...y'know, When I think about what being seen as being seen requires agentially, I think it's closer to gameplaying. Makes me think of C Thi Nguyen's _Games: Agency as Art_ and how we adopt temporary goals to instrumentalize while playing a game, and recognizing those goals as being goals of the arena we're operating within, yet pursue them (temporarily) with the earnestness we might see in a sincerity-based situation. To that end, I propose "play mates" as appropriate to profilicity.
This series, just like the thinkers/ideas that were covered, has been seminal for contemporary philosophy or even those with a passing interest. Thank you so much for all the work you and your colleagues have done behind the scenes!
Professor, the quotation you began your video with reminds me of a quotation from a novel by Gene Wolfe, one of my favorite fantasy/scifi authors: “We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges. When soldiers take their oath they are given a coin, an asimi stamped with the profile of the Autarch. Their acceptance of that coin is their acceptance of the special duties and burdens of military life-they are soldiers from that moment, though they may know nothing of the management of arms. I did not know that then, but it is a profound mistake to believe that we must know of such things to be influenced by them, and in fact to believe so is to believe in the most debased and superstitious kind of magic. The would-be sorcerer alone has faith in the efficacy of pure knowledge; rational people know that things act of themselves or not at all.”
@@JMoore-vo7ii Book of the New Sun. I’d highly recommend it for genre fans. Unreliable narrator, lots of puzzles for the reader, lots of themes and ideas but also some intense emotional moments.
I think there is something distinguishably different about modern media that makes an exegesis that begins with the mass reading of books somewhat unrelatable. I salute your "originality" insofar as you have here developed a comprehensive philosophical media theory in the continental school tradition of idealism, something that's both refreshing and old at the same time. Given that most modern philosophers haven't produced anything worth reading in decades, I think this is a testament to the corruption of the academic pursuits in the west, that you would have to work out of China to have the space necessary to advance your ideas, all of which, as far as I can tell, you are spot on. Both your notions of prophilicity, and your exegesis of wokeism as a symptom of neoliberal individualism and German guilt-pride are very correct in my view, and finally provide the kind of explanation that is consistent and makes sense. I find your views with respect to profilicity as it functions within a status system rather more convincing, however, than how it connects to the broader media theory presented here. The interplay between media as an observer and relayer of information, and the instrument that shapes, inversely, the behavior of the subject is very interesting and I think accurate. If we observe the present state of the Instagram generations, it becomes fairly obvious that the camera is not just the method of relaying life experience, the camera instructs almost in a scripted way the generation of the life experience. Prior to it, and without it, the life experience would have unfolded through the authentic desire of the subject, but is now instructed in a scripted fashion by the perceived audience, the subject desire to obtain feedback from the audience, and the particular fancy of the broader context that in all directions influences the generation of the stage play. This inauthentic life experience poses as authentic life experience making the pursuit of aspirational screenshot scripted life the actual pursuit rather than the capture of authentic moments.. A stage play generated by the instinctive speculation. Which is almost certainly always a comedy both in the content and in the method. The subject is no longer observed, he is both observing and scripting his own life play aspiring to the kind of achievements and experiences that would play best recorded, making the audience as much a part in determining the script as he can anticipate would receive the broadest indulgence. Though rather modern, this still fits nicely into the biological evolutionary theory with respect to status hierarchies, where humans form three primary hierarchies: dominance, merit and virtue. The media play of seeking followers (for profit in many cases) fits somewhere along all three, or perhaps requires a fourth "influencer" hierarchy since it's difficult to exactly pinpoint whether the audience likes the performer or despises the performer. He has therefore a complicated relationship with his audience, which is both crafting and observing the script of his life, while he attempts to dominate them both in fame and wealth, outdo them in the same pursuit or similar in the merit category, and as far as virtue goes, well, as long as one is woke that seems to be sufficient to at least not break the performative art. His relationship with his audience is both hostile and mutual, and it's tough to say who the parasite is. Both the audience and the performer recognize that what's unfolding is an elaborate stage play with cameras and lights. But yet they still are not able to separate how it compels them and how it shapes their view of themselves. In that way, it is the ultimate of the idealistic systems, a subject and a mass of people caught within their own non-objective commodity structure, the reification plainly apparent in every screenshot, and yet unable to separate themselves from Plato's cave transfixed and addicted to the shadows before them. It is, in a perverse way, an addiction to the ideal form. The ideal form of that sublime object of desire nobody quite knows - the aspirational nothing that feels like something attainable, if just for a moment, through the profilitic form of someone else, which neither the subject is, nor what the audience could be, but desperately desires. Lacan lives in the form of the ideal, the sublime object of desire. The media, the tools as you call, might therefore be new, but what is human remains the same. Kudos to you for a nod both to the new and to your broader philosophical tradition of Hegel, and Plato, and Žižek.
