Aphani­sis of the Girl Online

The chaos of the girl who inhabits and feeds the online world with her own flesh—a flattened and endlessly repeatable series of images—finds its counterpart in her sickening longing for control. This eerie chaos/control zygote, on the basis of which all of her (non-)essence is formulated, might provide a framework of thought for her seemingly total impotence within the system of techno-feudalism, her depersonalized identity as “pure value”,^[1] and her obsessive dependence on the impermeability of time. The time, the stillness of which she follows so eagerly, functions as a sarcophagus of her youth, although one that is always already deemed to fail. In the world of scattered fragments of her image(s), where mirrors have already lost anything principal to mirror, the girl seems to be a powerless object in the stream of techno-humanity’s scopic regime. She desires love but gives in to the cynical discourse on situationships. Never reveal to him what you actually want. The girl wants to be wanted for her, but must, to be this her, clean her cyberflesh of any residues of anxious attachment. Mother wound. Father wound. Self-inflicted wound. Of any attachment, to be precise. The art of detachment. The girl’s life is simple—all she has to do is lean into her “girl energy”^[2]—and everything she desires will simply be poured into her hands. To receive is your natural state. But to lean in, to achieve this simple gesture of effortlessness, she must first be exhaustively fabricated. Thus, whatever she does, she fails, as her destiny ultimately mimics the order of capitalism whose principal ethos now imbues the online world: I must be forever new. I must be forever more. I must forever be the engine of change. Such is the landscape of the rigor with which she executes control and the implosive chaos to which this control returns in endless rotations. I seek to see a glimpse but to find nothing.

But is she actually this passive in her obsessive activity? As we may read in Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young Girl, the telos of her endless lists of activities is to “remain unassailable in her passivity”.^[3] Does she hold any substantial role but that of materializing pure value? If one nods at the limitless deadlock of simulacra, which Baudrillard weaves from the radicality of contemporary phenomena such as the glaciation of meaning and system implosion,^[4] as truth, then this depersonalized signifier (the girl as the liquor cerebrospinalis of the internet), cannot really be bisected from the real world. The aforementioned state consequently sculpts the entirety of our existences. With other words and paraphrasing Tiqqun, we are all girls online. Even offline.

Aphanisis and the Internet?

However, the position in accordance with which we will be moving through this text is rather different. To perforate the death sentence to which we have condemned the girl online, but also those parts of ourselves that still might be (although always impurely) extracted as our “offline” facets, we must take a step back from the Baudrillardian notion of the “simulacra” from which “all drama, all pathos has been drained”.^[5] The pure disappearance implied in the cramming of simulacra after simulacra that disavows any outlook on the subject (although, one might contend, in the case of the girl online any usage of the word “subject” is inadequate as such) as a product of narration encounters its counterpoise in the Lacanian account of the subject. To save ourselves, at least partially, we will clutch to the notion of aphanisis. We (are desperate to) argue: the girl online is not a sheer vehicle of disappearance. With the flickering slices of her disembodied image—OOTD | Should I do eyeliner for hooded eyes? | #glow-up-tips—something appears. As a byproduct of such rumination, an additional question arises: is she what appears or is she what allows for the appearance of this something? What will we appear as, if we follow, with the ungraspable speed of the girl, the enigmatic shiver of technological novelties?

In Seminar XI entitled Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan outlines the narrative arc of the emergence of the subject, whose initial appearance takes place in the Other. The first, also called unitary, signifier, appears in the domain of the Other and represents the subject for the binary signifier, whose effect is the aphanisis of the subject.^[6] To summarize: the subject’s ingrained trait is their division. Once they appear somewhere as meaning, elsewhere they are revealed as disappearance, as fading. The moment in which the subject is brought into their function is the moment marked by the petrification of the subject, for the subject is summoned to speak only as a signifier.^[7]

Here, in a dramaturgical form that depends on a certain past-present dialectics, a passing between leaving behind and emerging, we may discern the initial laceration within which the subject is born. If our desire rests in discovering what structures the aphanisis, which takes place when the “young girl” as the general ill-condition of the subject under capitalism is suffused with algorithmic technology, engendering a metamorphic merging between their modes of functioning, then we must consider the parameters that enable for the outlining of the subject as narrative. What levitates in the background of the Lacanian tale of aphanisis and gives it the distinctive destructive-creative elan vital is a series of shifts in temporal, spatial, and corporeal categories.

