Interpassivity
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Interpassivity is a concept in social anthropology and psychoanalysis referring to instances where some entity consumes, believes, or enjoys in the place of the original consumer or audience. Interpassivity is not simply the opposite of interactivity since passivity is here conceived metaphorically as encompassing passion, intense experience, deeply held belief or personal affective identification, rather than mere lack of action. Interpassive outsourcing is explained by the psychic transfer of demanding or potentially traumatic experience into a less demanding and more comforting one. Hence, interpassive subjects often prefer to delegate, if only unconsciously, through minor acts of disengagement or keeping distance, their enjoyment or consumption to others for a less intense kind of enjoyment or pleasure experienced through this entity, be it purely symbolic, cultural or technological artefact. The meaning of the term was interpreted mainly (in German) by Robert Pfaller in 1996,[1] and was later taken up by Slavoj Žižek.[2]
The term of interpassivity first appears in cultural theorists’ Simon Penny’s and Mona Sarkis’ texts.[3][4] Pfaller picked up the term at a 1996 symposium in Linz, entitled Die Dinge lachen an unserer Stelle (trans: Things Laugh in our Place); in the same year he published an article entitled "Um die Ecke gelacht" (trans: Laughed Around the Corner) in Falter.[5][6] These titles refer to one of Pfaller's core examples of interpassivity, canned laughter: the laugh track laughs in the audience's place.
Although Pfaller reinterpreted the term, he is openly indebted to a longer conceptual history. In his 1959-60 Seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan argued that, in Greek Tragedy, the Chorus feels (emotionally) in the audience's place; following this insight, in his 1989 book The Sublime Object of Ideology, Žižek argued that canned laughter is the exact modern counterpart to the Chorus. At this point, Žižek refers to the phenomenon as the "objective status of belief", in which the external object believes/feels/laughs on behalf of the subject, leaving the subject internally free from responsibility.[7]