Very nice! It is truly a weird illusion we eventually (somewhat) awaken to. There is no way to be authentic and worse, we think we even can be. Not only to others but to ourselves. In reality, we are "hyper" objects, as Timothy Morton puts it... These are objects so complex that they can't even be comprehended, as they are made up of so many aspects beyond the reach of our minds. We fool ourselves constantly by thinking there's a little thing called the self that we can build a box around and identify, but upon closer analysis, we see that just isn't possible. We barely know our own history, something we only remember maybe .0001% of... And even if we remembered that, what about our ancestors, our friends, our society and how those effect us? Understanding is always just a practice of partials and probabilities. I suppose instead we can go off of intuition, another way of knowing without knowing. I agree that media in recent times has changed this process a lot, but it was fundamentally flawed from the start as we can't even touch a "true" essence of ourselves. This is only exposing what was already there. I am very appreciative of the professor for helping me see this more clearly in this series. I spent many years believing in authenticity. Luckily, somehow, I saw the vapid nature of social media early enough to get off and still have some sense of sanity about things. Although lately even that has been a challenge with watching the world become so dark over the many issues we face. I wonder how AI might affect some of this as it becomes even more apparent that we as individuals and as a species are not what we thought. Cheers
What are you talking about - "Lacan lives the the form of the ideal"? Did Zizek do this to you? Just wait till I see him next, he's gonna get such a beating.
Hi there. This is an interesting take. I think you are a bit more pessimistic about culture than H.G. Moeller, though. If I understand you correctly, you think that people have become "fake" because cameras were invented and they would still be authentic if there were no cameras. Moeller actually says in the video, and I agree, that there has never been an authentic self. Identity has always been a story about who we are that we tell ourselves and others - and something we perform. Yes, like a role on stage. Media like photography have just changed the way we tell it. Here's my point: if we accept this, this can actually be liberating. And personally I don't think that social-darwinist theories of status hierarchies are all that helpful an approach to social behaviour. There is more to it than competition. Luhmann's sociological theory seems more convincing and informative to me (and I admit that I don't know much about Luhmann except what I've learnt from Moeller's videos).
@@tobiasthiel5291 while I can't see any way to be completely authentic either, there is certainly degrees of deception, something I think it's important to minimize, maybe now more than ever. This especially applies in close relationships. We can't reveal everything about ourselves because we don't even know everything, or at least aren't immediately aware of it, but we don't need to deliberately hide important aspects. I don't think the perfection of our authenticity being unattainable means we shouldn't be trying our best to be honest with people around us. It's a lot trickier when we discuss how we should portray ourselves in a social structure where there are material benefits that come directly from the image others have of us. I think what's fair, is that accepting the profilicity as a thing leads to a culture that is more aware of what we're doing and can be honest about the importance of profile for making judgements about each other. Honestly, this whole process is already exhausting
@@MattAngiono Hi. I was actually replying to the comment by @dt6822, if there was some confusion about that. Of course I agree that we should be honest with each other. What you say about material benefits is an interesting point. I think this shows how the logic of the market enters our social relationships, which I also find worrying. This development is certainly amplified by social media, as exemplified by influencers. Here, I actually agree with @dt6822 insofar that I am also critical of influencers portraying themselves as relatable "friends" of their followers while their aim is actually to market products to them (whether this is always a conscious deception or not). Being aware of this can of course inform the way we consume social media. What we have less control over, unfortunately, is how social relations are increasingly influenced by the logic of cost and benefit and how we are forced to optimise ourselves as if we were commodities with a market value.
This concept of offline proficility is interesting; looking forward for the next video. Personally, I always differentiated what I put online about me (what I'd call my "image", or my "profile"), and who I am in first order observation. For example, I will say on my CV or my personal webpage that I'm good in this and that to find some work, but I won't speak about other of my skills because I don't want to use them for work. In that sense, I know there is a discrepancy between my first-order and second-order identity. Also, I don't think my first order identity is very well defined; I guess there is some core in there, but it's shifting and changing often. In contrary, I can build my profile to be consistent overtime, because to me it's only a tool I can use to help and get what I want (and it's not necessarily negative, to get the job I know I would enjoy and where I would be the most effective for example. It doesn't necessarily imply lying either, at the end the profile is just another part of my identity, and I wouldn't be surprised that, indeed, it shapes my first order identity too). I think what helped me the most in all your videos is this simple fact: our identity doesn't matter that much. Or at least we shouldn't take it too seriously. That's a very important point, and I think that it might be a key to feel better. Maybe to finally stop thinking about ourselves all the time. Don't know, my profile is thinking out loud.
