Digital Media. Psychoanalysis and The Sub

ISSN 2466541X ISSN 2466-5452 (Online)
CM
COMMUNICATION AND MEDIA
KOMUNIKACIJA I MEDIJI
Thinking (with) the Unconscious in Media and

Communication Studies: Introduction to the Special Issue
Steffen Krger, Jacob Johanssen
Framing the Mobile Phone:
The Psychopathologies of an Everyday Object
Iain MacRury, Candida Yates
If you show your real face, youll lose 10 000 followers The Gaze of the
Other and Transformations of Shame in Digitalized Relationships
Vera King
Media Traumatization, Symbolic Wounds and Digital Culture
38, Vol 11 2016

Allen Meek
The Other Self in Free Fall: Anxiety and Automated Tracking Applications
Christopher Gutierrez
Digital Feminisms and the Split Subject:
Short-circuits through Lacans Four Discourses
cdi Alison Horbury

A Digital Death Drive? Hubris and Learning in
CM
Psychoanalysis and Cybernetics
Colin John Campbell
YouTubers, Online Selves and the Performance Principle:
Notes from a Post-Jungian Perspective
Greg Singh
The Female Target: Digitality, Psychoanalysis and the Gangbang
Diego Semerene
Chaosmic Spasm: Guattari, Stiegler, Berardi, and the Digital Apocalypse
Mark Featherstone
38, Vol 11 2016

Redakcija/Editorial Board:
Ali Sead, Center for Philosophy of Media, Zagreb (Croatia)
Alvares Claudia, Lusfona University (Portugal)
Bailey Olga, Nottingham Trent University (UK)
Balytien Auks, Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania)
Brankovi Srbobran, University Singidunum (Serbia)
Carpentier Nico, Loughborough University (UK); Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium);
Charles University (Czech Republic)
Carpentier Reifov Irena, Charles University (Czech Republic)
Colombo Fausto, Catholic University, Milan (Italy)
Damsio Manuel Jos, Lusfona University (Portugal)
Gowacki Micha, University of Warsaw (Poland)
Hasebrink Uwe, University of Hamburg (Germany)
Heller Maria, Etvs Lornd University (Hungary)
Hibberd Matthew, University of Stirling (UK)
Jevtovi Zoran, University of Ni (Serbia)
Jirk Jan, Charles University; Metropolitan University Prague (Czech Republic)
Kejanliolu Beybin, Dou University (Turkey)
Kleut Jelena, Editorial Assistant, University of Novi Sad (Serbia)
Krsti Aleksandra, University of Belgrade (Serbia)
Kunelius Risto, University of Tampere (Finland)
Lauk Epp, University of Jyvskyl (Finland)
Labudovi Boris, Communication Direction Institute (Serbia)
Maigret Eric, Universit Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle (France)
Milojevi Ana, University of Belgrade (Serbia)
Nieminen Hannu, University of Helsinki (Finland)
Olsson Tobias, Jnkping University (Sweden)
Patriarche Geoffroy, Facultes universitaires Saint-Louis, Academie Louvain (Belgium)
Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt Pille, University of Tartu (Estonia)
Schrder Kim Christian, Roskilde University (Denmark)
Sorice Michele, CMCS LUISS University, Rome (Italy)
Stojkovi Branimir, University of Belgrade (Serbia)
Sundin Ebba, Jnkping University (Sweeden)
Terzis Georgios, Vesalius College, Brussels (Belgium); Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium);
University of Oxford (UK)
Titley Gavan, National University of Ireland (Ireland)
Todorovi Neda, University of Belgrade (Serbia)
Tomani Trivunda Ilija, University of Ljubljana (Slovenia)
Turilo Lejla, University of Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina)
Trkolu Nuray, Marmara University (Turkey)
Vuksanovi Divna, University of Arts (Serbia)
Wimmer Jeffrey, Technical University Ilmenau (Germany)
ISSN 2466541X ISSN 2466-5452 (Online)
CM
Broj 38, godina XI 2016 38, Vol 11 2016

Digital Media, Psychoanalysis and the Subject
Editors: Jacob Johanssen, Steffen Krger
Thinking (with) the Unconscious in Media and
Communication Studies: Introduction to the Special Issue 540
Steffen Krger, Jacob Johanssen
Framing the Mobile Phone: The Psychopathologies of an Everyday Object 4170
Iain MacRury, Candida Yates
If you show your real face, youll lose 10 000 followers The Gaze of the
Other and Transformations of Shame in Digitalized Relationships 7190
Vera King
Media Traumatization, Symbolic Wounds and Digital Culture 91110
Allen Meek
The Other Self in Free Fall: Anxiety and Automated Tracking Applications 111134
Christopher Gutierrez
Digital Feminisms and the Split Subject:
Short-circuits through Lacans Four Discourses 135166
Alison Horbury
A Digital Death Drive? Hubris and Learning in
Psychoanalysis and Cybernetics 167188
Colin John Campbell
YouTubers, Online Selves and the Performance Principle:
Notes from a Post-Jungian Perspective 189216
Greg Singh
The Female Target: Digitality, Psychoanalysis and the Gangbang 217242
Diego Semerene
Chaosmic Spasm: Guattari, Stiegler, Berardi, and the Digital Apocalypse 243268
Mark Featherstone
CM
Izdavai/Publishers:
Institut za usmeravanje komunikacija, Novi Sad / Communication Direction Institute
Fakultet politikih nauka, Beograd / Faculty of Political Sciences, Belgrade
Glavni i odgovorni urednik/Editor:
Miroljub Radojkovi, Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Belgrade (Serbia)
Issue editors
Jacob Johanssen, University of Westminster, United Kingdom
Steffen Krger, University of Oslo, Norway
Za izdavae/Official representatives:
Dragan Simi, dekan Fakulteta politikih nauka u Beogradu/Dean of the Faculty of Political Sciences in Belgrade
Boris Labudovi, Institut za usmeravanje komunikacija / Communication Direction Institute
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tampanje asopisa finansijski je pomogao

Pokrajinski sekretarijat za nauku i tehnoloki razvoj
Publication of the Journal is financially supported

by the Provincial Secretariat for Science and Technological Development
CIP
,
316.774
CM : Communication and Media = Komunikacija

i mediji / glavni i odgovorni urednik Miroljub Radojkovi.
God. 11, br. 38 (2016) . Novi Sad : Institut za
usmeravanje komunikacija ; Beograd : Fakultet politikih
nauka, 2016 (Beograd : igoja tampa). 24 cm
Tri puta godinje. Tekst na srp. i engl. jeziku. Je nastavak:

CM. Communication Management = ISSN 1452-7405.
Drugo izdanje na drugom medijumu: CM. Communication
and Media (Online) = ISSN 2466-5452
ISSN 2466-541X = CM. Communication and Media
COBISS.SR-ID 227945484
4
EDITORIAL
Thinking (with) the Unconscious in

Media and Communication Studies:
Introduction to the Special Issue
Steffen Krger1
University of Oslo, Norway
Jacob Johanssen2
University of Westminster, United Kingdom
doi: 10.5937/comman11-13131
Abstract: Under the title Digital Media, Psychoanalysis and the Subject, this spe-
cial issue of CM: Communication and Media seeks to reassess and reinvigorate psycho-
analytic thinking in media and communication studies. We undertake this reassessment
with a particular focus on the question of what psychoanalytic concepts, theories as well
as modes of inquiry can contribute to the study of digital media. Overlooking the field
of media and communication studies, we argue that psychoanalysis offers a reservoir of
conceptual and methodological tools that has not been sufficiently tapped. In particular,
psychoanalytic perspectives offer a heightened concern and sensibility for the unconscious,
i.e. the element in human relating and relatedness that criss-crosses and mars our best
laid plans and reasonable predictions. This introduction provides an insight into psy-
choanalysis as a discipline, indicates the ways in which it has been adopted in media
research in general and research into digital media in particular and, ultimately, points
to its future potential to contribute to the field.
Keywords: digital media, the unconscious, psychoanalysis, subjectivity, the psycho-

social
1
Contact with author: [email protected].
2
CM : Communication and Media XI(38) 540 2016 CDI 5

Thinking (with) the Unconscious in Media Steffen Krger
and Communication Studies Jacob Johanssen
1. Introduction
For the past two decades, critical research into media and communication
has sought ways to understand the significant shift brought about by digitalisa-
tion and the proliferation of networked online media. With this shift, questions
of individuality, the single media user as an entity and her/his relations to soci-
ety have taken on a renewed salience. Digital media enable individual choices
with regard to how media content is selected, appropriated, (dis)engaged with
and modified on an unprecedented scale. Such developments have resulted
in scholarship that has explored individual agency and questions of power in
relation to digital media in manifold ways, be it through simple consumption
choices, online activism, fan practices or many other forms of engagement.
At the same time, the individual as such has become part of the content
being produced. People find themselves instigated to express and share who
they are and relate to others via multiple, networked media channels on diverse
platforms that create afford, shape and suggest relations that indicate just
how interminable the processes of subjectification and individualisation are.
Within the corporate realm, these platforms are characterised by the double
objective of enabling feelings of community whilst also profiting from the
ensuing communication (see e.g. Burston, Dyer-Witheford & Hearn, 2010;
Fisher, 2012; Fuchs, 2014; Krger & Johanssen, 2014; Krger, 2016). Relying
on targeted data extraction as business models (Turow, 2011; Fuchs, 2014),
the relations they facilitate tend towards the commodification of the individual
and, intentionally or not, open up possibilities for corporate and governmental
surveillance. Thus, a focus on big data (boyd & Crawford, 2012), the politics
of algorithms (Bucher, 2012; Mager, 2012; Gillespie, 2014), media populism
(Moffitt, 2016) and, recently, so-called fake news (Bessi & Ferrara, 2016;
Giglietto et al., 2016) have complicated accounts that emphasise individual
choice and agency by pointing out how these individual choices become aggre-
gated into the behaviours of new masses (Baxmann et al., 2014).
The notions and concepts with which researchers have sought to emphasise
and highlight relevant aspects of this shifting situation, such as convergence
(Jenkins, 2006), connectivity (van Dijck, 2013), participation (Jenkins,
2006; Carpentier, 2011), produsage (Bruns, 2008), interactivity (Lister
et al., 2009: 21ff), user-generated content (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010), and
digital labour (Terranova, 2000; Fuchs, 2014) have long since become com-
6 CM : Communication and Media XI(38) 540 2016 CDI

Steffen Krger Thinking (with) the Unconscious in Media
Jacob Johanssen and Communication Studies
mon parlance. They are challenged and defended, changed and rearranged. A
variety of approaches, theories, models and assumptions attach themselves to
these concepts that focus on a diverse range of angles, including gender, eth-
nicity, class, subculture and group memberships from micro, meso and macro
perspectives. With these come diverse philosophies and worldviews that often
concern questions of activity, passivity and agency with regard to media use as
well as media power.
Yet, whereas many of these approaches can be seen as responses to the re-
newed interest in, as well as centrality of, the individual media user, the concep-
tions of the subject and subjectivity underlying these works frequently remain
implicit and in need of reflection and clarification. What is established by such
implicit notions of subjectivity (Dahlgren, 2013: 72) is an idea of media users
leaning strongly towards rationality, cognition, categorisation and assimilation.
While, as mentioned above, consumer choices become ever finer grained to
meet individual demand and while content is frequently tailored to meet the
expectations, or suspicions, of political loyalists, the challenge that the resulting
notions of individuality pose to our conceptions of the subject have only started
to be confronted by media and communication research and related fields (see
Wilson, 2010; Lupton, 2016; Brckling, 2016).
In order to counter the tendency of foregoing the relevance of subjective
experience and its impact on the social, Peter Dahlgren has recently advocated
reactivating concerns about the subject (2013: 73) in media studies research,
stating that researchers in the field also need to consider communicative modes
beyond the rational (2013: 82). Heeding this call, psychoanalysis may be one,
if not the discipline, best equipped to point to ways out of the rationalistic
impasse. As Brown and Lunt suggest, there is something about psychoanalysis
that is corrosive to the whole model of the subject built up by the social identity
tradition (2002: 8) i.e. the very tradition to which implicit models of the
subject in media and communication studies frequently default.
This special issue understands itself as a critical appreciation of this cor-
rosiveness of psychoanalytic theory as a productive potential for media and
communication studies. With its diverse traditions Freudian, Kleinian, La-
canian, Winnicottian, relational, etc. foregrounding the conflicted, ambiva-
lent, defended, divided, desirous, wishful, multifaceted, layered and processual
aspects of human beings in their relations with others, psychoanalysis shifts our

attention to contradiction, incoherence, ambiguity, resistance and enjoyment

in media texts and mediums as well as in our responses to them.
While psychoanalysis is primarily a clinical field, the application of theoreti-
cal and methodological concepts outside the consulting room has shown that
they can be immensely fruitful and productive if the specificity of the social
context in which they are used is kept in view. Thus, instead of colonising
the social with the psychical, which was one of the cardinal mistakes of early
psychoanalytic research, the focus is now firmly on the kinds of connections
between the psychic and the social, the co-constitution of the psychic and the
social and/or their mutual implication in one another (Hollway & Jefferson,
2000; Frosh, 2012).
As regards the in-depth study of this co-constitution, or mutual implica-
tion, of the psychic and the social, the media, media technologies and the users
relationship to these play a key role. In Western societies at the onset of the 21st
century, questions regarding socialisation, individualisation and subjectivation
can only thoroughly and satisfactorily be answered when we take our relations
in, through and with media into consideration. In this respect, what is most
striking from a psychoanalytic (but also from other, e.g. post-human and new
materialist) perspective(s), is the movement of information and communica-
tion technology ever closer to the human body and into each and every aspect
of everyday life. With the steady increase in computing power and a significant
rise in wireless transmission rates, with devices becoming smaller, lighter, more
mobile and ever more able to merge with the human body, a media sphere has
developed that is rapidly becoming a major, integral influence on the ways in
which we relate to and interact with others - ways that psychoanalysis holds to
be vital for subjective development.
While the articles collected in this issue of CM each inquire into specific sce-
narios of and challenges resulting from this proximity and integrality, what fol-
lows is a more general inquiry into the relationship between the psychoanalytic
unconscious and the current media situation. This assessment is followed by
the introduction of the articles collected in this issue in the context of existing
currents of psychoanalytically oriented research on digital media. We end the
introduction with an outlook on the future of psychoanalytic media research.

2. Digital Media and the Psychoanalytic Unconscious

As briefly broached above, psychoanalysis is, first of all, a clinical method
of treating mental illnesses that arise from intra- and intersubjective dynamics.
Advances in psychoanalytic theory have always been closely tied to what would
emerge from the interactions between analysand and analyst in the consulting
room. From the very beginning, however, this mode of theory production be-
came fertilised by analysts drawing on cultural materials and artefacts. When,
in the decisive phase of the foundation of psychoanalysis, Freud reported to
his friend, Wilhelm Fliess, that he had found in himself a strong love for his
mother and jealousy towards his father, he immediately referred this finding
to the gripping power of Oedipus Rex (Freud, 1962: 193), the antique stage
drama by Sophocles (ca. 429425 BC). Thereby, he connected a psychic insight
with a literary character and, as Alfred Lorenzer (1986: 20) further pointed out,
implicitly equate[d] an unconscious experience with the impact of a literary
work. In this way, then, cultural artefacts penetrated psychoanalytic theory and
practice and, consequently, it did not take long before psychoanalysis started
to venture into the realm of culture in return, with the founding of Imago, the
journal for the application of psychoanalysis in the human sciences, in 1912,
giving these ventures a platform of their own. Subsequently, the psychoanalytic
idiom began to sink into Western thinking, with people interpreting their own,
as well as others, behaviour in terms of repression, resistance, Freudian slips
etc. Therefore, when we, in this special issue, aim at an assessment and reassess-
ment of digital media from a psychoanalytic perspective, we position ourselves
in the tradition of psychoanalytic explorations (Kris, 1952) in culture. How-
ever, due to the very penetration of psychoanalysis and its terminology into
everyday life, this assessment must be done with a keen eye for the original
theoretical formulations, the nuanced clinical uses of certain terms and the
ongoing debates around them.3
Additionally, this self-reflexive turn is suggested by research on psycho-
analytic concepts itself. As Drew Westen (1999) wrote in his overview of the
scientific status of psychoanalytic concepts, the most fundamental assumption
of psychoanalytic theory and practice is no longer a matter of scientific debate.
3
Furthermore, as Eli Zaretsky (2015) and others (e.g. Halpern, 2014) have pointed out, psychoanalysis is also in need
of self-reflection since its paradigm has increasingly become intermixed with and contested by that of cybernetics. In
other words, as our conceptions of subjectivity in its various contexts are in flux themselves, an assessment of digital
media a realm largely driven by cybernetic thinking from a psychoanalytic perspective also needs to consider the
implications of digital culture for psychoanalysis.

