BILOCATION
Here’s a London tale as old as time: When I moved to the city in 2016, I bought a sausage roll at Greggs, the British bakery chain, founded in 1939 that is something of a cultural institution in the United Kingdom. It is often referenced in memes or pop culture– “Dear American Little Mix fans, let us explain Greggs…” reads a BBC article from 2017. In March 2024, CNN reported that Greggs took over McDonald’s by 19.6% as the king of to-go breakfast in the UK, snagging 8.2% of the overall market for takeaway food. Greggs is designed to be eaten by the hungry in a hurry, the chain sells about 130 million sausage rolls a year. It’s unsurprising considering Greggs has more branches in Britain than any other fast-food outlet and it’s not unusual to see two Greggs within walking distance of eachother. New drinking game– shot everytime you see a Greggs on your walk around Central London.
Loving a sausage roll is probably one of the top steps in assimilating to British culture. And I, an 18-year-old University student, was pretty adamant. After all, as writer Joel Golby of the Guardian has said, “If you do not love Greggs, you do not love life”, and I totally loved life; I swear to you. The only thing is, I quickly realised this iconic soss roll was mostly just cosplaying as a crispy, flakey pastry wrapped around a perfectly seasoned sausage filling. As I took my first bite, the pastry crumbled only slightly, revealing a mushier-than-normal sausage that’s just peppered and, well, lukewarm. Its popularity I assume, stemmed from being an affordable and not ornately posh, if not totally unpretentious, working class favourite. A sausage roll should cost around £1.30 as of November 2024. It’s straightforward, no mess like an inelegant cure to a hangover, it was comforting.
When I visited London again in 2023, three years later, I wrote in my notes app: “Greggs is not that good but it’s quintessentially London to me. Hyperreal almost. We eat this to feel some semblance of realness even if it’s just a parody of that very thing it’s trying to capture. Is it just nostalgia or something more?”
The digital is an extreme version of this.
In Eric Frank Russell’s short science-fiction story, ‘The Sole Solution’, an old man explores his loneliness as something that can only be overcome by drawing on his only resource: himself. Russell writes
The easiest escape is via the imagination. One hangs in a straitjacket and flees the corporeal trap by adventuring in a dreamland of one’s own. But dreams are not enough. They are unreal and all too brief. The freedom to be gained must be genuine and of long duration. That meant he must make a stern reality out of dreams—a reality so contrived that it would persist for all time.
If we take this as a drive to desire, we can interpret it as the dynamics between the Imaginary (where the ego is formed as fantasies or illusions), the Symbolic (the realm of structure, language, social norms), and the Real– three central concepts in Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory.
In a Lacanian sense, the Real is part of existence that resists symbolisation and is beyond the Imaginary or Symbolic orders. The Real is what remains when the subject tries to escape the confines of their desire or their illusions; it is the unsymbolisable, the traumatic and the incomprehensible. This desire for something lasting is an attempt to find a ‘full’ or ‘complete’ freedom: a place or state of being where the subject is no longer alienated or fractured. In psychoanalysis, we could argue that such a place doesn’t exist: the subject is always marked by what Lacan calls manque-à-être (a lack of being), and this lack is what drives their desire or shapes their experience of reality. So, there is no true or permanent freedom, because the subject is forever trapped in the tension between the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real.
My desire to ‘love’ Greggs– despite the sausage roll not living up to expectations– reflects the drive to fill the lack at the heart of my subjectivity. Greggs wasn’t just a bakery, it was a symbolic object representing Britishness and ‘authenticity’ in a city that can feel alienating or overwhelming to a newcomer like me. I idealised the sausage roll as a rite of passage in the British experience. It was more than just a snack, it was an illusory completeness of being a full-fledged Londoner. Ultimately, this was my ego’s desire to find a sense of self through an idealised object, even if the reality of the mushy sausage underneath revealed a truth: the disjunction between my fantasy of Greggs and the actuality of the product itself. The experience of eating it did not match my idealisation, but the desire to partake in it, to belong, to experience a camaraderie and sense of community continues within my mind.
The Real then, becomes its remnants when I am confronted with the impossibility of ever achieving total satisfaction. The sausage roll cannot satisfy my desire truthfully but I have grown accustomed to its taste. I crave sausage rolls now because there is a way of conditioning my mind through the lack Lacan talks about. I am filling in that missed connection between the idealised image and the reality of my experience.
Greggs is a simulation of my reality. It is not authentic or pure, but it functions as a way to navigate the realness of the city. It is hyperreal because it is not really ever about the sausage roll itself but about the symbolic and affective experience of eating it within the context of London life. In other words, Greggs represents London to me now, in a distorted and constructed way, it attempts to capture my essence of belonging, comfort and cultural integration even if it will never provide those things in their full depth. Greggs appears to offer something authentic, something truly fulfilling, but in the end, it is merely a simulation of authenticity.
Life is a movie or something like that.
