201
Filozofski vestnik | Volume XLIII | Number 3 | 2022 | 201–237 | cc by-nc-nd 4.0 | doi: 10.3986/FV.43.3.09
* Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana.| barakolenc@gmail.com
Bara Kolenc*
Voyeurism and Exhibitionism on the Internet: 
The Libidinal Economy of the Spectacle of 
Instanternity
Introduction
Today, in the situation that we call the instanternity of the digital age, the visual 
aspect of social (and power) relations is ever more important. The majority of 
human interactions on the Internet are happening in the field of vision. In this 
field, human desire follows the scopic drive, which is, according to Freud, ex-
pressed in the ambivalence of voyeurism and exhibitionism.
The notion of instanternity marks the constellation of reality in today’s digital-
ized world, but can also be used as a broader name for the digital age itself. In 
this, say, historical sense, instanternity is the name of the period that comes 
after “postmodernity” and is currently on the rise. Conceptually, it denotes the 
restructuring of our perception of time induced by digitalization, concerning, in 
the first place, the relation between finitude and infinity, which deeply affects 
the constitution of subjectivity and socio-economic structures.1 
An analysis of voyeurism and exhibitionism on the Internet, that is, in the spec-
tacle of instanternity as the reality irreversibly permitted and determined by the 
digital virtual, will therefore – this is what is at stake in of this article – help us 
understand a certain aspect of the mechanisms constituting the social tissue to-
1 We have coined the notion of “instanternity” as a conceptual crossbreed between the “in-
stant” and “eternity”. While in the traditional analogue perception of time the moments of 
the now represent the inexistent, always already lost reality, today, with the emergence of 
the virtual environment, the moment, the instant, becomes the merging point of reality as 
it is. The reality of the digital era builds upon a certain “preservation” and accumulation of 
present moments in a topological arrangement of time. In an enthralling way, the shift in 
our perception of time taking place with digitalization corresponds to the “timelessness” 
of the unconscious. This has enormous effects on the constitution of subjectivity and of 
the world today. It affects everything: psychic and socio-economic structures, the distribu-
tion of power, the relation between the particular and the universal, the mechanisms of 
grounding the political, and the human account of nature. 
202
bara kolenc
day, especially their inner hindrances as well as their transformative potential. 
This analysis, of course, exceeds the spatial limitations of one article. Of the 
three steps of the analysis, we will, at this point, only focus on the first one: the 
relation of voyeurism and exhibitionism to the scopic aspect of the spectacle of 
instanternity. What we want to trace here are the shifts, the minimal structural 
and phenomenal leaps triggered by the outspread of the digital virtual, which, 
even if they might not be immediately recognizable as the “break” with reality 
as it was (before digitalization), they nevertheless break with reality as it was.
In order to reach this goal, we will need to execute certain preliminary elabora-
tions on: 1) the relation of voyeurism and exhibitionism to the scopic field, that 
is, to the field of vision determined by the gaze and the light, and to its functions 
(the eye, the gaze, the picture, the image, the lure); 2) the relation of the scopic 
field and its functions to what Debord called “the spectacle”, that is, “a social 
relation between people, which is mediated by images”2; 3) the relation between 
Debord’s old spectacle and the spectacle of instanternity; 4) The relation be-
tween the screen and the mirror; 5) the unprecedented aspects of the function 
of the computer screen.
This topic, in a broader sense, tackles the inscription of the subject within the 
digital virtual spectacle, which deals with the relation between the individual’s 
imaginary and symbolic identification, that is, between the ideal ego and the 
ego ideal (the first step of the analysis executed in this article), with the enigmat-
ic liaison between the subject’s genuine ability to “play with the screen” and the 
processes of interpellation (the second step), and, finally and most importantly, 
with the question of the activity and passivity (or interpassivity) of the political 
subject, focusing on the prospects of their social activation (the third step). 
Adhering to Lacan’s comment that “there are many ways of being wrong about 
the function of the subject in the domain of the spectacle,”3 we should make sev-
eral preliminary remarks here:
2 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. K. Knabb, London, Rebel Press, 2005, p. 7.
3 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. A. Sheridan, New 
York, London, W. W. Norton & Co., 1998, p. 97.
203
voyeurism and exhibitionism on the internet
1. The inscription of the subject in the digital virtual field does not function 
exclusively in the digital virtual environment understood as some sort of 
a meta-world separated from (and imposed on) the “real” one. This is be-
cause a) these two worlds cannot be radically separated, and b) in a pure-
ly Deleuzian sense, both the actual and the virtual are real.4 What is reali-
4 The virtual, for Deleuze, possesses full objective reality, and cannot be confused with the 
possible, which lacks reality. Whereas “the possible is the mode of identity of concepts 
within representation, the virtual is the modality of the differential in the heart of Ideas,” 
as Deleuze states (Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton, Continuum, 
London, New York, 2004, p. 350). Ideas are, thus, pure virtuality: “All the differential re-
lations brought about by reciprocal determination, and all the repartitions of singulari-
ties brought about by complete determination, coexist according to their own particular 
order in the virtual multiplicities which form ideas.” (Ibid., p. 349.) As Freud notes in The 
Interpretation of Dreams, “everything that can be an object of our internal perception is 
virtual” (Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams: The Complete and Definitive Text, 
trans. and ed. J. Strachey, Basic Books, New York, p. 606.). The relation between the virtual 
and the actual is, in Deleuze’s view, “as though everything has two odd, dissymmetrical 
and dissimilar ‘halves’,” each dividing itself in two: “an ideal half submerged in the virtu-
al and constituted on the one hand by differential relations and on the other by correspon-
ding singularities; an actual half constituted on the one hand by the qualities actualizing 
those relations and on the other by the parts actualizing those singularities.” (Ibid., p. 
350.) Lacan, speaking about the imaginary plane and the scopic field, differentiates bet-
ween the “real image” as a representation in my mind of an object which I look at directly, 
and the “virtual image” as the mirror image of the object, that is, a representation in my 
mind of an object which I look at with the mediation of a mirror. In this article, the diffe-
rentiation between the actual and the virtual, which refers specifically to the difference be-
tween the non-digitally intermediated reality and the digitally created reality, somewhere 
echoes both Deleuze’s and Lacan’s notions. As for Deleuze, also for us both the actual and 
the virtual possess full objective reality, and are perplexed in the spectacle of instanter-
nity as “two odd, dissymmetrical and dissimilar ‘halves’.” However, if we were faithful to 
Deleuze (and we will refrain from this here), we would need to say that 1) both the non-di-
gital actual reality and the digital virtual reality have their “virtual and actual half”, and 
that 2) at the same time, neither the non-digital actual reality nor the digital virtual reality 
function beyond the plane of representation, identities, similarities, and contradictions, 
like Deleuze’s virtuality and actuality of differenciation and repetition do, but are both 
largely connected to this plane. On the other hand, we can fully adhere to Lacan’s notion 
of the virtual as that of an image in the mirror, for the computer screen is itself acquiring 
a certain “derailed” function of a mirror. At the same time, we are transforming Lacan’s 
differentiation between the real and the virtual image into the division between the ac-
tual and the virtual image, where both of them are real. Our notion of “reality” basically 
refers to Hegel’s definition of reality [Realität] as an existent quality [seiende Qualität], 
which contains negation as determination: “Quality, in the distinct value of existent, is re-
ality” (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. and ed. G. di Giovanni, 
204
bara kolenc
ty today is the very merging of the digital and the non-digital, the merging 
which is but a (repetitive, continuously boosted) stream of traversing the 
unsurmountable gap between them.5
 
Ad a) From the moment of the emergence of the digital, the actual world 
cannot be separated from its determinate negation as the non-digital. In 
the age of instanternity, the pre-digital turns into a myth. At the same 
time, in its striving to take supremacy over the actual physical existence 
as something that needs to be sublated (say, with multi-sensory technol-
ogies), the digital virtual can only exist in relation to the non-digital. Only 
in this sense – and not in the sense of a nostalgic idealization of “real 
life” as some primordial harmonic relation between the individual and 
the world, which has allegedly become lost forever throughout the indus-
trial and post-industrial processes of alienation – should we understand 
Debord’s statement that the spectacle is a “visible negation of life.”6
 
Ad b) Or, as Debord expresses himself: “objective reality is present on 
both sides.”7 He understands the connection between the spectacle and 
actual reality as a dialectical process of “reciprocal alienation”, where 
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 85.), and “Reality itself contains negati-
on; it is existence, not indeterminate or abstract being” (Ibid., p. 88.).
5 One of the possible prospects of the future is that the gap between human self-awareness 
and external reality might well close, thus sublating the traditionally “transitional” cha-
racter of man, and radically changing the status of the subject: “Once a direct connecti-
on of our brains to a digital network crosses a certain threshold (which is a quite realistic 
prospect), the gap separating our self-awareness from external reality will collapse (be-
cause our thoughts will be able to directly influence external reality and vice versa, and 
we will also be in direct contact with other minds).” (Slavoj Žižek, “Apokalipsa ožičenih 
možganov” [The Apocalypse of a Wired Brain], Problemi, Vol. 57, Nos. 7-8, Ljubljana, DTP, 
Analecta, 2019, p. 21.) From the original in Slovene, translated by B. K.: “Ko bo neposredna 
povezava naših možganov z digitalno mrežo presegla določen prag (kar je precej realističen 
obet), se bo vrzel, ki ločuje naše samozavedanje od zunanje realnosti, sesedla (ker bodo 
naše misli lahko neposredno vplivale na zunanjo realnost in obratno, poleg tega pa bomo 
tudi v neposrednem stiku z drugimi umi).” The question is, however, whether closing the 
gap between the non-digital actual and the digital virtual is a direct consequence of clo-
sing the gap between human self-awareness and external reality or not. Or, put differently, 
is the gap between human self-awareness and external reality a condition of the possibili-
ty of the gap between the non-digital actual and the digital virtual or not?