Wow, great stuff. Can't say I fully understand it yet but I connected with enough of it to make me want to understand it more deeply. Please understand that your work is highly valued and please keep it up. Regards
One thing I find interesting about profilicity is its inherent multiplicity. Multiple profiles serve different purposes, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tinder etc. In authenticity, this is explicitly inauthentic. I can remember my aunt once having a go at my dad for being "two-faced" because he'd been polite to a person but later talked negatively about them. To me, though, his behaviour was perfectly reasonable. There was no reason to be rude to that person when he met them and venting to family/friends is a great way to release the tension of having to be polite. My dad was being profilic while my aunt was judging him based on her idea of authenticity. Multiplicity isn't all good or bad of course. Politicians are famously multiplicitous, presenting as favourable a face to anyone that can support them. Voters or funders want to see very different things from a politician.
In comparison to authenticity being validated by present peer soulmates, How is validation negotiated with the general peer? Does that only occur online?
In regards to the last section, in what way does this new "internalized general peer" differ from the older idea of the "super-ego"? Similar in that it's an internalized external critical voice, but different in the type of 'seeing' and 'criticism' that happens? The agent being a general peer as opposed to authority figures or role-mates? I'm not saying necessarily that they are the same, or different for that matter, but I'm interested in what other people think about the comparison.
I would argue that WE don't shape media for curating profilicity because our material relationship to media is as a consumable. Media in most of its forms is a one sided operation feeding off of our needs to exploit weaknesses. Ownership of media production means to have material control over it. Celebrities are no realer than cartoons, but they serve a purpose. The prestige of classic novels and poetry also serve some underlying goal, The abstraction and intellectual weight of a philosophical discussion, Manly ruggedness of team sports, the sleekness and abstraction of programmers. Second observation is not our design. There is a natural second observation called ignorance. And then there is designed exclusivity and bias of traits and interests. Media becomes our vision past the horizon. It intends to replace our image of the world. It is a function of power, its just a filter. What media is right now is a real attempt to replace "scientific" observation and discussion with an idealized reality into our minds.
@williampan29 Do you own any media outlets? Probably not. Somebody does and uses it for profits and has editorial control, you cant censor privately owned media, it is already censored because it is private. It is the right of the owner to use their property as they see fit. Their profit motive also caters to advertisers. And the media outlet is at the behest of the state for propagandistic purposes for "national security".
I feel like from what I've read- but would hesitate to claim that I firmly understand- of one of Lacan's seminars (maybe the tenth one, on anxiety) that his discussions around the gaze and the mirror, and the Big Other, are perhaps psychoanalytic reworkings or maybe even earlier expositions of the idea of profilicity- of the idea of seeing others or you yourself being aware that you are being seen as being-seen. I dunno, I could be way off, the edibles are running strong.
I wonder when I buy some new item on Amazon or EBay I go over the reviews of product from other people, how does this affect profilicity of this product?
I wonder if the concept of an ever present god that watches and judges our every move (like in christianity or Islam) already lead to some kind of profilicity…? In a way if you believe in a ever watching/ever judging being you see the whole world your whole life from a second order observation. Or am I misunderstanding the concept of profilicity/ second order observation?
yes. We are. Which is why I believe it is better to feel being supervised by god than by social media peers. At least most religion clearly writes down how to be good; modern mass media just tells you to consume. edit: as a recently de-converted Christian apostate, I disagree with this written statement. Religion is indeed, as written by fellow repliers, too paradoxical in its dogmas.
@@williampan29not many religions present a clear or consistent moral code. a large portion of abrahamic morality is in conflict with post-enlightenment morality
@theethanatorem if by "post-enlightment" you mean "post-modern," then Professor Moelloer already stated that there is no definitive morality; for humans are by nature amoral.
@@williampan29is it really clear though? What about homosexuality? Not something that matters to me personally, but that seems pretty unclear. Also, how we should treat animals.... Religion doesn't give a very good answer generally, which basically equates them with being there for our use and exploitation. It doesn't see them as conscious creatures that we shouldn't abuse. To me, the sense of justice and non abuse towards anything conscious is far more ethical than any religion seems to discuss. And I don't need to have faith in anything I can't experience in this world to arrive at those ethics
Would it be possible for you to eventually cover Michel Clouscard, and specifically his "Neo-fascism and ideology of desire" (1973) ? More to the point how it can describe retroactively the society we find ourselves into today. I have a hunch, if the audience is anything like the French one for Clouscard, that his thoughts on the matter will find echo in many. I'd say it could be an extension of your media series, in a way. In any case, it'd be very interesting to hear your thoughts on Clouscard.
