Voyeurisme et réticence dans le spectacle du soi

The essay points to the roots of many of the phenomena of aggression that characterize the contemporary digital communication, arguing that they are based on ancestral mechanisms of signification and communication, and even on the bio-semiotic imbalance between the full and the empty, the said and the unsaid, and above all on the sign and cultural imbalance between memory and forgetting. Contemporary digital communication seems to have lost access to those ritual forms that allowed human communities of the past to remedy the said and the done, to manage through counter-narratives a painful past that is impossible to forget and yet necessarily present in memory. Instead, the fragile digital communities of contemporaneity prefer to abdicate this work of continual stitching together of meaning and memory that is necessary for coexistence and prefer to take refuge in the constitution of a reticent collective, where everyone is afraid to say and do because everyone feels that everyone is being watched by everyone else and at the same time everyone succumbs to the ancestral fear of the indelibility of meaning. In this way, however, digital society is transformed into a collective of passive-aggressive voyeurs who are just waiting for someone else to show or express themselves to trigger the mechanism of public ridicule, digital pillorying, generalized stigmatization, and collective hatred fueled by the frustration of reticence. Against the formation of this community of seemingly modest but, in reality, frustrated and violent voyeurs, the essay incites instead to rediscover a taste for the responsibility of speech and criticism, of exposing oneself personally, of showing one’s colors, of transforming the digital arena into a symmetrical theater, where there are no exhibitionists and voyeurs, but individuals eager to speak and listen.