6 Debord, Society of the Spectacle, p. 9.
7 Ibid., pp. 8-9.
205
voyeurism and exhibitionism on the internet
the two beings-in-themselves (the reality of the spectacle and actual real-
ity) mutually negate (and therefore determine) each other: “The specta-
cle cannot be abstractly contrasted to concrete social activity; each side 
of such a duality is itself divided. […] The spectacle that falsifies reality is 
nevertheless a real product of that reality. Conversely, real life is materi-
ally invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle, and ends up absorb-
ing it and aligning itself with it.”8 Reality, therefore, “emerges within the 
spectacle, and the spectacle is real.”9
2. Instanternity marks both the constellation of reality in today’s digitalized 
world and its spatio-temporal predispositions.10
3. The digital virtual cannot be reduced to its spectacular aspect, but the 
spectacular aspect represents a good part of it. As far as we consider or 
investigate the digital virtual from the perspective of the scopic field, the 
digital virtual reality, in a fundamental dialectical intertwinement with 
the non-digital actual reality, is the spectacle.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Due to the limitation on the length of this article, the spatio-temporal aspect underlying 
the reality of instanternity is left aside here. However, it is possible to argue that even be-
fore Heidegger’s project of the “temporalization of being (and its consequent ontologi-
zation of time)” (Bara Kolenc, “Is it too late?”, Problemi International, Vol. 58, Nos. 11-12, 
Ljubljana, DTP, Analecta, 2020, p. 115.) and Hegel’s “way towards a de-ontologization of 
time through the temporalization of the original cut as the co-determination of being and 
nothing/non-being” (ibid.), one of the most prominent philosophical fathers of the thus 
defined “instanternity” was Fichte and his philosophy of the I positing itself and the world 
right here, right now. While previous philosophies relied on some timeless frame of onto-
logical categories, Fichte’s I is entirely thrown into the full urgency of the present moment 
in which it must emerge. See especially Jure Simoniti’s reading: “Fichte did not stumble 
upon a foundation, which metaphysics was still supposedly capable of finding, but he, 
quite to the contrary, revealed that very groundlessness of being that must be filled out 
only here and now.” (Jure Simoniti, “Ko je svet začel gledati skozi nas. Fichte in ekološki 
argument” [When the World Started to Look Right Through Us. Fichte and the Ecological 
Argument], Problemi, Vol. 60, Nos. 5-6, Ljubljana, DTP, Analecta, 2022, p. 190. From the 
original in Slovene, translated by B. K.: “Fichte ni trčil na temelj, kot ga je dozdevno znala 
najti metafizika, temveč je, nasprotno, razkril tisto breztemeljnost biti, ki jo je treba zapolniti 
šele tukaj in zdaj.”
206
bara kolenc
4. The scopic field, the field of vision within which the spectacle operates, is 
not related solely to, or limited to, the image.11 Beyond the geometral pa-
rameters of the image, it is determined by the gaze and the light.
5. Debord’s notion of the “fundamentally spectalist” society should there-
fore be extended beyond the concept of the image in order for some of his 
insights to be applicable to instanternity as the unprecedent assembling 
of reality invoked by digitalization.
6. As long as the digital virtual needs the gaze and the light as its conditions 
of possibility, it operates within the scopic field, even if it does not handle 
images. To this extent, the digital virtual, in a dialectical relation with the 
non-digital actual, forms the spectacle of instanternity. In this sense, the 
spectacle, in Debord’s words, “represents the dominant model of life.”12 
7. In the scopic field, the spectacle takes place on two scales: on the level of 
the image and on the level beyond the geometral parameters of the image. 
The inscription of the subject in the spectacle of instanternity therefore 
refers to a) the image of the body, in a narrow sense (dealing with the in-
dividual’s imaginary identification, the ideal ego), and to b) the subject’s 
emergence in the field of the gaze and the light beyond the image, in a 
broader sense (that is, on the level of symbolic identification, the ego ide-
al). Both levels are interconnected. As Lacan demonstrated with the op-
tical model of a phantom bouquet, the symbolic order structures the im-
aginary: “My position in the imaginary is only conceivable insofar as one 
finds a guide beyond the imaginary, on the level of the symbolic plane.”13
8. In this respect, the inscription of the subject in the spectacle of instanter-
nity a) cuts across the gap between the digital virtual and the non-digital 
actual, and b) traverses not only the geometral parameters of the image, 
11 Here, we are referring to Lacan’s notion of the image, which leans on a definition of the 
image in optics: “to every point on the object there must correspond a point on the image, 
and all the rays issuing from a point must intersect again somewhere in a unique point.” 
(Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953-
1954, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. J. Forrester, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 123.)
12 Debord, Society of the Spectacle, pp. 8-9.
13 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I, p. 141. 
207
voyeurism and exhibitionism on the internet
but also the field of the gaze and the light beyond the image, linking the 
scopic field with the field of language, as well as computer language.
9. As long as the scopic drive is expressed in the dialectic of voyeurism and 
exhibitionism, these two mechanisms represent the privileged entry for 
the analysis of subjectivity and intersubjectivity in the spectacle of in-
stanternity.
You Never Look at Me from the Place from Which I See You and What I 
Look at Is Never What I Wish to See
Generally speaking, the apparition of the subject in the scopic field involves a 
lure: “The subject is presented as other than he is, and what one shows him is 
not what he wishes to see.”14 The lure unravels the relation between exhibition-
ism and voyeurism as non-complementary. It is not a simple symmetric inverse 
in the sense “I wish to see what you show, and what I show is what you wish 
to see.” Because desire, unlike need, is structurally insatiable (what I desire is 
always “not that”), what triggers desire in the voyeuristic, exhibitionistic inter-
play is the very discrepancy between what one shows and what the other wishes 
to see, on the one hand, and between how one wishes to be seen and what the 
other sees, on the other. It is the very failure, the very impossibility of the fulfil-
ment of exhibitionistic and voyeuristic desire, which drives their mechanisms.
What, in love, is a reproach – you never look at me from the place from which I see 
you and what I look at is never what I wish to see – has a certain relation to the 
logic of desire in exhibitionism and voyeurism. Here we are dealing with the re-
lation of the subject to another subject as the object of desire. The first sentence, 
you never look at me from the place from which I see you, refers to exhibitionism. 
In my desire, I show myself, I put myself into sight (donner-à-voir), thus putting 
myself under the gaze of the other. I make myself a picture, aspiring to trigger 
the other’s desire. I want the other to look at me from the place from which I 
see him or her. But I necessarily fail. Not because the other is unable to “look 
through my eyes,” but because it is structurally impossible for the other to enter 
the origin of my vision. The thing is that even if the other would somehow magi-
cally manage to crawl into my eye, he or she would still not be able to look at me 
14 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 104.
208
bara kolenc
from the place from which I see him or her. For the true origin of my vision is not 
in my eye – it is displaced in the symbolic. 
The place from which I see you is the place of my symbolic identification, I(A), 
of the ego ideal, Ich-ideal. When making myself a picture, I am reaching beyond 
the geometral parameters of my imaginary identification, i(a), that is, beyond 
the identification of my self-reflective consciousness with my image in the mir-
ror, which is represented in my mind as the “image of myself”, and in refer-
ence to which I recognize myself as a whole and a self-identical entity, forming 
thereby the instance of the ideal ego, Ideal Ich, instituted, from Lacan’s devel-
opmental perspective, with the notorious “Aha-Erlebnis” in the “mirror stage”. 
The subject emerges in the scopic field where the imaginary reveals itself to be 
structured by the symbolic:15 “Imaginary identification offers the support of rec-
ognition in the image, i.e. in an ‘objectified’ ego, through which the ego comes to 
itself, whereas identification through desire establishes the place of the subject 
as irreducible to any representation, as a void beyond all possible representa-
15 Lacan’s elaboration of the scheme of the phantom bouquet, an optical illusion described 
by George M. Hopkins in his Experimental Science from 1890, defines the relation between 
the imaginary and the symbolic, and, thereby, also the relation between one’s imaginary 
and one’s symbolic identification. The picture of the bouquet in a vase, which I see in the 
plane mirror with the help of a concave mirror, is only an illusion (for actually the bouquet 
is not in a vase, only the play of the mirrors represents it as if it were). With a shift in the 
direction of the gaze (if I step to the side), the bouquet “falls out of the vase” and what I 
considered to be “real” reveals itself to be merely an illusion. The shifted direction of the 
gaze is the true origin of one’s vision set on the symbolic plane. The imaginary perspective 
is, therefore, always illusory: “where the subject sees himself,” that is, where he recogni-
zes “the inverted image of his own body” in the plane mirror as himself (the ideal ego), 
“it is not from there that he looks at himself.” (Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of 
Psychoanalysis, p. 144.) The place from where he looks at him, namely, is not the gaze in 
his eye, but the offset place of the barred subject as a symbolic guide governing the angle 
of the plane mirror. It is from this place from which he forms his symbolic identification, 
the ego ideal.
 
209
voyeurism and exhibitionism on the internet
tion, and thus also as the inner agent and principle of the articulation of rep-
resentations.”16
The second sentence, what I look at is never what I wish to see, refers to voyeur-
ism: what one shows the subject is never what he or she wishes to see. As a voyeur, 
I relate to the object of my desire – I want to see what is not shown to me, what is 
hidden, and what is forbidden to be seen. I want to see “that”. In trying to grasp 
what is beyond what one shows me – an indefinite something that I assume 
is hiding behind the curtain – I fail again. There is nothing behind what one 
shows. For the subject is itself but a picture, a lure, a play with a screen. But as 
the very impossibility of satisfaction is the lever of desire, what drives a voyeur 
is exactly the object as an absence: “What the voyeur is looking for and finds is 
merely a shadow, a shadow behind the curtain.”17 
Because exhibitionism and voyeurism are the two forms of the rudimentarily 
ambivalent scopic drive, every exhibitionist is unconsciously also a voyeur – 
and the other way round. 
The Ambivalence of the Scopic Drive: Voyeurism and Exhibitionism 
“Visual impressions,” remarks Freud in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sex-
uality, “remain the most frequent pathway along which libidinal excitation is 
aroused.”18 Scopic drive, which is represented in the pair of opposites – Schau-
lust, the pleasure in looking, often translated into English as scopophilia, or vo-
yeurism19, on the one hand, and exhibitionism – Zeigelust, the pleasure in show-
16 Mladen Dolar, Samozavedanje: Heglova Fenomenologija duha II. [Self-Consciousness: 
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit II.], Ljubljana, DTP, Analecta, 1992, p. 23. From the origi-
nal in Slovene, translated by B. K.: “Imaginarna identifikacija ponuja oporo prepoznanja v 
podobi, torej v nekem “objektnem” Jazu, preko katerega Jaz pride do samega sebe, naspro-
tno pa identifikacija skozi željo vzpostavlja mesto subjekta kot nezvedljivega na katerokoli 
reprezentacijo, kot praznino onkraj možne reprezentacije, s tem pa tudi kot notranje gonilo 
in princip členitve reprezentacij.”
17 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 182.
18 Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905). The Standard Edition of the 
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume VII (1901-1905), trans. J. Strachey, 
London, The Hogarth Press, 1949, p. 161.