[] The clear experimental documentation of unconscious thought, feeling,

and motivation supports many aspects of psychoanalytic theory and practice
(1999: 1063). Having thus secured a scientific grounding for psychoanalysis,
Westen continues his overview by listing various kinds of unconscious processes
that the experimental literature has identified. While many of them fall inside
the traditional psychoanalytic field of interest, some of them serve functions
that diverge from those on which psychoanalysis has focused (Westen, 1999:
10631064). Westen therefore suggests a mutual opening of disciplines, so that
academic disciplines become receptive of psychoanalytic insight, but also, vice
versa, that psychoanalysis take on board the implications derived from findings
made in other fields.
For the purposes of the present article, while we cannot follow Westens
appeal systematically, what we would like to take with us into our outline of
psychoanalytic thinking in digital media studies are the following two points:
While it is necessary (A) to think the unconscious and to think with the un-
conscious in media and communication studies, it is just as necessary to (B)
approach and use traditional psychoanalytical terminology as a heuristic device
and in a way that is committed, but never uncritically bound to this terminol-
ogy. Thus, as indicated above, we want to conceive of the concepts and elements
of psychoanalysis as open and malleable to the demands and implications of
the field of digital media. In this spirit, we will now first give an outline of the
psychoanalytic unconscious in order to then bring it in touch with the study of
digital, online media.
2.1. The Psychoanalytic Unconscious

Without doubt, the most central aspect of psychoanalysis is the psychical
conflict upon which the unconscious as well as the whole of psychoanalytic
theory is based. In his definition, Stephen Frosh points out that the psychoana-
lytic unconscious
refers to the existence of ideas which are not just not being thought about
(hence not just not in consciousness) but which are also radically unavail-
able to thought - they cannot be brought to awareness even if the person
tries really hard, or at least it is more of a struggle than one person can
manage on her or his own. These hidden ideas, however, have a profound
influence on psychological life. (Frosh, 2002: 1213)

Whereas experimental evidence refers us to the existence of various kinds of

unconscious processes that are unconscious simply because they are not thought
about but are otherwise unproblematically available to consciousness, the speci-
ficity of the psychoanalytic unconscious is that it cannot simply be activated and
drawn into conscious, rational thinking. Instead, it is actively kept away from
consciousness, because its contents are too toxic for the individual and too pain-
ful to bear and engage with.
At the same time, unconscious ideas by no means disappear or become
entirely forgotten. Rather, as Frosh writes, although they are hidden from
awareness, they still remain active (dynamic), pushing for release (2002:
13). The process of repression, which becomes constitutive for the psychoanalytic
unconscious, has to be an ongoing, continuous one. Not only must intolerable
ideas be withdrawn from consciousness, they also have to be kept away from it
by continuing pressure (2002: 15). As with a taboo that ties prohibition and
attraction together in a tense relationship, the forbidden and forbidding nature
of unconscious ideas exerts a strong attraction and it is the dialectical, conflictual
relation between the desirable and the intolerable in one and the same idea that
is constitutive of the psychoanalytic unconscious.
In his second topography, Freud captured the tense dynamic between desire
and prohibition in a tripartite structure, namely, between the Id, i.e. the drives
and their representations, and the Superego, i.e. the conscience function, with
the Ego attempting to negotiate and strike a balance between the two with a
view to remaining adapted to the demands of (social) reality. As the conflictual
nature of the relationship between these three agencies suggests, the qualities and
quantities by which adaptedness might be measured are open to negotiation and
change. On the intrapsychical plane, these changes occur because we are neither
always able to put in the effort that it takes to keep the unconscious in check nor
always willing to do so e.g. because we are mentally exhausted, under stress,
in an overwhelming life situation, drunk or otherwise intoxicated, or simply,
asleep. In these situations, the repressed unconscious can easily return to us
and announce its existence in an abundance of ways, e.g. in dreams, parapraxes
(characteristically called Freudian slips) and in faulty, or even bizarre acts that,
in social situations, create scenes about which we later might simply shake our
heads. The frequently heard excuse of I dont know what came over me, or I
wasnt myself in that moment are typical ways of dissociating from the break-
ing through of aspects or traits that one might have been attempting to disown.

It is when looking back on embarrassing situations, such as those implied

above, that we might obtain an insight into the existence of an afterlife of infan-
tile thinking and acting an afterlife that is part of the unconscious, since many
of those ideas and scenes that we experience as so intolerable that they have to
be repressed either stem from, or follow relational patterns, the foundations of
which were laid in early childhood. As grown-ups, while we never encounter
our unconscious i.e. that which intolerably, unbearably belongs to us in
a completely unfiltered, undiminished way, our confrontations with it are of
varied intensity. As Frosh writes,
there is, for example, sufficient censorship remaining in dreams to mean
that little damage is usually done by them. But sometimes a crisis occurs,
for example when the only way in which a tumultuous energy of uncon-
scious life can be contained is to allow some of it expression in the form of
neurotic symptoms. (2002: 23)
Similar to dreams, such symptomatic expressions function as openings into
a persons unconscious. However, it is important not to understand them as
pure and straightforward expressions of it; what is breaking through in symp-
toms is not a voice speaking directly from the depths of the unconscious.
Rather, symptoms can be understood as compromise formations that organ-
ise and regulate psychic life by creating provisional outlets. The unconscious
manifests itself, then, in expressions that are riddled with metaphors and me-
tonymies, as well as the Egos defensive attempts at keeping these expressions
within the conventions of the normal. Anna Freud (1936/1984), in particular,
devoted a significant part of her theoretical work to identifying and differentiat-
ing these defence mechanisms and naming them according to their functions,
e.g. projection, identification, rationalisation etc. But other traditions, first and
foremost that based on the works of Melanie Klein, have also identified mecha-
nisms that have immense value for understanding psychic dynamics, such as
splitting and projective identification (see e.g. Hinshelwood, 1991).
Due to these theoretical developments, the concept of repression is now be-
ing used in two different ways. On the one hand and in its more general usage
it has become an umbrella term for the various mechanisms with which peo-
ple attempt to fend off the anxiety that announces the breaking-through of the
unconscious. After all, as Frosh (2002) states, once the workings of repression
are fully described, it becomes apparent that all defences have a similar func-
tion, which is to keep unconscious impulses at bay. So, every defence involves
repression, and repression in the general language sense is what every defence
does. (Frosh, 2002: 21) On the other hand and in its more specific usage
repression becomes one defence mechanism amongst others, with all of them
serving the Ego to retain homeostasis and a relatively workable and endurable
mode of functioning. Yet, they achieve this in a way that is not completely
harmless. The more established the defences against the threatening return of
the repressed (Freud, 1915) become, the more the subject becomes caught up
in the anxious abating of its conflicts, in a precarious, highly inhibiting manage-
ment of unthinkable desires and life threatening prohibitions.
The clinical process of psychoanalysis is geared towards the analysand, in
small steps taken in dialogue with the analyst, developing an awareness of
exactly those patterns of thinking, feeling, relating to and interacting with oth-
ers that continuously re-enact and reproduce the conflicts upon which his/her
unconscious and its ensuing dynamics thrive. The ultimate aim is to make these
patterns lose their efficacy and binding power. However, since the unconscious
is a dynamic of thinking that is principally outside language, with unconscious
ideas behaving more like things than words, and since psychoanalysis is a
process in which language and speech are central for the acknowledgement of
inner states, the unconscious can never be wholly captured, understood and
explained in and through its efforts. Furthermore, analysands can never be
completely healed of the symptoms from which they suffer, nor should we
hope for such a healing. After all, since it is also our unconscious that makes us
who we are, a complete recovery would also mean a total change of personality.
Summarising our account so far: What distinguishes psychoanalytic from
other kinds of unconscious processes is its dynamism a dynamism that is
based on a tense, conflicted relation between various psychic agencies, in the
classic Freudian conception between the It, the Superego and the Ego, which
might be translated as desire, duty and reality. The psychoanalytic unconscious
is not so much a realm or place, but rather, should be conceived of as a process
in which intolerable ideas and imaginations become withdrawn from con-
sciousness. Becoming repressed, these imaginations then become constitutive
of the unconscious, (a) because they need to be kept from becoming conscious
on a continuous basis. And since this is not always possible or even desirable,
unconscious ideas (b) make their presence known as symptoms that emerge in

different situations, ways and intensities. In this way, writes Frosh, unconscious
ideas are also causal they make us who we are and produce much of the weft
and warp of psychic life, its richness and its confusion (Frosh, 2002: 1315).
2.2. Thinking (with) the Unconscious in Digital Media

Arguably, continuing from the above, it is by no means obvious how the
psychoanalytic unconscious in its dynamic complexity can be brought into play
in the study of media content and form. That which is brought to the fore in
clinical psychoanalysis, in the relation between analyst and analysand, seems to
entail far too personal and intimate a knowledge as to pertain to the study of in-
stitutional and sociocultural practices. Since the psychoanalytic unconscious is
constituted by that which is too painful for the individual to associate with and
through the very act of keeping these thoughts, imaginations and experiences
away from consciousness and from expression in the social, how could they
ever have an impact upon the sociocultural at all? By the same token, however,
the above question can also be turned on its head. Since our unconscious plays
a vital part in who and what we are, not only in symptomatic expressions, but
also by pushing our personal development into directions that emerge from the
necessity to respond to and manage our conflicted and conflictual needs, it is
indeed highly improbable that this unconscious, as it is shaped by the social,
does not also play a vital role in shaping the social in return.
Questions regarding the exact relationship between the psychic and the so-
cial have been vexing researchers throughout the 20th century. Since the early
attempts of the Frankfurt School, critical theorists have sought to combine so-
ciological accounts of the workings of the social with psychoanalytic accounts
of the workings of the human psyche. However, while straightforward attempts
at coordinating these two poles have hardly ever been convincing e.g. Herbert
Marcuses terms, such as surplus-repression (Marcuse, 1955), suggest to us
somewhat too clear-cut equivalences recent times have seen some far more
sophisticated advances in mediating between the psychic and the social and we
will touch upon them in our overview of the traditions of psychoanalytic think-
ing within media and communication below.
However, a limitation of many of these approaches is that their focus is
very much on media content and its potential effects a focus that comes at the
expense of the medias forms of mediation themselves. In view of the ubiquity
of digital media, shifting our attention to the specific ways of mediation and
their impact becomes increasingly important. With media technologies becom-

ing ever more mobile and moving ever closer to the body as well as into things
(which are thus turned into non-human actors), our interest in unconscious
processes needs to be opened out to the question of how far and in what ways
do these media themselves come to play a part in their audiences subjectivities
and, vice versa, how far and in what ways do audiences themselves come to
play a part in the medias agency. Therefore, as the next step in this subchapter,
we want to turn to the question of how we might describe a process of media
socialisation (or even subjectivation) from the point of psychoanalytic theory.
2.2.1. Online Disinhibition - An Exemplary Case of

Understanding the Digital Psychoanalytically
One scenario in which a process of media subjectivation can be unfolded
is offered by John Sulers now classic article on the Online Disinhibition Ef-
fect (2004). Suler presents six characteristic factors that shape the behaviour of
users engaged in communicative practices facilitated by online environments.
While some of these factors (they are: anonymity, invisibility, asynchronic-
ity, solipsistic introjection, dissociative imagination and minimisation of
authority) are more promptly understandable than others, Sulers main drift
is that all of them must be seen in relation to the loosening of ties with signifi-
cant others in online interactions a socio-technological tendency that Sherry
Turkle unfolded in her seminal Alone Together (2011) and in subsequent pub-
lications (2015). In the scenarios that Suler describes, people act and interact
without being burdened by the weight of their social identity and reputation
and/or with significantly less consideration for tact and the emotional well-
being of others. As Suler observes, these situations, although typical of specific
online contexts, are also reminiscent of other social situations, particularly that
of the psychoanalytic hour itself, to which Suler refers explicitly. Apropos the
factor of invisibility he writes:
According to traditional psychoanalytic theory, the analyst sits behind the
patient in order to remain a physically ambiguous figure, revealing no body
language or facial expression, so that the patient has free range to discuss
whatever he or she wants without feeling inhibited by how the analyst is
physically reacting. (Suler, 2004: 322)

Suler holds that in many online environments, too, the absence of bodily
signs in response to a users actions allows this user to push his/her actions ever
more into the direction of his/her prior dispositions and proclivities. Further-
more, when he claims that people say and do things in cyberspace that they
wouldnt ordinarily say and do in the face-to-face world, that they loosen
up, feel less restrained, and express themselves more openly (2004: 321), this
shows interesting correspondences with the most basic requirement in psy-
choanalysis, namely, that the analysand freely associate and give expression to
whatever comes to mind (Freud, 1978).
We could continue our playful comparison of Sulers conception of online
disinhibition with the psychoanalytic situation here. However, if we take seri-
ously the correspondences between the two situations, then, the more interest-
ing question to consider is what these correspondences imply for the psycho-
analytic conception of the subject in these contexts of online disinhibition.
Thus, when we take disinhibition to mean the loosening of repression and the
emergence of freely associative modes of interaction, must we not expect to find
a kind of subjectivity facilitated in these online environments that externalises
its unconscious to a far greater extent than psychoanalytic theory could foresee?
And, consequently, must we not expect to be confronted there with displays of
the unconscious in a decisively rawer form than the concept of repression sug-
gests?
Answering these questions for the specific cases of online disinhibition, it is
worth returning to the differentiation between the two uses of the term repres-
sion. As stated above, whereas its narrower use points to the specific defence
mechanism of repression by which an idea is withdrawn and kept away from
consciousness, its more general use points to repression as an umbrella term
for various kinds of mechanisms by which unconscious ideas are kept from an
individuals awareness. With a view to incidences of online disinhibition, then,
repression in the general sense can no longer be seen as performed by repression
in the specific sense. Rather, Sulers text suggests that more regressive4 forms of
interaction will become commonplace, with less restrained and, indeed, less
inhibiting defence mechanisms coming to the fore, e.g. projection, acting out,
splitting, idealisation etc.
4
We use regressive here in its non-pejorative, psychoanalytic sense of a return to less structured and differentiated
modes of expression and interaction (see Laplanche & Pontalis, 1973: 436).

