The movement was associated with progress: science and technology, production, consumption. Travel and tourism were booming. The distances and the times were shortened in the speed of the communications that globalized information, tendencies, ideology. Success was measured in the ability to draw crowds who, together with others, shared a recital, a sporting event, a food court. With the same speed, a virus out of control at one point in the world turned into a pandemic. And the panic and the proposed solution were also quickly transmitted: he isolation. From the movement to the arrest, society acquired another profile. We are transiting the stopped society.
Our culture was organized around an ideal of consumption and an offer of enjoyment that aimed to cover all needs. Existential anguish was not in fashion. “Do not stay with the desire for anything” He said a notice that summarized the ideology of the time and the illusion was generated that all wishes would be possible. But behind the brilliance of the promises grew the growing rumor of the marginalization and abandonment of the planet. With the current response to the danger of contagion, we are witnessing the appearance of restrictions opposed to the saturation of waste.or. The conquest of time and space has been followed by the restriction of space, which therefore modifies the perception of time, emptiness is opposed to fullness, distance from closeness, immobility to movement. As always, history confronts us with the dialectic of oppositions. And the rumor of the vulnerable continued to grow.
From psychoanalysis Lacan had warned against the impulse of our time towards progress, movement, the search for truth, knowing more and more, as if that implied a happy and beneficial solution; This can be from time to time, he said, but in other cases it can be disastrous. And he added that the truth is shown in an alternation of strictly opposite things that must be made to revolve around each other. Following your proposal, we could ask ourselves: Who said that more activity and more consumption would bring well-being and happiness? Society privileged the object and not the subject, the search for happiness was out.
Psychoanalysis addresses the concepts of excess and lack in intersubjective relationships around a lost object that it tries to recover in order to solve the lack that afflicts the individual. But this is an illusion, the recovery of all the plus is impossible. Goodwill plus enjoyment. When enjoying and producing something you have to lose or transform. Otherwise, wanting to recover what was lost leads to a sinister result, just as the absence of tension, the lack, leads to death. The plus and the lack are universal phenomena that interact with each other. It has the excess, the voracity in the accumulation of monetary values of a sector at the cost of the lack of protection and the impoverishment of a majority, a policy that tried to privilege profitability without rest, the unrestricted manipulation of nature, have generated an imbalance with consequences dire? From another angle, the interest placed in consumption distorted the desire to transform it into a mandate towards an ideal enjoyment, without limits, another excess that made the individual feel insufficient or excluded. When he does not have a phobia or depression, as an internal limit to the external push.
It is known that at a moment of a certain sign another of the opposite sign occurs. Is it a casual phenomenon? Sometimes it seems to convey an effect of magic or a religious message. However, we can think that the opposite arises because each epoch, each structure, contains the germ of its own opposition, even of its own destruction. In this case, among other conditions, the parate is the evidence of an excess, the inevitable derivative of savage policies that even now do not stop and accept to take the only effective protection measure so far, isolation. And that they no longer tolerate it and seek to boost the movement again, to resume slowed production, even at the cost of lives that they consider interchangeable.
Movement and detention. The arrest that was associated with failure at this point is protection. The responsible leaders of the planet chose to contain, stop, stop, build better conditions of care and cure. Isolation refocuses attention on the subject, on the inside. There are those who take advantage of it, but in many cases the subject is stunned. Fear generates the situation prone to authoritarianism and guilt. The victim is accused of having wanted too much. The representation has been appealed to that this abrupt brake is like a biblical punishment for consumer ambition, or the opportunity to have pacified ailments that now seem secondary to the threat to life is appreciated. The social demands that various countries were going through in pursuit of a more equitable reality were silenced
The new normal must be able to include the loss, manage the lack so that the gain of one sector does not imply the destruction of another. The movement generated by technological and scientific advances is highly rewarding and beneficial, the calls that bring together people passionate about sports, music or intellectual exchanges renew vitality, work, acquire necessary or desired objects, travel, isolate or crowd at will , celebrating, being able to hurt the dead, constitutes us as human beings.
the new normal It is not the banal belief that from now on we wash our hands more frequently or that we wear a mask or that we avoid kissing strangers; Nor is it the praise of the quiet life.
The new normal should be a more equitable distribution of surplus so that the lack does not end up becoming an abyss that swallows us all. With or without viruses.
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Degree in Psychology with Clinical Orientation from the UBA. Titular Member in Didactic Function of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association (APA) and of the Psychoanalytic Federation of Latin America. Author of the book “The hidden subject in virtual reality”.