Does anyone think that the conclusion draws a full circle in which we're back to a new form of earnestness, albeit an earnestness that is far more all encompassing i.e., no matter your traditional "role" in culture, now you obey the injunction to "profile," at a higher order? Earnest profilicity?
I'm wondering if profilicity is a mandatory way of creating your identity today? If we decided that we wouldn't want to create profiles, would other people consider us as having no identity at all? If not now, because we can still rely on older identity-making technology, then will that old technology eventually be considered obsolete, and we would virtually have to create profiles, just to be able to communicate our identity to enough people to meet our needs? Should I be trying to create a profile?
live the series! thank you. Any thought given to the Heideggerian distinction between "Hervor-bringen" und "Heraus-fordern" as two modes of revealing? so authenticity seen as a form of action rather than an identity?
Professor Moeller have you ever had any interest in the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor? there seems to perhaps some similarities in your interests?
The media it was hoped. could be a tool of authenticity. yet how the majority of large movies are made in Hollywood by people who live in Hollywood and who have morals and views shaped by Hollywood leading to many Hollywood movies feeling the same.
This video makes me think that the dualism of "mind vs body" of the past has been replaced with "society/technology vs people". They way people talk about culture, media, technology and government is as if they are wholly separate from people, as if these systems are interchangeable and the people who inhabit them will remain the same, only with "better" or "worse" conditions. You see it with reactionaries who think we can just return to old systems of religion and that they will work as they always have; and you see it in revolutionaries who think, "oh, just impose this new system and the people will flourish" instead of realizing that once the system is imposed, the people you intended to "help" will now be different and in a different world.
The thing I wonder about is, well, what are media? Language is certainly a medium of "communication." Technological sophistication would have been nothing without it; language invents the text. So, I wonder, is language the original point of departure from some imagined point where sincerity and authenticity are not issues?
How do you mean that, "it points out"? "Sign" in the quote is used in the sense of semiotics, the study of signs. Semioticians, such as Ferdinand de Saussure, differentiate between the signifier (what in the quote is called "sign") and the signified. In this sense, a sign does signify.
@@tobiasthiel5291 Hjelmslev is of a different opinion, he thinks that there is only form of the content and form of the expression. Signifiers are conventions, in communist China Party didn’t fancy red light to signify “stop” so they ordered that green should represent “stop”. So red doesn’t signify “stop”, it just points out, it shows the colour red, and people decide what that colour means…
@@exlauslegale8534 oh, I see what you mean. Yes, the relationship between signifier and signified (or the forms of expression and content) is arbitrary and a matter of convention, as other post-structuralists have also pointed out. In regard to the quote in the video, it doesn't matter how you call it, though. You could also say, 'modern society prefers the form of the expression to the content.' This, for example, is what some critics have said about the films of Luc Besson; that they favour style over substance. Or, in other words, Besson favours spectacle over substance.
I would love to see a conversation between you and professor Sam Vaknin. He's an expert on narcissism and psychology and talks frequentlyc about how social media has affected our minds and personalities. Hint: we've all become more narcissistic and or codependent. I think you'd have fun talking with him and i think your audience would gain a lot from it. Just don't do it to build your profile 😉
Hi mates! If we seek role mates in sincerity, and soul mates in authenticity, what kind of mates do we seek here in profilicity?
parasocial mates
a more serious answer: stage mates
Customers
...y'know, When I think about what being seen as being seen requires agentially, I think it's closer to gameplaying. Makes me think of C Thi Nguyen's _Games: Agency as Art_ and how we adopt temporary goals to instrumentalize while playing a game, and recognizing those goals as being goals of the arena we're operating within, yet pursue them (temporarily) with the earnestness we might see in a sincerity-based situation.
To that end, I propose "play mates" as appropriate to profilicity.
patrons
scroll mates
This series, just like the thinkers/ideas that were covered, has been seminal for contemporary philosophy or even those with a passing interest. Thank you so much for all the work you and your colleagues have done behind the scenes!
I think this is your best video explaining profilicity. I will share this video so that other people will know that I think this is your best video.
Professor, the quotation you began your video with reminds me of a quotation from a novel by Gene Wolfe, one of my favorite fantasy/scifi authors: “We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges. When soldiers take their oath they are given a coin, an asimi stamped with the profile of the Autarch. Their acceptance of that coin is their acceptance of the special duties and burdens of military life-they are soldiers from that moment, though they may know nothing of the management of arms. I did not know that then, but it is a profound mistake to believe that we must know of such things to be influenced by them, and in fact to believe so is to believe in the most debased and superstitious kind of magic. The would-be sorcerer alone has faith in the efficacy of pure knowledge; rational people know that things act of themselves or not at all.”
What is the novel?
@@JMoore-vo7ii I *think* it's from the Citadel of the Autarch, part of his Book of the New Sun series.
