Ressentiment towards capitalism fuels a consumer slave-morality based on envied deprivation which favours consumption as passivity and unreflective receptivity. Consumption however, as De Certeau rightly stipulates, is not to be unproblematically equated with passivity or to be thought of, simply and naively, as the opposite of production. It is not.
Instead he reasons, consumption is another production. Consumption is a hidden productive process itself, a hidden poiesis. The ‘consumer-sphinx’ produces practices, ways of “making-do”.
Perhaps inter-passivity can be thought of as such a practice. After all De Certeau’s basic example to illustrate consumption (both as ‘use’ as well as a kind of behavior) is the use of television which also happens to provide the paradigmatic example of inter-passive behaviour. I say ‘use’ because in De Certeau’s opinion we are consumers or users of television which begs the question: to what end do we use or consume television?
In what way, if any, have we turned watching television into a practice in the sense that Certeau means it?
Like cooking and living in the city, watching television provides us with some sort of pleasure. There is a kind of doing-television-watching to phrase this in Certeau’s own idiom i.e. as a performative enunciation. The act of watching television, if it produces anything in our consumer-sphinx, is hidden from an external observer’s scrutiny, one of the characteristics of a practice. The television watcher also has his own set of gestures, another important part of Certeau’s ‘ways of doing’. The gestures might be simple, perhaps even stupid, requiring only ‘ordinary intelligence’, they are still heavily ritualized gestures. For instance to reach for the remote, to flip channels, are rituals in the same sense as those found in cooking (the example discussed at length in the second volume of The Practice of Everyday Life).
But perhaps the most striking parallel between De Certeau’s (or really Luce Giard’s) analysis of the practice of cooking is the idea of ‘multiple memory’. The most avid and skilled television watcher knows exactly what is happening on multiple channels at the same while he is constantly flipping between channels. It involves a kind of calculation, a sense of timing and evaluation of what is shown on multiple channels at the same time, in order to succesfully surf the channels.
On the other hand, the most striking difference between cooking and watching television is that we eat food to live while I don’t suppose anyone would say he watches television to nourish himself. But perhaps this can be remedied if we take into account the isolation one can experience when not in tune with what happened on television last night, in a particular show everyone is talking about at work, or in the train etc. In that sense the practice of watching television can be thought of essential to living.
Finally, the one thing that we can list in a defense of watching television as a practice is the idea of the practice as a kind of subversive action. The Spanish might have colonized and conquered the Indians, forcefully bequeathing upon them their religion etc. it was done on the Indians own terms as De Certeau summarizes: ‘they metamorphized the dominant order: they made it function in another register’.
In the same way, interpassivity can be thought as an act of subversion, as a kind of defensive measure against the pressures of modernity (to always be interactive, online, engaged etc). Suppose we have been colonized ourselves by a dispositif, an apparatus who’s disciplinary excercise of power is through the demand to be interactive.
Interpassively doing-television-watching i.e. having and allowing the television to enjoy in our stead, might very well be an act of rebellion in that case. A way to defend our true enjoyment, the true product of our consumption, by cunningly misleading the Big Other to believe we are in fact enjoying what s/he believes we are enjoying. By completely foregoing interactivity we elude and evade the interactive apparatus while maintaining the appearance (i.e. interpassive behaviour) at the same time.
In this way, to conclude these preliminary remarks, inter-passivity offers a way to escape the realm of ressentiment-capitalism and the naive notion of consumption as passivity which it instills i.e. the slave-morality it nurtures.