These changes at the interactional level have implications for our overall
conception of subjectivity in these contexts, too. After all, if people change
the ways in which they cope with anxiety, conflict and desire, this will have
consequences for their whole way of being. Thus, in an attempt to capture the
potential impact of online disinhibition on subjectivity, it becomes clear from
our perspective that online subjectivity is now frequently less guarded and, as
a consequence, more vulnerable to fragmentation, with the means to defend
against such vulnerability having become more archaic and loud.
Yet, as regards this potential impact on subjectivity, we have to be careful
not to colonise all online environments with the above theoretical speculations.
Suggesting a vastly sceptical outlook on culture, the online disinhibition ef-
fect, as Suler conceives of it, finds an echo in Freuds bleak societal diagnosis in
Civilization and its Discontents (1981) and its main thesis that natural human
proclivities must be bound by a repressive culture so as to make coexistence at
all possible. Along these lines, the introduction of the Internet in general would
have to be seen as a dangerous step in a development leading to the loosening
of repression on a global scale and to a general re-aggressivisation and re-sexual-
isation of social ties. To use this conception indiscriminately for all online prac-
tices and all relational cultures emerging from them would be a grave mistake.
Rather, while the phenomenon of online disinhibition finds most resonance
in social media, online discussion forums and news boards, it seems just as pos-
sible to identify practices and environments with markedly different structures
of feeling and with cultures in which users relations to their media call for dif-
ferent theoretical reflections as well as inflections. The vast field of fandoms
and online fan cultures (e.g. Saito, 2011), for example, suggests cooperative and
mutually supportive relationships in which ties to significant others are all but
loosened and where different kinds of sexualities and, ultimately, subjectivities
are being imagined and performed that have the potential to challenge set psy-
choanalytic expectations in ways that are different from the above.
In turn, when it comes to the field of corporate social networking sites, we
can see that they afford forms of interaction that are disinhibiting and highly
inhibiting at the same time. While the corporate desire for user-generated con-
tent brings forth ever new possibilities for the users to, in Sulers words, loosen
up [] and express themselves more openly (2004: 321), this drive towards
freely-associative material is countered and contradicted by the desire to attach
these associations to the users true identities (Hogan, 2013). What is being

suggested in this conflicted mixture of affordances is a form of subjectivity that

comes with a strong orientation towards self-marketing and self-commodifica-
tion and can well be seen as the fulfilment of what Adorno, with a view to the
cultural industry, termed psychoanalysis in reverse (1954: 223).5 However,
whether or not users comply with this mode of self-fashioning and subjectiva-
tion is another matter. Clearly, a significant number of them are keenly aware
of the corporate modes of surveillance in place on the sites. And while many
users feel either increasingly inhibited to share information there (Marwick &
boyd, 2011, 2014; Stutzman, Gross & Acquisti, 2012), or use ironic modes of
compliance, there is also a proud tradition of subverting, or even sabotaging,
the corporate interest in user creativity (e.g. Saco, 2002; boyd, 2014; Karppi,
2015; Phillips, 2015; Krger, 2016). This tradition again holds potential for
identification and subjectivation and goes to show that even those mechanisms
that, at the relational level, have a defensive function, might have a sublimating,
progressive effect at the sociocultural level.
Now, turning to the next subchapter of this introductory article, we will
present this issues contributions in the context of the broader currents of psy-
choanalytic media research from which they derive.
3. Mapping Psychoanalytic Research into

Media and Communication
While it is safe to say that psychoanalysis leads a niche existence within most
media and communication departments across the world today, with the authors
discussed in this section representing a minority in the field, it is nevertheless
possible to point to genealogies, or tentative lineages, of psychoanalytic media
research. However, the following presentation of these lineages has been made
for the sake of summary rather than to canonise authors into set traditions.
3.1. Critical Theory, Cultural Studies and Psychoanalysis

As briefly touched upon above, some of the first attempts to combine psy-
choanalytic and sociological thinking can be traced back to members of the
Frankfurt School who sought to combine readings of Marx with Freud in order
to critique capitalism and its inherent modes of domination, commodification
5
Marcuse (1964/1991) points in a similar direction with his concept of repressive desublimation. Also, in this
respect, ieks critical reading of cyberspace as the suspension of the master (1997: 193ff) is still very current.

and exploitation, which they came to see as both grounded in structural forces
as well as entangled in subjective processes (e.g. Fromm, 1941/1994); Marcuse,
1955; Horkheimer & Adorno, 1972; Adorno, 1975). All of them touched
upon the media in their works to an extent. Perhaps it was Horkheimer and
Adornos chapter on the culture industry, in The Dialectic of Enlightenment
(1972), that most famously conceptualised mass media as a form of affirmative
pleasure a pleasure that not only reproduced capitalisms relations of produc-
tion but was also able to manipulate and shape audiences tastes and desires.
Horkheimer and Adornos account of the media was received rather sceptically
in Anglo-American academic circles where they were accused of conceptualis-
ing audiences as too uncritical, passive and pacified. It was British cultural stud-
ies in particular that argued for empirical investigations into audiences and how
they made sense of the media. In the process, however, the discipline started to
lose sight of and turned away from psychoanalysis (Hall, 1980; Morley, 1986;
Grossberg, 1987; Couldry, 2000).
By contrast, in post-war Germany, the link between critical theory and psy-
choanalysis was revitalised by the second generation of the Frankfurt School.
Major impulses came from the works of Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich
(1967/2007), the early Habermas (1972) and Alfred Lorenzer (e.g. 1970a, b).
The latter in particular, through his works on depth-hermeneutics, offered a
viable theoretical and methodological approach to cultural research from a psy-
choanalytic perspective that still exerts a strong influence on social and cultural
research in Germany (see, e.g., Knig, 2006; Lchel, 2002). From a pragmatic,
historical-materialist orientation, depth-hermeneutics conceives of the psy-
choanalytic concepts of the conscious and unconscious in terms of evolving
forms of interaction that are either granted or not granted access to language
and conscious modes of thinking. Since these forms evolve from earliest child-
hood, in repeated interactions between infant and caregiver, the social comes
into the picture from the very beginning. As the caregiver is always already a
social being, the interactional patterns that take shape in the infant through its
encounters with her/him inevitably come to carry a psychic as well as a social
dimension.
Vera Kings article on the Transformations of Shame in Digitalized Rela-
tionships is rooted in this tradition. Based on open, unstructured interviews
with mobile media users, her analysis captures the sociocultural implications

of the evolving media practices in dialogue with psychoanalytic and sociologi-

cal theories of shame. What she finds in her article are changes in the quality
of relationships to physically present yet communicatively absent others
(p. 72). Specifically, the absence of shame from situations in which people use
digital media while others are physically present points to a shift in relational
practices on a sociocultural scale.
3.2. Feminist Media Studies

A number of feminist thinkers have and continue to engage with psycho-
analytic ideas (Mulvey, 1975; de Lauretis, 1984; Doane, 1987; Copjec, 1989;
Cowie, 1990; Silverman 1992). This tradition has primarily been connected
to the medium of film and has often drawn on Lacanian theory to describe
the ideological (unconscious) effects of cinema on spectators. Lacan posits that
our first encounters with ourselves and others are pre-symbolic and of a visual
nature. The baby sees herself in a mirror and mirrored through others reactions
towards her and, as a result, mis-perceives herself as a coherent, unified and
rational being. The very act of perceiving the self as self is marked by a funda-
mental break between the I who perceives itself and the self that is perceived as
an other. This relationship between the individual and his/her (imagined) other
lies at the heart of Lacans thinking. Laura Mulvey (1975), in turn, adapted
Lacans notion of the mirror stage and coupled it with his theory of the gaze.
In her work on Hollywood cinema, she argued that cinema, in its ideological
function to reproduce patriarchy, invariably presents female bodies from the
perspective of the gaze of the films male protagonist, so that the audience will
unconsciously identify with this gaze and become interpellated by it.
Another tradition of media analysis that has become revitalised over the past
decades and which builds strongly on Lacanian psychoanalysis is a version of
discourse analysis. For this tradition Lacans conceptualisations of the symbolic
and of discourse are crucial. In his reinterpretation of Freuds unconscious as
outside language, Lacan holds that the unconscious is actually a (side)product
of our entry into language and the symbolic. Specifically, he ventures that from
our first attempts at symbolising experience and desire, and articulating (sig-
nifying) these in language, there is something that must become excluded and
remain unsaid. In fact, that which remains unsaid only comes into existence as
the unsaid through our attempts at articulating it as part of a signifying chain

in the first place. This unsaid i.e. that which eludes symbolisation and only
comes about through symbolisation is the unconscious an unconscious
that, enigmatically, is outside and, at the same time, inside language.
The basic dependency of the Lacanian unconscious on language and the
symbolic suggests a mode of analysing unconscious aspects in texts without
necessarily relating these aspects to individual life-histories. Rather, each lin-
guistic statement in its particular sociocultural context is seen here to evoke a
realm of that which cannot be said, which comes to hover over a given scene,
and it is this realm that Lacanian discourse analysis is geared to shed light
upon. Ian Parker, the main proponent of this research direction, explicitly sug-
gests ready-made media texts (Parker, 2010: 157) as a fertile material for this
approach. In this way, one can say, the Lacanian analysis of media discourse
manages to bypass the narrower biographical dimensions of the psychoanalytic
unconscious by focusing on the more general workings of the symbolic. Argu-
ably, this makes this approach less prone to speculations at the level of intimate,
personal meanings. At the same time, however, its predominantly social interest
makes it debatable as to whether its object of analysis still falls within the realm
of the stricter psychoanalytic definition of the repressed unconscious.
Alison Horbury can be seen as being affiliated with this tradition. Her
analysis of feminist discourses online is based on Lacans (2007) conception of
the four discourses and their structures. In her article, Digital Feminisms and
the Split Subject, she argues that digital feminist discourse most often takes the
form of the discourse of the hysteric a discourse that is inevitably directed
towards the Other as master. As Horbury shows, while this is a necessary
discursive position, it also gets stuck in the power relations it seeks to attack.
Since the Other is addressed as both the oppressor, but also, unconsciously, as
the authority that is to acknowledge the struggle of the hysteric (for example
in discourses touching upon patriarchy, toxic masculinity, or anti-feminism),
this discourse conserves what it seeks to do away with. Moreover, the more
established a given feminist position becomes, the more one can observe a shift
in online discussions: the discourse of the hysteric becomes replaced by the
discourse of the university. Consecutively, the rhetoric of power shifts from
the oppressed protesting against her oppression to a voice claiming authority
through knowledge. However, this shift leads to further rifts in and between
feminist groups. Since the knowledge that is granted authority is knowledge

about oppression, hysteric positions now emerge in response to this new feminist
authority and in contestation over what kind of feminism shall be given a privi-
leged epistemological position.
3.3. Queer Theory and Intersectional Studies

The fields of queer theory and intersectionality studies have also drawn
on psychoanalysis when theorising the (queer) body. While there has been
resistance to and critique of psychoanalysis, several scholars have made use of
psychoanalytic concepts (e.g. Butler, 1990; Dean, 2000; Edelman, 2004; Wat-
son, 2009; Ahmed, 2014). However, not many publications have specifically
addressed the media through the prism of queer theory and psychoanalysis.
An exception seems to be the evolving field of porn studies, which has shown a
tendency to take psychoanalytic concepts into account, as various articles in the
recently launched journal of the same title attest (Neville, 2015; Ryberg, 2015;
Varghese, 2016).
In a way, Diego Semerenes article criss-crosses the field of queer, porn and
media studies. Drawing ethnographically on sexual encounters in group set-
tings, Semerene states that the digitally assisted gangbang (through hookup
apps and websites) emerges at a particular point in time in which the male body
is increasingly made visible online. This constant demand of digital represen-
tation puts this body at risk of phallic failure. The gangbang may be read as a
cultural symptom where men unite in order to ward off this risk of fragility and
(symbolic) impotence through engaging in sexual practices that put an other
primarily women as the gangbanged subjects in the place of utter inferior-
ity and victimhood. Ultimately, Semerene links these practices to the Freud-
ian narrative of the great misdeed (Freud, 1981). Freud saw the initial act
of civilisation in the primal horde killing the archfather a collective act that
initiated the sense of kinship among the group members and contained feelings
of guilt. By inserting herself into the constellation of the gangbang as a t[rans]-
girl, Semenere manages to subvert the phallocentrism of this descendant of the
great misdeed and its socialising dynamics. With the victims gender rendered
ambiguous, the homoerotic and homosocial implications of the act come to the
fore. By the same token, the t-girl becomes legitimated as female in this archaic
act by being referred to as she or her by the male collective. Through the
insertion of the t-girl, then, the gangbang is shown to effectively destabilise a

system of binary gendered bodies. Facilitated through digital media, it opens

up a space for acts that disrupt the idea that the body is individual, rational and
privately owned.
3.4. Studies of Networked and Mobile Media

Studies into mobile media (Elliott & Urry, 2010), gadgets (Krzych, 2010),
as well as social media and subjectivity (Flisfeder, 2015; Zajc, 2015) have also
shown an interest in psychoanalytic concepts. Again, many of these have drawn
on the works of Jacques Lacan (often via the writings of Slavoj iek) in order
to theorise Internet technology and the use of social media in general, as well
as smartphones and applications in particular (Flisfeder & Willis, 2014). In
her influential work on informational or communicative capitalism, Jodi Dean
(2009, 2010) argues against the widely held belief that social media have con-
tributed to more open and participatory forms of communication. Following
iek, Dean holds that in contemporary online culture, symbolic efficiency,
i.e. the Lacanian (1977) notion of the Symbolic Order, has been diminished.
Instead, digital culture is characterised by circuits of the drive. According to
Lacan, a drive does not pursue a specific goal, but rather follows an aim as a
means in itself, circling around an object without ever capturing it. Communi-
cative capitalism is being kept operative online through drive loops. Users are
captured in networks of enjoyment, surveillance and production that do not
satisfy a particular desire but merely capture and reproduce drive. I enter. I
click. I like. I poke. Drive circulates, round and round, producing satisfaction
even as it misses its aim, even as it emerges in the plastic network of the decline
of symbolic efficiency (Dean, 2010: 60).
Christopher Gutierrezs article, The Other Self in Free Fall: Anxiety and
Automated Tracking Applications, in which he develops the Lacanian notions
of affect and anxiety with regard to self-tracking applications, can be seen as a
contribution to and continuation of Deans work. In particular, he considers
self-tracking applications [to] represent a particular affective loop [] which
drives a never-ending anxious attempt (p. 111) to reunite the subject with
itself. As Gutierrez points out, however, anxiety does not emerge from a self as
object that is lacking or missing, but from the shock of finding an object where
there should not be one. In the case of digital tracking applications, while the
subject expects to encounter a gap between itself and its data, the tracking apps
constantly seek to close this gap. The embodied self and digital self are conflated
and the apps promise that we can indeed behold of ourselves through them.
When this promise becomes plausible, however, desire becomes conflated with
anxiety and that which we long for comes to haunt us.
3.5. British Object Relations and Media Studies

The British psychoanalytic object relations school mostly revolves around
the psychoanalysts Melanie Klein, D. W. Winnicott, Ronald Fairbairn and
others who developed Freuds ideas. Briefly put, object relations mark a de-
parture from Freuds one-person psychology towards a more relational and
intersubjective approach that aims to take account of the multitude of relations
and attachments that make up our inner worlds. In relation to the media,
it is Winnicotts terms and concepts in particular that have been taken up by
media scholars. His notions of the transitional object and potential space
(Winnicott, 2002) have been adapted in fan studies (Hills, 2002, 2005, 2014;
Sandvoss, 2005), for example, in order to explore fans relationships with their
objects of fandom that often span decades and are of biographical as well as so-
ciocultural significance. Furthermore, Candida Yates and Caroline Bainbridges
Media and the Inner World research network (e.g. Bainbridge & Yates, 2014) has
been dedicated to interrogating the role of (object-relational) psychoanalysis
in contemporary media cultures by bringing scholars, media practitioners and
clinicians together.
Winnicotts concepts of the transitional object and potential space also
take centre stage in Candida Yates and Iain MacRurys article Framing the
Mobile Phone: The Psychopathologies of an everyday Object. Reviewing the
body of cultural research literature on the mobile phone as well as applications
of the concept of transitional object in culture and media studies, Yates and
MacRury work out how and how far the mobile phone can indeed be
understood as transitional in Winnicotts sense. With the mobile blurring
boundaries between me and not-me, absence and presence, subject and ob-
ject, work and free time, control and surveillance, they argue that it can be legit-
imately identified as a transitional object and understood as a way of expressing,
reflecting on and enacting states and feelings linked to the unconscious and the
potential space. However, this potentiating, transitional function can never be
entirely taken for granted as regards our various attachment styles. Drawing on
the work of Thomas Ogden (1992), the authors explicate both the healthy and
pathological ways in which the potential of the mobile can become unfolded.