19 Consistently, Freud couples exhibitionism with Schaulust, and not with voyeurism, which 
for him denotates specifically the aspect where Shaulust as a normal function of the hu-
210
bara kolenc
ing, on the other hand – is not only one of the most important players in an 
individual’s psychic constitution, but has, for Freud, a specific conceptual im-
portance. Not only does it serve, along with sadism and masochism, as a prom-
inent example of the ambivalence of drives, but it also allows him to elaborate, 
specifically in Instincts20 and its Vicissitudes, on the complex intertwinement of 
a) the two vicissitudes of the drives (out of four, sublimation and repression be-
ing left aside in this study), that is, the reversal into its opposite [Verkehrung ins 
Gegenteil]21, and turning round upon the subject’s own self [Wendung gegen die 
man psyche turns into a perversion. For example, Freud uses the couple voyeurism-exhibi-
tionism in claiming the ambivalence of drives: “Whenever we find in the unconscious an 
instinct of this sort which is capable of being paired off with an opposite one, this second 
instinct will regularly be found in operation as well. Every active perversion is thus ac-
companied by its passive counterpart: anyone who is an exhibitionist in his unconscious 
is at the same time a voyeur.” (Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905). The 
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume VII (1901-
1905), p. 167.) For Freud, Shaulust is itself a normal function of the human psyche, which 
turns into a perversion under specific conditions: “On the other hand, this pleasure in lo-
oking [scopophilia] becomes a perversion (a) if it is restricted exclusively to the genitals, 
or (b) if it is connected with the overriding of disgust (as in the case of voyeurs or people 
who look on at excretory functions), or (c) if, instead of being preparatory to the normal 
sexual aim, it supplants it. This last is markedly true of exhibitionists, who, if I may trust 
the findings of several analyses, exhibit their own genitals in order to obtain a reciprocal 
view of the genitals of the other person.” (Ibid., p. 157.) A perversion, further on, turns into 
a pathological symptom, if “instead of appearing merely alongside the normal sexual aim 
and object, and only when circumstances are unfavourable to them and favourable to it—
if, instead of this, it ousts them completely and takes their place in all circumstances—if, 
in short, a perversion has the characteristics of exclusiveness and fixation—then we shall 
usually be justified in regarding it as a pathological symptom.” (Ibid., p. 161.) In this arti-
cle, we use the terminological couple of voyeurism-exhibitionism as the two aspects of the 
scopic drive, which can be understood on a scale from the “normal” functions of a psychic 
apparatus, to perversions, and to pathological symptoms. Schaulust, on the other hand, 
is used as the economic term, expressing the “third great polarity” of human psyche, that 
of pleasure-unpleasure, and can be, in this sense, coupled not with the term exhibitioni-
sm, but Zeigelust, the pleasure in showing. The scopic drive is therefore understood in the 
ambivalence of voyeurism-exhibitionism from the perspective of the polarities activity-pas-
sivity and object (external world) and subject (ego), and in the ambivalence of Schaulust-
Zeigelust from the perspective of the polarity of pleasure-unpleasure.
20 James Strachey, the translator of The Standard Edition of the Collected Works of Sigmund 
Freud, consistently translated Freud’s term “Trieb” with “instinct”. As Freud distinguishes 
between “Instinkt” and “Trieb”, “drive” is a more accurate translation for the latter.
21 Regarding the reversal of a drive into its opposite, Freud traces two different processes 
here: a change from activity to passivity, and a reversal of its content. While the second 
211
voyeurism and exhibitionism on the internet
eigene Person], and b) two out of the “three great polarities that dominate mental 
life,”22 i.e. the polarity of subject (the ego) and object (the external world), and 
the polarity of activity and passivity.23
It is through the elaboration of the two “best-known sexual instincts that appear 
in an ambivalent manner,”24 voyeurism-exhibitionism and sadism-masochism, 
where Freud draws a clear line between the polarity of activity-passivity, on the 
one hand, and the polarity of subject (ego) and object (external world), on the 
other, while, at the same time he points to their fundamental interweaving. For 
Freud, the “antithesis active-passive must not be confused with the antithesis 
ego-subject – external world-object.”25 An important observation here is that the 
reversal in the polarity of activity-passivity affects the aims of the drives, where 
“the active aim (to torture, to look at) is replaced by the passive aim (to be tor-
tured, to be looked at),”26 whilst the reversal in the polarity of subject-object ac-
counts for the change of the object, the aim remaining unchanged: “The turning 
round of an instinct upon the subject’s own self [die eigene Person] is made plau-
sible by the reflection that masochism is actually sadism turned round upon the 
subject’s own ego [das eigene Ich], and that exhibitionism includes looking at 
his own body.”27 Nevertheless, we cannot fail to notice, states Freud, that both in 
one, the transformation of a drive into its “material” opposite, is explained through the 
single example of love (which admits not only of one, but of three different opposites – 
loving-hating, loving-being loved, and the complex of loving-hating as the opposition to 
unconcern or indifference), the first one, a change from activity to passivity, is elaborated 
through an analysis of the two pairs of opposites: voyeurism-exhibitionism and sadism-
-masochism.
22  Sigmund Freud, Instincts and Their Vicissitudes (1915). The Standard Edition of the 
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV, trans. J. Strachey, London, 
The Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1957, p. 140.
23 Although the third polarity, that of pleasure-unpleasure, is not specifically addressed in 
Freud’s elaborations on exhibitionism and voyeurism, it is, of course, the driving force of 
both exhibitionism as Schaulust and voyeurism as Zeigelust, running to a good extent on 
the masochistic enjoyment detected by Freud as the initially incomprehensible pleasure 
in unpleasure.
24 Freud, Instincts and Their Vicissitudes (1915). The Standard Edition of the Complete 
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV, p. 132.
25 Ibid., p. 134.
26 Ibid., p. 127.
27 Ibid.
212
bara kolenc
voyeurism-exhibitionism and in sadism-masochism “the turning round upon the 
subject’s self and the transformation from activity to passivity coincide.”28 
The change of the object coincides with the change of the aim: with the turning 
of a drive upon the subject’s own self, the active aim turns into a passive one, or, 
which is the same process, the shift from the active aim to the passive one results 
in the turning of the drive upon the subject’s own self. In the case of an exhibi-
tionist, who shares in the enjoyment of his or her exposure, this means that, si-
multaneously, the external object (a mother or any other person, her genitals, or 
any other part of her body, or a fetish) has been replaced by the subject’s own self 
(his or her own genitals or any other part of his or her body), and the active aim 
(to look at) has been substituted by the passive aim (to be looked at). An exhibi-
tionist is therefore showing off, exposing parts of his or her body (a change in the 
object, which now becomes the subject’s own self) in order to be looked at, to be-
come an object of desire of the other (a change in the aim from active to passive). 
What we can notice here is that for Freud – somewhat counter-intuitively – the 
voyeur is the active agent, while the exhibitionist is the passive one. Our in-
tuition normally follows the well-known mantra of passive observers, specta-
tors–consumers, who are unable to change the order of things, versus active 
performers, the actors in the spectacle, the players on the world’s stage holding 
the conductor’s stick. For Freud, an exhibitionist is indeed very much active in 
showing himself29, but in following his aim, in his desire, he occupies a passive 
position: what he desires is not to look at (to see, to perceive, to notice), but to 
be looked at (to be seen, to be perceived, to be noticed). An exhibitionist invests 
much of his effort into putting on all the masks, the costumes, the make-up, the 
personas, running around, laughing and speaking loudly; he is super-active, 
but at the end of the day, all of these activities are subordinated to pursuing his 
passive aim. He makes all this circus only to make himself be looked at. He is all 
active to make himself passive. The true position of the exhibitionist is a passive 
one: this is the locus of his desire and enjoyment. The one who is truly active, in 
Freud’s view, the one following his active aim to look (to see, to perceive, to no-
tice), although he might remain unnoticed himself, is the voyeur.
28 Ibid.
29 For ease of reading, from this point onwards in the text, male pronouns shall also be con-
sidered to include both sexes. 
213
voyeurism and exhibitionism on the internet
There is a certain close connection between narcissism and the scopic drive – 
the myth of Narcissus falling in love with his own image clearly points to this. 
The autoerotic pre-phase of the scopic drive, in which “the subject’s own body 
is the object of the scopophilia,” must be, states Freud, “classed under narcis-
sism.”30 The basic predisposition of narcissism is, namely, the turning round 
upon one’s own self, the choice of one’s own body as the libidinal object, which, 
subsequently, corresponds to the passive aim of “being looked at” rather than 
“looking”, of “being loved” rather than “loving”, and even of “being tortured” 
rather than “torturing”. This is why, according to Freud, in the later develop-
ment of the active scopic drive into voyeurism, narcissism is left behind, while 
the passive scopic drive, that is, exhibitionism, still “holds fast to the narcissis-
tic object.”31 Narcissism, therefore, defines the scopic drive, especially the exhi-
bitionist’s part therein.
The autoerotic pre-phase of the scopic drive coincides with and, in this sense, 
importantly defines primary narcissism. Subsequently, the “mirror stage” estab-
lishes the scene not only for the development of the “normal” object-related psy-
chic constitution with more or less expressed narcissistic traits, but also for the 
development of secondary narcissism, that is, of a predominantly narcissistic 
psychic constitution of a grown-up person. The narcissistic traits in a psychic 
constitution of a grown-up person are formed through a complex dialectics be-
tween the individual’s imaginary identification, that is, his relation to the ideal 
ego, and his symbolic identification, that is, his relation to the ego ideal.
In the immanent critique of the notion of the “pathological narcissist” put forth 
by American ego psychology (Kernberg, Kohut, Winnicot) and popularized by 
Christopher Lasch in his book The Culture of Narcissism from 197932, Žižek, in 
an article from 198533, exposed one crucial feature of the so-called “pathologi-
cal narcissist” as the predominant subjective constitution of the neoliberal age 
30 Ibid., p. 132.
31 Ibid.
32 Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing 
Expectations, W.W. Norton, New York, London, 1991.
33 Slavoj Žižek, “‘Patološki narcis’ kot družbeno-nujna forma subjektivnosti” [The “Patho-
logical Narcissist” as the Socially-Necessary Form of Subjectivity], Družboslovne razprave 
= Social Science Forum, II, Vol. 2, Slovensko sociološko društvo: Fakulteta za družbene 
vede, Ljubljana, 1985, pp. 105–141.
214
bara kolenc
(along with the borderline34). In reference to Lasch, who was the first to point 
to the replacement of the ego ideal with the “anal” superego as a fundamental 
feature of late capitalist bureaucratic society, the product of which – especial-
ly due to changes in micro and macro social structures (de-hierarchization, the 
dismantling of authority, the critique of identitarianism, and so on) and the as-
sociated permissive upbringing – is the “pathological narcissist”, Žižek points 
out that what basically defines the “pathological narcissist” is the unsuccessful 
symbolic identification.
