Anthony Curtis Adler answered this
Anthony Curtis Adler, works at Yonsei University
It is important to distinguish between narcissism (a character trait, a psychological ‘drive’, that nearly everyone possesses) and a narcissist (someone whose personality is characterized by an unusually high level of narcissism).
But even more important: we should distinguish between narcissism (at whatever level it is found) and the socio-psychological means by which someone is able to satisfy their narcissism. Let us call the latter the NSM —-the narcissism supply machine.
A narcissist will spend their lives building their NSM. And they will do their best to make it “bulletproof”—-invulnerable to sabotage, to ‘hacking’, but also to any sort of “natural disaster” that might befall them.
(For a sense of what this might mean, read Kafka’s extraordinary and neglected short story “The Burrow (Der Bau).” )
What makes narcissism so interesting is that the narcissist’s task is an impossible task, an impossible one, and indeed the impossibility of the one.
There can be no satisfaction of narcissistic desire, since what the narcissist wants is something contradictory: an emotional payoff that can only come from the risk and danger of submitting to the other yet without the actual risk of submission.
(Hegel already clearly diagnosed a variant of this in his celebrated master-slave dialectic: the master seeks recognition of his mastery, and hence he needs the slave to recognize him as master, and yet the recognition of the slave will always be worthless. Yet there are, however, many variants of this paradox. )
A possible task can often allow an ideal, optimized solution—-and hence in a way only this one solution is really possible. Over time this one solution will tend to triumph over the others. The wondrous thing about impossible tasks is that, since no solution is actually possible, all sorts of bad solutions are possible—-possible as not possible.
The kind of dysfunctional relationship described in the question is only one “solution” to the narcissistic problem, only one possible NSM. There are innumerable others, and while none of these really achieve what they seek to achieve, some are far more subtle, impregnable, and at least relatively “bulletproof” than others.
There are some solutions, moreover, that are so subtle that it is impossible to recognize them as NSM’s. And one might even begin to suspect that a great deal of what we think of as the world consists in an assemblage of these “grandfathered” NSMs—- and this is indeed the essence of patriarchy (and of matriarchy, of every inherited “archy”)
(This is not to deny that often with an extreme narcissist the “solution” —-say: a perfect domestic life—- will only in fact be an appearance, and that somehow the appearance matters more than the reality. When the appearance is ruptured, such a narcissist can end up doing terrible things—Yet it is not clear to me that this superficiality is inherent to narcissism, or that it is not rather the easiest way to build an elaborate NSM with limited resources, as if it were a shoddily-constructed McMansion)
It is quite possible, indeed, that what we think of as “traditional culture” consists in nothing else than a complex assemblage of inherited NSMs. These are often the most innocuous and at the same time the most effective, since their cultural pedigree, their noble provenance, blocks off reflection… This leads to what we might call smugness. Smugness is the aristocracy of narcissism; whereas virulent narcissism has a democratic aspect.
(This somehow makes me think of Princess Diana and Prince Charles —- but I won’t follow up on this)
(And as much as people hate narcissists, they hate the smug even more—- which is why narcissists, even of a rather malignant and unstable ilk, can so easily become our heroes. They are like vicious little mongooses sent out against all those snakes that, coiled around themselves, continue to digest last month’s bloody feast)…
And one must also remember that no human is an engineer when it comes to building their NSM. We are all bricoleurs, jury-riggers—- We work with what’s available… (Kafka also saw this… )… How else could it be: from the moment we leave the womb, we have been assigned an impossible task: reconciling the absoluteness of our selves with the absoluteness of the world… We are everything—- we are nothing.
The materials offered to us, as we try to cobble together our NSM, are whatever offers itself as an avenue of individual success and a viable model to follow.
This can be obedience. This can be criminality… This can be domination, or submission, or individualism. This can be “being good,” or “being bad.” Being smart, pretty, athletic, or even just pleasant and good-natured… Being devout, or being irreverent. Obeying the parents, or defying them…
(People show tremendous ingenuity in building their NSM, but seldom any imagination or real planning—- And thus, at a certainly point in life, if they have the least capacity for self-reflection, they realize that they’ve imprisoned themselves, and been imprisoned, by the path that they chose—-and that was offered them. Often though, by the time they see this, it’s too late. )
Our relations with our parents weigh heavy in this regard, and there is something especially insidious and damaging about this. We are always born into other people’s NSMs, and our own NSMs are entangled with other’s NSMs… This can lead to devastating realizations later on in life.
It might seem to follow, from what I have said, that everyone is a narcissist. It is true, pretty much, that everyone has narcissistic desire—-that narcissism is a general aspect of the human psyche. But not everyone becomes a narcissist in the stricter sense… This is because most people reach a point of satisfaction —-exhaustion—- in the life-work of building their NSM. It is not absolutely bulletproof, indeed it is vulnerable in innumerable ways, but it is “good enough,” and they are “good enough”—- These “good enough” NSMs assume a kind of wondrous stability, and this stability allows them to build on each other —- to support each other, to grown into and around each other.
This, indeed, is what we call society, and a “good enough” image—-I was going to write “perfect” in my typical hyperbole, but I checked myself —- of this “good-enough”-ness is a city: a haphazard ensemble of buildings (mostly poorly constructed, clashing), people (mostly neurotic and semi-dysfunctional) and random, weird things. When NSMs work together, function together, then this, in turn, reinforces their stability-in-instability, their “metastability” as one might say. And, in the fullness of time, it becomes easy to forget their cruel and impossible origins. And perhaps nature itself, even the entire universe, is also just such an ensemble of NSMs, with narcissism assuming its most rudimentary animate, organic, or even inorganic form: survival, reproduction, even bare existence.