3.6. Trauma Theory and Media Studies

Sigmund Freud defined trauma as an experience which within a short pe-
riod of time presents the mind with an increase of stimulus too powerful to be
dealt with or worked off in the normal way [] (Freud, 1961: 275). Along
this line, we can think of trauma as a rupture in the subject, as something so
profoundly life changing and threatening to the subjects coherence and well-
being that the ego blocks images, memories or thoughts touching upon that
event from entering consciousness. While, throughout the past decades, the
notion of trauma has been developed and modified in various ways (see e.g.
Felman & Laub, 1992; Caruth, 1995; Kaplan, 2005; Radstone, 2007; Leys,
2010; Meek, 2010; Pinchveski, 2012), the most recent development concerns
work revolving around the idea of the traumatic image (Meek, 2010: 32).
Specific events or images are either framed as traumatic by the media, or the
media coverage itself is seen to have the potential to traumatise audiences. In
his contribution, Media Traumatization, Symbolic Wounds and Digital Cul-
ture, Allen Meek inquires into this idea in detail. Departing from Bettelheims
concept of the symbolic wound (1955), Meek explores the idea of collective
trauma and how it manifests itself in contemporary digital culture. He traces
the academic discussions of Geza Roheims film Subincision (1937), which
depicts subincision rites amongst an Aboriginal tribe, as well as subsequent
research that drew on it. Meek argues that images that have traditionally been
associated with trauma and, thus, with overwhelming, anxiety-provoking and
paralysing effects, can now be observed being circulated online for various po-
litical purposes and with radically different psychosocial effects. Images such as
the broadcasting of police violence on Facebook may be proactively captured
by specific groups and used to challenge hegemonic power structures. Even ISIS
videos of beheadings can be expected to have an identificatory appeal. Meek
grounds his observations in Bruno Bettelheims reading of Roheims Subinci-
sion. In contrast to all later uses of the film in experimental stress and empathy
tests, Bettelheim argued that the shocking, ritualistic wounds that the members
of the tribe inflicted on each other should be appreciated for their participa-
tory, self-transformative and collective dimensions of meaning. The idea of the
symbolic wound that can be used for self-transformation, collective identifica-
tion and group participation may, according to Meek, act as a corrective to the
dominant idea of trauma as necessarily rendering a subject passive and as being
inherently negative, stressful and disempowering.
3.7. Jungian and Post-Jungian Studies

While C. G. Jung started out in close collaboration with Freud, changes in
his thinking led to him breaking away from the founding father of psychoanaly-
sis, with their fundamental disagreements revolving around the role of libido
and sexuality in the individual subject. In his own approach to psychoanalysis,
which he subsequently unfolded, Jung emphasised the existence of a collective
unconscious made up of commonly held memories and ideas transmitted from
generation to generation. The notion of the archetype as the basic form of those
transmissions became central to Jungs work and it is not surprising that film
scholars over the years have drawn on Jungian ideas in their works (Hauke &
Alister, 2000; Hockley, 2007; Singh, 2009, 2014; Hauke & Hockley, 2011;
Izod & Dovalis, 2015). There are, however, few works on contemporary digital
culture that make use of Jungian theory (Balick, 2014). A welcome exception
is Greg Singhs article YouTubers, Online Selves and the Performance Princi-
ple: Notes from a post-Jungian Perspective, which develops Jungs concept of
persona in relation to popular YouTube vloggers. As Singh points out, Jung
(1953, 1971) defined persona as a psychological archetype of social adapta-
tion (p.178) something that can be understood as a fixed, routinised perfor-
mance based on expectations of what is socially acceptable in a given context
and society at large. While Jung stressed the danger of over-identifying with
ones persona, Singh works out how such over-identification becomes inevita-
ble in the context of Youtube and social media in general, where mechanisms
of commodification and exploitation continuously encourage users to identify
with their persona instead of the less defended parts of their subjectivities.
From a Jungian perspective, alienation in digital media thus approximates
what Marcuse (1955) called the performance principle. Singh makes this
evident in his discussion of successful YouTube stars and their audiences: If
YouTubers themselves are conforming to the needs of the apparatus [i.e. the on-
line platform, S.K. and J.J.] through content production and the performance
of conventions associated with professional vlogging, YouTube end-users are
also conforming to their own assigned roles as commodified objects. (p.187).

3.8. Media Philosophy and Psychoanalysis

Coinciding with Singhs work, Colin Campbell, in his article, A Digital
Death Drive? Hubris and Learning in Psychoanalysis and Cybernetics, also
draws on Herbert Marcuses writings for his confrontation of the digital. Camp-
bell approaches digital media from a perspective that results from his interest
in both Freudian psychoanalysis and Batesonian cybernetics. Arguing that the
idea of the digital has become a fetish in Western culture, he relates Batesons
notion of hubris to Freuds conceptualisation of the death drive. From the
perspective of this comparison, he holds that the term digital now widely
stands for and, indeed, camouflages a process of abstraction, cutting-up
and fragmentation and an emptying out of a lived experience. [T]he digital
fetish numbs us to the profound relation between body and machine, technol-
ogy and nature (p.199). The moment of hubris lies in the act of mistaking
digital representation as the whole of lived experience an act that approxi-
mates the workings of the Freudian death drive in that it follows a craving for
stillness and order and the cessation of tensions (p.204). In opposition to this
thanatotic tendency in contemporary culture, Campbell promotes a utopian
approach to the understanding of our lifeworld that combines Batesons theory
of learning with Marcuses conception of Eros. As Campbell writes, such an
approach would involve a profound analog-digital integration, a quantum leap
forward in the capacity of language and consciousness to map social experience
richly, without forgetting the traumatic cut digital language applies (p.211).
Campbells argument points us in the direction of media philosophy as a
field that has also put forth productive accounts of contemporary life in digital
media in which psychoanalytic thinking is combined with questions of episte-
mology and the ontology of media technology. Mark B. Hansen (2000, 2004,
2006), for example, has drawn on Sigmund Freud and Didier Anzieu in his
writings on technology and new media, in which the use of psychoanalysis goes
beyond questions of subjectivity and is deployed to reconceptualise technology
itself. Similar questions have been explored in Bernard Stieglers work on phar-
macology that has made use of Freud and Winnicott, amongst others.
Related to the media philosophical approaches above, Mike Featherstones
article on the Chaosmic Spasm combines Stieglers concern (2013) for forms
of care and carefulness along Winnicotts lines with Guattaris (1995) and Be-
rardis (2015) conceptualisations of chaosmosis and the chaosmic spasm.
All of these authors diagnose a hyper-acceleration of globalised and mediatised

lifeworlds that is seen to result in a process of disorientation and de-subjectiv-
isation. The individual subject is incapable of meaningfully situating itself in
social, symbolic structures because of a symbolic order that has become com-
modified to a degree that reduces it to a carrier of quantitative value only. In the
gradual intensification of this state, the notion of the spasm marks its climax
as well a caesura, giving way to a utopian, hopeful moment of post-apocalyptic
transformation and reparation.
4. The Future of Psychoanalytic Media Research

The notions of transformation and reparation give us our cues for the
final part of this Introduction. On the basis of the above overview, we want to
end here with a brief outlook on the future challenges for psychoanalytic explo-
rations of media culture. Broadly, we identify three such challenges that may
(indeed, should) also be read as potentials for development.
The first of these challenges concerns a shift in theories and methodologies
that revolve around so-called big data. Emerging disciplines such as digital
sociology, digital humanities, software studies, science and technology studies,
and computational social sciences are symptomatic of a general drive towards
quantification in academia: terms such as digital methods often signify quan-
titative methods for providing data analytics of large datasets that have been
extracted from social media with the help of automated software. This digital
positivism (Fuchs, 2017: 4) an empiricist fetishisation of data, algorithms
and structural processes comes at the expense of a focus on subjectivity, micro
processes, forms of interaction, engagement and agency that threatens any the-
oretical exploration of notions of the subject or the media user more specifically.
While we do not wish to dispute the manifold roles that data now play in our
lives, responses to it must continue to take account of both big and small data,
i.e. quantitative and qualitative frameworks. This is especially pertinent in the
light of the possible changes in the nature of the unconscious itself with regard
to the subjects situatedness within media in contemporary culture. If media
are increasingly inhabiting all aspects of everyday life, the emerging question
is how can we reconceptualise the conscious and unconscious relationalities
between people and their evolving media technologies? We maintain that psy-
choanalysis is one of the disciplines that lends itself to researching such questions.

Thus, rather than merely arguing for a reconceptualisation of the social in the
light of mediatisation processes, as Andreas Hepp and Nick Couldry (2016) have
recently done, we argue for a reconceptualisation of the psychosocial dimensions
that engulf, entangle and surround societies, individuals, structures and media
spheres today. In this respect, turning our critique here into a positive call for
future research, psychoanalytically-oriented researchers should be encouraged
not to shy away from this drive towards the quantitative, but, on the contrary,
to actively engage with it, interpret the data as well as the methods by which
these data are gathered and processed and point towards the manifold ways in
which our conceptions of subjectivity, relationality and sociality have bearings
on the findings derived from the quantitative.
The second challenge revolves around psychoanalytic theory itself and its
often contested status within academia. Frequently, we find New Materialist,
Deleuzian and Foucauldian approaches (amongst others) to be conceived in
rather stereotypical opposition to psychoanalysis an opposition that does jus-
tice to neither field. Large parts of contemporary affect theories, for example,
have established themselves in opposition to psychoanalysis and its perceived
over-individualising viewpoint. While this may have been a rather hasty and
reductive attempt at establishing a new terrain affect studies the question
remains as to whether there is not significant potential within the various psy-
choanalytic theories that have the power to critique, contest, modify and, ulti-
mately, further the above approaches. Offering the briefest of examples for this,
our point is corroborated forcefully by Jacques Derrida (2001: 87), when he
suggests in view of Foucaults critique of psychoanalysis that we might find al-
ready in Freud, to say nothing of those who followed, discussed, transformed,
and displaced him, the very resources of the objection levelled against [] the
father of psychoanalysis. Again, turning this point of critique into a call for
research, while there are many laudable impulses to be found in the present
issue, further work is needed that criss-crosses theoretical fields and negoti-
ates between psychoanalysis and other theoretical approaches not in order
to create false harmonies, but to determine in detail where the differences and
contradictions between the fields lie.
Thirdly, and most importantly, what is needed is more hands-on, empiri-
cal research from a psychoanalytic and/or psychosocial perspective. Generally,
while psychoanalytic theories can offer profound insights into media-cultural

processes from the micro to the macro level, we still have to improve the ways
in which we bring these theories and their insights to the reality we seek to un-
derstand. In this respect, a substantial part of psychoanalytic media scholarship
risks overwhelming its audience with a dense theoretical discourse that remains
on a decisively abstract level. If psychoanalysis is to secure a place within media
research, it needs to open itself up to other paradigms and, fundamentally, to
empirical research. Questions around methodology and the extent to which
psychoanalysis can be a method in social and cultural research are important
in this respect (Johanssen, 2016a, b; Krger, 2016). We believe that this issue
of CM both addresses and illuminates the challenges and potential of psychoa-
nalysis for digital media research today.

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Acknowledgements
Jacob Johanssen and Steffen Krger would like to thank the reviewers who
worked on this issue for their help, as well as the CM editors, particularly Jelena
Kleut, for the friendly cooperation and enthusiastic engagement.
Steffen Krger is funded by the FRIPRO programme of the Norwegian
Research Council (NFR).


ORIGINAL SCIENTIFIC PAPER
Submitted: 08.07.2016.
Accepted for publication: 01.12.2016.
Framing the Mobile Phone:

The Psychopathologies of an Everyday Object
Iain MacRury1
Bournemouth University, UK
Candida Yates2
Bournemouth University, UK
doi: 10.5937/comman11-11517
Abstract: This article proposes that the affective processes that shape our relation-
ship to the world of digital consumption and communication can be illuminated further
when viewed through a lens of object relations psychoanalysis. We focus on the use of the
mobile phone as both an object in the world and of the psyche in order to reflect upon its
uses as an evocative object that shapes the psychosocial boundaries of experience in every-
day life. We argue that in contrast to the concepts of interpersonal communication that
can be found in some domains of popular culture and in communication studies, object
relations psychoanalysis can be usefully deployed in order to explore the unconscious at-
tachments that develop in relation to consumer objects, allowing for the complexity of
feeling and reflection that may emerge in relation to them and the potential spaces of the
mind. The mobile phones routine uses and characteristics are widely understood. At the
same time, the mobile phone invites critical reflections that identify a paradoxical object
of both creative and pathological use. Such reflexivity includes the mobiles relationship
to the complexity of psychosocial experience within the contemporary cultural moment.
Applying the ideas of psychoanalysts Donald Winnicott, Thomas Ogden and Christopher
Bollas, we argue that one explanation for why the mobile phone continues to attract not
only enthusiastic cultural commentary but also a degree of apprehension across academic
and popular-discursive settings can be found in its capacity to both disrupt and connect
as an object of attachment and as a means of unconscious escape.
Keywords: transitional object, potential space, pathology, mobile phone, object

relations psychoanalysis
1
2

Framing the Mobile Phone: Iain MacRury
The Psychopathologies of an Everyday Object Candida Yates
1. Mobile Anxieties: Overview of a Psychosocial Object

The mobile phone3 is a complex cultural and technical object; singular,
in that it can be held in the palm of the hand, but also multiple in scope, in
terms of its functionality and in the personal and social significances attached
to it. This technology forms at once a disruptive and containing intervention in
contemporary psychosocial experience and a core component in shifts towards
a more mobile society (Elliot & Urry, 2010). The mobile phone provides a ma-
jor vector for grasping contemporary experience (cognitively, emotionally and
practically) and it provokes some disruptions in the patterning of psychosocial
and cultural life. Such disruptions invite anxiety and commentary, producing
thinking and reflective analyses across public discourses that we propose are
inflected by the unconscious emotional-intimate properties of the mobile-as-
object. As we discuss, object relations psychoanalysis provides a highly evocative
set of concepts to explore the contemporary experience of the mobile phone,
which is bound up in the unconscious processes of object relating as a mode of
experiencing the self and of engaging with the world.
The mobile (as we shall call it from here on) remains in the cultural limelight,
not just through promotions-driven marketing, with slogans such as, This
changes everything, and Inspire the World, Create the Future, produced by
major manufacturers such as, Apple, Samsung and Microsoft, LG and Huawei,
and via network providing retailers such as Vodaphone, EE and 3, but across
news, comment and broader cultural conversations. The mobile provides an
object for reflective and sometimes obsessive-seeming commentary across me-
dia. Recent headlines indicate typical preoccupations including: Mobile phone
addiction ruining relationships (Alleyne, 2012), How women love their mo-
bile phones... more than their boyfriends (Daily Mail Reporter, 2009), Just
Thinking About Your Cell Phone Makes You More Selfish (Garber, 2012),
Mobile phones have changed the world, for better or worse (Clark, 2015),
Do you have a love/hate relationship with your phone? (Kunst, 2012), Mo-
bile addict parents guilty of child neglect (Bingham, 2012) and Nomophobia
3
For this paper we have adopted the phrase mobile phone rather than the ostensibly more modern smartphone to
refer to the devices under our investigation. Widespread usage of the term smartphone has largely been the result
of journalistic and marketing rhetoric rather than clear demarcations between hardware and software platforms. As
Kang & Son (2009: 919) note, there is no clear industry-standard definition of smartphone. Consumers them-
selves are unlikely to talk about losing their smartphone, whereas where on earth did I leave my mobile? is a modern
cri de cur.