@@ArawnOfAnnwn much obliged!
@@JMoore-vo7ii You're welcome. Note that that's the last book of the series. So don't start with that book. 😅
@@JMoore-vo7ii Book of the New Sun. I’d highly recommend it for genre fans. Unreliable narrator, lots of puzzles for the reader, lots of themes and ideas but also some intense emotional moments.
This completely refreshed my drive into continuing media studies.
Thank you.
I think there is something distinguishably different about modern media that makes an exegesis that begins with the mass reading of books somewhat unrelatable. I salute your "originality" insofar as you have here developed a comprehensive philosophical media theory in the continental school tradition of idealism, something that's both refreshing and old at the same time. Given that most modern philosophers haven't produced anything worth reading in decades, I think this is a testament to the corruption of the academic pursuits in the west, that you would have to work out of China to have the space necessary to advance your ideas, all of which, as far as I can tell, you are spot on.
Both your notions of prophilicity, and your exegesis of wokeism as a symptom of neoliberal individualism and German guilt-pride are very correct in my view, and finally provide the kind of explanation that is consistent and makes sense. I find your views with respect to profilicity as it functions within a status system rather more convincing, however, than how it connects to the broader media theory presented here. The interplay between media as an observer and relayer of information, and the instrument that shapes, inversely, the behavior of the subject is very interesting and I think accurate. If we observe the present state of the Instagram generations, it becomes fairly obvious that the camera is not just the method of relaying life experience, the camera instructs almost in a scripted way the generation of the life experience. Prior to it, and without it, the life experience would have unfolded through the authentic desire of the subject, but is now instructed in a scripted fashion by the perceived audience, the subject desire to obtain feedback from the audience, and the particular fancy of the broader context that in all directions influences the generation of the stage play. This inauthentic life experience poses as authentic life experience making the pursuit of aspirational screenshot scripted life the actual pursuit rather than the capture of authentic moments.. A stage play generated by the instinctive speculation. Which is almost certainly always a comedy both in the content and in the method.
The subject is no longer observed, he is both observing and scripting his own life play aspiring to the kind of achievements and experiences that would play best recorded, making the audience as much a part in determining the script as he can anticipate would receive the broadest indulgence. Though rather modern, this still fits nicely into the biological evolutionary theory with respect to status hierarchies, where humans form three primary hierarchies: dominance, merit and virtue. The media play of seeking followers (for profit in many cases) fits somewhere along all three, or perhaps requires a fourth "influencer" hierarchy since it's difficult to exactly pinpoint whether the audience likes the performer or despises the performer. He has therefore a complicated relationship with his audience, which is both crafting and observing the script of his life, while he attempts to dominate them both in fame and wealth, outdo them in the same pursuit or similar in the merit category, and as far as virtue goes, well, as long as one is woke that seems to be sufficient to at least not break the performative art. His relationship with his audience is both hostile and mutual, and it's tough to say who the parasite is. Both the audience and the performer recognize that what's unfolding is an elaborate stage play with cameras and lights. But yet they still are not able to separate how it compels them and how it shapes their view of themselves. In that way, it is the ultimate of the idealistic systems, a subject and a mass of people caught within their own non-objective commodity structure, the reification plainly apparent in every screenshot, and yet unable to separate themselves from Plato's cave transfixed and addicted to the shadows before them. It is, in a perverse way, an addiction to the ideal form.
The ideal form of that sublime object of desire nobody quite knows - the aspirational nothing that feels like something attainable, if just for a moment, through the profilitic form of someone else, which neither the subject is, nor what the audience could be, but desperately desires. Lacan lives in the form of the ideal, the sublime object of desire. The media, the tools as you call, might therefore be new, but what is human remains the same. Kudos to you for a nod both to the new and to your broader philosophical tradition of Hegel, and Plato, and Žižek.
Very nice!
It is truly a weird illusion we eventually (somewhat) awaken to.
There is no way to be authentic and worse, we think we even can be.
Not only to others but to ourselves.
In reality, we are "hyper" objects, as Timothy Morton puts it...
These are objects so complex that they can't even be comprehended, as they are made up of so many aspects beyond the reach of our minds.
We fool ourselves constantly by thinking there's a little thing called the self that we can build a box around and identify, but upon closer analysis, we see that just isn't possible.
We barely know our own history, something we only remember maybe .0001% of...
And even if we remembered that, what about our ancestors, our friends, our society and how those effect us?
Understanding is always just a practice of partials and probabilities.
I suppose instead we can go off of intuition, another way of knowing without knowing.
I agree that media in recent times has changed this process a lot, but it was fundamentally flawed from the start as we can't even touch a "true" essence of ourselves.
This is only exposing what was already there.