With symbolic identification, the subject submits to symbolic authority, inte-
grates the law, and, in a purely Kantian sense, takes it as his own, entering into 
a symbolic covenant as his own ethical position to which he is accountable, and 
in relation to which he is responsible (accountable to the other). By accepting 
the law as his own determinant, the subject frees himself from the irrational de-
mand of the superego and enters the field of desire, which constitutes him in the 
symbolic. Here, it is crucial to maintain a strict distinction between the concepts 
of the superego, the ideal ego, and the ego ideal, which correspond to the trini-
ty of the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic: “The feature that separates the 
ego ideal and the ideal ego from the superego is, of course, identification.”35 The 
superego excludes all identification; it appears as an “irreducibly alien, nonin-
ternalized, traumatic, unperceived, terrifying command, i.e. something real in 
the sense of the impossible-unsymbolized.”36 For the narcissist, therefore, so-
34 Žižek notes that the two disorders systematized by Otto. F. Kernberg are alike in showing 
both psychotic and hysteric characteristics and symptoms, which was inconceivable from 
the perspective of traditional psychoanalytical theory.
35 Ibid., p. 118. From the original in Slovene, translated by B. K.: “Poteza, ki Ideal-Jaza in ide-
alni jaz loči od nadjaza, je seveda identifikacija.”
36 “The feature that separates the ego ideal and the ideal ego from the super-ego is, of course, 
identification; the ego ideal and the ideal ego are two modes of identification, the symbolic 
and the imaginary, or, in Lacanian mathemes, I(A) and i(a), identification with the ‘una-
ry trait’, S1, the signifier in the Other representing the subject, and identification with the 
mirror-image, while – as J. A. Miller remarks – the super-ego excludes all identification, it 
appears as an irreducibly alien, noninternalized, traumatic, unperceived, terrifying com-
mand, i.e. something real in the sense of the impossible-unsymbolized.” Translated from 
Slovene by B. K.: “Poteza, ki Ideal-Jaza in idealni jaz loči od nadjaza, je seveda identifika-
cija; Ideal-Jaza in idealni jaz sta dva modusa identifikacije, simbolni in imaginarni oziroma, 
v lacanovskih matemih, I(A) in i(a), identifikacija z ‘enotujočo potezo’, S1, označevalcem v 
Drugem, ki zastopajo subject, in identifikacija z zrcalno podobo, medtem ko – kot opozarja 
J.-A. Miller – nadjaz izključuje sleherno identifikacijo, nastopa kot ireduktibilno tuji, nepono-
215
voyeurism and exhibitionism on the internet
cial laws are merely the “rules of the game”, which do not bind him internally. 
Since in the “pathological narcissist” the moment of symbolic identification is 
absent, the image of the Self, by itself, without the support of symbolic identi-
fication, performs the function of “integration”: “instead of an i(a) ‘mediated’ 
by an I(A),” we have to deal with “an i(a) that relies directly on a cruel, mad, ‘ir-
rational’, ‘anal’ superego.”37 All that the “pathological narcissist” can lean on, 
therefore, is his imaginary identification, which is the only thing that structures 
him and which responds to the impossible, capricious demand of his superego, 
expressed in the paradoxical imperative of enjoyment. 
Following this consideration, we can state that the aspect of the image as the ge-
ometral part of the scopic field is pivotal for the constitution of “pathological nar-
cissism”. Because of the lack of symbolic identification, the elemental feeling 
that defines the “pathological narcissist” is anxiety, a sense of inner emptiness 
that the narcissist tries to fill with euphoria, eccentricity, excess, promiscuity, 
the abuse of substances, workaholism, and so on, and which he strives to soothe 
with the phantasmal entity of the “grandiose Self”, with the help of which he 
is supposed to receive the eagerly awaited validation from the superego. The 
“grandiose Self” is not only a fantasy, but a performed Persona, which the 
“pathological narcissist” creates as a hollowed image of himself. Subsequently, 
“pathological narcissism” is expressed as a more or less overt exhibitionism – in 
a secret ambivalence with covert voyeurism.
The Autoerotic Pre-phase of the Scopic Drive: The Original Split 
Between the Eye and the Gaze 
As in sadism-masochism, Freud traces three developmental stages in voyeur-
ism-exhibitionism: “a) Looking as an activity directed towards an extraneous 
object. b) Giving up of the object and turning of the scopophilic instinct towards 
a part of the subject’s own body; with this, transformation to passivity and set-
tranjeni, traumatični, nedojeti, grozljivi ukaz, torej nekaj realnega v pomenu nemogočega-
-nesimboliziranega.” (Žižek, “‘Patološki narcis’ kot družbeno-nujna forma subjektivnosti” 
[“Pathological Narcissus” as the Socially-Necessary Form of Subjectivity], p. 118.)
37 Žižek, “‘Patološki narcis’ kot družbeno-nujna forma subjektivnosti” [“Pathological Nar-
cissus” as the Socially-Necessary Form of Subjectivity], p. 119. From the original in Slovene, 
translated by B. K.: “Pri ‘patološkem Narcisu’ imamo torej namesto i(a), ‘posredovanega’ z 
l(A), opraviti z i(a), ki se neposredno opira na kruti, nori, ‘iracionalni’, ‘analni’ nadjaz.”
216
bara kolenc
ting up of a new aim - that of being looked at. c) Introduction of a new subject 
to whom one displays oneself in order to be looked at by him.”38 These stages, 
on the one hand, pertain to the development of a child, but are, in a grown-up 
person, co-existent – this is what Freud’s idea of the ambivalence of drives ba-
sically refers to. 
However, what Freud notices at some point is that the parallel between sad-
ism-masochism and voyeurism-exhibitionism – as the two examples of the re-
versal of a drive into its opposite regarding the (combination of) the polarities 
of activity-passivity, on the one hand, and that of subject-object, on the other – 
somewhere hits a limit. The thing is that unlike in sadism-masochism, a certain 
autoerotic pre-phase takes place in the scopophilic instinct, which precedes the 
three developmental stages evident in both phenomena. 
The autoerotic pre-phase serves Freud to present the diagrammatic picture of the 
scopophilic drive:
 (α) Oneself looking at a               = A sexual organ being 
 sexual organ looked at by oneself                
 (β) Oneself looking at an (γ) An object which is oneself
 extraneous object or part of oneself being looked at
 (active scopophilia) by an extraneous person
 [aktive Schaulust] (exhibitionism)
  [Zeigelust, Exhibition]
The autoerotic pre-phase is represented in the first row of the diagram (α). In the 
second row, the scopophilic (i.e. scopic) drive develops into (β) voyeurism and 
(γ) exhibitionism.
This autoerotic pre-phase, remarks Freud, is interesting, “because it is the 
source of both the situations represented in the resulting pair of opposites.”39 
Out of this stage, voyeurism (aktive Schaulust) and exhibitionism (Zeigelust, 
38 Freud, Instincts and Their Vicissitudes (1915). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psycho-
logical Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV, p. 127.
39 Ibid., p. 130.
217
voyeurism and exhibitionism on the internet
Exhibitionism) develop “according to which element in the original situation is 
changed.”40 If the change concerns the object (a baby swaps one of his own or-
gans as the object of his gaze for someone else’s, usually one of his mother’s) – 
the aim here remains unchanged – the pre-phase turns to voyeurism as the ac-
tive aspect of the scopophilic drive. If the change concerns the aim (the baby 
swaps from actively looking at his own organ to the passive aspect of his organ 
being looked at by someone else, usually his mother) – here, the object remains 
unchanged – the pre-phase turns to exhibitionism as the passive aspect of the 
scopophilic drive.
What is pivotal here is that this pre-phase is not diachronic, rather, it reveals 
the bare structure of all the players and forces that will later be stretched into a 
temporal sequence of the three developmental stages. The autoerotic pre-phase 
of voyeurism-exhibitionism displays the situation where a baby is looking at his 
own sexual organ at the same time as his own sexual organ is being looked at 
by himself. He is at the same time the active and the passive agent of the scop-
ic drive (looking and being looked at), and he is both a sexual organ (object) 
and his own self (subject). In a sort of a limbic state, he is entirely turned into 
his own body, because the instance of the ego and a relation to the external 
world have not yet been established. However – in contrast to other examples 
of sexual excitation in autoeroticism as the primary phase of a child’s sexual 
development, such as thumb sucking, where the polarities active-passive and 
subject-object have not yet been substantiated – the autoerotic pre-phase of the 
scopic drive establishes some sort of a “differentiation of the undifferentiated,” 
a minimal distance between looking and being looked at, between the object 
(the baby’s own sexual organ) and the subject’s own self. 
In the autoerotic pre-phase of the scopic drive, I actively look at my own organ 
and I am at the same time passive towards my own gaze. We can see how a cer-
tain externalization takes place here, setting the ground of extimacy on the very 
fundamental level (that is, before the instance of the ego and the relation to 
the external world are established, and before the process of alienation through 
one’s imaginary and symbolic identification takes place), where, on the one 
hand, my own sexual organ becomes the object of my desire, and, on the other 
40 Ibid.
218
bara kolenc
hand, my own gaze turns into the gaze of the other.41 Followed by the three stages 
of voyeurism-exhibitionism in the later development of a child, that is, the turn-
ing of the subject to the external world, the formation of dialectics between the 
ideal ego and the ego ideal, and the development of voyeurism and exhibition-
ism proper, the constellation of the autoerotic pre-phase – and this is crucial – 
is not simply overcome, but persists in the psychic apparatus as a fundamental 
constellation, as the elemental setting of the split between the eye and the gaze.
The Representational and the Specular Screen
There is a basic relation defining the scopic field: the relation between the 
screen and the mirror.
In the classical idealist conception of introspection, that is, of a self-reflective 
consciousness observing the world with the gaze resting in one's eye, when 
viewing an external, physical object, I create an image of this object in my 
mind. Like some sort of a screen set between the eye (which possesses the gaze) 
and the object, an intermediate layer is thought to be formed onto which the ob-
ject, lit by light, is “projected”, thereby creating a representation of the object in 
the mind of the observer. This screen – let us name it a representational screen – 
has always been understood as a kind of mirror: a reflection of the world in 
one’s mind. The idea of a mirroring of the world in introspection supports the 
psychic construction of the “I”, the thinking self (ego) woven around the illu-
sion of self-identity, which is largely caught in the imaginary parameters, that 
is, in the organization of the field of the gaze and the light (i.e. the scopic field) 
through geometral points. 