Iain MacRury Framing the Mobile Phone:
Candida Yates The Psychopathologies of an Everyday Object
affects majority of UK (Royal Mail, 2008). These titles and their prevalence are
partly a function of clickbait culture, yet they also offer a sense that mobiles
provide a recurrently anxious focus for lifestyle commentary, with the final one
referencing a syndrome called nomophobia, to capture the idea that people
fear losing their mobile phones.
2. Mobile Disruptions: Context and Critique

The mobile induces a more complex-seeming sociality, widening the com-
municative arrays and practical intersections that generate the global and local
networked individualism that is characteristic of the contemporary period
(Castells, 2007). In a more psychological register, the mobile is assertively
individualistic in terms of its use. Connective as they are, mobiles are rarely
shared, as such. An individuals phone clusters and invites personal attention. It
stands as both a conduit for and an object of excitement; a mirror and a lamp,
projecting and receiving informatic and affective material; a stage and a screen
for everyday engagements and emotional attachments. Personal in this sense,
the mobile is highly personalised via account settings, passwords and fingerprint
recognition. The phone is also personalising, in part via the evolving (mobile)
digital footprints and signatures of users data and surveillance-based algorith-
mic constructions, binding persons to mobile personae.
The symbolic and material significance is linked to wider power relations
within the contemporary historical moment or conjuncture4 (Hjorth, Bur-
gess & Richardson, 2012). The mobile phone brings together key concerns that
address notions of power and the construction of the subject in culture and it
is helpful to think about the mobile as a cultural formation that shapes and is
shaped by the affective experience of cultural life. Put simply, the mobile phone
represents a developing inflection within contemporary structures of feeling.
The mobile raises questions about identity and associated notions of agency,
creativity and desire. Notably, the mobile opens up new capacities, facilitating
modes of intimacy that are at once immediate and yet can seemingly transcend
the limits of time and space (Daz & Ekman, 2011; Hjorth & Lim, 2012).
On the other hand, the impulse to keep checking ones phone continues
to be framed as a symptom of the anxious neoliberal subject of late modern
capitalism (Giroux, 2015; Fisher, 2009, 2014; Elliot, 1996). Whilst contem-
4
As with earlier studies of the Sony Walkman as an object of cultural consumption (Du Gay et al., 2013).

porary digital culture creates opportunities for privatised modes of escape and
self-experience, it also contributes to the process of emotional governance and
the unpaid labour of the neoliberal workplace, where one is continually avail-
able online (Serrano-Puche, 2015). So just as the mobile facilitates complex and
fluid relationships it can also be viewed as an object that is used defensively in
order to retreat into regressive psychological positions in which communication
with the outside world can feel curtailed or surveilled, structured by globalised
software companies such as Google and Microsoft.
3. An Evocative Object
We propose that one explanation for why the mobile retains its place as
an object of fascination and as a continuing focus for thinking (as well as a
source of worry) across academic and popular-discursive settings can be found
in a psychoanalytically informed examination of the uses of the mobile as an
object in everyday life and its role in shaping subjectivity. Beyond its cultural
and practical-functional significance, the mobile carries powerful unconscious
importance. Specifically, as an object, the mobile often serves as an index for the
work (and play) of social, emotional and personal attachment (Bowlby, 2008;
Winnicott, 1971). The mobile is a unique intervention in the endeavours of
human relating and not (just) a disruptive new communications technology.
The mobile forms for us, we suggest, a powerful unconscious representation
of connection and disconnection, one that evokes thinking, analysis and com-
mentary and conveys feelings that are redolent of the Zeitgeist.
We argue that object relations psychoanalysis has a useful role to play in
helping to contextualise some of the concerns about the specific problems
that have emerged around mobile phone consumption and use. As we have
seen, in popular discourse, the enthusiastic and creative use of the mobile
phone is also often shadowed by discourses identifying addiction, relation-
ship breakdown, illiteracy, solipsistic mobile privatism and related, emergent
psychosocial problems. We propose that the mobile has become, culturally,
a particular kind of evocative object, following Christopher Bollass (2009)
phraseology, also echoed in the work of Sherry Turkle (2011b). As we discuss,
the mobile has become uniquely evocative of the present conjuncture in such a
way as to inflect elements in the public discourse, but also in the sense that, as
Bollas puts it, it forces us to think and think again (Bollas, 2009: 856) about
psychosocial experience.
4. An Object for Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalytical ideas offer perspectives to enrich some of the main theoret-
ical framings through which academic analysis seeks to understand and evaluate
mobile cultures and human relations. There has of late been a turn to object
relations psychoanalysis (Bainbridge & Yates, 2014) that emphasises the realm
of maternal phantasy within a relational paradigm that places the processes of
relating to objects at its heart and therefore offers a relevant set of emphases
for thinking about ones relationship to the mobile phone. The object rela-
tions approaches developed by, amongst others, Melanie Klein (1937, 1946)
and Donald Winnicott (1971), and further extended and explored by Thomas
Ogden (1992) offer a useful idiom for thinking about the mobile. Winnicott,
in particular, stressed the importance of attachments,5 and of the first relation-
ship between the infant and its mother for the shaping of selfhood and identity.
Object relations perspectives help to capture the complexities of networked
intersubjective life whilst holding on to an account of interior experience in a
unique way. As Ogden argues:
Object relations theory, often erroneously thought to be an exclusively in-
terpersonal theory that diverts attention from the unconscious, [is] in fact
fundamentally a theory of unconscious internal object relations in dynamic
interplay with current interpersonal experience. (Ogden, 1986: 131)
This strand of psychoanalytic thinking offers an understanding of objects
and spaces that is well equipped for grasping the instability and paradoxical
qualities of the mobile and its uses, specifically, as we will now propose, via
Winnicotts conceptions of potential space and transitional objects.
5. Paradoxes and Transitional Objects

Frequently identified as paradoxical (Eco, 2014; Fortunati, 2002; For-
tunati & Taipale, 2014; Elliot & Urry, 2010), the mobiles phenomenological
presence nags at functional analytical categories. The mobile is so frequently
identified as paradoxical because it plays at boundaries. At the levels of prac-
tice and the imagination, the mobile mixes up presence and absence, me/not-
5
Despite some tensions in their relationship, Winnicott was influenced by Bowlbys attachment theory, developed
in the early 1950s (Kahr, 2016; Bowlby, 2008) an approach that has continuing relevance and which in turn has
influenced Didier Anzieu and other non-Lacanian psychoanalytic theorists.

me, subject and object; and it seems to mix these things up in us. Such mixing
can provoke anxieties. As observed, the mobile is continuous with us, precious,
and, in some sense a McLuhanesque extension (McLuhan, 1964). At the
same time, it also stands as a distinct object.
After exploring and clarifying the meanings and uses of D. W. Winnicotts
concepts of the transitional object and the potential space, we will identify
some of the varieties of pathological distortion experienced in them distor-
tions also frequently evoked in discourses around the mobile phone.
5.1. The Transitional Object

Typically working by analogy with Winnicotts (1971) approach (one that
is based on nursery and clinical work, (Kahr, 2016)), the mobile can be seen
as having some similarities with the special objects found and, in an impor-
tant sense, created (Winnicott, 1971: 96) by young children in the play of
development and becoming, the fabled favourited toy or piece of material. As
Winnicott sets it out, for the baby, the physical object concerned in this work
hardly matters: perhaps a bundle of wool or the corner of a blanket or eider-
down, or a word or tune, or a mannerism, but (nevertheless) the transitional
object becomes vitally important to the infant (Winnicott, 1971:2; see also
Kahr, 20166). The object is important in the formation of the self and in the
separation and connection between the object-world and the world of internal
objects, a third part of the life of a human being, a part that we cannot ignore
an intermediate area of experiencing, to which inner reality and external life
both contribute (Winnicott, 1971: 2).
The transitional object indexes a prefiguring ground for some of the work of
separation and attachment (Bowlby, 2008), but also for an enduring existential
frame stretching beyond infancy. The use of an object symbolises the union of
two now separate things, baby and mother, at the point in time and space of the
initiation of their state of separateness (Winnicott, 1971: 97, Italics in original).
The transitional object, and the developmental achievements entailed in the use
made of this object7 are, subsequently, vitally important to human development
to living. As Winnicott outlines:
6
Kahr refers to Arthur Millers childrens story Janes Blanket as a well rendered account of the transitional object.
Winnicott himself mentions Charles M Schultzs Peanuts cartoons and A. A Milnes Winnie the Pooh as helpful
cultural reference points.
7
As Winnicott tries to clarify: what I am referring to in this part of my work is not the cloth or the teddy bear that
the baby uses not so much the object used as the use of the object (Winnicott, 1971: xi).

I have introduced the terms transitional objects and transitional phe-

nomena for designation of the intermediate area of experience, between
the thumb and the teddy bear, between the oral erotism and the true ob-
ject-relationship, between primary creative activity and projection of what
has already been introjected, between primary unawareness of indebtedness
and the acknowledgement of indebtedness. (Winnicott, 1971: 2)
The transitional object, and the use made of that object,8 is the beginning
of cultural experience (Winnicott 1971: 100) but, also, an opening up of a
space for highly valued, developmental achievements, that include: reciprocity,
creativity and what he describes as a capacity for concern (Winnicott, 1963).
A final developmental element in this narrative is that the transitional ob-
ject prefigures the attainment of another significant and paradoxical achieve-
ment: the capacity to be alone in the presence of the mother. This capacity to be
alone (Winnicott, 1958) marks a subtle specification for creative, independ-
ent and engaged living. In the intensively connected mobile world the fragile
link between creative aloneness and psychosocial belonging remains a peren-
nial theme, which is explored, for instance, in Sherry Turkles Alone Together
(2011), an echoic reframing of Riesmans classic The Lonely Crowd (1950) for
a mobile-digital age. We suggest that, because of this ongoing thematic, there
is a renewed resonance of transitional objects in the analytical conversation
regarding mobiles within the frame of the present conjuncture.
We propose that the mobile phone is a kind of objectual9 realization of this
conception of a transitional object, a practical figuration of this special,
first object. As a major part of thinking about culture and experience, the
mobile is also a prop in individuals continuing dramatic enactment of another
key idea: potential space. The mobile phone enacts and dramatizes potential
space and (as such) it invites interpretations that seek to analyse the (paradoxi-
cal) potential space spoken of in object relations psychoanalysis. As Ogden
puts it:
The transitional object is a symbol for this separateness in unity, unity in
separateness. The transitional object is at the same time the infant (the om-
8
To underline, emphasis is given to, not so much the object used as the use of the object (Winnicott, 1971).
9
Objectual is a term deployed see Knorr (2008) and see also Woodwards highly relevant (2011) conception-
definition: Objectual things are handled and used, powerfully combining embodied pragmatics with emotion,
cultural myth and symbolism (Woodward, 2011: 367).

nipotently created extension of himself ) and not the infant (an object he
has discovered that is outside of his omnipotent control). The appearance
of a relationship with a transitional object is not simply a milestone in the
process of separation-individuation. The relationship with the transitional
object is as significantly a reflection of the development of the capacity to
maintain a psychological dialectical process. (Ogden, 1992: 228)
What we propose is that when people talk about mobile phones, they are
exploring psychological processes entailed in potential space. The discourse
around mobiles is indexical to a deeper set of anxieties adumbrating experiences
of, and capacities to experience, potential space.
6. Exploring Mobile Transitions

Some applications of the idea of transitional objects have set out to help
think about media, material and cultural consumption (see, for example, Tur-
kle 2011; 2013; Silverstone & Hirsh, 1992; Hills, 2007; Woodward, 2011;
Whitty & Carr, 2003; Kuhn, 2013; Johnson, 2010). However, sometimes,
the accounts that focus on the mobile phone underemphasise the unconscious
dimension in favour of a more interpersonal conception of the use of mobiles
as objects that focus on the here and now rather than evoking resonances with
early infant experiences (Ling, 2007, drawing on Silverstone & Hirsh, 1992;
Ribak, 2009; Kullman, 2010; Johnson, 2010). These studies have applied the
notion of the transitional object within an ethnographic framework that seeks
to understand the place of technology within the delicate nexus of attachments,
separations, and entanglements characteristic of specific social contemporary
domains such as love (Johnson, 2010), family life (Ribak, 2009), school jour-
neys (Kullman, 2010) and adolescent emancipation (Ling, 2007). In these
cases, the mobile becomes a means in the practical and emotional management
of separation and development. For example, Ling examines
the dialectic nature of mobile phone use by teens. On the one hand it
serves as a greatly extended umbilical cord or in the phrase of Roger Sil-
verstone, a transitional object (Silverstone, Hirsch, & Morley, 1991), but
on the other hand it plays into the emancipation process of adolescents.
(Ling, 2007: 61).

Ribak (2009) extends the umbilical cord metaphor, but adds in the idea
of remote control, and situates the mobile in a set of triangular relationships
marking the parent, technology and the child. Ribak makes a detailed and
convincing analogy with the transitional object and yet ultimately rejects a too
direct comparison on a number of practical grounds. Kullmans (2010) geo-
graphic approach adds a helpful Latourian twist, recognising that the mobile is
but one component in an assemblage of transitional objects (bags, books, toys)
used by tween children nervously navigating early journeys in third spaces be-
tween home and school and depending on flexible adaption between adult and
child. She notes that essential for this flexibility is the most common technol-
ogy among children the mobile phone (Kullman, 2010: 837).
The conception of the mobile as a transitional object now colours con-
temporary popular discourse. For instance, business guru, Margaret Heffernan
(2013) writes:
The cell phone has become the adults transitional object, replacing the
toddlers teddy bear for comfort and a sense of belonging. We clutch
phones to show that we do know at least one other person that we might
look solitary but we have connections. We are important because we might
get called about something crucial or, at least, non-trivial. We count in
the world. Our insecurity may be laughable but our response isnt. (Hef-
fernan, 2013)
Aaron Balick (2016), who has written extensively on digital cultures from
an object relations perspective (2013), writes in his insightful blog, in more
nuanced terms, that, as a culture, we, have re-invented the transitional object
only rather than a furry blanket or a teddy bear, its a smartphone. He adds
some thought-provoking advice for his readers:
So next time you absentmindedly reach into your pocket for your smart-
phone pause for a second and think. What am I actually searching for?
You may find that at bottom theres a niggling sense of insecurity and you
just want to check to make sure someone else on the planet is thinking of
you. (Balick, 2016)10
10
http://www.aaronbalick.com/blog/checking-your-smartphone-again-its-an-object-of-emotional-supply/, accessed
10 December, 2016.

7. Potential Space: The Psychosomatic Underpinning

for Attachment, Culture and Communication
The idea of a transitional object is clearly an appealing one in the various
contexts identified above. It offers an insight in ethnographic analyses (Ling,
2007; Kullman, 2010), even when important reservations are set down (Ribak,
2009).11 The observation of the transitional object typically highlights its char-
acter as an intermediary part of real world usage correlating neatly with the
phones practical-communications functions. However, this vision can occlude
the unconscious underpinning identified in the original literature and the psy-
choanalytic observation of transitional objects. It also understates the peculiar
place of the object, its location in a fluid nexus of related conceptions, most
notably Winnicotts ideas of transitional phenomena and potential space. As a
result, when the metaphor is transplanted into everyday scenarios, some aspects
of things identified as transitional objects suffer a diminution in meaning.
The transitional object becomes, more straightforwardly, an intermediary ob-
ject, either marking developmental stages (a prop in the transition to independ-
ence) or a point of connection in interpersonal relationships.
The unconscious component of experience in respect of the transitional
object is at risk of being forgotten about. Sometimes, the transitional object
becomes identified as a regressive object because it is associated with infancy
but is used by adults. Yet, in Winnicotts conceptions, the transitional object is a
component in normal, ongoing healthy development and is linked with lifelong
cultural capacities and creative object relations. Furthermore, focusing on the
object and its intermediary function, rather than on the (unconscious) use of
the object, can occlude recognition of the pathological meanings and uses that
may underlie the activities of intermediation. These misconceptions can arise if
the object as in the example of the mobile is thought about independently
of the connected ideas of transitional phenomena and potential spaces.
11
Ribak qualifies the metaphor in a number of ways, partly linked to her focus on teenagers and parents, and con-
cludes: the mobile phone is not transitional in the way teddy bears and blankets are, since it provides an actual link
to the mother: it is less of a symbolic object and more, a means of communication (Ribak, 2009: 192).