I am very appreciative of the professor for helping me see this more clearly in this series.
I spent many years believing in authenticity.
Luckily, somehow, I saw the vapid nature of social media early enough to get off and still have some sense of sanity about things.
Although lately even that has been a challenge with watching the world become so dark over the many issues we face.
I wonder how AI might affect some of this as it becomes even more apparent that we as individuals and as a species are not what we thought.
Cheers
What are you talking about - "Lacan lives the the form of the ideal"? Did Zizek do this to you? Just wait till I see him next, he's gonna get such a beating.
Hi there.
This is an interesting take. I think you are a bit more pessimistic about culture than H.G. Moeller, though. If I understand you correctly, you think that people have become "fake" because cameras were invented and they would still be authentic if there were no cameras. Moeller actually says in the video, and I agree, that there has never been an authentic self. Identity has always been a story about who we are that we tell ourselves and others - and something we perform. Yes, like a role on stage. Media like photography have just changed the way we tell it. Here's my point: if we accept this, this can actually be liberating.
And personally I don't think that social-darwinist theories of status hierarchies are all that helpful an approach to social behaviour. There is more to it than competition. Luhmann's sociological theory seems more convincing and informative to me (and I admit that I don't know much about Luhmann except what I've learnt from Moeller's videos).
@@tobiasthiel5291 while I can't see any way to be completely authentic either, there is certainly degrees of deception, something I think it's important to minimize, maybe now more than ever.
This especially applies in close relationships.
We can't reveal everything about ourselves because we don't even know everything, or at least aren't immediately aware of it, but we don't need to deliberately hide important aspects.
I don't think the perfection of our authenticity being unattainable means we shouldn't be trying our best to be honest with people around us.
It's a lot trickier when we discuss how we should portray ourselves in a social structure where there are material benefits that come directly from the image others have of us.
I think what's fair, is that accepting the profilicity as a thing leads to a culture that is more aware of what we're doing and can be honest about the importance of profile for making judgements about each other.
Honestly, this whole process is already exhausting
@@MattAngiono Hi. I was actually replying to the comment by @dt6822, if there was some confusion about that.
Of course I agree that we should be honest with each other. What you say about material benefits is an interesting point. I think this shows how the logic of the market enters our social relationships, which I also find worrying. This development is certainly amplified by social media, as exemplified by influencers. Here, I actually agree with @dt6822 insofar that I am also critical of influencers portraying themselves as relatable "friends" of their followers while their aim is actually to market products to them (whether this is always a conscious deception or not). Being aware of this can of course inform the way we consume social media. What we have less control over, unfortunately, is how social relations are increasingly influenced by the logic of cost and benefit and how we are forced to optimise ourselves as if we were commodities with a market value.
absolutely eye-opening. keep it up.
This concept of offline proficility is interesting; looking forward for the next video. Personally, I always differentiated what I put online about me (what I'd call my "image", or my "profile"), and who I am in first order observation. For example, I will say on my CV or my personal webpage that I'm good in this and that to find some work, but I won't speak about other of my skills because I don't want to use them for work. In that sense, I know there is a discrepancy between my first-order and second-order identity.
Also, I don't think my first order identity is very well defined; I guess there is some core in there, but it's shifting and changing often. In contrary, I can build my profile to be consistent overtime, because to me it's only a tool I can use to help and get what I want (and it's not necessarily negative, to get the job I know I would enjoy and where I would be the most effective for example. It doesn't necessarily imply lying either, at the end the profile is just another part of my identity, and I wouldn't be surprised that, indeed, it shapes my first order identity too).
I think what helped me the most in all your videos is this simple fact: our identity doesn't matter that much. Or at least we shouldn't take it too seriously. That's a very important point, and I think that it might be a key to feel better. Maybe to finally stop thinking about ourselves all the time. Don't know, my profile is thinking out loud.
Wow, great stuff. Can't say I fully understand it yet but I connected with enough of it to make me want to understand it more deeply. Please understand that your work is highly valued and please keep it up. Regards
Very efficient and thorough. Very GERMAN.
Excellent wrapping up
The conclusion segment is grim and it gets only more grim as it goes on, describing a kind of person it would be horrifying to become.
Please can you do a profilicity-based critical analysis of The Truman Show movie?
Hello professor, are you going to make a video about Simondon?
This video is brilliant!
would you consider adding Flusser to your media analysis?
Woah i was just watching an old Kant video of yours wondering when you were going to upload again
How did you do the cover for this video? It's awesome.