Beyond the imaginary of introspection, however, there is a certain pre-exist-
ence of the gaze – as Lacan pointed out following Merleau-Ponty42 – which de-
41 That is, my own sexual organ becomes the object of my desire as desire of the other, and my 
own gaze is in dissonance with, yet resonates in, the gaze of the other. All Lacan’s propositi-
ons regarding the scopic field seem to be inscribed in the pre-phase of the scopic drive. In 
the autoerotic cocoon of the scopic drive, the gaze extricates itself from the eye and starts 
lingering around as the gaze of the Other, the subject turns into a picture, while the object 
is detached from the subject as forever lost, but persistently present in its absence. 
42 Lacan’s introduction of the split between the eye and the gaze is inspired by Merleau-
Ponty Le Visible et l’invisible and La Phénomenologie de la perception, which demasks the 
219
voyeurism and exhibitionism on the internet
fines the subject’s inscription in the scopic field: “It is no doubt this seeing, to 
which I am subjected in an original way.”43 What is, according to Lacan, the 
original constellation of a subject in the scopic field is not a self-reflective con-
sciousness observing the world through the gaze in their eye, but the split be-
tween the eye and the gaze: “The eye and the gaze – this is for us the split in 
which the drive is manifested at the level of the scopic field.”44 The gaze is not 
an exclusive possession of the eye as an organ, but floats around, as an incon-
ceivable point of light which cannot be pinned on a geometral map: “I see only 
from one point, but in my existence I am looked at from all sides.”45 This sets the 
subject as a blurred and ephemeral apparition in the field of vision, as a stain, 
in relation to which the “I”, the “self”, and its representations turn out to be a 
mere illusion of a self-reflective consciousness and an effect of an individual’s 
striving for self-identity. On the very fundamental level, I am not the one ob-
serving the world, but the one being observed: “We are beings who are looked 
at, in the spectacle of the world.”46 In this sense, exhibitionism is an original 
constellation of the subject in the scopic field, underlying the forms of exhibi-
tionism and voyeurism proper.47
While a self-reflective consciousness believes that it sees the world as an image, 
in the original constellation of the scopic field, conversely, the subject makes 
itself a picture for the gaze of the Other. What is crucial here, however, is that 
in this shift from the idea of the image as something perceived and imagined in 
the illusion of introspection, forming, together with many other images, a rep-
resentative base of the conscious “I”, towards the subject qua picture, Lacan’s 
differentiation between the image and the picture not only serves the purpose of 
illusion of introspection: “That in which the consciousness may turn back upon itself  – 
grasp itself; such as Valery’s Young Parque, as seeing oneself seeing oneself – represents 
mere sleight of hand. An avoidance of the function of the gaze is at work there.” (Lacan, 
The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 74.)
43 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 72.
44 Ibid., p. 73.
45 Ibid., p. 72.
46 Ibid.
47 “And, incidentally, in the same sense, exhibitionism – being exposed to the Other’s gaze 
– is not simply a symmetrical reversal of voyeurism, but the original constellation that 
supports its two sub-species: exhibitionism proper and voyeurism.” (Slavoj Žižek in the 
chapter “Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes, please!” in the book Judith Butler, Ernesto 
Laclau, Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, London, Verso, 2000, p. 117.)
220
bara kolenc
turning around the perspective on the subject, but at the same time puts forth a 
certain conceptual distinction between the two: differently from an image, a pic-
ture exceeds and evades the geometral parameters of representation. A picture 
operates in the field of the gaze and the light even beyond the imaginary scope.
 
Just as in the conception of introspection, also in the constellation of the split 
between the eye and the gaze the screen plays a central role as “the locus of 
mediation”48. But differently from the representational screen, which is set be-
tween the eye (self-reflection) and the world (external objects), the screen – let 
us call it a specular screen – is now set between the subject qua picture, on the 
one side, and the gaze, which lingers around as a point of light, on the other. 
The subject makes itself a picture in such a way that it plays with a screen (for 
Lacan, a genuine ability of human beings49), projecting itself on the screen as 
a splash of its transient emergence in the glow of the gaze and the light. In this 
scheme, again, the screen functions as a mirror. Here, however, the screen is 
not a mirror reflecting the world in one’s mind, but a mirror reflecting the world 
directly. The subject reflects the world not in representation, but directly, as a 
speculum mundi, a mirror of the world:50 “That which makes us consciousness 
institutes us by the same token as speculum mundi.”51 The specular screen is a 
mirror-screen on which the picture projected on it, which is the subject, is at the 
same time the mirror-image of the world.
In the scopic field, the gaze occupies two functions at once: a) the function of 
the elusive objet-petit a, marking the relation of the subject to the object, which 
can only be defined negatively, as a lack,52 and b) the function of the Other, 
marking the relation of the subject (as barred, constituted upon a lack) to the 
48 Ibid., p. 107.
49 “Desire that is the essence of man—is not, unlike the animal, entirely caught up in this ima-
ginary capture. He maps himself in it. How? Insofar as he isolates the function of the screen 
and plays with it. Man, in effect, knows how to play with the mask as that beyond which 
there is the gaze.” (Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 107.)
50 In his book Speculum mundi from 1635, John Swan presents an original idea that the world 
is actually a mirror reflecting God. Since God created the world in six days, there should be 
six mirrors, each showing one perspective of God’s creation: hence, the world should take 
the shape of a hexadreon.
51 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 75. 
52 “The objet a in the field of the visible is the gaze.” (Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts 
of Psychoanalysis, p. 105.)
221
voyeurism and exhibitionism on the internet
phantasmal entity of control and also of protection (the Other not only watch-
es me, but also watches over me) within the realm of intersubjectivity to which 
the subject ultimately responds and which is a referential point of his symbolic 
identification, i.e. his ego ideal. In this second function, the gaze turns into the 
Gaze. In the original split between the eye and the gaze, the subject is there-
fore set in the space of the Other: “But, certainly, it is in the space of the Other 
that he sees himself and the point from which he looks at himself is also in that 
space.”53 Like in the realm of language, also in the realm of vision, the subject 
emerges in the field of the Other through alienation as the fundamental proce-
dure of its institution, which is defined by its very disappearance, aphanisis. 
When the subject is playing with the specular screen, making himself a picture, 
he is playing with the reflection of light, trying to, simultaneously, distract the 
gaze – like annoying someone with a mirror by reflecting light into his eyes – 
and to show itself as a stain, a blurred spot of a bare reflection, a present ab-
sence, as something that is at the same time being lit by light and absorbing it.
Both schemes, the representational and the specular, are at work in the scop-
ic field. The representational illusion of a self-reflective consciousness is per-
sistently fractured by the subject’s fragmented and transient apparition in the 
field of the gaze and the light, as a picture evading the geometral parameters 
of images. What is pivotal for our further analysis, however, is that in both 
schemes the screen functions as a mirror and that in their geometral representa-
tion drawn by Lacan as two non-equilateral triangles – which is, of course, 
only approximate, because it is itself limited to the imaginary scale – these two 
screens, the representational and the specular, overlap.54
The Computer Screen as an Actual-Virtual Object
What the spectacle brings about is a certain physical (or corporal, to use Derri-
da’s term) materialization of the screen. In this sense, the screen functions as 
a prosthesis. However, even if we do not go into a detailed elaboration of the 
53 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 144.
54   
 
222
bara kolenc
prosthetic theory as regards the digital virtual media – adhering here to Freud’s 
understanding of prosthetics as the mediator between mind and body, between 
internal and external, and between conscious and unconscious, and to his de-
scription of man as a “prosthetic God”55, or to Marx’s basic formula of aliena-
tion stemming from the blurred line between man and the materialism of com-
modities, to which later theories of prosthetics refer (Marshall McLuhan, Henry 
Ford), and to the aspect of amputation as the flip side of the prosthetic extension 
of a human body stressed by Heidegger, an idea that was further developed in 
McLuhan’s theory of autoamputation accompanying any extension of media, 
we can immediately notice a certain fundamental structural difference between 
the prosthetic function of the screen of the old spectacle, that is, the TV or the 
cinema screen, on the one hand, and the prosthetic function of the screen of the 
digital virtual spectacle, that is, the computer screen, on the other hand.
While we can well read a desktop computer as the apotheosis of McLuhan’s idea 
of media convergence, that is, of a certain self-absorption of media and their 
ability to perform an incessant transformation of form into content (“the medi-
um is the message”56), and, in this sense, can see the digital virtual media as a 
continuation and intensification of the procedures of the old uni-directional me-
dia, we can, from another perspective, notice a certain shift, or a leap between 
the old spectacle and the digital virtual one. A desktop computer represents a 
certain turning point, where the prosthesis is not only an externalized exten-
sion of the human body, but the human body itself, as some sort of prosthesis 
of a prosthesis, becomes an externalized extension of the computer. This only 
makes it a real prosthesis, a real amputation – but at the same time, this pros-
thesis makes possible a new realization of reality, which is not only a negation 
of actual physical reality (so-called “artificial reality”), but is, exactly through 
negation, its very affirmation.
Despite Debord’s visionary understanding of “everyday reality” and the reality 
of the spectacle as fundamentally intertwined and mutually determining each 
other in their “reciprocal alienation”, the two realities are, in the old spectacle, 
55 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, trans. J. Strachey, New York, London, W. 
W. Norton & Co., 2010, p. 19.
56 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, New York, London, MIT 
Press, 1994, p. 9. 
223
voyeurism and exhibitionism on the internet
still detachable from each other. Only the spectacle of instanternity fully realiz-
es Debord’s theoretical setup in blurring the difference between one reality as 
primordial (so-called “everyday reality”) and the other as only secondary (so-
called “artificial reality”). In the spectacle of instanternity, we are on both sides: 
we not only try, like in the old spectacle, to domesticate the new artificial uni-
verse, which is alienated from our physical existence, but we equally try to do-
mesticate the old physical reality, which is alienated from our digital existence. 
From this perspective, both “everyday reality” and “artificial reality” appear as 
only mythical.
In the sense of a voyeuristic-exhibitionistic ambivalence, the computer screen 
not only shows something, like a TV screen, but it also watches (as a camera is 
integrated in it). At the same time, the user of a computer not only looks at the 
screen, like at a TV, but also shows himself on the screen.57 What is pivotal for 
an understanding of the old spectacle, and what has not yet been clearly put 
forth, is that in the old spectacle, the fundamental split between “everyday real-
ity” and the reality of the spectacle is not the divide between the spectator as the 
allegedly passive voyeur, on the one hand, and the spectacle as the active exhi-
bitionist on the other. Such a division of roles, namely, is only a consequence 
of a more radical split between the two realities, and a symptom of a certain 
blockade brought about by the old spectacle. The crucial point here is that the 
abruption of the old spectacle is not that it divides the roles within the voyeuris-
tic-exhibitionistic interplay, but that it fully sabotages the voyeuristic-exhibition-
istic interplay itself, which is at work in the original ambivalence of the scopic 
drive. The true difference between the old spectacle and the spectacle of instan-
ternity, therefore, lies not in an individual’s simple passage from a passive to an 
active position (say, from a spectator to a user), which is the usual argument of 
57 With the emergence of the digital virtual reality, which induced an unprecedented suppo-
sition of physical isolation and digital social interaction, man is entering a novel existen-
tial condition – intersolation. While the formula of the old spectacle is isolation + passive 
reception, the formula of the spectacle of instanternity is isolation + active interaction. 