8. From Transitional Object to Potential Space

In the object relations view, the transitional objects intermediary role is
linked to and embedded within an interplay of both external and inner spaces
of the self so here we propose an attentiveness to psychoanalytical uses of the
term that seek to acknowledge more fully the unconscious aspects of (transi-
tional) experience. Winnicott indicates what he means by this:
Of every individual who has reached the stage of being a unit with a limit-
ing membrane and an outside and an inside, it can be said that there is an
inner reality to that individual, an inner world that can be rich or poor and
can be at peace or in a state of war. (Winnicott, 1971: 2)
To think about inner and outer experiences, and me-not-me experi-
ences, an area is invoked (as it were) between inner (First) and outer (Second)
areas:
the third part of the life of a human being, a part that we cannot ignore,
is an intermediate area of experiencing, to which inner reality and external
life both contribute. It is an area that is not challenged, because no claim
is made on its behalf except that it shall exist as a resting-place for the in-
dividual engaged in the perpetual human task of keeping inner and outer
reality separate yet interrelated. (Winnicott, 1971: 2)
He continues:
I am concerned with the first possession, [i.e. the transitional object
and, also and at the same time], with the intermediate area between the
subjective and that which is objectively perceived. (1971: 3 italics added)
The term, area is important here, as it underlines that the transitional
object (and its use) represent and enact an incidence of and within a space.
Winnicott talks about this idea of an existential resting place within being
and of the idea of potential space, thereby indicating something of the basic-
ontological value of experience in and of this space. Psychoanalyst, Robert
Rodman clarifies:
Experiences in the area of potential space allow us to have periods of rest
from the struggle to draw lines between ourselves and others. There is
a built-in strain in human life caused by the need to maintain a line that

defines us as separate from others. This line need not confuse and exhaust
the baby in possession of a transitional object, and a mother who under-
stands his or her need for a particular kind of comfort. The resting place
thus given continues to play the same role in the successive stages of human
development. (Rodman, in Winnicott, 2005: xiv)
We propose that the mobiles capacity to represent and to index this resting
place and the disruptions entailed to it is a notable component in our ongo-
ing experience of neoliberal subjectivities, cultures and social milieus and the
negotiation of meanings in these contexts.
Winnicott underlines that the transitional object cannot be, exclusively, the
focus within this conceptual framing. It has a part to play, one that in terms of
the object itself, recedes into the past, but which includes and is included in
a legacy of capacities and dispositions linked to transitional phenomena and
potential space. As the child develops,
the transitional object loses meaning, and this is because the transitional
phenomena have become diffused, have become spread out over the whole
intermediate territory between inner psychic reality and the external
world as perceived by two persons in common, that is to say, over the
whole cultural field. (Winnicott 1971: 5)
Highly abstract (and hypothetical) as it is, potential space allows us to
apprehend a somatic inter-and intra-subjective achievement linked to the earli-
est phases of development (Ogden, 1986: 131). Its place in infancy does not
relegate potential space to the past. Nor does its origin in neonatal devel-
opment render its contribution to experience, infantile or regressive. Instead,
potential space remains a generative pre-condition that continues in growth,
going on framing present (adult and maturational) psychosocial capacities and
experiences creative and re-creative, ordinary (Winnicott, 1971) and hu-
man (Ogden, 1992).
Potential space is always-already preliminary to development, yet it is also
necessary to any future generativity. Its formation engenders within the devel-
opment of any individual, a pre-forming within the emerging relationship that
occurs between the baby and the object (mother or part of mother) (Win-
nicott, 1971:107). What we grasp, in potential space, is something of the
dynamic conditionality imbricating the emergence of subjective experience;
one whose (primitive) legacy continues into and throughout the future life of
the subject.

It is both intermediation and the intimation of a frame for relationality. It

opens up the ground against which any subjectivity that might become, must
initially, be figured (out). This emergence is a core component of the experience
of separation, the phase of the repudiation of the object as not me, that is, at
the end of being merged with the object (Winnicott, 1971: 107). As such,
potential space forms and informs the matrix-template through which experi-
ence (thoughts, feelings and symbols) become articulated (see Ogden, 1992). It
is part of processes of detachment, setting the tone for future dialogic achieve-
ments: attachments and separations. It becomes, for Winnicott, the basis for
our most valued capacities: playing, concentration, creativity, and cultural
living (Winnicott, 1971: 95110).
Potential space evokes an interstice and an interlude; peculiarly empty
and full and linking being to becoming. As Winnicott puts it: Potential space
is an intermediate area of experiencing (1971: 2) that lies between the inner
world, inner psychic reality (1971: 5), and actual or external reality (1971:
41). This conception offers a grasp of a subtle unconscious dynamic, paradoxi-
cal connection-disconnection: Potential space both joins and separates the in-
fant (child, or adult) and the mother (object), it lies in the paradoxical moment
where continuity is giving place to contiguity (Winnicott, 1971: 101).
Potential space can be understood, then, as a psychosomatic, unconscious
underpinning for attachment, culture and communication with, we suggest,
the mobile functioning as a powerful enactor of, and vector for and within
such capacities. This change of emphasis from primary attention upon the
transitional object itself, places it within the nexus of unconscious experiencing
facilitated as well as represented by the potential space. This shift of perspec-
tive also helps us to understand the discourse around mobile phones more
fully. We propose that the prevalent conversation across a number of discursive
areas about the mobile is not just to do with its characteristic similarity to the
transitional object alone, but, instead is due to its taking a place in the cultural
imagination that is unconsciously and practically evocative of the transitional
object and potential space. As such, the mobile affords and can be understood
as a means to reflect on, express and occasionally act out feelings and emotions
linked to unconscious experience in these terms.
Put simply, the mobile phone becomes emblematic of and a useful way to
think about our ongoing experience of connection and disconnection within
the social world. As has been well documented, this social experience, which is

characterised by risk (Beck, 1992) and the flux and change of liquid modernity
(Bauman, 2007), also includes anxiety and anomie.
9. Pathologies of Potential Space

Alongside what might be called the healthy, life-enhancing uses of
transitional objects and potential space, there is also a recognition of obverses:
an inhibition or seduction connoting either the under or exaggerated use of the
object (Winnicott, 1971: 1525). The pathological use of transitional phenom-
ena may be expressed in relation to the emergence or non-emergence of creative
capacities, failures in separation and the various instabilities that also character-
ise this space (Kahr, 1996, 2016; Spelman & Thomson-Salo, 2014; Ogden,
1992). Winnicott (1971: 1520) offers a valuable clinical vignette that helps to
grasp the unconscious anxieties underpinning exaggerated or pathological use
of a seeming-transitional object.
Following a short clinical example of a boys use of string,12 Winnicott
(1971: 16) describes a 7-year-old boy who played obsessively with string. He
discerned deep-seated concerns linked to anxiety about separation and a de-
pressed mother. Winnicott concludes:
String can be looked upon as an extension of all other techniques of com-
munication. String joins, just as it also helps in the wrapping up of objects
and in the holding of unintegrated material. In this respect string has a
symbolic meaning for everyone; an exaggeration of the use of string can
easily belong to the beginnings of a sense of insecurity or the idea of a lack
of communication. In this particular case it is possible to detect abnormal-
ity creeping into the boys use of string, and it is important to find a way of
stating the change which might lead to its use becoming perverted. (Win-
nicott, 1971:19)
We might say the same about mobiles they invite us to look at them and
they seem to evoke a sense of (all) other techniques of communication. As
such, and in the face of, say, exaggerated use, we might recognise some aspect
of perversion creeping into the use of this object, too. Winnicotts intimation
(above) of such perversion is, we propose, connected to cultural concerns
about psychosocial experience. As we argue, the mobile affords a means to ex-
press existential and unconscious anxieties.
12
And here, we cannot but recall the old-fashioned telephone games played with cans and string.

10. Pathologies Examined and Exemplified

Thomas Ogden has outlined ways of thinking about specific pathologies
of potential space (Ogden, 1992). Healthy potential space can be fragile. It
can even collapse. Ogdens (1992) contribution is useful, then, in articulat-
ing something of the vicissitudes of such collapses and seeking to specify the
characteristic dynamics of such pathologies. Ogden (1992) carefully articulates
the ways that potential space can fail to fully sustain dialogical capacities for
(object) relating between inner and outer experience. He describes the various
disruptions in potential space, seeking to clarify Winnicotts account of poten-
tial space, and to examine patients difficulties, while at the same time provid-
ing a useful proto-typology of disruptions in the formation and experience of
transitional objects and potential spaces. This can be represented in a diagram
(Fig 1.0), although, necessarily, any such representation simplifies the experi-
ences being explored.

We suggest that the mobile, and critical reflection upon its meaning and use
can be framed within the terms of these characteristic pathologies, which we
will present and discuss in detail below.
10. 1. Disturbance: Collapse into Fantasy

Ogdens first disturbance is set out as follows: The dialectic of reality and
fantasy collapses in the direction of fantasy (i.e. reality is subsumed by fantasy)
so that fantasy becomes a thing in itself (Ogden, 1992: 229).
By way of illustrating this disturbance in relation to the mobile, we might
think of the use of the phone as a kind of cocoon, as identified by Mizuko Ito
et al. (2009).
Cocoons are micro-places built through private, individually controlled
infrastructures, temporarily appropriating public space for personal use.
[] These cocoons also have specific temporal features, functioning as
mechanisms for filling or killing in-between time when people are inhab-
iting or moving through places within where they are not interested in fully
engaging. (Ito et al., in Ling, 2009: 74)
This idea of the phone affording a fantasy cocoon or fantasy bubble is a
frequent feature within discourses around mobility the mobile virtual bubble
becoming the real world and amplifying solipsistic involvements. In contrast
to engagements with other materialities, the mobile, because of its intimate
proximity and animate character, can be experienced in a more seamless fashion
as being, in some sense, part of the self. It can be viewed as facilitating the crea-
tive entanglement of subject and object and of inner and outer worlds. And yet,
this merging with the object is sometimes viewed negatively as creating or am-
plifying a privatised, self-obsessed mode of existence (Music, 2014; Abraham,
Pocheptsova & Ferraro, 2012). This seems to be affirmed by Konrath, OBrien,
and Hsing (2016), who note that declines in college students empathy coin-
cided with the rise of social media and mobile phone usage.
The above accounts propose a form of digital narcissism (Bainbridge &
Yates, 2014) and affirm Sherry Turkles (2011a) well known suggestion that in
a digital age, we are all alone together. The superficial and narcissistic dimen-
sions of ones relationship to the mobile phone in this context is anticipated in
Frederic Jamesons (1991) work, which highlights superficial and depthless
aspects of postmodern culture, a critique, which as we discuss below, remains

influential within cultural studies approaches to the mobile phone and digital
culture more widely.
10. 2. Disturbance: Collapse into Reality

Ogdens second disturbance is characterised in these terms: The dialectic
of reality and fantasy may become limited or collapse in the direction of reality
when reality is used predominantly as a defense against fantasy Imagination
is foreclosed (Ogden, 1992: 229).
This disturbance finds its actualization in relation to the mobile in scenarios
when its use becomes radically instrumental. Thinking about and experiencing
the array of communicative possibilities afforded by the mobile is then sup-
planted by a restricted and restricting sense of its rational functionality. There
is a closing down or an inhibition in the use of some mobile potentials. Here,
we may think, also, of the self-critique, or censorships, that become attached to
some forms of mobile use, those that restrict the desire to explore new spaces or
dangerous uses and are defended against by an appeal to real communi-
cations or environments. The phone is apprehended primarily as a functional
thing in itself rather than a means of connection and human communication
or intimacy. The mobile phone becomes (in imagination or reflecting real ar-
rangements in some cases) overwhelmingly a work object rather than a space
for playful engagement. Anxieties about mixing work and leisure-play related
usage can become exaggerated. Owning dual or multiple mobiles is a means to
manage such anxiety, with some practical developments designed to institute
a formal division between the playful-expansive as opposed to the work-a-day-
instrumental aspects of the phone (Metz, 2015). Such anxieties are sometimes
expressed in terms of phone security (Abrahams, 2014).
We might also think here of non-use as in the distrust of phones and ap-
prehensions about going mobile in respect of intimate aspects of life (David-
son, 2013). For some, mobiles stand simply as practical objects, transactional in
use, and thought about, primarily in the frames of data plans and call charges.
But the mobile is placed within boundaries set, to a degree, against intimacy
and with suspicions about the quality or authenticity of mobile intersubjec-
tive life. In extreme instances, the mobile becomes implicated in a feeling of
switching off and, in psychosocial terms, becomes the objective correlative of
a sense of disconnection.

