On Facebook we can interact by sending kisses, hugs, beatings, and drinks, or even by turning each other into vampires and zombies. We can become part of political groups, let Facebook find our perfect match, join fan clubs or take tests that determine which stripper names, cakes, or philosophers best represent us.

All these actions are ways of building up an online profile—a Facebook identity. We can choose what pictures we upload, tag others, and approve the tags others put on pictures of us; we can become members of those clubs and networks that signal our desired identity, no matter how we are in real life.

Facebook gives us a platform on which to actively build an identity, a surrogate self, that is easier to protect from outside interference than the actual, vulnerable, real-life self. In real life we can be ridiculed, hurt, disappointed with ourselves, and laughed at without being able to censor it. This of course is something that takes place at Facebook as well, but here we can also to a very large degree decide for ourselves who is able to comment on our identity and which parts of our identity we would like people to see. These actions to build up a preferred online Facebook identity are not only interactive, they are also what the Slovenian philoso pher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek characterizes as interpassive. To put it briefly, interpassivity is interactivity’s uncanny supplement-double. ¹²⁰ We not only interact with Facebook, we also let Facebook take on our passivity.

“Passivity” must be understood here in a grammatical sense. It doesn’t refer to being inactive, but to being influenced or submitted to something else. Interpassivity, then, is when a medium—in this case Facebook—externalizes my most intimate feelings: I can become a member of the Obama campaign, a support Tibet cause, or a group for all my old high school friends without actually having spent precious time to show up to a rally, a demonstration, or go back for my high school reunion. Or as Žižek himself explains it:

Suffice it to recall the old enigma of transposed/displaced emotions at work in the so-called ‘weepers’ (women hired to cry at funerals) in ‘primitive’ societies, as in the ‘canned laughter’ on a TV screen, or in the adoption of a screen persona in cyberspace. When I construct a ‘false’ image of myself which stands for me in a virtual community in which I participate, the emotions I feel and ‘feign’ as part of my screen persona are not simply false: although (what I experience as) my ‘true self’ does not feel them, they are nonetheless in a sense ‘true’ just as when watching a TV mini-series with canned laughter, even if I do not laugh, but simply stare at the screen, tired after a hard day’s work, I nonetheless feel relieved after the show.

It is in this sense that our Facebook self can feel for us. Our Facebook profile is interpassive in that it relieves us of the burden of actually feeling emotions directly ourselves, just as canned laughter in sitcoms or weepers at funerals laugh and mourn for us. Our profile online might be a new and improved version of who we really want to be, but this improved version of our self also defers our emotional responses from the person we are off-line onto a online self, who undergoes these things for us.

The interpassivity of Facebook can be seen in four ways:

First, Facebook is something that can feel and believe for you.

Second, it demands a lot of time and effort online; a lot of activity on Facebook.

Third, what motivates interpassivity on Facebook is its ability to let us get away from the duties of our everyday self.

And fourth, and perhaps most importantly, interpassivity involves an ideology that influences the way we act when we’re on Facebook.

We’ll look at each of these four aspects in turn. But first,

Wait, Slavoj Who?

We’ll say a few words about the curious character, Slavoj Žižek. While Žižek can be rather inaccessible at times, and some might even describe him as weird or crazy, he is—perhaps for this very reason—famous for his commentaries on everyday cultural phe omena. Žižek is fascinated by phenomena in popular culture and has commented on everything from wars and political figures to more ‘mundane’ phenomena such as blockbuster movies and toilets. The fact that he himself has not yet commented on Facebook (or at least nothing comes up on Google today as we write this) is surprising. We hope to make up for this lack. So what are the insights that interpassivity gives us about Facebook?

Interpassivity—or How We Let facebook Enjoy for Us

The concept of interpassivity is, as already indicated, best understood in contrast to interactivity. Interactivity is not the same as activity. Being interactive with an object involves actively engaging in it by choosing things or taking part in things. Interpassivity with something, on the other hand, is when it is affected by things or undergoes things on our behalf. Again, the ‘passive’ of ‘interpassive’ is to be understood in the grammatical sense of, for example, the passive voice. In interpassivity, I am active by deferring my passivity , passing it on to something else.