Instead of passivizing, the virtual digital spectacle rather forces individuals into constant 
activity (it could be for leisure or work, or for political, romantic, sexual, etc., purposes), 
which demands physical isolation (remember the common image of teenagers sitting on 
a bench together and communicating with each other via their smartphones?). This leads 
to some sort of an (obsessive) neurotic situation, where one is caught in an endless loop: 
the more one is physically isolated, the more one engages in digital interaction – and the 
more one is physically isolated.
224
bara kolenc
leftist cultural criticism:58 but the fact that the old spectacle blocks the voyeuris-
tic-exhibitionistic interplay, while the spectacle of instanternity enables it. Only 
when the voyeuristic-exhibitionistic interplay in the non-digital actual reality is 
extended and intertwined with the voyeuristic-exhibitionistic interplay in the 
digital virtual reality, can the two realities, through their reciprocal alienation, 
become the two sides of one reality. 
The subject’s genuine ability to play with the specular screen as the basic mech-
anism of his scopic inscription in the field of the Other is, in the spectacle of in-
stanternity, affected by the mediation, or rather, the intrusion of a new form of 
a physically materialized screen – the computer screen. When using a computer 
screen, an individual plays with this screen, making himself a picture on it. In 
this sense, the computer screen acquires the function of the materialized spec-
ular screen. At the same time, he uses the screen as a representational plane of 
how he sees the world. Here, the same computer screen acquires the function of 
the materialized representational screen. Thereby, the computer screen takes on 
the role of the two screens operating in our psychic apparatus: the representa-
tional screen of the illusion of introspection and the specular screen of our origi-
nal exposure to the Gaze. While in the (mythical) non-digital actual reality these 
two screens well structure the psychic, but operate on different scales (their 
overlapping in Lacan’s drawing is only schematic), in the physically material-
ized existence of the computer screen they factually overlap. The great estrange-
ment of the digital virtual stems exactly from this (impossible) overlapping of 
the two screens operating in our psychic apparatus, which are now materialized 
in the same object.
This materialization, however, is only possible because the computer screen is 
an object of a new kind: it is not only physical, but also digital. As such, it en-
58 The general leftist argument about the passivization of the political subject caused by 
the spectacle as the “visualized and materialized ideology” is in this sense too sloppy. 
Namely, it does not see that the position of a voyeur, that is, the spectator, is actually an 
active and not a passive one – so it is not the position as such, but certain other factors 
that passivize the spectator. Where the spectator of Debord’s spectacle is truly passivized, 
or castrated, is in that he cannot fully engage in the ambivalent interplay of voyeurism and 
exhibitionism, because a) he is pushed into a (regulated) voyeuristic position – he can only 
watch what has been shown to him – so he cannot really follow his active voyeuristic aim, 
and b) he is prevented from exhibiting himself, so he cannot actively pursue the passive 
aim of being watched.
225
voyeurism and exhibitionism on the internet
ables the computer to become a prosthesis of a human body (and mind), and 
also the human body (and mind) to turn into a prosthesis of the computer. As 
an actual-virtual object, a computer screen is at the same time the bearer of the 
intersection of the two realities, which are now inseparable, and of their mutual 
determination through negation, as well as the locus of the materialized over-
lapping of the two psychic screens. As such, it is simultaneously: 1.) as a ma-
terialized representational screen, the actual-virtual intermediate between the 
individual’s eye as the illusory source of his vision and the objects of the world 
(and, among these objects, also his own mirror image), and 2.) as a material-
ized specular screen, the actual-virtual intermediate between the subject mak-
ing himself a picture by his playing with the screen and the gaze of the Other. 
With this, the computer screen not only enables the voyeuristic-exhibitionistic 
interplay within the digital virtual reality, but makes possible a complex dia-
lectic between the digital virtual voyeuristic-exhibitionistic interplay and the 
non-digital actual one.
The computer screen as an actual-virtual object functions in the realm of vision: 
without the light and without the gaze the screen is a dead thing. As soon as it 
lights up, it becomes both a source of light and an illuminated object – it illu-
minates itself. More than any other object, the screen calls for the Gaze. At the 
same time, it itself establishes a field within which the Gaze circulates.
The Radical Consequences of the Selfie-Turn
What is a selfie? It is a photographed image in a mirror. Or, to be more precise, 
it is a photographed image of oneself in a mirror created by oneself. The first 
front-facing camera on a smartphone was introduced in 2010. “Selfie” was pro-
claimed a word in 2013. Today, each smartphone has two cameras: one to cap-
ture the outside world – the user’s field of vision – and one to capture the user 
himself. What is pivotal here is that with a camera installed above the screen, 
the screen takes on the role of a mirror.
A computer screen is a mirror with the miraculous ability to freeze the image it 
reflects. With a click of the camera, I want to catch what I consider to be myself 
on an imaginary scale – what I want to grasp is the point of my imaginary iden-
tification, my ideal ego. This is, of course, an always failed attempt. No matter 
how much effort I put into the creation of an image that would finally capture 
226
bara kolenc
the ideal me (doing my makeup, my hair, dressing up, choosing the right angle, 
appropriate light, etc.), I necessarily fail. What I desire to see in the mirror never 
matches what the mirror shows me. So I am driven to give it another try, to take a 
better shot. Or to endlessly correct an existent one. Selfie-mania is, in this sense, 
nothing but obsessive hunting for the ideal ego.
In contrast to the old spectacle, where an anonymous spectator watched stars 
on a screen, on the Internet, everyone is turning into a star, that is, into a “spec-
tacular representation of living human beings,” according to Debord, which is 
“the opposite of an individual.”59 The star, says Debord, enters the spectacle “as 
a model to be identified with,” and thereby “renounces all autonomous qualities 
in order to identify himself with the general law of obedience to the succession 
of things.”60 But because, in the spectacle of instanternity, both the non-digital 
actual and the digital virtual reality are real, the gap defining the spectacle is no 
longer set between an anonymous observer as the individual and the star as a 
reified [verdinglicht] model, which has become part of the spectacle as the “ma-
terialized ideology”61. The individual is now on both sides – everyone is at the 
same time a star and a no one, a reified model, a digital virtual commodity, on 
the one hand, and a human being with his own physical determinations and his 
own mental constructions, on the other. 
Today, with the development of technology, we can change our faces as if the 
face itself were a mask or make-up. The transformation of our faces can be both 
physical and digital, the latter being easier and cheaper. What is a novel aspect 
here, however, is not man’s tendency to beautify his face to match his ideal ego, 
but the fact that because, in the spectacle of instanternity, both the non-digital 
actual and the digital virtual reality are real, the individual’s haunting of his 
ideal ego is now subjected to the reciprocal alienation of the two realities. This 
can be, so it appears, highly traumatic. In 2017, the American Academy of Facial 
59 Debord, Society of the Spectacle, p. 29.
60 Ibid.
61 “Ideological expressions have never been pure fictions; they represent a distorted consci-
ousness of realities, and as such they have been real factors that have in turn produced 
real distorting effects. This interconnection is intensified with the advent of the spectacle 
– the materialization of ideology brought about by the concrete success of an autonomized 
system of economic production – which virtually identifies social reality with an ideology 
that has remolded all reality in its own image.” Debord, Society of the Spectacle, p. 116.
227
voyeurism and exhibitionism on the internet
Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery found that 55% of facial plastic surgeons say 
patients have requested cosmetic procedures to look better on social media. To-
day, with the recent escalation of face morphing apps, the trend has arrived at 
the absurd: people are requesting plastic surgeries on the basis of their digitally 
corrected photos. The recently identified body-image disorder known as “Snap-
chat dysmorphia” is characterized by the need to heavily edit one’s own digital 
image, which, at its most severe, causes people to seek out cosmetic procedures 
in order to replicate the digitally morphed faces they present online. In such a, 
so to say, “hysterization of the gap,” in a literally “plastic” embodiment of its 
insurmountably, paradoxically as it may seem, the two realities have become 
truly indivisible.
Because the computer screen is also a means of communication, one’s image on 
the screen-mirror is shared with others. In the digital virtual reality, we are, in 
an unprecedented way, constantly looking at ourselves when interacting with 
other people (via video calls, video conferences, streams, and so on). This has 
become a new form (and a new norm) of digital virtual social interaction. Unlike 
in the (mythical) actual non-digital reality, where I, when interacting with other 
people, played with the specular screen in making myself a picture for the gaze 
of the Other, in the digital virtual interaction I at the same time look at my image 
in the mirror. I show myself to the Other, and I at the same time look at myself 
showing myself. The selfie is a prime example – but many mechanisms on the 
Internet work like this; much of how we make ourselves a picture in the scopic 
field is monitored by us looking in the mirror, where we are driven to see the ide-
al image of ourselves.
When watching my mirror image on my computer screen, I am using the com-
puter screen as a materialized representational screen of my psychic appara-
tus. I am making a “projection” of my imaginary self-perception on the digital 
screen. When sharing a selfie with my collocutor, I believe he can see me just 
as I see myself. However, even if the other looks at me through the filter of my 
selfie image, which I consider to correspond to my ideal ego, the exhibitionistic 
demand (I want you to look at me from the place from where I see you) would still 
not be fulfilled. The place from where I see the objects, and, among them, also 
other people and my own image in the mirror, never coincides with the place 
from where the other, my collocutor, sees me. This is because the true origin of 
my vision is not in my eye, forming, in my mind (and now, in the digital virtual, 
228
bara kolenc
on the computer screen) a representation of the world, but is rather the place of 
my symbolic inscription, the place where I, as a subject, emerge in the symbolic. 
It is this symbolic place, wherefrom I structure my imaginary perspective. The 
illusion of a selfie as the fulfilment of the exhibitionistic demand is therefore 
nothing but a result of the “retroversion effect” as a paradoxical winding of sub-
jectivity where the imaginary self-experiencing of the ‘I’ (moi) as the origin of its 
actions is the way the subject “blinds itself to its radical dependence on the big 
Other, on the symbolic, of which it is the effect.”62
A computer screen as a means of communication taking up the role of a mir-
ror is not at all an innocent technological improvement. Rather, what it brings 
along is a fundamental transformation of the traditional function of the mirror. 