A happy marriage is like this: a compact between two people who have both managed, with the prescience that only hindsight ever grants, to compromise on many things in order to hold on to what is most essential… Each one has realized that his partner will go along with his NSM only if he goes along with his partner’s…like a flower and a bumblebee—- a wondrous symbiosis. A relationship is like the life-cycle of minerals: it starts out with a volcanic eruption and the pure, porous, floating rocks born of flame. These get ground down into sand, which is then pressed together, and eventually, under the incomparable weight of the earth, becomes something almost unbreakable… (If diamonds must be forever, it’s because the passions of love are so very transient…)
An unhappy relationship, by contrast, tends to involve NSMs (and there are always at least two in play) that are unstable, that have not deemed themselves “good enough,” and that, in consequence, express their paradoxical instability through dynamic cycles of creation and destruction, hatred and love, violence and intimacy…
There is the widespread idea that contemporary life, especially with the rise of social media, is especially narcissistic. These arguments are often applied to “reactionary” ends: let’s return to family values, let’s get back to country-living and to God—- or worse, to Ethno-Racial identity…
Yet if narcissism is understood in the right way, this much becomes clear: people have always been narcissistic. Anyone who has spent any time in a part of the world where so-called “traditional customs” remain to a degree intact has realized that they are rarely more than NSMs clothed in ritual, habit. This is perhaps why “shame” can weigh so heavy: shame is a way of policing NSMs—- compelling people to adhere to the inherited, legitimated, dominant NSMs as opposed to idiosyncratic, counter-culture NSMs. “Modesty”=accepting the NSM of chastity, marriage, motherhood, patriarchy. “Immodesty”=rejecting this for the NSM of love, of sex, of authenticity.
But it is also important to recognize the value of tradition: it remains the most viable source of metastability. Other solutions demand tremendous patience, intelligence, care—-and may still not really work quite so well. Yet traditional NSMs, beyond questions of justice and injustice, have a terrible vulnerability: they only work if they are not recognized as such. And hence, to an ever greater degree, they don’t work at all. They can only survive with a kind of smugness…
(In South Korea, for example, the clash between these two regimes is amazingly subtle and complicated, yet more so since, at the level of national policies, —- under the aegis of “national branding” —-the Korean government has been actively involved in engineering a collective NSM…Not least among the results: K POP, which is itself paradoxically ultra-narcissistic (celebration of erotic individuality in its most superficial form) and anti-narcissistic (almost total submission to the group, total choreography). This is also the advantage of being a relative “late-comer” to the world stage of global national competition: one can take an engineering approach.)
The only thing that has changed is this: the stability of the inherited order of NSMs has broken down. Smugness has become almost impossible. It cannot stand up to the threat of the global flow of cultural capital. The sense of rootlessness that so many feel comes down to this: we want a NSM that we can live in without thought, without reflection, without shame… that is simply there. We want roles we can play out, costumes we can don; we want to be ourselves without the shame of being ourselves….
This is, I suspect, a fantasy mostly of people from affluent parts of the world. For those who are born into NSMs that remain smug and relatively secure, the challenge of living is very different, especially when they are not the “privileged” elite for whom these NSMs grant the greatest satisfaction. It is the challenge of carving out a space in which they can exist. And this is also true for anyone who those who were born into the violent, dysfunctional NSMs of their parents… This perhaps was also Kafka’s case…
Perhaps no one performed, and understood narcissism, better than Eartha Kitt, and I am reminded of the words of her song, which burrowed into my ear and tormented me incessantly for several weeks last Christmas—-”Santa Baby”
I really do believe in you
Let's see if you believe in me
Let's see if you believe in me
Religion is the NSM to end all NSMs; when every other NSM fails, religion steps in, and steps up… Yet religion, in this sense, has nothing to do with the our belief in the Other. When the child stops believing in Santa, it is only because it has started believing in something else, some proxy: their parents as Santa. Life is a series of Ersatz-Santas: parents, lovers, spouses, the NATION, the PRESIDENT, GOD…And yet this question remains haunted by a very different kind of doubt…
The question is not: do I believe in X, but, does X believe in me; will X reward me for my fidelity, my devotion, my suffering, my beauty, my power, my wit, my grace, my genius…The trap of narcissism—-but has anyone every escaped this trap—- is the impossibility of ever leaving this question this behind…
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So then, “narcissism” is our skin, our external coating and our meta-means of acquiring and enforcing stability. This is very, very clear to me, although it doesn’t explain everything. I will say that I think the opposite, or inverse, to the meta-logic of narcissism is the logic of the schizoid. in fact, I have only ever read one book that bought this home to me, which was Black Sunlight, by Dambudzo Marechera. It is almost impossible to explain the contents of the book, never mind how it functions on the mind of the reader, but the logic is completely disarming of all narcissistic defences (I guess that is one oblique way to describe it). When I read the book, I thought things were structured eternally so that whites and blacks, for instance, in colonial africa, just had different spheres of interest, along with their different identities, historically forged, and that there was no way to encounter the other, on his side of this mental barrier. However, this book creates a phenomenology which is essentially, or actually, the inverse or all possible structures of meaning. And, at the same time, I have never found anything so life-altering or so meaningful. I think this schizoid mode of writing, in a way that is so consistent with an entirely different interior logic to that of narcissism must be the most rare thing on Earth.
APES IN CAPES!
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