Everyone is stimulated, nothing is stimulating
Hyperstimulation, Impotent Desire & The Being-ness of Migrants
This is an essay I wrote in 2022. I’ve been trawling through my older pieces of writing. There’s some good stuff (i think) so I’ll be sharing a few. I’ve also been writing my “book” (hard quotations there haha) ‘Free Range Ethnic’ and perhaps it could be time to start sharing snippets of it. I’ll have a think about that. For now, enjoy this short ( I set a 1k limit) and slightly unresolved piece on one of my favourite tv series of the last 10 years - Ramy.
Ramy’s remarkable Season 3 opens with the titular character’s attempts to recalibrate his life after an unfortunate series of mistakes. Things appear to be on the mend, but for one major issue; he can’t get it up. So he seeks the help of his doctor-friend Ahmed, who subjects Ramy to an EEG test in which images such as “a beautiful woman in a swim magazine” and “Bradley Cooper” are played on a projector in front of him. The diagnosis? Ramy is “over-stimulated''. His morals are “twisted” and his emotional attachment to fantasy™ has imprisoned him in a pornographic nightmare in which attempts at relationships mimic poorly written adult-fiction plotlines.
If you aren’t familiar with Ramy, you’re SURELY familiar with this 21st century gripe of hyper-stimulation; Yes, your mum is right, you DO spend too much time on your phone, though she probably doesn’t know just how much porn you watch. Nietzsche warned us of this passive imprisonment of humankind to pleasure seeking and consumption. Brave New World bore this out in dubious yet engaging speculative fiction. Father John Misty uncomfortably (although catchy AF) suggested that the pleasure apex of technological development is “Bedding Taylor Swift/Every night inside the Oculus Rift”. And Mark Fisher succinctly surmised that “no one is bored, everything is boring”.
For Fisher, Capitalism had in fact “neutralised boredom”: a space he argues was once generative, citing the emergence of the ‘Punk’ music genre as proof positive. He believed boredom had been “neutralised” primarily through capitals insistence on participation (#jointheconversation); a claim which Slavoj Zizek reiterates in his extension of Marx’s ‘Alienation of Labour’ to ‘Alienation of ‘Leisure’. Ramy quite often joins this conversation through the other side of the no one is bored, everything is boring coin; everyone is stimulated, nothing is stimulating. The examples are countless, but the marvelous S1 episode in which child Ramy believes he caused the 9/11 attacks because he masturbated, comes (sorry) to mind.
I see this scene as a portal to some world just before proper Capitalist Realism set in, with its accompanying consumerist obsession of ‘Retromania’. Young, “foreign” to the USA and not yet integrated into hyper-stimulation and nine million streaming services, Ramy believes his dick/subjectivity might actively matter. In an episode which navigates the despicable racial hatred lobbied at Middle Eastern/Arabic peoples post 9/11, the show still searches for moments outside passivity. So why can’t Ramy get hard in 2022, or have a hand (sorry) in global interruption? Our access to social media, “success” and “pleasure” is apparently commensurate: “dicks” have never had the chance to “matter” more.
Matty Healy from The 1975 is almost Ramy-like on the opening to their newly released album - “Feeling apathetic after scrolling through hell, I think I’ve got a boner but I can’t really tell ”. Here the blame is laid squarely at the altar of the doom scroll; the affective locus of non-stimulating stimulation. In 2022 Confusion and passivity rule, a reality the 20th century German philosopher Herbert Marcuse predicted. Like Fisher’s support of the need for ‘boredom’, he was adamant that the satiation of individual desire limits the creative potential of desire. And not only that, the once generative potential of libido and the erotic now only means “sexual experience and satisfication”. A move which props up a status quo of passive and inactive enjoyment that isnt actually the “ideal expression of” our “sexual and romantic desire”. As Zizek often notes; “we don’t really want what we think we desire.”
Stuck between a digitalised rock in 5G and an unable-to-get-hard place, Ramy dives head first into the erotic imaginary impasse brought on by the insatiable Capitalist domination of our attention and pleasure. Its response? Well, it doesn’t really propose a direct answer. Ahmed suggests to Ramy that “love” could be a salve to his impotence, but the season walks gently away from that sexual issue. Season 3 very much informally unpacks Julia Kristeva’s work on the abject and in particular the figure of the migrant. Kristeva’s work on the ‘abject’ is too extensive to properly elucidate here, but can be briefly defined as a prior state to the formation of the human subject via its acceptance into the symbolic order of a “society”. The abject is something which must be moved beyond so that an acceptable social subject can exist e.g. the migrant figure who attempts to assimilate by adopting new languages and religious practices.
But is the socialised subject something to be accepted in a world with no boredom and a “rigidly reduced pleasure field”? Probably not. So Ramy does not do away with what a Western, Capitalist society would find to be abject. What it might wish could be ‘smoothed’ over, neutralized. Rather, the show provides the paradoxes of migrant experience a platform, granting its visual language an interruptive quality through an assemblage of familiar and unfamiliar filmic relationships to the eyes of Western Christendom; Arabic is spoken, Islam is practiced, Jewelry is sold, Ramy’s parents work the gig economy, fecal transplants are suggested and Religious Polygamy is taken seriously. Through the ‘migrant’, Ramy portrays figures who can not just simply participate in the passivity of pleasure, because in some very real sense they can never quite belong to it. And so they float amongst what we fail to see as tatters of ‘The Meritocratic Dream’ and the internal/external racial anxiety of assimilation. Perhaps we should, in whatever ways we can, embrace, discover and create an abject which exists outside the horny scroll of an overstimulated, socialised subjectivity.