Clint Burnham Does the İnternet Have an Unconscious Slavoj Zizek
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Does the Internet Have an Unconscious? PSYCHOANALYTIC HORIZONS Psychoanalysis is unique in being at once a theory and a therapy, a method of critical thinking and a form of clinical practice. Now in its second century, this fusion of science and humanism derived from Freud has outlived all predictions of its demise. Psychoanalytic Horizons evokes the idea of a convergence between realms as well as the outer limits of a vision. Books in the series test disciplinary boundaries and will appeal to readers who are passionate not only about the theory of literature, culture, media, and philosophy but also, above all, about the real life of ideas in the world. Series Editors: Esther Rashkin, Mari Ruti, and Peter L. Rudnytsky Advisory Board: Salman Akhtar, Doris Brothers, Aleksandar Dimitrijevic, Lewis Kirshner, Humphrey Morris, Hilary Neroni, Dany Nobus, Lois Oppenheim, Donna Orange, Peter Redman, Laura Salisbury, Alenka Zupančič Volumes in the Series: Mourning Freud Madelon Sprengnether Does the Internet Have an Unconscious?: Slavoj Žižek and Digital Culture Clint Burnham On Dangerous Ground: Freud’s Visual Cultures of the Unconscious (forthcoming) Diane O’Donoghue Born After: Reckoning with the Nazi Past (forthcoming) Angelika Bammer The Analyst’s Desire: Ethics in Theory and Clinical Practice (forthcoming) Mitchell Wilson At the Risk of Thinking: An Intellectual Biography of Julia Kristeva (forthcoming) Alice Jardine Does the Internet Have an Unconscious? Slavoj Žižek and Digital Culture Clint Burnham BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2018 Copyright © Clint Burnham, 2018 Cover design: Daniel Benneworth-Gray Cover image © The incredulity of Saint Thomas (1601–2) by Caravaggio (1571–1610), Sanssouci Picture Gallery All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Burnham, Clint, 1962- author. Title: Does the Internet have an unconscious? : Slavoj Žižek and digital culture / Clint Burnham. Description: New York, NY : Bloomsbury Publishing, [2018] | Series: Psychoanalytic horizons | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017051452 (print) | LCCN 2017054655 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501341311 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781501341304 (ePUB) | ISBN 9781501341298 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Žižek, Slavoj. | Internet–Philosophy. | Digital media–Philosophy. Classification: LCC B4870.Z594 (ebook) | LCC B4870.Z594 B85 2018 (print) | DDC 199/.4973–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017051452 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-4129-8 ePDF: 978-1-5013-4131-1 eBook: 978-1-5013-4130-4 Series: Psychoanalytic Horizons Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters. This book is for Jeff Derksen, who knows I only do psychoanalysis because I have to. Contents Figures viii Acknowledgments ix List of Abbreviations xi Introduction 1 1 Does the Internet Have an Unconscious? 9 2 Slavoj Žižek as Internet Philosopher 23 3 Was Facebook an Event? 37 4 Is the Internet a Thing? 67 5 The Subject Supposed to LOL 105 6 Her: Or, There Is No Digital Relation (with Matthew Flisfeder) 131 7 The Selfie and the Cloud 153 Conclusion 169 Notes 190 Index 215 Figures 4.1 Twitter screengrab 87 7.1 Tim Lee, Duck Soup, The Marx Brothers, 1933, 2002 156 7.2 John Gerrard, Farm (Pryor Creek, Oklahoma) at Thomas Dane Gallery, 2014 164 7.3 Semiotic Rectangle (the Cloud and the big Other) 165 C.1 Semiotic Rectangle (the Digital and Art) 173 C.2 Semiotic Rectangle (the Social and the Sublime) 188 Acknowledgments Thank you to Mari Ruti for the early interest in this book; your belief in the project (your enjoyment of the symptom?) made it happen. Thanks as well to Haaris Naqvi and Katherine De Chant at Bloomsbury New York for the editorial stewardship, and to Vinita Irudayaraj at Integra in Puducherry for the copyediting and production. Special thanks to the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript. Thank you of course to Slavoj, Todd, and Anna for the generous blurbs. Chapter 1 appeared, in different form, in the proceedings of the first conference of the Canadian Network for Psychoanalysis and Culture (CNPC): The Freudian Legacy Today (2015). Thank you to the anonymous reviewers, and to the conference organizers: Dina Georgis, Sara Matthews, and James Penney. A shorter version of Chapter 2 appeared in Žižek and Media Studies: A Reader, eds. Matthew Flisfeder and Louis-Paul Willis. London: Palgrave, 2013. Thank you to Matthew and Louis-Paul especially for the comradely edits. A version of Chapter 6 was first published as the article “Love and Sex in the Age of Capitalist Realism: On Spike Jonez’s Her” by Matthew Flisfeder and Clint Burnham from Cinema Journal, Vol. 57, No. 1, pp. 25–45. Copyright © 2017 by the University of Texas Press. All rights reserved. Thank you to the anonymous reviewers for their comments, and, again, to Matthew for the team effort. A version of Chapter 7 is forthcoming in After Lacan, ed. Ankhi Mukherjee. