Extimate Sociality I: Disappearance

Ghosting, gaslighting, ragebaiting, form a trio of subtle new terms that define the limits of urban, bourgeosie sociality today. For me these form a necessary part of the study of novel political, economic and social configurations that 21st century has brought about. 

The extraction of social surplus from various milleus that is them commoditized through apps, like Uber or Hinge, or Facebook are not just symptom of a malady, they represent in many ways an end to simplistic humanism and idealitic romanticism, with their roots in highly fascistic, melancholic and male-subjectivity oriented idealism. 

I argue here in a series of articles that what we are witnessing are emerging forms of sociality. While teaching we are often made aware of a 'post-COVID' generation of students, who's sociality switched drastically to more solitary, and alienated exchange. Such generations are seen to have shorter attention spans and are more given to visual learning. However in making such arguments I believe, as a friend of mine recently commented to me: we are always concerned with diagnosis and perhaps in the Social Sciences it is time for some prognosis. 

Extimacy is a Lacanian concept with Heideggerian roots. It emerges particularly in Lacan's Seventh, Tenth and Eleventh seminars. It is closely related to concepts like Das Ding, and Object a. It represents a space of non-intimacy is relations that are conventionally intimate. For example, growing up one might get a sense of the fact that one's parents and relatives have roles and concerns as well as beliefs that one doesn't understand and may never fully comprehend. It is the outside to the inside of intimacy. It is quite literally the uncanny, in the Freudian sense where the unhomely and homely are closely tied together. It is our most intimate sense of being that hides our most uncharacteristic traits and tendencies. 

By extimate sociality I mean sociality where the intimate is no longer expressible, it is surveilled and becomes a point of politics. Far from being concerned about any moral questions here, it is incumbent on us as thinkers of various ilks to be alive to and keen in understanding the shift that we have encountered here. 

In India events like 'notebandi', metoo and finally the COVID pandemic led to an increasing extraction of various social functions onto organized interfaces, a kind of beuraucracy that draws one's social ability and exchangeability into quantifiable terms. Think for example of rating a driver on uber, and getting rated back in turn as against the more archaic hailing of an auto followed by negotiations of price. A number of social functions and discursive practices; hailing, price negotiation, distance estimation, route choosing, knowledge of the city's landscape are all extracted onto the app. 

It is the same with dating apps. Dating apps extract social surplus involved in a very dynamic and consequential social process: courtship and flirtation. It replaces the earlier processes of courtship that function on visibilized non-anonymous networks and replaces it with a form of sociality where a very vast amount of intimate practice has to be produced out of conditions of complete extimacy and anonymity. It is not however the 'anonymous' in the Simmelian sesne of urban anonymity or just strangeness. Instead here the strange in its most derascinated form: a simple profile with cultural likes and dislikes and economic capital displayed, to the complex task of sifting through various permutations of economic and social capital to allow for the emergence a compatiblity. 

It is crucially different from earlier marital websites in that these followed a format that was socially available, with minor modifications to it provided by the interface. In the case of these dating apps it is a case of virality through difference and alienation rather than virality through mimesis. And negotiating the app becomes a negoatition not just of mediating anonymity and producing familiarity but of dealing with ambiguity in language. 

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The term ghosting I find applies very well to this grey space in language. As a modern tactic of the urban bourgeosie it is worth delving into it further.

Ghosting literally means talking to a relative stranger who then suddenly disappears.It induces sudden feelings of withdrawal and melacholia on the person left behind. The other related term is breadcrumbing, which means paying little bits of attention to someone to keep them hooked. However as a number of friends and acquaintances I discussed the issue with suggested, both terms are skewed to one side of the behavioural pattern evinced. Breadcrumbing might also be caution for example on an otherwise volatile and anonymous platform as might ghosting. 

What is striking about all these forms of psycho-scoial investment is that they all produce (as many studies reveal) drastic effects, a total loss of world, of time-perception etc. 

Ghosting presents itself as a minor social fact of the digital age, a small silence in a world saturated with communication, yet its force may be better understood through older grammars of loss. What appears as the mere cessation of messages resembles the structure of bereavement.

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 In the recent movie Train Dreams (2025) *spolier* a lumberjack travels across americas wilds in the 19th century logging, and making occasional acquaintence of a fellow logger. Rather like the sociality of manual labour groups and networks the interactions are fractitious and fragmented. It is rare to meet the same person in two successive labout seasons. The lumberjack returns home to his wife and daughter every season until finally one year in his 30s they die in a fire that burns down the town. The rest of the movie is the story about the lumberjack finding meaning in a world compeltely devoid of signs that stimulate his desire and joy. He lives 80 years waiting on a miracle, rather like Tagore's crushing story 'The post master'. Both stories rely on the presence of hope itself as a kind of addiction that keeps the person's life imprisoned in cycles of hope and despair. Time itself is absorbed into these cycles, and the world becomes nothing more than a landscape of loss for the yearning heart. 