One thing I find interesting about profilicity is its inherent multiplicity. Multiple profiles serve different purposes, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tinder etc. In authenticity, this is explicitly inauthentic. I can remember my aunt once having a go at my dad for being "two-faced" because he'd been polite to a person but later talked negatively about them. To me, though, his behaviour was perfectly reasonable. There was no reason to be rude to that person when he met them and venting to family/friends is a great way to release the tension of having to be polite. My dad was being profilic while my aunt was judging him based on her idea of authenticity.
Multiplicity isn't all good or bad of course. Politicians are famously multiplicitous, presenting as favourable a face to anyone that can support them. Voters or funders want to see very different things from a politician.
I feel like we live in an age of increasing conformity. I think a video on surveillance capitalism would be really relevant.
Is that the ‘Blame!’ manga on the shelf? Nice. Probably in my top 10.
In comparison to authenticity being validated by present peer soulmates, How is validation negotiated with the general peer? Does that only occur online?
In regards to the last section, in what way does this new "internalized general peer" differ from the older idea of the "super-ego"? Similar in that it's an internalized external critical voice, but different in the type of 'seeing' and 'criticism' that happens? The agent being a general peer as opposed to authority figures or role-mates? I'm not saying necessarily that they are the same, or different for that matter, but I'm interested in what other people think about the comparison.
Please consider doing an analysis of television show The Curse it seems to be circling many of the same issues you are in your work.
I would argue that WE don't shape media for curating profilicity because our material relationship to media is as a consumable.
Media in most of its forms is a one sided operation feeding off of our needs to exploit weaknesses. Ownership of media production means to have material control over it.
Celebrities are no realer than cartoons, but they serve a purpose. The prestige of classic novels and poetry also serve some underlying goal, The abstraction and intellectual weight of a philosophical discussion, Manly ruggedness of team sports, the sleekness and abstraction of programmers. Second observation is not our design. There is a natural second observation called ignorance. And then there is designed exclusivity and bias of traits and interests. Media becomes our vision past the horizon. It intends to replace our image of the world. It is a function of power, its just a filter.
What media is right now is a real attempt to replace "scientific" observation and discussion with an idealized reality into our minds.
could you elaborate, or give an example how media serves the powerful?
@williampan29 Do you own any media outlets? Probably not. Somebody does and uses it for profits and has editorial control, you cant censor privately owned media, it is already censored because it is private. It is the right of the owner to use their property as they see fit. Their profit motive also caters to advertisers. And the media outlet is at the behest of the state for propagandistic purposes for "national security".
I feel like from what I've read- but would hesitate to claim that I firmly understand- of one of Lacan's seminars (maybe the tenth one, on anxiety) that his discussions around the gaze and the mirror, and the Big Other, are perhaps psychoanalytic reworkings or maybe even earlier expositions of the idea of profilicity- of the idea of seeing others or you yourself being aware that you are being seen as being-seen. I dunno, I could be way off, the edibles are running strong.
Great one boss. What you think of Bruno Latour ?! Feels quite same ish to some regards
I wonder when I buy some new item on Amazon or EBay I go over the reviews of product from other people, how does this affect profilicity of this product?
14:39 There is no universe where Starkultus isn't the name of a Star Wars sith master...
Watching this video to shape my identity
I wonder if the concept of an ever present god that watches and judges our every move (like in christianity or Islam) already lead to some kind of profilicity…? In a way if you believe in a ever watching/ever judging being you see the whole world your whole life from a second order observation.
Or am I misunderstanding the concept of profilicity/ second order observation?
ha, ha. That would mean we made a full turn now: it's gods we seek as mates!
yes. We are.
Which is why I believe it is better to feel being supervised by god than by social media peers.
At least most religion clearly writes down how to be good; modern mass media just tells you to consume.
edit: as a recently de-converted Christian apostate, I disagree with this written statement. Religion is indeed, as written by fellow repliers, too paradoxical in its dogmas.
@@williampan29not many religions present a clear or consistent moral code. a large portion of abrahamic morality is in conflict with post-enlightenment morality
@theethanatorem if by "post-enlightment" you mean "post-modern," then Professor Moelloer already stated that there is no definitive morality; for humans are by nature amoral.
@@williampan29is it really clear though?
What about homosexuality?
Not something that matters to me personally, but that seems pretty unclear.
Also, how we should treat animals....
Religion doesn't give a very good answer generally, which basically equates them with being there for our use and exploitation.
It doesn't see them as conscious creatures that we shouldn't abuse.
To me, the sense of justice and non abuse towards anything conscious is far more ethical than any religion seems to discuss.
And I don't need to have faith in anything I can't experience in this world to arrive at those ethics
Would it be possible for you to eventually cover Michel Clouscard, and specifically his "Neo-fascism and ideology of desire" (1973) ? More to the point how it can describe retroactively the society we find ourselves into today. I have a hunch, if the audience is anything like the French one for Clouscard, that his thoughts on the matter will find echo in many.