My Facebook profile is an interpassive medium to the degree that it deprives me of the burden my passivity sometimes is; it is the profile that enjoys, laughs, believes in the right political causes and suffers instead of me, thus relieving my own real bodily self of all these sometimes unbearable duties and injunctions of being a decent human being. This is not to say that I don’t necessarily think that I am enjoying spending time doing my status updates or have a genuine belief in the political and ethical mes sages the different online groups have. But as Žižek makes clear in cases like the canned laughter and the weepers, we might think we’re enjoying the show or that we are suffering alongside the weepers, but we are actually postponing this ‘being-affected’ by letting something else do it for us: “The gesture of criticism here is that, no it was NOT YOU who laughed, it was the Other (the TV set) who did it.”

In so far as Facebook is interpassive, then, Facebook deprives me of my feelings and reactions so that my Facebook ‘me’ responds instead of me. On Facebook, the different signs, images, symbols, and interactive buttons rely on interpassivity in that you can not only do things through them, but you can also defer or substitute face to face interactions with virtual ‘face to face’ interactions. Whether I notice it or not, Facebook frees me from the duty to enjoy life and to be interesting (which I now need to be online), so that I can be free to be my more boring and uninteresting self during my everyday chores. To quote Žižek again:

I am passive through the other: I concede to the other the passive aspect (enjoying) of my experience, while I can remain actively engaged (I can continue to work in the evening, while the VCR passively enjoys for me; I can make financial arrangements for the deceased’s fortune while the weepers mourn for me).¹²¹

The interpassive subject is passive through the object—Facebook—and leaves it to Facebook to enjoy while it can be actively engaged in something else—something perhaps less enjoyable than following and commenting on my friends’ lives. Even though I am unshowered and bored by trivial work tasks in front of my computer, my Facebook identity may be exaggeratedly funny or beautiful and in the midst of doing something really interesting. When I’m bored by the text I’m writing and feel stuck and tired, my Facebook profile status might say: “. . . is pondering the interpassive relationship between herself and Facebook”—which makes me seem so much more interesting than I actually feel! I am interpassive because Facebook is having fun instead of me, and I can in this way keep my ‘real’ self in brackets and delegate enjoyment and beliefs to the Facebook profile. This, however, also demands a lot of activity.

The Frantic Activity of Updating Selves Again and Again and Again and . . .

In interpassivity, “the subject is incessantly—frenetically even—active, while displacing on to another the fundamental passivity of his or her being.”¹²² We work hard to uphold the beautiful and interesting image on our Facebook profiles. There are tests to be taken, comments to be made to these tests, statuses to be updated, friend requests to be accepted or rejected, friends to be tagged in notes, and on and on. Tests might include answering a half-dozen questions that can determine what we are meant to do in life (one of the authors proudly displays that she is meant to be a hero!), how white we are, what kind of ethnicity we should be dating (how racist is that?), what our parents should have named us (now we finally get a chance to blame them for all the problems that our poor numerology has caused us). You can even find out what ‘Disney Channel Hottie’ you are! Of course, results are only shown if you actively allow Facebook to publish the result, so one can take a hundred tests and display those one wants to identify with—or identify as. One of our friends on Facebook took the test ‘what type of Foucauldian are you?’ and got the answer ‘Foucault himself’!!! Another one of our friends took the ‘what nation are you test’. His result came out as Germany—a result which resulted in frantic activity to dis-identify with this by making it into a joke.

So on Facebook, the interpassive gesture seems to rely upon the activity of producing of a profile that my virtual ‘face’ takes care of for me. In this way I transfer beliefs and emotions to someone ‘that does it for me’ independently of my ‘real’ existence. A Facebook profile therefore not only becomes another better ‘me’, it becomes a ‘me’ that I can suffer through or enjoy my friends with, but without investing myself fully into this relationship. This also means that my ‘real’ self doesn’t necessarily have to believe in the designed Facebook culture and its different political causes; it is not real, ‘only my friends are dumb enough to take it seriously’. I can invest the functionality of believing at a distance in Facebook, and have it do my social networking for me—like spinning a Tibetan prayer-wheel to have it pray for me.