10. 3. Disturbance: Avoiding Specific Meanings

A third disturbance in the dynamics of potential space is described by
Ogden as follows: The dialectic of reality and fantasy becomes restricted when
reality and fantasy are disassociated in such a way as to avoid a specific set of
meanings, e.g., the splitting of the ego in fetishism (Ogden, 1992: 230).
Again, mobiles, and talk about mobiles, can remind us of such patterns,
for instance in the recognition and misrecognition of intimacy, within which
the mobile can become implicated. Jukka Jouhki (2009) notes the blend of
psychological and somatic attachment and its fetishistic character, highlighting
the haptic aspects of mobile experience. If we continue to further analyse the
haptic quality of the bond, the device could be viewed as a modern day magical
fetish. The mobile in all its rewarding tactility and controlled aesthetic frames
becomes the place where excitation and apprehension (erotic and intimate) can
be experienced and shared (e.g. via sexting and photography (Drouin & Land-
graff, 2012)) at the expense of other connections and channels. The risk evoked
is that some degree of the experience of real, intimate, messy and risky human
relating is foreclosed in favour of a fixation privileging the mobile screen.
In a more technical form of fetishism that echoes Menzies-Lyths (1988)
work on social defences against anxiety, research on medics use of mobiles
indicates the powerful-extensional role the mobile can play, becoming a reposi-
tory for medical knowledge and, as an extension of medical training, a support
for medical decision-making. It is even a convenient instrument for medical
testing. In the same way that the stethoscope has traditionally been both an
extension of the doctors ear and a symbol of the doctors knowledge (of data
gathering and interpretation), the mobile phone represents a far more potent
extension of the physicians senses and learning. It becomes a new interface
with the world under investigation at the same time as it helps to establish a
relationship with the dynamic storehouse of medical knowledge and protocol.
The risk is that the mobile interface dehumanises the matrix of care afforded by
the doctor, rather than enhancing it.
What connects these evaluations of the mobile as pathological is that they
propose and seek to help clarify a variety of forms of disturbed psychosocial
attachment. Ogden (1992: 224232) draws on Hannah Segals (1957/1990)
notion of Symbolic Equation, which implies the negation of thirdness and
a capacity to experience psychological complexity that such pathologies of po-

tential space entail.13 In commentary and casual reflection the mobile serves as
a powerful metaphor and metonym for thinking about wider and more deep-
seated anxieties derived from emergent, complex and disruptive socialities.
However, in some instances the metaphor or metonym becomes overpowering
and the mobile is not held in mind but demonised as a cultural bad object.
With limited capacity to distinguish symbol and symbolized, that which
is perceived is unmediated by subjectivity (a sense of oneself as creator of
meanings). The upshot is that perceptions carry with them an impersonal
imperative for action and must be gotten rid of, clung to, concealed, hid-
den from, put into someone else, worshipped, shattered, etc. What the
person cannot do is understand. (Ogden 1992: 217)
Cultural reflections on the mobile certainly include and open up insight-
ful analysis. These analyses are energised to varying degrees by more primitive
anxiousness. Such reflections reframe the mobile, as we seek to understand its
complex materiality and significance and re-produce it as an object, variously,
for worship, clinging, rejection and concealment.
11. Discussion: Mobile Objects in Culture

From an object relations perspective, many of the negative readings of the
mobile phones cultural effects that we have presented, evoke a state of mind
that is unable to mourn and think about the losses of late modernity associated
with the rapid transformations that have accompanied the evolution of new
technologies and the greater mobility and also instability that such techno-
logical change represents. It is easy to see the mobile at the vanguard of such
changes and it is not surprising, therefore, that it becomes framed as both a
catalyst and cause of increasing disturbance.
The unthinking repetitive use of the mobile, which is often referred to as an
addiction in popular discourse and which is echoed in the pathologies of at-
tachment discussed above, is also alluded to in Cultural Studies literature about
the mobile, although it is not referred to explicitly in psychoanalytic terms. And
13
Segal (1990) distinguishes between symbol formation proper and symbolic equation, noting the distinction
between relations to symbols as supporting interpretive meaning-making (i.e. understanding that this symbol might
stand for that referent in this context), versus an experience of symbolism that concretely equates the symbol with
the thing it seems to stand for, i.e. this symbol is the thing referred to. For instance, one might reasonably say my
mobile is a representation of my friendships, but, in a (mad) panic, feel, when a phone is lost, that we have (actually)
lost all our friends.

yet, descriptions of the obsessional attraction and repeated use of the mobile
by some cultural studies commentators seem to describe an unmediated need
rather than an active desire for the object. For example, Mark Fisher describes
the demands of the digital and links the mobile phones appeal to the he-
donistic world of internet pornography and Viagra as the related modern drug
of choice, because they dispense with seduction and aim directly at pleasure
(2009: 178). 14 Citing Fredric Jamesons (1991) critique of postmodernism as
characterised by a vacuous recycling of the past, Fisher says that the communi-
cational intrusions of 21st century digital media and the smart technology of
mobile phones demand that we remain in constant touch (Agar, 2004). Fisher
looks back at the Walkman, which was once used as an object of escape and he
contrasts it with the all-consuming digitally induced instant pleasures of the
mobile. Fisher says that we experience a digital realm, representing a super-
ficial .newness (2009: 229). At the same time, we use the phone as a way to
forget that we are stuck within a temporary zone in which culture recycles the
past, always engaged but never connected.
Cultural Studies privileges an account of contemporary digital culture that
cannot process the past and move on. Instead, it perpetuates a culture of pas-
tiche and a faux mode of nostalgia, as Jameson (1991) once said, and the cur-
rent newest digital technology becomes a way of refurbishing the old (Fisher,
2014: 13). Here, it is argued that the digital realm of the mobile and our
relationship to it articulates a mode of pathology that manifests a sense of rep-
etition and alienation. In contrast to the relational possibilities of smart phone
technology, the mobile is viewed here negatively as a symptom of neoliberal-
ism, which as a cultural formation is also bound up with the end of history as a
potential space for meaningful change. The repetitive use of the mobile echoes
the stuckness of that wider cultural system and its use becomes a way to shore
up a self that cannot mourn or let go of the past. The pathologies of potential
space in this context are thus related to fetishism, obsession and a wish to revisit
a version of the past that functions as a means to ward off that which cannot be
let go or symbolised.
14
We learnt of the sad news of Mark Fishers recent death after this article had gone to press, The authors wish to
acknowledge the valuable thought-provoking contributions of Mark Fisher to the field of Cultural Studies and to the
analysis of shifting technological and cultural formations. His insights into the social and political costs of cultural
disruption have influenced and inspired many important interventions in the study of the contemporary moment
not least in relation to understanding the mobile phone.

12. Finding New Spaces for Intimacy and Connection

There is a recurrent tendency in the analyses of mobile culture to articulate
concerns in which the mobile becomes an indexical symbol of deeper anxieties
about the experience of disconnection and loss within the late modern world.
Such an account is a legitimate response to the mobile phone in a neoliberal age
where the practices and values of instrumentalism disembed and redistribute
affective and intimate relationships in both space and time and where the mo-
bile seems to offer an insufficient substitute for other intimacies that have been
lost or re-routed. Nevertheless, such a response risks overstating the negative
impact of mobile technology in the contemporary era. The tantalising qualities
of the mobile evoke desires for meaningful connection as represented in those
discursive domains where more optimistic accounts of the mobile connote a
more complex, multi-layered relationship between self, object and the outside
world. In such contexts, it seems that the mobile enables an experience of in-
timacy to emerge that escapes the narcissistic impulse for mastery that is often
said to shape communication today (Turkle, 2011). Instead, the new modes of
intimacy that are implied here sit well with Winnicotts (1971) relational para-
digm of transitional phenomena, which emphasises the process of meaningful
and life-enhancing interaction with an/other. Ogdens theoretical assumptions
regarding the dialectics of potential space can be applied in this context insofar
that the mobile functions as a bridge between Ogdens notion of the interpret-
ing subject and the M/other in which the triangular dynamics of symbolisa-
tion operate and occur (1992: 213).
This relational model of communication taps into an alternative notion of
the mobile subject where the negotiation of time and space are said to play a key
role in reflexive subjectivity and in forming relationships with others (Tachi,
Kitner & Crawford, 2012). From this perspective, the experience of the mobile
opens up new spaces for creativity and the extension of the self, in which the old
boundaries of time, space and otherness can be transcended in order to create
new intimacies and discover new ways of relating with one another across me-
dia platforms. This more nuanced account of subjectivity and communication
is, in part, analogous to Ogdens developmental schema of the childs transfor-
mation of unity into thirdness (Ogden, 1992: 216) whereby the child moves
from a state of being merged with the mother into one of separation, when the
experience of thirdness emerges. Yet, as Ogden says, the experience of separa-
tion is not a fixed state but rather an on-going, dialectic process, in which the
child (and later the adult) never separates completely from the first object but
instead reworks that relationship in different contexts.
The temporal and spatial aspects of using the mobile in a fast-moving glo-
balised world thus allow the development of new conceptions of the reflexive,
mobile self (Elliott & Urry, 2010). From this perspective, the mobile phone
functions as a portable extension of that self, shaped by a technological uncon-
scious that enables the subject to negotiate the productive possibilities of an
international networked world (Elliott & Urry, 2010). In this scenario, the
productive possibilities of a networked environment can be seen as analogous
to Winnicott and Ogdens model of the facilitating good mother. Here, one can
argue that when internalising the possibilities that she (the mother) represents,
the interpreting subject (the user of the mobile) moves in a fluid fashion be-
tween oedipal and pre-oedipal modes of being, thereby challenging the duality
that has hitherto sustained a split gendered mode of relating to the world. The
mobile can thus been seen as both contributing to and functioning within a
nexus of psychosocial and technological relations that unsettle older, vertical
structures of selfhood and communication and instead enable horizontal modes
of relating where the dialectic of potential space can operate.
13. Conclusion
Throughout this article, we have argued that Winnicotts theories of tran-
sitional phenomena take on new meaning in a networked society where the
experience of mediatisation and the fluid processes of communication that
stem from it become bound up with the relational dynamics of everyday life.
The mobile stands as a useful figuration of the transitional object a specific
instantiation of the idea of transitional phenomena. Winnicotts writings bring
to life the significance of play for the early development of subjectivity and also
for the capacity to play with objects and ideas in later life. The deformations
and difficulties associated with transitional objects and potential spaces allow
us to extend the analogy with mobiles to incorporate an understanding of the
vicissitudes of mobile cultures, which include: addictions, anxieties about sur-
veillance, cultural distraction, and the seductions and dangers of the exposure
of self through the use of the mobile-as-subjective-object. Taking an object

relations perspective allows us to draw on such ideas in order to unpack the

relational dynamics of the mobile phone and its uses.
Our relationship to external objects such as the mobile is always psychologi-
cal, always psychosocial (Bainbridge & Yates, 2012, 2014). In other words, our
relationship to the mobile is shaped continually by the experience of potential
space and of coming into being and the processes of imagination, fantasy,
emotion and identification. As an object of both pleasure and frustration, the
symbolism of the mobile phone is significant because it is evocative of a deeply
held wish for meaningful connection within the precarious setting of the late
modern world.

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If you show your real face, youll lose

10 000 followers The Gaze of the
Other and Transformations of Shame
in Digitalized Relationships
Vera King1
Sigmund-Freud-Institute & Goethe-University, Frankfurt/M., Germany
doi: 10.5937/comman12-11504
Abstract: This essay examines the significance and transformation of shame in the
context of digitalization, in particular, the psychosocial and psychological consequences
of shifts in the boundaries between public and private manifest in the contemporary dig-
ital world. Moreover, it will examine the dynamic relationships of shame, humiliation
and shamelessness as they develop in digital environments characterized by the dissolu-
tion of physical and communicative presence, as well as the, in turn, changing functions,
ambivalences and affective pitfalls of self-presentation. On the basis of descriptions and
commentaries by contemporary adolescents on the significance of social networks and
on their own digital self-presentation, it will identify mechanisms for dealing with the
imagined, projected or abnegated gaze of the other in the net.
Keywords: digitalization, shame, transformation of shame in digitalized relation-
ships, gaze of the other, digital shame
The consequences of digitalization for the development of the psyche and

the construction of subjectivity are a matter of intense debate. While some
emphasize the dangers of digitalization with incisive metaphors like digital
dementia (Spitzer, 2012), others, such as Altmeyer (2016), make the argument
that the contemporary digital age offers the opportunity to present yourself to
1

If you show your real face, youll lose 10 000 followers Vera King
others in order to receive more attention and affirmation (14). The Inter-
net, Altmeyer maintains, has turned out to be a social resonance system (15).
This essay is less concerned with normative observations than with the
analysis of the psychic significance of self-presentation and communication
in digital worlds, and the associated transformations of shame in digitalized
relationships. The latter refers not to the frequently discussed phenomenon of
lowering thresholds of shame, i.e. revealing oneself and sharing the intimate
details of ones life publically on the net. Rather, the focus, here, is on the more
crucial transformations in configurations of shame brought about by changes
in the meaning of the gaze of the other in the context of the digitalization of
communication and life practices, as well as associated changes to the relations
between the self and other.2 Thus this essay will examine changes in the relation
to others, as well as to the self, in a communicative context in which the gaze
of the other is directed, concretely and figuratively, towards an image of the self
generated through the use of media. The article will further discuss changes in
the quality of relationships to physically present yet communicatively absent
others.3 For example, children often experience primary caretakers, who share
the same physical space, but whose attention is frequently directed towards
mobile and digital devices, or third-persons, resulting in greater fragmentation
of the parent-child interaction and the relationship, as a whole. Psychoana-
lytic concepts regarding the construction of subjectivity and the significance of
shame in the development of the psyche provide insightful tools for the analysis
of the transformations now common to growing up in the wake of digitaliza-
tion.
The essay will, first, sketch some thoughts on the particular situation on the
net, wherein the other is both omnipresent and ephemeral (1), before turning
2
In a broad sense, the self constitutes itself in the mirror and through the resonance of the other. Experiences with
the other are fundamental to the development of the psyche, for self-image and identity. As a result, the (type and
quality of ) interactions of the self and other are at the centre of various social and psychological theories that concep-
tualize the constitution of subjectivity, psychological, social and mental development (see section 2 of this article).
We are what we are through our relationship to others, maintains G. H. Mead (1934/1973: 430). What the
individual is for himself is not something that he invented. It is what his significant others have come to ...treat him
as being, as Goffman (1972: 327) writes, as an extension of Mead. For the understanding of shame, experience of
the self with significant others plays an essential role. Compare Seidlers theory of shame (2000; 2014), which refer-
ences the prominent theory laid out in self-psychology (e.g. Broucek, 1991 or Goldberg, 1991), as well as to Sartres
notion of the Gaze of the Other in Letre et le nant (1943). The relationships of self and other are central for the
constitution of subjectivity and shame (as well as for the transformations in the scope of digital relationships).
3
On the relationship between presence and absence in communication, see also Turkle (2011), Baym (2010), Gergen
(2002).

Vera King If you show your real face, youll lose 10 000 followers
in the next section to a discussion of the psychoanalytic (development-theoret-

ical), social-psychological and sociological aspects of shame and the gaze of the
other (2). Thereafter, it will look at practical examples of changed constellations
in the relation of self and other in the context of digitalization (3). These will
illuminate the effects of what media theorists refer to as POPC, the state of be-
ing permanently online, permanently connected (Vorderer et al., 2016) and of
subsequent alterations in face-to-face communication on a.) parent-child inter-
action, and b.) interaction with members of the adolescent peer group. This dis-
cussion will be used as the basis for examining the changed form, practice and
significance of the phenomenon of see and be seen, and of self-presentation
and being observed in social networks. Particular attention will be paid to the
explicit orientation of this behaviour towards success, efficiency and profit, in
the broader sense of the entrepreneurial logic (Brckling, 2016) of self-pres-
entation on the net (4): Excerpts from interviews conducted with adolescents,
in which young men and women explain their methods of, and motivations for,
posting images of themselves on social networks, illustrate the entrepreneurial
and psychic significance of being-seen and not-being seen or not being-liked.
The essay concludes with the identification of emerging variants of shame in
digitalized relational contexts and shifts in the meaning of shame.
1. The Other in the Vastness of the Net Omnipresent,

Yet Physically Absent and Uncertain
For the majority of adolescents, but not only adolescents, communication
takes place largely through digital networks, with others or an other, who is not
physically present, yet whose physical absence is tied to a virtual permanence.
In a peculiar way, the other is always and never there. There is a permanent
connection to physically distant people, whose perpetual medial presence is a
virtual precondition of the connection, though it is not necessarily or, in fact,
continually guaranteed like a person lurking in the background, who may
or may not be watching. For, at some point, he or she, or the others, will, per-
haps, read the message, look at the posted photos, the selfies and posts, or the
text messages and emails, or follow the Twitter messages, hashtags and endless
stream of communications in the various Whatsapp groups all the things that
happened while you slept or had to tune out for a second to watch for cars
as you crossed the street. But, sometimes the other(s) might be looking at the
very moment I am writing. Are you there? is the typical call, as we enter the
vague and uncertain space of the net, appealing to an echo, we might say, the
call of the always-present-yet-never-unequivocally-there other of digital com-
munication.
Correspondingly, the significance of the real, physically present other vacil-
lates and declines; behaviour towards physically present others and the gaze of
the other transform in a physically immediate and symbolic sense. Face-to-face
communication is partially supplemented and partially replaced by net-based
or medial communication, whereby, on the whole that is, through the in-
crease in digital communication relationships take on different forms. For
example, face-to-face communication is often accompanied by parallel medial
communication, so that, one might say, the inner, mental representation and
relationship of presence and absence, of separateness and relatedness, as well as
the various meanings of the gaze of the other, transform in very fundamental
ways. So, too, does the significance of seeing and being seen, of self-presenta-
tion and being observed in social networks. There, the gaze of the other takes
on a different quality, generating new constellations of shame. In this regard,
selected psychoanalytic, social-psychological and sociological aspects of shame
will be outlined below.
2. Shame and the Gaze of the Other Psychoanalytic,