1) The temporal layer of the Lacanian conception of aphanisis is made manifest by the psychoanalyst himself: at a certain point in Seminar XI, when explaining precisely the triadic nexus between the subject and two initial signifiers, Lacan speaks of a “temporal pulsation” in which what defines the topology of the unconscious as such—the closing—is instituted.^[8] The whole process may be grasped through the optics of a leap into the signifying motion of the Symbolic, begetting the interchange between Real and Symbolic temporalities. 2) The significance of spatiality or a differentiating intervention in its topology in aphanisis can be detected in Lacan’s uttering of the Other as the locus in which the chain of signifiers is situated.^[9] There, we might say, lies a vast space that is protected by an utterly ambiguous entrance, a spatio-temporal threshold of almost mystical (dis)appearance. Aphanisis. Further on, the thinker apprehends the subject’s birth in the field of the Other as something reminiscent of an “indeterminate place”, confirming once more that the aphanisis as a limen indeed depends on a spatio-temporal matrix.^[10] 3) But no less important is the body, insofar as the drive, according to Lacan, springs at the point of fracture of the human instinctual operations, that is, in the moment when the subject enters language. The drive, which encapsulates the effects corporeality and language have on each other, can be interpreted as cuts with which the signifier tattoos the body.^[11]

An equivalent to this abandoning of certain modalities of time, space, and the body, which float through aphanisis as a digestive apparatus that distills what seems as undifferentiated chronotopic lumps into differentiated, almost geometrically envisioned categories, appears to be very difficult to apply to the online universe. The girl whose worth can only be extracted—or at least confirmed—through social media should never afford to rest. One would imagine that once the contours of her face have been praised as poise and magnificent, she can afford to take a brief slumber, to feel her body once again as “made present” in her tactile surroundings. To make her eyes turn inward from observing only the most subjective beauty. To enjoy, in an enervating haste, what will remain forever hidden from the mosaic memory of the virtual lens. Instead, once externalized through the shimmering screen, the girl leaves behind the possibility of any “authentic” cuts between the past, the present, and the future. From then on, no past will be archived as past, still and untouchable. Every aspect of the past is already outdated and nullified as if it never took place. But there will be no present either. Do not rest on your laurels is the girl online’s most important prohibition. As her ontological status exists in complete congruence with (not) being forgotten, all of her past and future will hang, as suicided bodies, on some future whose present will nevercome to pass. To be forgotten on the internet, whose algorithmic structuring is cunningly designed to both preserve and eradicate everything, haunts the entirety of the girl’s surface being. Particularly the present she is never to possess.

It is this logic of an evaporating nothingness that paints not just the temporal but also the spatial lineations of the internet. Redefined and dispossessed of any physical qualities such as different perspectives, space on the internet is severed into particular synchronically disconnected units and therefore appears as deeply fragmented and unable to be grasped as a continuous landscape. The girl can immediately cross the online space, but she can do that only via completely alienated pathways that do not have a direct contact with the entirety of the WWW’s physicality (or the absence thereof). To move anywhere, the “here and now” must be immediately left behind with just the cut of a single click.

Once the girl is consecrated as part of the virtual ecosystem, the traits of what Tiqqun describes as belonging to the young girl as such achieve their most radical manifestation. The internet occupies the position of a butcher who makes visible what already lethally defines the girl’s relation to her body: as a series of tectonic plates, the girl’s body is a composition of separable units that she never gets to possess. Instead, they possess her,^[12] the sum of their individual worth (masked into the romantic or passionate vocabulary of “beauty” and “hotness”) is the capital with which she steps into the menagerie of the internet. If her hotness, which she fears losing so much that she will forever swear by manufacturing her body to unsuccessfully strive towards impermeability of time, defines her offline, then her scattered pieces (her eyelids, her breasts, her lips, her TikTok dancing) make her value estimable only through their coagulated cutting. If am I not mistaken, the latest TikTok trend makes the girl ask: Tell me the truth: which blindness do I have?