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thank you to Ankhi for the comradely edits, to the anonymous reviewer for the push to sharpen my discussion of the fragility of the big Other, and to Anna Kornbluh for the assist. Talks from the material in this book were delivered at the Department of English, Simon Fraser University (Vancouver), the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (Kitchener), CNPC (University of Toronto), the Centre for Theory and Criticism (Western University), Incredible Machines (Vancouver), the International Žižek Studies Conference (Cincinnati), What is Documentary? (Portland), the University of Rijeka (Croatia), CAMRI at the University of Westminster (London), LaConference 2015 (Vancouver), and the LACK conference (Colorado Springs). Thanks to the organizers and audiences, and especially to Kelly Wood, Joshua Schuster, x Acknowledgments Mohammed Salemy, Katarina Peović Vuković, Christian Fuchs, Todd McGowan, and members of the Vancouver Lacan Salon. Thank you as well to the Urban Subjects collective for the Vienna residency, to my SFU colleagues in the Department of English, the Centre for Global Political Economy, Institute for the Humanities, and Office for Community Engagement. Thank you also to my students. Thanks to Alois Sieben for the index. Thanks, finally, to the anonymous reviewers on ratemyprofessors.com, who pointed out that I am an ageing hipster who tries to apply Lacan to everything: they are my sinthome! List of Abbreviations ADB Against the Double Blackmail: Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbors. London: Penguin, 2016. AR Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso, 2014. CHU Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. London: Verso, 2000. Disparities London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Event London: Penguin, 2014. EYS! Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. London: Routledge, 1992. FTKNWTD For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. 2nd Ed. London: Verso, 2008. FTTF First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. London: Verso, 2009. IR Interrogating the Real, ed. Rex Butler. London: Bloomsbury, 2005. LA Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992. LtN Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso, 2012. ME Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality. London: Verso, 1994. PF The Plague of Fantasies. 2nd Ed. London: Verso, 2008. PV The Parallax View. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. SO The Sublime Object of Ideology. 2nd Ed. London: Verso, 2008. TS The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London: Verso, 1999. Introduction This book is both an introduction to the work of Slavoj Žižek and a way to use his ideas to think about the digital present. My thesis throughout is that we need the unique combination of German Idealism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Marxist materialism to be found in Žižek’s thought to understand how the Internet, social and new media, and digital cultural forms work—how they work in our lives, how their failure to work structures our pathologies and fantasies, and how our failure to properly understand—our misrecognition of—the digital is constitutive of the political (it is where we organize and what we abandon to organize “in real life” [IRL]), of the aesthetic (which is to say, art in the age of the digital simulacra), and of the psychosexual (the smartphone, nestled next to our genitals or wallet, as the site of trolls, passwords, lovers, and “sexts”). But it works in the other direction, as well: we need the Internet, digital culture, social media, and smartphones, to understand Žižek; to understand how his thought is structured; how his books work; how his reputation, controversies, and ideas circulate, are debated, disagreed with, dismissed—but never ignored. The two parts of this book’s title, then, need to be given equal weight: the Internet, and the unconscious. And by the Internet, as my audiences have reminded me a few times, I mean everything digital (our use of digital devices, including laptop computers and mobile devices especially), everything social media, and also the often-invisible machinery on which the Internet “runs”— the servers, stacks, tubes, and bandwidth.