Symbolic Collisions: Short-Circuits in the Libidinal Economy by Alexis Wolfe B.A., The University of British Columbia, 2017 Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the Department of Humanities Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences © Alexis Wolfe 2019 SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY Fall 2019 Copyright in this work rests with the author. Please ensure that any reproduction or re-use is done in accordance with the relevant national copyright legislation. Approval Name: Alexis Wolfe Degree: Master of Humanities Title: Symbolic Collisions: Short-Circuits in the Libidinal Economy Examining Committee: Chair: Paul Dutton Professor Samir Gandesha Senior Supervisor Associate Professor Gary McCarron Supervisor Associate Professor, School of Communications Svitlana Matviyenko Internal Examiner Assistant Professor, School of Communications Date Defended/Approved: September 19, 2019 ii Abstract The logic of late capitalism is a logic of deterritorialization, spurning demythologized, denarrativized and desacralized social relations that emanate from a collapsing symbolic order. Austere neoliberal political governance and the business ontology characterizing neoliberal ideology reduces all that exists on the symbolic plane to mere exchange value where the only subject position available is that of the consumer- spectator – libidinally mined for their addictive, and therefore highly profitable, disposition. At nearly every hour of the day, the debtor-addict subject experiences their attention solicited and short-circuited. In this process, the parasitical metaspectacle of platform capitalism short-circuits desire as well as reason, giving way to reactionary modes of thinking and acting. The dissolution of symbolic frameworks for sociality and total immersion in imaginary realms of relating seeds the soil of a fraught, fragmenting and therefore politically reactive social bond. This project traces, through a psychoanalytic lens, the tension between the imaginary and the symbolic emerging in an era dominated by rights discourse, where entitlements are contested, removed and granted at an accelerated cultural pace. It is within this tension that we find an increasing desire for representation as a victim in virtual spheres of competing symbolic orders. The central question of this project asks how economic antagonisms, issues of class, are continually inscribed, ignored and displaced into the realm of culture in a hyperperformative and informationally intoxicated social milieu. Keywords: Lacan; populism; spectacle; symbolic order; neoliberalism iii Acknowledgements Thank you to the anonymous posters of Reddit and 4Chan for bearing your unconscious so consistently and viciously for the rest of us to witness and analyze. I could not have developed these ideas coherently without the guidance and support of Jerry Zaslove, Samir Gandesha, the people of the Lacan Salon, and the ongoing reflections, critiques and polemics developed in bars, cafes, on couches and porches with friends and peers. iv Table of Contents Approval ............................................................................................................................. ii Abstract .............................................................................................................................. iii Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................ iv Table of Contents ................................................................................................................ v Chapter 1. Precarious Egos: Symbolic Misery ........................................................ 1 1.1. Introduction ............................................................................................................... 1 1.2. Democracy in Crisis .................................................................................................. 2 1.3. Deterritorialization in History ................................................................................... 5 1.4. Symbolic Decline ...................................................................................................... 8 1.5. Substitute Satisfactions: Luther and Calvin .............................................................. 9 1.6. Slouching Towards Fantasy .................................................................................... 11 1.7. The Machinic Turn ................................................................................................. 12 1.8. The Search for Meaning: Reterritorialization ......................................................... 14 1.9. Daddy Issues ........................................................................................................... 15 1.10. Postmodernism or, Reflexive Impotence ........................................................... 18 1.11. Superego Blues: Anomie, Narcissism and Incels ............................................... 21 1.12. The Entropy of Epistemic Certainty and Its Echo .............................................. 26 1.13. What Denarrativization Invites .......................................................................... 32 1.14. Digital Reterritorialization ................................................................................. 35 Chapter 2. Libidinal Diversions: Attention, Individuation and the Death Drive37 2.1. The Debtor-Addict as a Site of Resource Extraction .............................................. 37 2.2. “Paying” Attention .................................................................................................. 40 2.3. Short-Circuiting Consciousness .............................................................................. 43 2.4. The Death of Desire and the Desire for Death ........................................................ 45 2.5. Disindividuation and its Discontents ...................................................................... 47 2.6. Daddy’s Aesthetic Funeral ...................................................................................... 50 2.7. Despair! (A Rite of Passage) .................................................................................. 51 2.8. Suicidal Culture ...................................................................................................... 53 2.9. Could Depression Memes Politicize Depression? .................................................. 55 2.10. Towards Psychopolitics ...................................................................................... 56 Chapter 3. Cyber Sublimation and Desublimation: Confronting the Metaspectacle ........................................................................................................ 58 3.1. Watching Me, Watching You ................................................................................. 58 3.2. Reward: Marcuse’s Repressive Desublimation ...................................................... 59 3.3. Traverse the Imaginary for Symbolic Revival ........................................................ 61 3.4. Nostalgic Symbolic Coordinates ............................................................................ 63 3.5. Retreat into the Meta: Nostalgia as Distance .......................................................... 65 v 3.6. For Sale: Novelty .................................................................................................... 67 3.7. From Information Economy to Meme Economy .................................................... 68 3.8. Sorting(Coping)-Mechanisms ................................................................................. 69 3.9. Metaspectacle: The Living Tongue ........................................................................ 73 3.10. The Internet as Pharmakon: Counterarguments ................................................. 76 3.11. Political Impotence or, Libidinal Nihilism ......................................................... 78 3.12. Baudrillard and the ‘Mood of a Lost Reality’ .................................................... 78 3.13. Seducing the Unconscious: Interpassivity .......................................................... 79 3.14. Personality as Brand ........................................................................................... 81 3.15. Disaffection, Desublimation and Irony .............................................................. 83 Chapter 4. Politics as Therapy: Politicized Nostalgia and Politicized Melancholia: The 4Chan Right and the Identitarian Left ................................ 85 4.1. Ontological Insecurity, Discursive Chaos .............................................................. 85 4.2. Symbolic Collisions: To Gaze Backwards or Forwards ......................................... 87 4.3. The Precariat and Imaginary Identification ............................................................ 88 4.4. The Necessity of Symbols and the Symptom: Jordan Peterson .............................. 90 4.5. Nostalgia and Other Fetishized Repetitions ............................................................ 93 4.6. Jameson’s Paradox of Change ................................................................................ 95 4.7. Torn between the Despot or the Schizo .................................................................. 96 4.8. Displaced Political Anxieties .................................................................................. 97 4.9. Virtual Containers for Psychic Debris ...................................................................