And indeed she has a certain blindness. It might not always be a partial aesthetic blindness that prevents her from achieving her maximum value: her eyebrows, her lips, her hair dye. But she certainly has time blindness. For she walks into the world of the internet understanding it as her privileged field of expression and not something that by a certain temporal clash a priori makes her into an oxymoron. If she is defined solemnly by her past, always already nostalgic for the beauty she once possessed—if the image determines what she is only as what she was (a photo can only ever pertain in the past)—then the strange fixation the algorithmic logic has with the (always already lost) future makes her presence both pivotal as well as illogical in relation to the functioning of the internet.

In the undifferentiated nothingness of the internet, how does any narrative, necessarily underpinning the process of aphanisis, occur? Is the girl’s activity but an empty cyclical play of control and chaos, of uploading and dying? If the human inability to completely comprehend the internet and its consequences is perhaps its most uncanny hallmark of our relationship to it, carrying a deterritorializing potential, then what does the girl contribute to a “reterritorialization” or even a “deterritorialization” of a territory of techno-feudal non-time, a contribution that would gravitate towards dispensing with pure disappearance and instead pave the way for a new appearance? In what ways could the girl’s activity online be interpreted beyond mere passivity? How can she possibly be comprehended as an alchemist of time, space, and the material, a sculptor of what seem amorphous dimensions, if she does not even have immediate possession of her own body? An indecipherable funambulist that she is, the girl online skids between being a pure commodity and retaining, even in this state of commodification, a certain countering logic which might, maybe even accelerated to banality, opt for an aphanisis. A reenactment of the subject.

The Girl as Witch: Creasing Non-Time

Close your eyes and feel where you hold your attention
If it’s in the back of your eyes
Walk it down to your heart’s center
And make that the new place from which your thoughts enter
Clairvoyance comes mostly from this simple function
— Lana del Rey

The girl’s mind echoes the loud cacophony of the internet. Her thoughts move in fast and dispersed microexplosions, such as represented by a set of brushstrokes that oppose each other’s movements. A phenomenon quotidianly known as shortened attention span that adapts the functioning of the human brain to that of serial alluviums of algorithms. In this stage of brain functioning, it might thus seem harder than ever to resort to the mind—now dissected in convulsions of thoughts—as that which can imprint itself on matter and change, through patience and temporality, its shapes and outcomes. The girl online is, however, more than ever drawn to what Madame Blavatsky, perhaps in times that were objectively better in attending to a dedicated focus of the mind, called the interconnectedness of the Universal Mind and Cosmic Matter.^[13] Is individual guilt and ubiquity of (material and immaterial) labor, which is to permeate all realms of life in late capitalism, all that imbues the girl online with a fascination for manifestation, her fondness for witchcraft, potions, spells, visualizing, and tarot? To wander through “reels”, the short-form content suitable to be adapted to the plethora of parts whose sum is the girl, and never stumble across the advertisement of techniques, which attempt to influence the future through the present, is nowadays almost impossible.

A popular trend promotes the “Nikola Tesla method of manifestation”. Tesla, the almost mystified scientist in the figure of which, like in popular technological novelties today, both the spiritual and the technological solidify into a single entity, becomes a reference used to market a technique of manufacturing individual futures. When the girl wakes up, she is ordained on TikTok that she must write down three times on a piece of paper what she wants to manifest. In the second third of the day, she repeats the exercise, scribbling the same sentence(s) six times. She completes her daily manifestation exercise in the evening, inking her wish nine times.^[14] If she forgets this secretive errand of hers and she is unhappy (as we may say she always is because of something), it is likely her fault. You are out of focus. To attach things to you, you ought to be detached. For the outcome of her future is as malleable as clay—if only her beautiful, lacquered fingers take on the work of carefully shaping it.

