Presence and Dependence

We believe we choose independence but cultivate dependence everywhere. This contradiction structures our digital as well as affective lives, and reveals our fear of movement which is yet the very essence of life.

The confusion between why and how

A priori, what we will always advocate in educational or political discourse is independence, that is, critical thinking. We often cite Kant in What is Enlightenment? (1784), “Sapere aude!” (have the courage to use your own understanding). Yet, the reality of what is most often expected, whether in the field of business, school, or family, is obedience much more than independence.

Because obedience reassures, it does not question the system. Even when the system malfunctions, it is already present, it is there, it makes us believe it works because it is the one that operates the organization of the collective. And we are so accustomed to it that we believe it might be the only one that can function. Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish (1975), clearly showed how disciplinary systems create their own legitimacy through their simple persistence over time.

This is obviously false. Independence precisely allows systems to evolve, and even to give them life. This is why, within the systems themselves, the capacity for questioning, evolution, and flexibility is indispensable to their survival. Complex adaptive systems, as Edgar Morin describes them, survive only through their ability to integrate disorder and permanent reorganization.

Unfortunately, this is poorly implemented at the individual level. We sometimes prefer to die slowly and let a system wither away, even the system of our own body, which reassures us because we know it, rather than questioning it. Because questioning seems dangerous for the system, since it will potentially change its operating rules. So yes, it is dangerous for the system as it is, but it is sustainable for the future of the collective or project of which this system is only the infrastructure enabling its existence. We often tend to confuse the why and the how.

What truly matters is the why (the well-being of individuals who compose the group, collective fulfillment, the realization of a common project), not the how (maintaining a certain mode of organizing individuals, even when it would be harmful to them). We believe that stability resides in the immobility of the how, in the perpetuation of the same structures. And we set aside the why, we gradually forget it.

Presence as welcoming perpetual movement

True stability, as Zygmunt Bauman suggests in his theory of “liquid modernity,” is one that consists of always putting the why forward and that inscribes itself in perpetual movement. Allow me to take the image of a café waiter who circulates at full speed between tables holding a tray loaded with full glasses, balanced at the end of his raised arm. If the tray were rigidly fixed to his arm, if he absolutely wanted to keep the tray perfectly horizontal permanently, well this tray would suffer all the shocks of his movement and thus the glasses would overflow, spill and fall all the time! Whereas if the tray accompanies his movement in a harmonious and complementary way, constantly adapting to changes in direction and speed, that is, undulating permanently, well all the glasses placed on it and the liquids they contain move in echo, in a coordinated dance, and thus neither spill nor fall. The stability of the tray paradoxically comes from its permanent movement, from its capacity for continuous adaptation; its sustainability resides in its why which is to bring full glasses safely to the café customers.

This movement that is authorized by independence is intimately linked to a quality of presence. And the quality of presence is precisely this capacity to welcome permanent change, to be in resonance with the reality of the world which is always in movement, never frozen. Heraclitus had formulated it: “One never bathes twice in the same river.” (5^th Century BC) The earth turns, the oceans recede and return with the tides, temperatures fluctuate according to seasons, trees grow, our body continuously transforms, our cells renew themselves, our thoughts evolve. The world is movement, life is movement, and our presence, that is, what founds our harmonious existence in the world, is the conscious welcoming of this movement.

Voluntary digital servitude

But unfortunately, we cultivate dependence much more than we want to admit. I would like to propose here the idea that we are infinitely more dependent than we believe ourselves to be, and that this dependence infiltrates domains where we think we precisely exercise our freedom.

The recurring operating principle of dependence, I have just described it: it is reassuring oneself by putting the how before the why. And this is what blinds us profoundly because, as we are reassured by the apparent stability of the system, we think we are right and that we are independent and free. Even though we actively, daily choose the strongest dependence on a multitude of systems and relationships.