I'd say it could be an extension of your media series, in a way. In any case, it'd be very interesting to hear your thoughts on Clouscard.
How does the general peer differ from the big other? What you describe is basically what I understood the big other to be.
“Copies without originals” reminds me of Rene Girard
Does anyone think that the conclusion draws a full circle in which we're back to a new form of earnestness, albeit an earnestness that is far more all encompassing i.e., no matter your traditional "role" in culture, now you obey the injunction to "profile," at a higher order? Earnest profilicity?
Yes, Moeller calls it "genuine pretending."
I'm wondering if profilicity is a mandatory way of creating your identity today? If we decided that we wouldn't want to create profiles, would other people consider us as having no identity at all? If not now, because we can still rely on older identity-making technology, then will that old technology eventually be considered obsolete, and we would virtually have to create profiles, just to be able to communicate our identity to enough people to meet our needs? Should I be trying to create a profile?
we create our ideals, and our ideals create us.
live the series! thank you. Any thought given to the Heideggerian distinction between "Hervor-bringen" und "Heraus-fordern" as two modes of revealing? so authenticity seen as a form of action rather than an identity?
please start selling those t shirts
and so it begins
I'd strongly favor that. With shipping to Belgium please!
Professor Moeller have you ever had any interest in the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor? there seems to perhaps some similarities in your interests?
The commodification of the self; copies without originals
So is this a bad thing for human emancipation? And if so how can we escape/move past this?
The media it was hoped. could be a tool of authenticity. yet how the majority of large movies are made in Hollywood by people who live in Hollywood and who have morals and views shaped by Hollywood leading to many Hollywood movies feeling the same.
How is the notion of "profilicity" not merely a defeatist rebranding of Heidegger's Das Man?
What does having this much self-awareness between media and the viewer affect the viewer moving forward?
Check your grammar. Not sure what your asking. If you mean why rather than what. It's still weird because your premise is biased garbage.
Self awareness is good. Truth is good. There's never an argument against it
love the thumbnail picture:)
This video makes me think that the dualism of "mind vs body" of the past has been replaced with "society/technology vs people". They way people talk about culture, media, technology and government is as if they are wholly separate from people, as if these systems are interchangeable and the people who inhabit them will remain the same, only with "better" or "worse" conditions. You see it with reactionaries who think we can just return to old systems of religion and that they will work as they always have; and you see it in revolutionaries who think, "oh, just impose this new system and the people will flourish" instead of realizing that once the system is imposed, the people you intended to "help" will now be different and in a different world.
love the BLAME! tome as a pun
The thing I wonder about is, well, what are media? Language is certainly a medium of "communication." Technological sophistication would have been nothing without it; language invents the text. So, I wonder, is language the original point of departure from some imagined point where sincerity and authenticity are not issues?
Time for another lecture
Hi! Do you have an email for business inquries, by chance?
i love you, dog
11:37 Sign doesn't signify, it points out
How do you mean that, "it points out"? "Sign" in the quote is used in the sense of semiotics, the study of signs. Semioticians, such as Ferdinand de Saussure, differentiate between the signifier (what in the quote is called "sign") and the signified. In this sense, a sign does signify.
@@tobiasthiel5291 Hjelmslev is of a different opinion, he thinks that there is only form of the content and form of the expression.
Signifiers are conventions, in communist China Party didn’t fancy red light to signify “stop” so they ordered that green should represent “stop”. So red doesn’t signify “stop”, it just points out, it shows the colour red, and people decide what that colour means…
@@exlauslegale8534 oh, I see what you mean. Yes, the relationship between signifier and signified (or the forms of expression and content) is arbitrary and a matter of convention, as other post-structuralists have also pointed out. In regard to the quote in the video, it doesn't matter how you call it, though. You could also say, 'modern society prefers the form of the expression to the content.' This, for example, is what some critics have said about the films of Luc Besson; that they favour style over substance. Or, in other words, Besson favours spectacle over substance.
Anyone else here a fan of Blame!?
I would love to see a conversation between you and professor Sam Vaknin.
He's an expert on narcissism and psychology and talks frequentlyc about how social media has affected our minds and personalities.
Hint: we've all become more narcissistic and or codependent.
I think you'd have fun talking with him and i think your audience would gain a lot from it.
Just don't do it to build your profile 😉
He's a self-proclaimed narcissistic sociopath. Don't waste your time simping for that goofball.
777
weed
Nothing is authentic in the sense of trueness. Authenticity is a broadly misunderstod term, which is more correctly defined as "seemingly true".
Autêntico não é o oposto de falso?
Cool narrative.
I don't believe it.
Tremendous Summary! The Age of Second Order Mimetic Imbecility!