The Murcian writer and psychoanalyst Lola López Mondéjar was the winner of the Anagrama 2024 Essay Prize, whose decision was announced this morning in Barcelona by the prize jury, made up of Jordi Garcia, Pau Luque, Daniel Rico, Remedios Zafra and from the Silvia editorial team. Sésé and Isabel Obiols.
The winning work is No story. Atrophy of narrative capacity and crisis of subjectivitya critique of the social consequences of the so-called “digital revolution”. Daniel Rico described it as “an intense and polyphonic dialogue with philosophy, psychoanalysis, cinema and literature.”
For her part, Remedios Zafra, winner of the same prize in 2017 with her essay Enthusiasmdefine No story as “a work on the complexity of a world which encourages people to talk about themselves at all times and which at the same time boycotts the narrative and creative logic that any subject needs to be constructed as such”.
In this sense, during the award ceremony, Mondéjar claimed the “recovery of the individual subject”, which according to her has been blurred by the digital revolution, which she described as “simplification of reality and standardization of the individual personality “.
The era of “stochastic parrots”
The author began her acceptance speech by talking about what she calls “adhesive identities,” which she believes are becoming prevalent in our society. With this term, it defines a personality type that uncritically adheres to all types of causes and ideologies, without analyzing the underlying reasoning that defines them.
Mondéjar assured that the main cause of the spectacular increase in “adhesive identities” is the shift of life to social networks, where there is practically no room for complex explanations and analyzes of reality. “On the Internet, we have ended up gamifying not only our social relationships but also reality,” he added.
In this sense, she underlined that this adherence to often polarized and populist currents of thought has made of us what the psychoanalyst calls “stochastic parrots”, that is to say imitators of the dominant voices – which he calls whether they are politicians or opinion makers. , influencers, YouTubersetc. – always following those who have the highest level of audience and without questioning the veracity of their postulates.
Thought consumers
Mondéjar cites Flauvert’s character of Emma Bovary as the embodiment of the fickle personality devoted to the emotions of that era, which he describes as “the era of the consuming masses” to reflect the fact that more than elaborating a thought , we consume that of another.
“The industrial revolution took place in an improvised manner, it did not take into account the limits of the planet and today we are suffering the consequences”, Mondéjar also underlined to illustrate that “the digital revolution is also taking place improvised manner and does not take into account human limits.
The industrial revolution took place in an improvised manner, it did not take into account the limits of the planet and we are suffering the consequences.
Lola Lopez Mondejar
— Writer
“That’s why the question of whether we are now less human recurs throughout the book,” he added. According to him, we become “psychic cyborgs”, that is to say beings endowed with emotionality and intellectuality governed by machines such as mobile phones, computers… “which are those who think and feel for us.
According to this definition, our opinions are deeply colonized by algorithms and conditioned by social networks, which mark our political affiliations, leisure activities, etc. “We see on television, when any demonstration is covered, that when we ask the participants about their reasons for being there, they babble incomprehensible things, because in reality they have no not done any intellectual elaboration”, he emphasized.
No “creative friction”
No story This also affects the area of personal relationships. “Children today feel overwhelmed when they are not connected, because they have lost the ability to be alone, to be bored and to develop their own creativity,” explains the writer, who believes that ‘thus the “friction” with reality is lost and, therefore, the capacity to mature intellectually and emotionally.
“We are afraid of friction with others, we avoid them in search of the simple relationships that we maintain. gamified to make them painless, and this led us to the loss of desire,” said Mondéjar, who later said that “desire has diminished a lot in current generations, who often prefer to have relationships with machines rather than with other human beings. »
Mondéjar cited thinkers such as Zygmunt Bauman and his concept of “liquid life” to explain how consumer capitalism attacked digital reality, which in turn came to colonize the physical, gradually alienating individual identities in favor of a homogenization dictated by the networks.
“We thought at the beginning that the Internet would serve to improve the quality of our societies and the people who make them up, but we saw that it was ultimately the opposite that happened,” underlined the author, who does not has stopped pleading for a return to life outside the networks, the “return to creative friction” with reality and the return to “the diplomacy of interdependencies that Baptiste Morizot speaks of”. A term that illustrates the following: “We must all live together on this planet because we depend on each other. »
Finally, the psychoanalyst closed the presentation of “No Story” by alluding to the Italian philosopher Franco Berardi and his theory of the Great Defection. “We see that women are abandoning reproduction,” said López Mondéjar, who sees this as a rejection of the capitalist system. “We must desert more,” he said in conclusion.