Never before in the history of technological development has it happened that 
the closed intimate relationship between me and my reflection in the mirror, as 
a basic paradigm of the mirror image, has been penetrated by another relation-
ship. Exactly this is now made possible by a digitally shared mirror image. In a 
videocall, another person (or more of them, even a global community) is enter-
ing the one-to-one relation between me and my mirror reflection. This interfer-
ence has a severe impact on both one’s imaginary and symbolic identification. 
Through the eye of my selfie camera, the other sees my image in the mirror not 
as the outside observer from his own perspective, but from the same angle, with 
the same light, and so on, as I do. He sees exactly what I see: my image in the 
mirror. Like a vampire, he can observe my mirror image without being visible 
in the mirror himself. As an odd inversion of the figure of the double, the other 
literally “settles in my eye”, intruding into my intimate relationship with my re-
flection in the mirror, which I, in my introspection, perceive as “myself”. Here 
again, just from an inverted position, the double threatens to eliminate me as 
his rival, not by taking my place in the world, like in Golyadkin’s schizophren-
ic delusion in Dostoevsky’s The Double, but by stealing the origin of my vision. 
62 Slavoj Žižek, “Graf želje” [The Graph of Desire”], Vestnik Inštituta za marksistične študije, 
IX, Vol. 2, ZRC SAZU, Ljubljana, 1988, p. 49. Available at https://ojs.zrc-sazu.si/filozofski-
-vestnik/article/view/3631/3325, accessed 23 November 2022. From the original in Slovene, 
translated by B. K.: “Omenjeni ‘učinek retroverzije’ se opira prav na imaginarno raven, t. j. 
nosi ga iluzija jaza kot avtonomnega dejavnika, kot nosilca, ki je že od vsega začetka navzoč 
kot samodejni izvir svojih dejanj : to imaginarno samodoživljanje jaza kot izvira svojih de-
janj je način, kako subjekt sprevidi, kako se zaslepi za svojo radikalno odvisnost od velikega 
Drugega, od simbol nega, čigar učinek v resnici je.”
229
voyeurism and exhibitionism on the internet
The double sees my image as the image of himself – which is only possible if he, 
when invading my eye, occupies not only my imaginary perspective from which 
I form my ideal ego, but also the symbolic place from which I, for real, see my-
self: the place of my ego ideal.
By sharing my mirror image on the computer screen, however, I do not relate 
only to my collocutor, but also to the camera’s eye. The relation between my mir-
ror image and myself is mediated by a camera. The mirror does not have an eye – 
it is a reflective screen. The camera, conversely, possesses an eye, the phantas-
mal origin of vision. The computer screen turns into a mirror only with the me-
diation of a camera. Leaning on the fantasy of the omni-voyeur as an all-encom-
passing source of power,63 I imagine the camera eye is looking at me. I fantasize 
the big Other is watching me, and that I am under the absolute control of this 
Gaze (remember the paranoiac covering of webcams with adhesive tape so that 
some hacker-robbers will not be able to study one’s apartment through it?). Un-
like in the (mythical) non-digital actual reality, however, the Gaze of the selfie 
camera does not extend all around, but is, so I imagine, clearly directed through 
one tiny hole. The digital-virtual omni-voyeur seems to be peeping through a 
keyhole. So, to maintain the idea of the omni-voyeur in the age of digital tech-
nology, I need to presume cameras are everywhere. Albeit this perspective can 
be paranoid, it is a fact that cameras are everywhere today (there is some real 
cause of paranoia): not only fixed, like in Orwell’s 1984, but mostly mobile. In 
the reality of instanternity, the controlled society is turning into a self-controlled 
and auto-controlled one.
From another point of view, because I am the operator of my device, I can, so I 
believe, manipulate the Gaze. I can control how the camera captures the world, 
and also how it captures my image in the mirror. In the digital virtual reality, the 
original exhibitionistic disposition of the subject is transfigured in such a way 
that when I show myself to the gaze of the Other (playing with a specular screen, 
which is now externalized, and making myself a picture), I at the same time try 
to control this gaze. When making a selfie, or observing my image on the com-
puter screen during, say, a Zoom conference, I try to factor the Other’s gaze into 
63 “The spectacle of the world, in this sense, appears to us as all-seeing. This is the phantasy 
to be found in the Platonic perspective of an absolute being to whom is transferred the qua-
lity of being all-seeing.” (Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 75.)
230
bara kolenc
this photo, that is, how I am being photographed, as a picture, in the field of the 
gaze and the light.
As we have seen before, in a computer screen as the virtual-actual object, the rep-
resentational and the specular screen as the two functions of a psychic apparatus 
somewhat weirdly overlap. The computer screen plays the role of the representa-
tional screen insofar as I imagine seeing the world on it, that is, images and vid-
eos of people, of objects and events, and also of myself. But as soon as I share my 
image with my collocutor or post it on the Internet, the computer screen turns 
into a specular screen, on which I give myself into the gaze of the Other. However, 
as the two screens of my psychic apparatus are both materialized in the comput-
er screen, I, in the case of selfies, try to “glue” the materialized representational 
screen onto the materialized specular screen. I try to “superimpose” my image 
over my picture. In doing so, I want my collocutor to see the computer screen not 
as my specular screen on which I reflect the world as a speculum mundi, but as 
my representational screen on which I – in an exhibitionistic demand – expose 
the illusion of my imaginary self-perception. Using a selfie camera, I interact with 
others through some sort of “imaginary filter”, which functions as a damper of 
social interaction beyond the geometral parameters of the image. As Dolar points 
out somewhere, “the image began to serve as that in which desire cannot quite 
recognize itself as desire and which always betrays it.” 64
The Auto-modelling of Subjectivity and the Domination of the Image
The overlapping of the two psychic screens materialized in the computer screen 
results in the auto-modelling of subjectivity as the principle individual’s imag-
inary inscription in the spectacle of instanternity. Auto-modelling, which has 
been showing its contours more and more clearly in recent decades, refers to 
two characteristics of the processes of modelling, that is, of reifying the individ-
ual in the digital virtual, i.e. to these processes being autistic insofar as they are 
radically reflexive and self-referential, and to them being automated inasmuch 
as they are not (solely) individually controlled or guided, but are produced 
64 Mladen Dolar, Samozavedanje: Heglova Fenomenologija duha II. [Self-Consciousness: 
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit II.], Ljubljana, DTP, Analecta, 1992, p. 23. From the origi-
nal in Slovene, translated by B. K.: “podoba je začela služiti kot tisto, v čemer se želja ravno 
ne more prepoznati kot želja in kar jo vselej izda.”
231
voyeurism and exhibitionism on the internet
through the fluidity of the technologically inter-mediated relations. Auto-mod-
elling refers to Internet exhibitionism as the narcissistic part of the ambivalence 
of the scopic drive. When someone’s mirror image (i.e. a selfie) as a representa-
tion of an individual is “glued” onto his playing with the specular screen, the 
individual’s self-reflection acquires a self-referential, autistic form: what he en-
gages with in the space of the Other as a speculum mundi are all the (imaginary) 
reflections of himself. This process is automated in a sort of an “infinite mirror”: 
once you roll the digital-virtual machine, algorithms start to reproduce the sche-
ma by themselves. 
The representational screen overriding the specular screen as the prevalent prin-
ciple of the digital virtual social interaction begets the domination of the image 
in the spectacle of instanternity. The ascendancy of the image promotes narcis-
sistic exhibitionism, which again actuates the reign of the image. The prevailing 
imaginary environment of the Internet captures the subject in auto-modelling 
as a narcissistic-exhibitionistic trap, thereby reproducing “pathological narcis-
sism”, which (and this is its vicious circle), in the absence of the ego ideal, is 
easily caught in this trap and even reproduces it. With this self-supporting struc-
tural process, the apparition of the subject in the field of the gaze and the light 
beyond the geometral parameters of the image, that is, on the level of the sym-
bolic, which staples the realm of vision with the realm of language, is to a large 
extent blocked. The reduction of the field of vision to the reign of image has, of 
course, already taken place in the old spectacle – the point is that here, unlike 
in the old spectacle, this reduction is established through the intervention of an 
individual, the “user” – through his active engagement in following his passive, 
that is, his exhibitionistic aim. Thereby, it turns into auto-reduction.
The Internet voyeur, the stalker, is driven in his obsession with the “this is not 
it” relation to the object of his desire, which functions as its lever: what I look at 
is never what I wish to see. 
The stalker’s double thrill – and in the spectacle of instanternity we are all stalk-
ers – resembles the double thrill of the old-fashioned voyeur. On the one hand, 
he wants to catch the other at the point where he does not show, in order to finally 
see, in his fantasy, what he wishes to see. This part of the excitement is powered 
by his relation to the objet a. On the other hand, the stalker is driven by the fris-
son of shame that he feels in a state of suspicion that he himself might be caught 
232
bara kolenc
in his ignominious act of stalking. This part of the thrill is related to the big Oth-
er. The shame of the stalker, however, is not only about him being ensnared in 
his physical existence sitting on the bed in his room and stalking others through 
his computer screen, but also about his stalking being revealed within the digital 
traits. Passing invisibly between the two realities, the Gaze is all around.
Surfing through all the selfies, where the targeted individual (the object of the 
voyeur’s desire) is trying to convince the Other that he is the image of him-
self, and through all the photos where this individual is posing for someone 
else’s camera, the stalker is looking for photos from parties and other occasions 
where the other is captured when unaware of being watched and photographed 
(the more awkward or intimate the situation, the higher the excitement). But 
what the stalker gets in such a case is again an image, someone else’s (that is, 
the photographer’s) representation of the other: in this manner again there is 
someone, the paparazzi-photographer, who attempts to regulate the Gaze ed-
iting his representation of how he saw the other. The Internet stalker tries to 
penetrate through the narcissist self-referentiality of the Internet exhibitionist, 
who covers his screen with endless layers of images looped in an infinity-mirror 
effect. The image-shower makes the stalker apathetic: you have blinded me by 
showing me how you want to be seen, and in doing so you confront me only too 
bluntly with the fact that what I am looking at is not what I want to see – you 
do not stimulate my desire, you are killing it: I don’t want to look at you any-
more. Only by reaching beyond the auto-modelling of the Internet exhibitionist 
can the true drive of the Internet voyeur be triggered: only there can he fail to 
see what he wishes to see and only there can he be driven by the thrill of being 
caught in his secret act. 