 The loss of the wife arrives not as an event fully grasped but as a thinning of the world, a quiet subtraction that cannot be stabilized by ritual or explanation. The man continues to live among traces, the absence taking on a presence more enduring than any declaration. 

Curiously instances of ghosting often produce a similar condition: not a severance clearly marked but an erasure that leaves the subject suspended between attachment and abandonment. It is here that the comparison drawn by Sigmund Freud between mourning and melancholia becomes analytically precise. Mourning, Freud suggests, proceeds through the recognition of loss, a painful but finite labor in which the object is relinquished and the world gradually restored. Melancholia, by contrast, emerges where loss is uncertain, where the object is neither fully absent nor securely present, and where the subject cannot detach because the conditions of detachment are never established. Melancholia is apriori mourning as a structure. 

Ghosting occupies precisely this ambiguous terrain. The ghosted subject is denied the knowledge that would allow mourning to begin; the other is not declared gone but simply withdraws, leaving behind an indeterminate relation that cannot be resolved through acknowledgment or symbolic closure.

What results is a form of social experience structured by uncertainty, in which the absence of communication becomes itself a mode of communication. The silence is not empty but saturated with meaning, though its meaning remains unstable. One re-reads past exchanges, reconstructs conversations, and interprets delays as signs, much as the widower in Train Dreams continues to inhabit a landscape shaped by what has vanished. The world persists, but it does so in diminished form, its objects marked by the imprint of a relation that has not been formally concluded. This condition produces what might be called a temporal suspension: the future cannot be projected because the past has not been sealed, and the present becomes a prolonged waiting. Such waiting is not passive but laborious, demanding continuous interpretation and emotional investment. It resembles Freud’s melancholia in that the lost object is internalized without being relinquished, transforming absence into a persistent presence within the self.

Yet ghosting also reflects a broader transformation in contemporary social relations, where technological mediation permits exit without confrontation and disappearance without accountability. The digital interface enables a withdrawal that lacks the drama of conflict and the finality of farewell. It allows one to vanish without declaring absence, to remove oneself from the relational field while leaving the other within it. This asymmetry produces a distinctly modern form of suffering, one grounded not in overt rejection but in indeterminacy. The violence of ghosting lies not in what is said but in what remains unsaid, not in the clarity of refusal but in the opacity of silence. It is, therefore, neither simple abandonment nor ordinary loss but a condition in which the subject confronts the limits of social recognition itself. Like the quiet devastation portrayed in Train Dreams and the unresolved attachment described in Freud’s account of melancholia, ghosting reveals how human relations depend not only on presence but on the shared acknowledgment of absence. Where such acknowledgment is refused, the work of mourning cannot proceed, and the subject remains bound to a relation that persists precisely through its disappearance.

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This raises the fundamental question involved with any form of Extimate sociality, the possiblity that one will be entirely without the other. Loneliness epidemics are sweeping across nations in differing ways, and with the commoditization of any form of social surplus, it would perhaps be possible to imagine a more self-sufficient and organized form of loneliess. However the movie train dreams reminds us that disappearance has been a very old human possiblity. In the modern configuration it would seem that we disappear within ourselves, we disappear into our phones, into an increasingly spiraling world of day dreams, into many small deaths (le petite mort) of the everyday. 

In a certain sense no one is more alone than the man who is condemned to death a theme explored quite idealistically by the Hrishikesh Mukherjee classic 'Anand' (1971). Rajesh Khanna's role in this movie perhaps epitomizes the most conventional therapeutic and social response to isolation, alientaiton and loneliness: to bracket and delay as well as to focus on the available world. To focus on the sunsets and sunrises of the everyday, to stiffle the dark sun of the soul. 

I feel however that here Mukherjee could learn a good Freudian lesson: Rajesh Khanna's character is a kind of pure void in the movie, an ideal subject without any fascisitc drives like melancholia, he is given over to the world. But one is forced to ask here a very serious question: isn't this precisely the image of the ideal 21st century post-therapeautic subject that would excel precisely at mastering the depleted social exchanges of digitized sociality. 

Khanna's chraacter expels the extimate permanently,  our question as this series progresses will be, how do people live with it, what expressive forms of life are born of it, and how is one to imbue these new social structures with theory adequate to their analysis.