I wonder if eating a Greggs sausage roll outside of the UK will transport me back there. An embodiment of the feeling itself, a limerence for a voided space. It’s sort of the way I feel about music as a form of relocation. These things are all a kind of flattening. A flattening of the complexity of a reality into easily digestible, fragmented bites of information like much of our lives now mediated by the digital, AI and algorithms which consolidate disparate elements of our lived experiences into curated feeds. There’s a lot to say about how the line between natural and artificial has been blurred beyond recognition and the implications of that but there’s a sort of freedom here, an experimentation of self in the meaninglessness of the self. How are we able to navigate this tension between idealised authenticity (as something that doesn’t exist) and the reality of our desires?
Part of the answer lies in recognising that authenticity doesn’t exist as a stable, external force: it is something we consistently negotiate with, shifting between time, place and the very tools we use to moderate our experiences. In a way, desire itself is a relational flow through social systems, shaped by cultural codes that can both create or destroy realities. The self is not unified and never was, it was always in-process to, fragmented and in-flux.
We could see this obsession with authenticity in a technologically-driven society as a desire for coherence when maybe there is none. There is no unifying thread through the chaos of modern life where coherence is fixed and absolute. The self is an assemblage of things and encounters with other things and encounters. This doesn’t necessarily diminish the value of our experiences, like eating the Greggs sausage roll, it just reframes it as a part of an ongoing, ever-evolving process.
In this same way, we can see algorithms as exacerbating this fragmentation by offering a curated, hyper-focused version of our reality– that’s what the flattening is all about– complex messy human experience as reduced to a series of predictable patterns forced to reinforce an idealised vision of who you might be or want to be. There is a constant feedback loop and it can lead to the degradation of self when the digital self attempts to curate a world already curated and identity becomes less about a personal revolution and more about the idealised. But identities aren’t linear, they shouldn’t be, they can’t possibly be. Identities are abundant and our desires are not shaped by a singular self but in a stream of relationality. In real life, you are a sibling or a friend or a partner. Online, you are constantly sifting through connections and flows of information. You use a multitude of apps like TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, operating as different selves who consumes different types of media offered by these different kinds of platforms which then interact with eachother as countless nodes within a vast network, interconnected with other users, social interactions, systems of desire and broader cultural trends.
In a recent reading group on cyborgian identities, a participant expressed their concern for the machines taking over as the death of humanity. I asked them what it meant to be human to which he replied, “consciousness.” I asked, “wouldn’t you say consciousness is the awareness of?”
My friend tells me about the Paris Syndrome, a psychological phenomenon where Japanese tourists experience a range of very intense symptoms when the reality of Paris does not match their romanticised, almost mythic version of the city they nurtured back home. Symptoms included, “acute delusional states, hallucinations, feelings of persecution, derealisation, depersonalisation, anxiety, as well as, psychosomatic manifestations like dizziness, tachycardia, sweating and vomiting.” Is this a reflex of harbouring some kind of cognitive dissonance/avoidance complex. Of lying to yourself?
What these two points suggest is that our perceptions of reality and the narratives we choose to engage with, IRL or not, are largely influenced by our imagination. But, who is pulling the strings? The awareness of this game as a self-reflexive performance, a play on the idea of realness, is where the constructed and the “authentic” can feed into eachother to reveal something apart from. AI could be our next step of evolution, not in a primal soup of orthogenetics kind of way but as an interesting force of hybridity between things.
The proximity between “online” and “IRL”; where “digital culture” and “culture” have already absorbed one another… “Online” and “IRL” are not separate realms, never were and probably won’t ever be. Our phones and the internet have become extensions of ourselves, so we’re already cyborgs– a hybrid of flesh and algorithm. In Donna Haraway’s seminal, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ she describes the cyborg as a “hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as creature of fiction.” The cyborgian here, is something other than an extension beyond the self or of the self. Being a four-eyed spectacle-wearing freak can be defined as technological, a cyborgian assistance or how some hard-hearing people may require hearing aids, etc. By the way, the first hearing aid was invented in 1898. Maybe this merging of technology and real life doesn’t have to be only a dystopian future, but also a space for personal liberation– a queering of what the body and identity can be as something already not realistic enough to be familiar with but still too human… a redefinition.
Normally, the body has its limits literally and socially. It is a subject of ageing, physical fatigue, injury, gender roles, and so on. Through this POV, the body is pushed beyond its natural boundaries and given new possibilities. It can be a subversive force of the deterritorialisation of the natural order if we are able to play into an excessive desire and theatrical performance that inherently resists traditional positions. It involves a constant becoming, a fluid procession of testing both the social body and the natural body. We have already arrived, we are already commodified, there’s nowhere to go.
It is only the beginning of this ontological warfare–of what it means to be and not to be all simultaneously… a part of a new comprehension where performativity contradicts realness and agency challenges production. This is an act of rebellion, a transgression of becoming.