Unlike the Internet exhibitionist, the stalker is, following his active aim, not 
caught in the imaginary mirror-cage of auto-modelling – or at least, even if he 
is addicted to this activity (for he is nothing but the exhibitionist’s flipside), he 
tries to break through its inner cracks due to the structure of his desire – which 
makes him (that is, his position) the “transformative potential” of the spectacle 
of instanternity.
233
voyeurism and exhibitionism on the internet
Conclusion
This analysis of voyeurism and exhibitionism on the Internet, namely, in the 
spectacle of instanternity as the reality irreversibly permitted and determined 
by the digital virtual, has brought us to the following conclusions:
1. Although the digital virtual cannot be reduced to its specular aspect (the 
digital virtual reality does not function only in the field of vision), the 
field of vision, as long as we operate with computer screens, precondi-
tions the digital virtual reality.
2. This means that voyeurism and exhibitionism as the two mechanisms of 
the scopic drive, that is, the two ways the subject is constituted in the 
field of vision – despite the fact that language, written and spoken, is 
present on the Internet to the same extent as visual content – are the 
fundamental principles operating in, and structuring, the digital virtual.
3. Subsequently, the changes in the operation of voyeurism and exhibition-
ism in the digital virtual compared to the (now only mythical) non-digital 
actual have a significant impact on the constitution of subjectivity in the 
reality of instanternity, and, with this, also on the prospects of sociality 
in the future.
4. These changes are related to a) the fact that the digital virtual and the 
non-digital actual are (or soon will be) inseparable, and to a certain ex-
tent also indistinguishable, so that the individual is on both sides, con-
stantly and repetitively traversing the unsurmountable gap between 
them and riding on the waves of their reciprocal alienation, and b) to the 
technological improvements that are penetrating certain basic relations 
underlying the mechanisms of voyeurism and exhibitionism, namely the 
relation of the subject to the object, to another subject (as the object of de-
sire), and to the Other (which, in the field of vision, operates as the Gaze), 
as well as the relation of the individual to himself qua the object (the nar-
cissistic proposition of turning round upon one’s own self), that is, to 
his own mirror image, and therefore affects the formation of the psychic 
constellations of the ego, the ideal ego, the ego ideal, and the superego.
234
bara kolenc
5. The screen of a desktop computer or a mobile phone equipped with two 
cameras brings about the following changes, which fundamentally im-
pact the constitution of subjectivity and intersubjectivity:
a) The computer screen as the actual-virtual object conjoins the two 
screens (the representational and the specular) operating in our psychic 
apparatus and defining our functioning in the scopic field. “Material-
ized” in one single object, which is, as no object before, both physical 
and digital, the two structurally diverse screens somehow forcibly over-
lap. This overlapping results in a number of psychic consequences (ob-
sessive selfie-mania or attempted control of the Gaze, hallucinatory fixa-
tions to the Gaze as in “Snapchat dysmorphia”, or the paranoiac fantasies 
of being under the control of the Gaze, and so on). Notwithstanding these 
effects on the psychic constellations, the most important consequence of 
the overlapping of the two screens materialized in the computer screen is 
the representational screen overriding the specular screen, which results 
in the domination of the image in the spectacle of instanternity.
b) With a selfie camera, or webcam, installed above the screen, a comput-
er screen acquires the function of a mirror. Unprecedently, we now inter-
act with others while looking at ourselves in the mirror. This has become 
the new norm of digital virtual communication. 
c) With this new norm, and with the representational screen overrid-
ing the specular screen, communication as such has become (self-)rep-
resentation.
d) In such a disposition, an individual – necessarily, structurally – gets 
caught in the auto-modelling of subjectivity as a narcissistic, exhibitionis-
tic self-referential cycle, which again reproduces the reign of the image.
e) The computer screen brings about a historical transformation of the 
function of the mirror: the intrusion of the other – as the double – in an 
individual’s intimate relationship with his mirror image.
 
6. Although the exhibitionistic-voyeuristic interplay, unlike Debord’s old 
spectacle, is enabled in the spectacle of instanternity, it still results in 
235
voyeurism and exhibitionism on the internet
the euthanization of the political subject: the spectacle of instanternity, 
namely, actively produces the passive position of the exhibitionist, while it 
puts to sleep the active position of the voyeur (it makes him apathetic). Be-
cause of this, the spectacle of instanternity produces a paradoxical situa-
tion: the very interaction with others prevents intersubjective relations.65
7. At various levels, the abolition of the ego ideal is at work in the digital vir-
tual. The reduction of the scopic field to the realm of the image promotes 
narcissism, which, as a pathology, emerges exactly due to the unsuccess-
ful symbolic identification. Caught in a trap of auto-modelling, “patho-
logical narcissism” has overflowed into the digital virtual. Simultaneous-
ly, the transformation of the function of the mirror brought about by the 
computer screen also undermines symbolic identification, because the 
other, as an uncanny double, in an unprecedented way intrudes upon my 
origin of vision displaced in the symbolic. 
8. Instead of the ego ideal, there comes the network. Power relations to-
day are not predominantly hierarchical, but function for the most part 
as “points of coincidence and accumulation” in a system of multi-dimen-
sional interconnections. This is where the network of the World Wide Web 
and the network of the established global free market economy are per-
fectly aligned – in this sense, the Internet truly functions as a “material-
ized ideology”.
9. The “pathological narcissist” is embedded in it. By his essential consti-
tution – marked by a lack of symbolic identification – the “pathological 
narcissist” is the exact opposite of a political subject.
65 This can be referenced to Samo Tomšič’s notion of the antisociality of capitalism: “By im-
posing relations of competition as the paradigm of social bond, capitalism in fact performs 
a foreclosure of the social, thus allowing only a politics of animosity or ressentiment. No 
surprise, then, that, together with the foreclosure of solidarity, equality was replaced by a 
quasi-naturalized vision of inequality while freedom became associated first and foremost 
with the market, thus becoming the unbound, absolute freedom of economic abstractions. 
Within this framework, the other’s freedom no longer functions as condition and con-
straint of my own freedom, but as a threat.” (Samo Tomšič, “No Such Thing as Society? 
On Competition, Solidarity, and Social Bond”, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural 
Critique, Vol. 33., Nos. 2-3, Duke University Press, Durham, 2022, pp. 62–63.)
236
bara kolenc
10. To exit the spectacle that materializes the ideology of neoliberal market 
economy, a change in the existent libidinal economy would be necessary 
– or vice versa – the question is what socio-technological constellation 
could establish a libidinal economy that could generate a new political 
subject. Assuming that a return to a pre-digital reality is not possible, the 
only way forward seems to be to posit a radically different relationship 
between the Internet, as the technological essence of the age of instan-
ternity, and the World Wide Web, as its “ideological materialization”. One 
that would break through the self-generating mechanism fostered by the 
inherent relationship between the reign of the image, narcissistic exhibi-
tionism, “pathological narcissism”, autism, the injunction to enjoy, and 
slavish subordination to the network. The Internet, with hypertext as a 
symbolic structure of a different scale, indeed makes this theoretically 
possible (remember the utopian dreams of its pioneers?). The practical 
incentives in this direction are few, but on the rise.
11. At this point, however – before any further analysis – we can conclude 
with an approximate assumption that the transformative potential in-
scribed in the spectacle of instanternity is implied in the voyeur, who is, 
unlike the exhibitionist, able to distance himself from the self-referenti-
ality and self-generation of the spectacle due to the logic of his desire.
References
Butler, Judith, Ernesto Laclau, Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, Lon don, 
Verso, 2000.
Debord, Guy, Society of the Spectacle, trans. K. Knabb, London, Rebel Press, 2005.
Deleuze, Gilles, Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton, London and New York, 
Continuum, 2004.
Dolar, Mladen, Samozavedanje: Heglova Fenomenologija duha II. [Self-Consciousness: 
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit II], Ljubljana, DTP, Analecta, 1992.
Freud, Sigmund, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905). The Standard Edition of 
the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume VII (1901-1905), trans. J. 
Strachey, London, The Hogarth Press, 1949.
Freud, Sigmund, Instincts and Their Vicissitudes (1915). The Standard Edition of the 
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV, trans. J. Strachey, 
London, The Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1957.
237
voyeurism and exhibitionism on the internet
Freud, Sigmund, Civilization and its Discontents, trans. J. Strachey, New York, London, W. 
W. Norton & Co., 2010.
Freud, Sigmund, The Interpretation of Dreams: The Complete and Definitive Text, trans. 
and ed. J. Strachey, New York, Basic Books, 2010.
Freud, Sigmund, “On Narcissism: An Introduction”, in J. Sandler, E. S. Person, P. Fonagy 
(eds.), Freud’s On Narcissism: An Introduction, London, Karnac Books Ltd, 2012
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, The Science of Logic, trans. and ed. G. di Giovanni, 
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Kolenc, Bara, “Is it too late?”, Problemi International, Vol. 58, Nos. 11–12, Ljubljana, DTP, 
Analecta, 2020, pp. 91–118.
Lacan, Jacques, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. A. Sheridan, 
New York, London, W. W. Norton & Co., 1998.
Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953-
1954, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. J. Forrester, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Lasch, Christopher, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing 
Expectations, New York, London, W.W. Norton, 1991.
McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, New York, London, 
MIT Press, 1994.
Simoniti, Jure, “Ko je svet začel gledati skozi nas. Fichte in ekološki argument” [When 
the World Started to Look Right Through Us. Fichte and the Ecological Argument], 
Problemi, Vol. 60, Nos. 5–6, Ljubljana, DTP, Analecta, 2022, pp. 173–201.
Tomšič, Samo, “No Such Thing as Society? On Competition, Solidarity, and Social Bond”, 
differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Critique, Vol. 33., Nos. 2–3, Duke University 
Press, Durham, 2022, pp. 51–71.
Žižek, Slavoj, “‘Patološki narcis’ kot družbeno-nujna forma subjektivnosti” [The 
“Pathological Narcissist” as the Socially-Necessary Form of Subjectivity], Družbo-
slovne razprave = Social Science Forum, Vol. II., No. 2, Ljubljana, Slovensko sociolo-
ško društvo: Fakulteta za družbene vede, 1985, pp. 105–141.
Žižek, Slavoj, “Graf želje” [The Graph of Desire], Vestnik Inštituta za marksistične študije, 
Vol. IX, No. 2, ZRC SAZU, Ljubljana, 1988, pp. 46–58. Available at https://ojs.zrc-sazu.
si/filozofski-vestnik/article/view/3631/3325. 
Žižek, Slavoj, “Apokalipsa ožičenih možganov [The Apocalypse of a Wired Brain]”, 
Problemi, Vol. 57, Nos. 7–8, Ljubljana, DTP, Analecta, 2019, pp. 5–29.