But whether we believe in it or not, our Facebook profile needs to be kept actively alive. We need to actively care for it, feed it, nur ture it. The profile identity can’t survive on its own. Žižek’s own favorite example of an interpassive object is the Japanese electronic toy, the ‘Tamagotchi’. If it is not fed and cared for, it dies. The Tamagotchi, which can be a doll or a pet, displays when it is hungry, when it needs attention, and when it needs to be loved. If you fail to respond to these demands, it dies. In the same way, if your Facebook profile is not fed, it dies. It is only alive and displaying the ‘right’ identity so long as you actively construct a profile and react to the signs, images, symbols, and buttons. You are responsible for keeping the profile interesting and up to date, responding to the challenges you receive, your friend requests, and the battles you are invited into. To get gifts you need to send cute little teddy bears (or an embittered Marxist, for that matter) to your friends, and to get the result of your ‘Disney Hottie’ test you might need to send a ‘test request’ to at least five of your friends.

Who Am I, Really?

We’re not necessarily victims of the lure of Facebook, however. The promise that Facebook might let us transverse different fantasies of who we might want to be is not all that motivates this interpassive part of Facebook. To understand Facebook as interpassivity does not mean that the time and effort we spend on Facebook is motivated by the promise of becoming someone we want to be. Rather, the interpassivity of Facebook is motivated by the desire to escape the demands that are put on us as part of a social community. Not in the sense that it lets us escape our chores at work or boring nights in front of the TV, but in the sense that Facebook helps us escape the duty to believe in certain values, to act on them, to be a good friend (without finding your friends too demanding), and to enjoy our life in general.

All these acts can be deferred on to our Facebook profile. Facebook, then, can “accomplish a task that concerns my inner feelings and beliefs without really mobilizing their inner states.”¹²³ My activity to construct the funniest, smartest, and most interesting profile is interpassive in the sense that they let me get away from the social duties of my ‘real’ self and let my Facebook profile be the funny, relaxed, understanding and politically correct part of me, so that the rest of me doesn’t have to deal with all that crap.

In the same way, even our ‘real’ bodily self is subject to and determined by the social structure and communities it is part of. Or as Žižek puts it “our social identity, the person we assume to be in our social intercourse, is already a ‘mask’.” ¹²⁴ As real bodily selves, we are always under the sway of different ideologies and expecta tions, in what Žižek calls ‘the symbolic order’—the system of symbols, meanings, and expectations which we are always related to, either through identification or differentiation. We are already masks off-line, then, because this symbolic order demands something of us even before we are born.

Before we are born we are given a mask in the symbolic order. We are given a name and our parents start to invest us with different fantasies and dreams about how we will be. We’re all born into a language that we have to learn and obey. So whenever we speak of ourselves—or others speak about us—we are not merely interacting with others, but with the symbolic order as well.

As Žižek puts it: “our speech activity is grounded on our accepting and relying on a complex network of rules and other kinds of presuppositions.” These rules are both grammatical (if I don’t speak in this way no one understands me) and social (the people I speak with must understand and share my life-world), and perhaps most importantly, all of them demand something from me. We are met with prohibitions and demands about being a good citizen and a good friend, about being honest and self-actualizing. The demand to be someone who is enjoying his or her life and pursuing happiness—as long as this happiness doesn’t have (too many) dirty secrets and obscene and perverse inclinations. All these social demands inform the self we are offline.

What the interpassivity of Facebook then does is to defer all these demands about enjoying life, being a decent citizen, and so on, onto our surrogate selves. When we give our friends a ‘thumbs up’ on their status-update or take part in yet another group for a good cause, the duties we have as a real self are deferred. This also implies that interpassivity does not necessarily defer enjoyment in order to be more ‘authentic’, but instead, it delays what Žižek calls the very duty to be my authentic real self. I defer the duty to enjoy my life (for example, to enjoy the film) to another who passively endures it (for example, the video-recorder), even if that other is my Facebook profile.

The Cost of Interpassivity—Facebook as Toilet

However, by deferring our duties from our bodily self to a surrogate self we are not home safe. In the same way that our real life might be fake (we have to live up to a lot of social demands), the fake self on Facebook has elements of reality to it. So while we do establish a distance to our Facebook identity (it is not the full picture of me) this identity still holds a great deal of reality—not least because Facebook has its own social duties. It demands online time and forms a reality you are intertwined with as a user, whether or not you believe in the significance of your Facebook second-self.

