Fusion and the Subjugated Self
Fusion is a process or event that occurs with regard to the individual and media, by which the person becomes one with media; this process transcends person or subject, via occupation by media. We are losing our souls because of the virtual. The flux of our being is altered by and captured in media; our subjectivities are lost in media. This is more than Baudrillard’s symbolic exchange; rather, it is a transformation of the individual being into what is experienced as the process and changing nature of media. This process exists regardless of its content and simply stands as a phenomenon on its own.
The following is an example of virtual reality that is experienced in the fusion process. A virtuality of medium is used to provide the help one needs to experience calmness and serenity.
Sitting. That’s all. Counting breaths. Not driven by any intentionality. There is no drive, no fashion of motivation, no pressure to succeed in altered consciousness. The imagery and vocal tone take me to a placid, calming region of “my” mind. I can separate myself from any external influences and follow the voice which leads me through a beatific terrain, with glistening waterfalls and a shimmering lake. Green pastureland and light blue skies reign above my head. A light mist, originating from some waterfalls, softly sprays in my face. I can arrive at this peace of mind with the encouragement of my iPod,
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trending podcasts, and YouTube videos in the form of relaxation and
meditative spirit. This is my placid, private world in which I dwell.
Although others use the same medium, I spend this time alone on the
Internet, eliminating my mind’s-eye view, because the beauty is provided
through my connection with my mouse and screen of my PC.
This placid experience is neither interior nor exterior, but instead
is in a virtual space which incites the mind to connectedness.
It is the experience of fusion, whereby the whole of one’s self becomes
caught up in the process. To this extent, the person becomes
one with media in the process. The subject is identical to media in
this process. Therefore, there is no contradistinction, no dialectical
moment, and no interior versus exterior. Such envelopment allows
for the feeling of disconnect from the world of force and ideas. In
fact, there is entrapment of the subject in the process, whereby the
will is integrated with media process. Persons become mere connections
inside of media process.
Media are reproduced and melded with the subject in the
fusion process. Our subjectivity works as a flow; it is almost not
there to begin with, in the sense of a concrete self. In a Lacanian
understanding or reading, there is no continuous subsistence or
substantiation of the subject. The subject is stolen by media’s fluidity;
even our imagination is questionable and compromised. Gilles
Deleuze states it well when he understands that “nothing is done by
the imagination. . .the production of an idea by the imagination is
only a reproduction of an impression.”1 The degree of vividness that
makes sense perception acute is found in the pixels of representation.
Within the mind of the individual are also intrusive pixels
which make up memory. The reproduction is the subject caught in
media process.
Sitting in front of a media device is more than just captivating;
there is the loss of self in this process. Memories and minds
affected by fusion are in a perpetual process of reimaging, distortion,
and violence. The more pixels, the more memory, and then the
more lost in the process the subject becomes. There is a great and
significant loss of control as well. Pixel value and auditory stimuli
1. Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 94 (emphasis original).
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that correspond to the fusion process are so overpowering that the subject must give way; it gains integration with media moment by moment. Whether experienced as degrading or orgasmic, media have had a strong grip on the soul and our collective consciousness, and our collective unconscious, for decades.
This also includes absorbing media values about what it means to be a self in the world. The forces draw the subject into relationship with media; the person ultimately comes to understand themselves as identical to a media characterization based in the seeming myriad options. The options seem multiple, but the limit is one, by concomitant force received by the person. There are multiple images that influence what we become, but we all become one person, we become more alike than we realize. The creative process is stifled by media portrayals of what we should become, which are not fair to many. The experience of fusion determines identity by violating the subject. Fusion sucks us in, no matter what our inclination; it is a violation of the subject. Each time one is engaged with a media device, whether it is television, gaming, or a PC, the subject is violated and ensnared.
From birth, one has no other baggage to bring to an experience than that very meaning-making apparatus of the larger media. Even in a child’s infancy, media are so pervasive they affect the formation of the subject. Kathryn C. Montgomery extends the concern that there must be a way to clearly present information to children in order to maintain quality of care for their minds. Montgomery states there is a need for policy and protocol “to help ensure the development of a quality digital media culture for children,” and there is more to this discussion than meets the eye. It is evident a particular mindset is expected of children in the “digital or information age.”2 Those who determine the appropriate development of media to address the needs of children should consider content and process. Proceeding with the mores and behaviors media will contribute to these children, the fusion process is particularly powerful in giving structure to children, regardless of the content. Children of this era spend most of their time in cyberspace. Even adults fall prey to the entrapment of media
2. Montgomery, Generation Digital, 146.
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seduction. The virtually real carries with it the strength to determine
the lives of child and adult alike.
The nature of the overarching world understanding is a philosophy
which heavily influences the way persons exist in the West.
The philosophy is seductive and attractive as it continues to deconstruct,
to the extent that there is no logic left or even a world of
objectivity. This postmodern philosophy is the turn to the subject;
the subject desires and is seduced, and therein we have reached
an end of history as we know it. History is no longer relevant because
everything becomes refocused toward the subject and their
likings. These likings are determined by media, the predecessor
of any inclination the person might have, because media literally
control this process. As in many games, persons are developing
and constructing their own worlds. Two errors must be addressed
here: persons only have the materials provided to them by media,
and fusion happens to the extent that persons no longer have control
or efficacy.
