (despite the emotional blackmail on the part of the censors who wish to persuade themselves of this, and to persuade us of it). It simply attests to the fact that the balance is a precarious one, that the social and moral order is made up of contradictions.
How to recognise our deep entanglement in these contradictions, to peer into the shadows, to see our doubles, all while trying to avoid lapsing into ‘ambient nihilism’, these are some of the challenges we face as we seek to live together, somehow.