But in this appeal to take on more and more work and expose herself to an additional quantity of guilt in the case of it not being done well enough, one might recognize the girl online’s effort to counter the restrictive numbness of the internet’s temporal structure. Leeching off a future that defines the impetus of the algorithmic chronos as described above simultaneously disables any conceptual separation of the future from the banally quick rhythm of algorithmic stimuli. Through manifestation, the future is, although falsely, claimed as something distanced and observed. The future is material, engraved on a piece of paper with the girl’s fingers while the body and the mind coalesce into an isolated “now”. This now is presented as outside of the endless flow of algorithms and as an impermeable vitality. A hatchery of the future. The girl online therefore appears as an intermediate structure that takes on the uncanny burden of non-time and folds it into a narrative arc that includes even her active corporeality, and at the same time places the locus of the instance of the temporal back into the subject. Countering something paradoxical with a paradox, the girl accelerates obsession with the future while at the same time building a preliminary bridge that inserts some sort of gap between now and then.

The engine of her want, which she so eagerly caters to with manifestation, is of many natures, while the most nonsensical—to be loved for her essence only and to be returned to because she is loved, insurmountably, for her essence—remains the main one. A method shall be used before sleep: upon closing her eyes, the girl should picture her romantic interest: from the brown hair to the glasses by the nightstand, the eyelids, the mouth, the birthmarks on the face. She envisions the person she loves as already sleeping. In her scenario, she enters the room in which they are in, approaches their laid-down body, and whispers three times exactly what she wants to come true: You are in love with the girl. You are in love with the girl. You are in love with the girl. Then she kisses their cheek and walks away. But do not forget to close the door. The closing of the door is very important, she is instructed.^[15] Why the closing of the door? To separate the present from the future, perhaps? To move apart the mechanism of desire from “palpable reality”, as if a sudden split is injected between the Symbolic and the Imaginary?

The girl online does not only manifest. The occult holds such a lure for her that she makes potions in which the ingredients are associated with the feelings that they are supposed to engender. Sweet for love, bitter for revenge. Dust, nails, peony, cinnamon. "The girl online's occult vision, commonly found in/common in standard paganism, opts to “imbue matter with life”. Furthermore, tarot card readers on TikTok make sure she “recognizes” herself in specific readings, referring to people’s astrological signs or initials. I hear the letterZ. To be able to recognize herself in their deciphering of the present and future occurrences, the girl online’s life story petrifies into a conglomerate of Soon/Moon rising signs, a lattice of vectors that sketch a meta-image of her life to be shared by others of the “TikTok collective”. Through the stratification of time (the present both warns about and shapes the future) and fixing the present into material artifacts, such as cards, potions, material writings, and doors (which stand between the vividness of the mind’s imagination and the tactile events that are to happen), the girl online suddenly appears, although only as a quick glimpse of dispersed vectors.

As Walter Benjamin suggests with his “Schuldzusammenhang”, an interpenetrating, ontological connection to everything is required for the clairvoyant to relate a person’s destiny to cards or planet placing. Furthermore, the world of magic and the occult depends on a peculiar temporal modality of the occluded realm of fate.^[16] An aphanisis-like recognition, individual and collective, that requires playing with temporal structures.

The Girl as Daughter: Creasing the Non-space

Women to survive,
must be unfaithful to their child.
— Camille

When space is in question, the series of gashes that configure the girl online’s identity are in fact her biggest strength. The distance between her and her image and the distance between the scatterings into which her surface-turned corporeality is divided make up a moving principle of her online activity. She might fully participate in nurturing and sustaining the alienating economy, which is possessed by all visual and capitalizes upon human attention. However, the corpus of the girl’s phraseology and her tropes seems to function as a counterforce to the mysterious instinct d’abandon, a mystico-biological expression parallel to the death drive, but birthing primarily in an organism’s relationship to space.