Ideologically, then, Facebook functions in the same way as your toilet. According to Žižek, the reason for the different designs of toilets cannot be reduced to the utilitarian function of ‘doing your number twos’. Different toilets express different ideologies. As he put it:

In a traditional German toilet, the hole in which shit disappears after we flush water, is way in front, so that shit is first laid out for us to sniff at and inspect for traces of some illness; in the typical French toilet the hole is far to the back, so that shit is supposed to disappear as soon as possible; finally, the American toilet presents a kind of synthesis, a mediation between these two opposed poles—the toilet basin is full of water, so that the shit floats in it, visible, but not to be inspected. (“How to Read Lacan”)

For Žižek the toilets themselves express “three different existential attitudes: German reflective thoroughness, French revolutionary hastiness, English moderate utilitarian pragmatism.”

Žižek implies that the ideology contained in the symbolic order is not just what we think of and believe in. Ideology is not just a set of misjudgments about our world: it’s not simply a cover-up that blurs our real actions and what we think our actions are and do. Ideology works on the level of action, not of thinking. For Žižek, the true slave of ideology is the person who knows that what we do is not the only way it can be done, and its implications are not ‘true’, but does it anyway.

Facebook, then, is also a toilet, insofar as it not only serves a function (to connect people), but also prescribes a certain ideology (we have to be funny, interesting, and franticly up-to-date with our profiles to be able to connect) that we don’t necessarily have to consciously buy into to be part of Facebook. We might know that it is, among many things, a time-consumer that doesn’t really change anything, but it is our use of it that makes us a part of the ideology of ‘life as vibrant happy ironic clever creative interesting-ness’—not our intensions and reflections on this use.

So even though Facebook might serve as a medium for an interpassivity that defers the social duties and expectations of our offline selves, we are also part of a new ideology on Facebook. Indeed, when we ‘play’ ourselves online, this play impacts who we are and what we do. ‘Faking it’ doesn’t mean we are just having a bit of fun online. We are really, actually doing something significant and impactful—and that real, actual, significant, and impactful thing is faking it.

In fact, even though the feelings I express on Facebook are not necessarily directly felt by my real bodily self, they can still become true. Or, to put it differently, every time we can locate a sense of yearning that needs to be expressed—but yet can’t quite be put into words, or doesn’t fit an accepted social practice—we also find a gap (however minimal it may be) between the ‘authentic’ feeling and its expression; its externalized form in the symbolic order. This gap between the feeling and expression shows us that the interpassivity of Facebook not only allows us to fake authentic feelings, but also allows us to induce them. Facebook, then, has the Alcoholics Anonymous slogan—’Fake it till you make it’—built into it. What started as fake becomes real when we do it again and again.

Is This It?

Facebook is an interactive medium for political concerns, or for getting in touch with long lost friends and family, or even just for our everyday chatting where we can express hope, cynicism or humor. Some consider this interactivity a way of robbing time from other activities, others say that it is an efficient way to bring people together. Facebook can be used to easily mobilize people: it only takes a click to become part of ‘Save Darfur’ or stop the violence on the street. Others, again, find its claims to democratic power questionable: if it only takes a click, you might join because your friends are part of the group, and not because you care about the group’s cause.

What the concept of interpassivity brings to this discussion is that Facebook, whether we consider it a waste of time or a new political battleground, is also a medium that takes on the sometimes unbearable burden of my passivity. You may think you enjoyed the intimate time with your friends or that you changed something (and you may indeed have changed something) by joining yet another Save Darfur group—but in fact Facebook did it for you. It was not you that enjoyed or cared, it was Facebook. Interpassivity lets me defer the encounter with off-line political acts and that enjoyable meeting with friends I haven’t seen for a while, thus making me keep the belief in its possibility. I can continue to have a full commitment to a political action, as long as I don’t have to make choices about what to actually do, and how to fit it into my already too-crowded life. I can continue to believe that it would be great to catch up with my old friends from high school only so long as I don’t actually ever do so. Actually doing things isn’t difficult because it requires action—it’s difficult because it requires passivity: being affected by things, caring about things, and undergoing things.

The interpassive part of Facebook, then, is its ability to act like the video-recorder that records the films I want to see but never get the chance to. It postpones the encounter with my own passivity, my suffering and enjoyment, while also maintaining the promise that, when I finally do it, it will really be it.