For example, in our use of digital technology, we believe ourselves free with this permanent and ubiquitous access to all our data. As Sherry Turkle analyzes in Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (2015), we have confused connection and relationship, access and freedom. This freedom that seems simple and even consubstantial to our modern lives, which is inscribed in our most daily reflexes of communication with others via our smartphones, instant banking management, GPS navigation, is in reality an absolute dependence on major industrialists, mainly American, who are the exclusive operators of these services, networks and technologies that enable their existence.

We can reassure ourselves by thinking that this is not truly a problem because the economic stakes are so vast that they guarantee the continuity of service. These industrialists, we think, will necessarily ensure the sustainability of their platforms. And thus, there would be no need to worry about it because becoming more digitally independent would be unnecessarily complicating one’s life: having to deal with basely material things, hard drive management, regular backups, domestic NAS and other personal infrastructures.

It seems so much simpler and more intelligent to focus on the essential, namely the content we create and share among ourselves, using these so practical and “free” services. I’m not saying this reasoning is totally wrong, but we must acknowledge that dependence has become absolute.

We believe ourselves free while letting ourselves be piloted by each new service that is offered to us. We believe we are in perpetual innovation, in creative movement, because we constantly adopt new applications, new functionalities. But we believe we are in movement when in reality we are completely frozen and prisoners of the how.

Our lives change superficially, but in this relationship of dependence, and we are completely absent to the very consciousness of our digital servitude. As Étienne de La Boétie wrote in his Discourse of Voluntary Servitude (1576): “They are therefore tyrants those who through wickedness or cunning have managed to steal the people’s freedom; but the people themselves consent to their servitude.” If we were more concerned with our digital independence, we might indeed have the impression of devoting too much time to the how, to managing apparently secondary technical aspects. But it is precisely deceiving ourselves to believe that a tool, a how, is neutral. Marshall McLuhan had perfectly formulated it: “The medium is the message.” (1964) The tool shapes uses and thus transforms us, makes us dependent, even makes us blind to profound changes in our own existences, which are decided by others.

We find ourselves in dependence even in our ways of thinking about the world, which are subtly oriented by tools and algorithms that impose themselves on us without our even questioning their existence as tools. We naturalize them, we consider them as a sort of neutral public service when they are only industrial projects oriented by logics of profit and control.

Consciously taking interest in the how of digital tools is therefore an essential way to become aware of their existence as constructions, of their inherent biases, of our structural dependence, and thus to be able to make truly enlightened choices. Awareness of dependence is the first indispensable step toward a reconstruction of freedom.

The psychic roots of affective dependence

I will now explore another domain, apparently very different but structurally similar: that of romantic relationships. When we meet a person we fall in love with and this relationship fulfills us, enriches us, expands our level of consciousness, we have the impression of fully exercising our freedom of choice. The other enriches us, and due to the intimacy of the relationship, transforms us positively. We receive enormously from this person who becomes so close to us, and this transformation seems beneficial to us because we consciously choose it within the framework of a relationship we consider healthy.

We must distinguish here healthy relationships from symptomatic relationships, the latter being powerful but unhealthy unions, based on the repetition of traumatic patterns rather than on balanced psychic ground, on the authentic encounter of two autonomous people.

Let’s take a truly healthy relationship then. A priori, everything seems perfect: each person freely chooses, without manipulation, to live this relationship, to be enriched by it, to progressively build a common life, perhaps to start a family, to make shared material acquisitions, to marry, to weave ties with respective families.

But if we look more closely, with the acuity that Erich Fromm proposes in The Art of Loving (1956), we discover that very often, even within initially healthy relationships, the relationship ends up fulfilling a function of affective security. The material stability we seek by making a common acquisition of real estate for example, we unconsciously transpose it into the emotional domain. We progressively put ourselves in expectation of the other who must reassure us, like this house to which we return each evening and whose roof protects us from bad weather.