The last crushing blow to dialectic is to have an image that is
self-affirming, without contradistinction, and that also is fused into
collective consciousness. The logical movement from one side of
the dichotomous to the opposite, then to the synthesis, is disintegrated
into a single movement; this is a singular event which exists
as one process. Meaning-making, then, is not found in a dialectical
process, through which an identity could be formed. Meaning and
identity formation instead evolve in the virtual space in a singular
moment, not through anything other than definitions as they are
presented on screens. The person gets identity through the imprint
of the other as presented on the screen. The screen offers an ideal
other not to emulate, but at once to become. This seems like an
occasion for expanding the repertoire of which a person might become,
whetting their appetite for the ideal ego, which they wish to
gain, but in fact it is a singular moment which violates them.
When subjects are caught in this process, they lose will
and control over who and what they are to become; they become
the fusion process itself. Therefore, fusion is a process of reducing
the power of the subject, indeed overpowering the subject. The
existential meaning-making I, which is its own destiny, loses will
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to fusion or the person becomes a mere connection. Fusion is not just a simple turning to the self as deconstructed, but it is to see the subject disappear in the frenzy and flash of media. The subject becomes identical to media in this process.
In the case of fusion, oneness is lived in the experience of a subject who is crowded in by meaning-making stimuli. Reality is so full of the virtual that the world as the person experiences it cannot be extracted from that which the subject has become: the fusion process. Daniel Wegner states: “we might purposefully suppress the unwanted thought of an upcoming awkward confrontation with someone, and in order to do this concentrate on a television show.”3 This happens all the time at work, at home, or in public. Media and the subject become one through the trap: fusion. This process engages everyone who is exposed to the audio-visual media of today’s landscape. It appears at every turn and leaves us in a life of delusion.
Almost everywhere a person goes, the virtual beckons them to participate in this process. Once the screen is introduced in a public setting, it is taboo to look disdainfully away from it. Persons cannot even watch a ballgame in a stadium without being seduced by a huge screen, large enough for all in the stadium to see, in order to watch the game in all its virtuality. Fusion occurs when spectators concentrate on it as though they cannot see the game without it. Each person is caught up in the fusion process, which disallows the experience of reality. If media is in play with the person, and then the person walks away from it, the virtual still continues to change them and becomes part of their narrative.
Fusion is the process of media joining the process of the self, the soul, our very being. Fusion destroys experiences and makes them part of a process outside of the subject. The subject is enfolded into the process as it loses identity and media takes over its vicissitudes. By way of media, this enfolding of the subject into the fusion process involves fear, love, attraction, and indeed seduction. The enfolding by way of seduction and desire is the mechanics of fusion. While some assert that sometime in the near future, our technological and biological evolution will allow persons to create
3. Wegner, White Bears, 12.
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realities for themselves as they please, it seems more likely this creating
of reality is compromised, because fusion dampers one’s real
senses and replaces them with signals from a virtual reality.
It is a virtual world that seduces the subject, that tired decomposition;
media connect to desires concerning being and meaning.
Desire and seduction within and without the subject are all that are
left. The opposing forces within and without no longer have sway
over the individual. Fusion is an unnecessary drugging process by
which one experiences thought that one would otherwise not be
exposed to in the real world. The object, which is media, seduces
the subject; it then makes an object of the subject, in a carnival of
insidious control. Fusion is as compelling as the thoughts of an
obsession. When media come into the equation, the subject just
moves into its dance.
The subject-media process is the force by which the masses get
influenced in such a way as to flood them with ideology. The world
has seen accelerating technology within globalization that has emphasized
the subject as object of media for such duration as to practically
obliterate the subject. The subject loses itself in the global.
In a media-driven, postmodern world Hilary Lawson indicates the
“impact of reflexivity is in part due to a critical shift of focus, from
the individual subject to the text.”4 Media here is the counterpart
of text, for our primary source is media. In the postmodern world,
each subject is minimized or erased; this erasure is developed in the
philosophical tradition of deconstruction, a tradition that began
with Martin Heidegger and was later developed by Jacques Derrida.
Derrida states: “the idea of the end of man is then always already
prescribed in metaphysics, in the thought of the truth of man. What
is difficult to conceive of today is an end of man which is not organized
by a dialectic of truth and of negativity.”5
There is a new way of understanding subjectivity; no longer
does the subject sit in direct opposition to the object. Dialectic
can be seen in the dichotomies such as God/Satan, good/evil, and
sanity/insanity. These have been evaporated; these used to be the
4. Lawson, Reflexivity, 10.
5. Derrida, “Ends of Man,” 42.
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battlegrounds for persons’ very beings, both body and soul. This dialectic of the old person has been swallowed up into the process of media, i.e. fusion. Indeed, Baudrillard has said persons lose the grandeur of the individual soul. The subject is reduced to violation. Fusion in action, the highlight of the twenty-first century, demonstrates how the subject has been violated, cut, and objectified.
This is the very altering of identity that fusion involves. This is the connectedness of the subject and the loss of it in a medium. This altering of the subject is part of the connecting process people simply cannot avoid. It happens when the audience is enamored of the jumbotron at sporting events or the television in restaurants. Fusion simulates some reality, which is understood as information, and a person could have the memory of experiencing that world; they would have been in a virtual world, and they are in that world. This is the nature of fusion, which is processual and about subjectivity (real experience) being combined in a process with the virtual, which in turn becomes our experience. Fusion is the flow or flux of being, interwoven and captured by media. People’s very nature, which drives them to connect, sets them up for this process and leads them into a world where surely the virtual is real