In his essay Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia, Caillois delves into common threads between animal mimicry and psychasthenic^[17] disorders, detecting them in what he calls “the lure of space”.^[18] Establishing mimicry as something else than a defense mechanism, the author presupposes a disorder of spatial perception as pertaining to both mimicry and schizophrenia, where the organism/subject becomes only one point of the coordinate system, no longer located in its place of origin. In schizophrenia, reports Caillois, the space takes the subject’s place, while the body and mind become dissociated. The subject feels as if they have exited the frontiers of their skin and are outside their senses.^[19] In this process of “depersonalization through assimilation into space”, they feel they have become space themselves.^[20]

The dissociated relationship the girl online cultivates with her attributes that, as we have previously established, possess her seems to suffer precisely from this loss of immersion into the online space, where she becomes yet another of the passing images. (Not) knowing herself only as value, the girl online is sucked into the undefined non-space of the internet. The inability to thoroughly grasp its mechanisms or to envision it in congruence with the physical space and corresponding perspectives is more similar to a feeling of darkness than light. As writes Roger Caillois, to lose one’s perspective in space essentially transforms this space into a dark one, for in the dark we possess no visual mastery of our surroundings. The dark touches and permeates us.^[21]

And what does the online space, which bewitches the girl into giving in to the instinct d’abandon, touch and permeate if there already exists an insurmountable distance between the girl and her photographed fragments? At this stage, the disappearance seems complete: there is nothing which resists being sucked into an undifferentiated space.

In a desperate search for a “but” to this hopeless condemnation, we might think of a random meme initially associated with Taylor Swift, but now elevated into one of the biggest compliments of the online community. “Mother is mothering” is but one of the plethora of sayings and images that produce a certain topology of the online space. Functioning as fake matrilineal communities, “online mothers” express a series of belongings based on a girl’s tastes, which in the online context represent the entire basis of her identity. If one (as does the philosopher Luce Irigaray) thinks of the maternal as what through a gesture of hospitality offers a primary dwelling and represents, through participating in the placental economy, the primary contact-spacing or difference in cohabitation of the mother and the child,^[22] then being a daughter to a “mothering mother” is perhaps a particular paradox. The space in which the girl online expresses her maternal belonging is precisely one of both individualism and sameness. Does the girl quote the primary place of dwelling to insert a topological structure into this self-alienating non-place as the only way she can resist the abandoning principle? Be it for whichever reason, for the sake of our written lines, we might as well interpret it as the sudden appearance of space within non-space that is rooted particularly in the subject’s initial space (of hospitality). The initial space where the subject appears as “different to.”

The Girl as Parts and as Whole: Creasing the Body

If the partitioned girl already equals only an estimated value of her parts, then why is she so obsessed with explicitly dividing them? There seems to be an overabundance of trends that concentrate on the relationship between the individual parts and the harmonious or dissonant wholeness of the body or the face. One that immediately comes to mind is “facial features vs. facial harmony” where the girl first provides maximized images of particular parts of her face, such as her eyes, lips, jawline, cheeks, and neck, and then gradually shows her whole face. The task is to rate, from one to ten, each individual part, and then do the same with the whole. This play of cutting and bricolaging seems almost to be a parody of the girl’s already alienated and fragmented self, an usurpation of the separating processes imposed on her.

The girl applies similar ambiguous tactics one might understand as perfect surrender to the capitalist scopic gaze or an accelerating approach that produces an “alienation effect” on things that may seem impossible to notice in the discord of the online world, to love: she is taught to remove her body from the sphere she invests with the most sentiments. Be less available. Make them miss you. Love is born through absence. Through the surplus of her image online, she is called to act and love as scarcity, to never lean in and always perform a particular labor intended to preserve mystery. This recalls the total commodification of love in which the latter is made into a luxury good. At the same time, the discrepancy between the quantifiable approach towards the online image and real-time presence and behavior, between what is public and what is private, might communicate to the girl online that the image is not where she ends. Between the image and the body exists a gap, an empty container in which complete identification with the image, an imago-mania, can still be surpassed, leaving room for the appearance of a body that might still hold some autonomy from the image.

It is in these ways that the girl online walks the complex and sundered path between appearing and disappearing in the wireless universe.