In doing so, without even being aware of it, in all good faith, we have insidiously put ourselves in dependence on the other. And paradoxically, this maintains the illusion of a solid relationship. “When I come home and am reassured by the presence of the other, this is for me solid, stable, lasting.”

It is however exactly what most weakens the relationship. Because as soon as the other would no longer reassure us sufficiently, the entire edifice would waver on its foundations. We actually slip, without noticing it, very quickly into emotional dependence: the anxious expectation that the other constantly reassures us, particularly on questions of romantic exclusivity.

Each person carries within them, and none is exempt from this, affective deficiencies inherited from their childhood. Donald Winnicott spoke of the “good enough mother” to emphasize that no parent can perfectly respond to all their child’s needs. This is not a parental failure, it is a structural impossibility: parents cannot read their child’s thoughts, they do their best with their own limitations, and they cannot perceive or anticipate exactly all their emotional needs.

Thus, each person carries in their psychic baggage a primordial fear of abandonment, a fundamental affective lack. And insofar as love activates these archaic zones of bond and attachment, the feeling of love inexorably confuses itself with these infantile needs for bond security and permanent emotional reassurance.

This confusion engenders jealousy as soon as the other manifests interest in a third person, or even simply when we fantasize this possibility, or even interest in a fulfilling activity, or professional one in which one or the other is involved (“you’re cheating on me with your work”), or even friendships. And this jealousy leads to the desire to possess the other to reassure oneself, which can go as far as the paradoxical desire for submission to the other to guarantee that we reassure them enough so they stay. We can clearly see how the initial feeling of love, potentially liberating and fulfilling, finds itself contaminated by dynamics of narcissistic repair, compulsive reassurance, cultivation of jealousy and fear, disproportionate dependence, objectification of the other, submission to potentially abusive dynamics. It is an intrinsic psychic violence that settles in without there necessarily being conscious bad intentions on either side.

This relational system is dysfunctional, but it is nevertheless the most widespread, the one our culture considers normal and even romantic. We believe that jealousy and love are intrinsically linked, when they are opposing forces: love liberates, jealousy imprisons. With this reading grid, we perceive the extreme fragility of the system: it suffices for one person to develop feelings for someone else, for needs to evolve differently, for fear to settle in, for everything to collapse. We thought we had built a solid system, in reality we are holding up an edifice of extreme fragility at arm’s length, which moreover can persist for years in this state of fragility, making us believe in its solidity, which is only superficial.

Toward a liberating consciousness

This initial choice of engagement in a relationship that seemed a space of mutual fulfillment thus transforms into a space of denial, concealment, lies, dependence and codependence, the exact opposite of authentic independence. The path to travel, in the affective domain as in the digital domain, is a path of consciousness, of patient deconstruction, of meticulous exploration of all these mechanisms. It involves engaging in enlightening readings, sincere exchanges, courageous discussions on the multiple facets of the relationship, of which love is only one dimension among others.

The objective is to understand, without judgment or guilt, the real extent of our dependencies. It is through this progressive awareness that we can hope to reinvest our authentic presence, our true autonomy, and build relational systems in service of human fulfillment rather than its limitation.

This transformation would be particularly beneficial for romantic relationships, whose breakups often cause considerable psychic damage to partners and their children. For lack of having made conscious and untangled these entanglements of dependencies, people remain prisoners, sometimes years after separation, of internalized conflicts, feelings of betrayal, transgenerational resentments that are transmitted like family curses, all of this stemming from this unconscious dependence never elucidated.

This is why the work of consciousness-raising seems to me of paramount importance, particularly today when dependence is also toward tools, therefore of a politics from which we can less and less escape. As Jiddu Krishnamurti might say: “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” Our task is therefore to question our adaptations, our naturalized dependencies, to find again the path of an authentic presence to the world, a presence that welcomes the perpetual movement of life without losing itself in it, that maintains its autonomy while remaining in relationship, that finally distinguishes the why from the how.