Social-Psychological and Sociological Approaches
The self is constructed through the gaze of the other. Shame derives from
the awareness of this relation. Sartre describes this experience pointedly in Being
and Nothingness (1943), where he writes, [S]hame is a unitary apprehension
with three dimensions: I am ashamed of myself before the Other (289). G.
H. Seidler (2000) extends Sartres constellation of shame in his book on the
analysis and psychoanalysis of shame, entitled In Others Eyes. An Analysis of
Shame. In his conception of shame and alterity, Seidler distinguishes between
three structural levels of shame: Whether someone a.) is able to be genuinely
self-reflective, or b.) if self-reflection requires the real presence of an external
observer, or c.) is shamelessly nave vis--vis the gaze of the other (Seidler,
2014: 827). The capacity for shame also reflects the level of structural devel-
opment of the psyche. While shame may be a response to the experience of
objectification, or take on a distressing or even pathological character, in this

perspective it is not merely a negative phenomenon, nor merely a potent and

meaningful intrapsychic affect impacting our sense of self-worth. It also serves
to protect us from and bind us to the other (Scheff, 2010).
Shame, in other words, performs two operations simultaneously. Like the
two sides of a coin, it is both a model of psychological development and the con-
struction of subjectivity. For in the gaze of the other, the I recognizes itself, its
value, and becomes aware of its self. This fundamental constellation of self-evo-
lution in the mirror and through the resonance of the other (Winnicott, 1965)
can be formulated in various theoretical positions emphasizing different aspects
of the process object relations theory, or the findings of infant research, as well
as attachment and mentalization theory, intersubjective and recognition theory.
According to Kohut (1971), the self delineates itself, in the best case, within the
shine of the mothers eyes (141). The gaze of the other, then, is a mirror of the
self, but more than simply a reflection, as new meaning is continually produced
in the interaction and mutual relation. Shame is a developmental-psychological
aspect of this process. It points to the dialectic of successfully proving oneself
and the potential for failure in the gaze of the significant other. At the same
time, it reveals the self s dependence on the related and affirming other and on
the constructive relational experiences out of which the developing childhood
self emerges and the adult self draws its psychic energy.
The possibility of shame, the potential to feel ashamed, then, is a constitu-
tive and indispensable part of this constellation of dependency from which
we cannot escape. For without the gaze of the other, the childs world remains
empty and their psychological development is impeded. This is how the Subject
affirms itself in the eye and gaze of the other, the one who sees and recognizes,
who gives affection and affirmation. For the self, this gaze of the other bears
important emotional consequences. Love and appreciation produce a balanced
satisfaction with oneself and pride, while indifference and rejection produce
insecurity and a fearful, unstable sense of self, resulting, in some cases, in the
compensatory attempt to make oneself independent through increased self-
centredness or exaggerated feelings of grandiosity. Like pride, shame is an affect
closely connected to narcissism, to the sense of self and self-esteem at a basal
level (Hilgers, 2012).4
4
Development theoretical and psychoanalytic approaches often understand shame as an indication of a discrepancy
between the I and the Ideal-I, and guilt as a discrepancy between the I and the Super-ego (Piers & Singer, 1953).
Following Steiner (1985), shame becomes meaningful in relation to the observing object, guilt in relation to the
desired object.

Sociological approaches point out that the experience of shame is related

to social conditions: When, why and how shame is experienced or triggered
is dependent upon a number of different cultural and historical circumstances
(Neckel, 1991), as well as on the social and psychological constellations of self
and others. As M. Lewis (1992) maintains, guilt is characteristic of a competi-
tive, individualistic, capitalist society, while shame takes on a particular, even
regulatory function in precapitalist, ethnic and traditional societies. Losing
ones credibility or honour, or falling into disgrace can mean social death.5 More
recent scholarship, however, argues that shame has become more significant in
late Modernity, as a result of the pressure on the individual to perform, opti-
mize and continually push boundaries. Consequently, we see an ever greater
discrepancy between the I and the Ideal-I, which, as A. Ehrenberg (2009) sug-
gests, can increase the tendency toward depression.6
As this essay contends, the idea and meaning of (the gaze of ) the other
changes in the wake of digitalization, lending a different quality to the phenom-
enon of shame. Furthermore, it will provide a selection of descriptions of the
various constellations of shame, humiliation and shamelessness, as they emerge
through forms of digital communication characterized by the dissolution of
physical and communicative presence. On the one hand, there is the digitally-
absorbed gaze of the physically present other and, in consequence, the thinned
out and fragile communication and attention to physically co-present persons;
on the other, there is the greater significance of the gaze of the physically absent
other onto the medially-constructed image of the self.
5
Norbert Elias' theses (2000) on the civilization process have been most commonly understood that in this process
the thresholds of shame increase and shame is increasingly internalized. As Wouters (1999) determined, for example,
a contrary tendency developed, by the end of the 19th century at the latest, in which the public demonstration and
presentation of things once painstakingly concealed (especially those of a sexual nature) were no longer taboo. There
is an evident shift in the boundaries of shame. It almost goes without saying that this shift has experienced greater
expansion through the World Wide Web. This essay is not concerned, however, with questions of sexuality and taboo
in the public space of the net.
6
An overview of psychoanalytic theories of shame is available in Seidler (2000, 2014), Hilgers (2012); on the history
and discussion of a sociology of shame, see Scheff (2010), who defines shame as the premier social emotion (84),
as well as Neckel (1991) and Greiner (2015).

3. The Digitally Absorbed Gaze of the

Physically Present Other
3.1. The Gaze of Father and Mother at the Smartphone

In a society shaped by digitalization, communication with physically absent
people has grown increasingly significant, so that, meanwhile, physical presence
is no guarantee of communicative attention. The spaces of secure, undisturbed
face-to-face exchange have become more seldom and fragile. Such spaces can
only be created with a concerted effort to keep our permanent availability from
interrupting the conversation, distracting our attention from one another. In
the German state of Hessen, billboards remind parents to talk to their children
rather than chat with others while with their kids.7
Digitalization creates the expectation and the illusion of omnipresence in
digital communication. Yet, our permanent availability in the private sphere
leads to the fragmentation of our face-to-face, immediately connected interac-
tion and, in turn, the tendency toward shifts in significance, which are unin-
tentional and often go unnoticed. Guilt and shame can be the consequences,
for example, when, despite self-expectations and good intentions, we still do
not manage to sustain our attention towards our children and avoid digital
distraction:
Sunday morning, any given amateur football field in Germany. Football
with fathers and their children. Your own son has been looking forward to
this all week. So have you. Then, you stand on the field and somehow play
football, but you are an empty shell, not really there, because your thoughts
are somewhere else. You are thinking of the email you got from your super-
visor at work just before the game started Then you go back home and
ask yourself why, once again, at least this time, you werent completely into
the game. Why you werent able to relax. And then you see the Smartphone
lying there, its red light blinking incessantly, and reach for it. You read and
begin to type. You dont hear your son ask if you saw the goal he made.
Every mail, every quick SMS is a little betrayal: another minute sacrificed
for work, even though you had promised this weekend to really spend time
with your family (Borst & Wefing, 2014: 2)
7
The motto and central message of the billboard campaign in Frankfurt a. M. 2015, showing images of mothers and
fathers looking at their smartphones or talking on their cellphone while with their children, read: Talk to your child
instead; cf. also Turkle (2011).

The father describes his regret for betraying his son but cannot change the
situation: A moment later, he is already digitally distracted once again. F. Opitz
(2012) describes a similar situation in his film Speed and his book by the same
name. Opitz interviewed a journalist after the latter had prescribed himself a
period of rehab from the Internet and his Blackberry, because his behaviour
with these technologies had become creepy and he was ashamed of it: If my
phone vibrated and I was with other people and it was embarrassing to look
at it , I would go the bathroom quickly to look at the message (Optiz, 2012:
64). Similar situations occurred more and more frequently within the family:
When I came home at night, the first thing I did was turn on the computer. Or,
the Blackberry a devils tool (63). My kids were furious at the thing. Rightfully so
cause I was always looking at the screen while talking to them, at the same time,
real quick, just to check my emails (74).
While feelings of shame predominate in these examples, in some cases, the

blurring of lines between work and private life is not experienced as burden-
some or as a shameful communicative shortcoming vis--vis ones children.
On the contrary, the feeling of being or needing to be permanently available is
accompanied by a sense of importance, of being irreplaceable, by the desire for
self-superiority that admits no feelings of shame:
Florian K.,8 for example, an enthusiastic self-optimizer, explains how he
keeps a log, so he knows down to the minute precisely how much of his day
is free-time and how much is work time though, at the end of the day, its not
that accurate, because well, when I am at home sitting in my sons room
playing with him and my cellphone is within reach and it somehow buzzes
and I pick it up to glance at it or I write a quick message it is actually
difficult to distinguish what is work and what is explicitly leisure time.
Florian K. describes a scene in which he reads and replies to mails and SMSs
while playing with his child, something not unique to him. What concerns
him in the narrative, however, is not the idea that repeatedly interrupting play
with his son might be a problem but rather his not knowing how to categorize
the time he spends in his sons room. His interest is limited to his own self-
observation and the perfection of his digital diary entries on how he spends
8
The case samples of Florian K. and Andrea W. derive from the APAS project by King, Gerisch, Rosa. For more
details on the project, see: King (2013), King et al. (2014), Schreiber et al. (2015).

his time. His sons needs are secondary. A similar constellation can be seen in
Andrea W.s narrative:
I think that was when Rafi was older, well, relatively speaking older, I mean,
he wasnt, wasnt a baby anymore, but a bit older, a toddler and then, sud-
denly, uh, started a little bit to, uh, uh, to demand things: I want to play Duplo
with you. I would be like: oh, ok, here is someone who wants you to have time
for him right now and who is not a baby anymore that you can lay down
somewhere and (takes a deep breath) say (in a high voice) looky here, look at
this awesome toy, now lay here under it, see the little bell, super! (in a normal
voice). Now, uh, there is someone who says, I want to play Duplo with you now
and you just picked me up from daycare and now do something with me I
want to go to the playground with you, uh, Mama, put your cellphone down
Well, I think I really needed someone, cause I actually really like what I do?
Eh someone who really calls it like it is and says, Hey, now, take a bit of time
off and relax and stop thinking about your job the whole time.
Here, too, the needs of the child are secondary. The mothers reflections on
the episode are focused on herself. Comparing the four narratives, each depicts
parents, fathers or mothers, working in the presence of their children and keep-
ing a steady eye on the more or less irresistible cellphone. The fathers in the first
narratives (still) experience shame and guilt for their lack or lapses of attention,
escaping to the bathroom with their smartphones. Florian K., however, is most
preoccupied with how to categorize the time he spends in his sons room work
or leisure? Andrea does not say, my child needs me but I needed someone to
say to me, Stop working for once Put your cellphone down.
Each of these narratives makes clear in its own way how the gaze of
parental others for their children can be absorbed elsewhere. Children com-
pete for attention with the (smartphone or computer) screen towards which
their parents focus their attention with great interest and, often, they come
up short. In the face of the increasingly common, even normalized practice of
withdrawing from immediate communication with those physically present to
devote attention to digital activities, the lack of shame visible in the narratives
of Florian and Andrea might be understood as an expression of an emerging
cultural transformation of values: When the majority behaves similarly it be-
comes ever more natural despite the costs and disadvantages to turn away
without shame from others, even a child in need of communication. In this
sense, what can be seen here is a historically new variety of shamelessness. For
the development of the psyche, the result may be a deficiency of affection and
affirmation that, in turn, affects the childs development of the capacity for
shame. As explained in the opening segments of this essay, to an extent, taking
up Seidler, to fully develop this capacity, the child must have adequate experi-
ence of being seen and affirmed by the significant other, that is, their primary
caretaker.
3.2. Multiplied and Fragmented Communication among Adolescents

The boundarylessness of medial consumption affects not only parental
practice but that of adolescents themselves as well (Kammerl et al., 2012; King,
2014). The JIM study, focusing on the use of media by children and adolescents
in Germany, emphasized as early as 2013 that a marked transformation in
the length of use-time had taken place (JIM-Study 2013: 28). The findings
were summarized in 2015 as follows, At 97%, nearly all adolescents use the
Internet. Among these, 80% of 12 to 19 year olds are online daily (...) While
12 to 13 year olds spend an average of 156 minutes online, this value increases
to 260 minutes by the ages of 18 to 19 years (JIM-Study 2015: 56). Given
these numbers, it is reasonable to assume that, in addition to the increasing
duration of use of the various options in the net () the permanent, very much
desired, availability allows for the (subjectively experienced) increase in use-
time (JIM-Study 2013: 7). Correspondingly, there are changes in the forms of
adolescent communication even among peers there are similar constellations
of disrupted attentiveness or communicative withdrawal as a result of digital
practices. As can be seen in an interview with a young man in Grossers study
(2014), when he is out with friends or a friend, and then hes on the cellphone
the whole time, [its] really annoying, because he only listens with one ear and just
messes around with his phone (4). A 22 year old describes a typical scene, when
she is out in the evening with friends, e.g. at a bar, then they all sit down and
the first thing that happens, they all put their cellphones on the table and it has
become normal that someone writes real quick, although we are all sitting there
together (4). When she is with someone alone and he spends the entire time
on the phone, I could scream, because thats just something I cant stand. She thinks
to herself, You dont even have to be here talking to me and she speaks about it
directly. She does it herself, she admits self-reflectively. Yet she finds it not very

pretty or entirely polite (5). Michael uses his smartphone during conversations
with others, too but you try to avoid it, but it just happens again and again.
Its really already a part of you (7).
These descriptions, too, suggest that, though contrasting norms are brought
into play, the physical, analog presence, i.e. the gaze of the other in its physical
immediacy, is becoming less significant. Physical, real presence grows ever
more similar to a kind of ornament or background in relation to what is really
important, like the temporary and inconsequential presence or insignificant
gaze of passengers in the train, who are co-present for a certain period of time,
but who remain insignificant and the majority of the time ultimately disappear
without trace. This logic of being absent in the presence of others penetrates ever
deeper into our intimate relationships that require sensual attentive presence. In
other words, as ever, adolescents meet up with their peers and spend a good deal
of time with other physically present adolescents. This does not mean, how-
ever, that they engage in actual face-to-face communication. For even when to-
gether in the same physical space, their gaze and attention are repeatedly turned
to the digital, i.e. messages, information, communication partners or sources
of entertainment, which affect the quality of communication, relationships and
forms and relevancy of exchange with present and absent others.
It can also be assumed that the more the shine in the eye of the other is sought in
digital social networks especially for those who experience the eye of the moth-
er or father (or other significant other) shining brighter when she or he looks
at the smartphone than at his or her childs face, or those who must compete
with the smartphone or screen of another device for their mother or fathers
attention the more likely it is that the search for this shine in the mothers
eye will be displaced onto the number of Likes, the affirmations and attention
received in the social network. Granted, one possible response to the childhood
experience of competing with the Smartphone for the mothers attention might
be to reject the smartphone. However, in a social environment in which digital
communication plays such a significant role, this response grows increasingly
improbable. The more likely outcome precisely in the case of insufficient at-
tention from the primary caretakers is greater conformity and the desire or
hope to at least gain control over the gaze of the digital other.
The process of proving oneself in relationships in the classical sense
through an always risky exposure of the self, in which failure is also a possi-

ble outcome in a form of communication in which individuals experience

themselves in speech and response, in direct exchange with one another (i.e.
dialogue, gestures and actions) not only loses significance but even appears sub-
jectively obsolete in the end. The experience of the self in the gaze of the other
is, thus, one might say, from the start, fragile, erratic, wavering and flickering,
like the screen itself. The greater the dependence on the diffuse recognition of
the digital generalized other, who replaces intimate experience, the more press-
ing the shame resulting from disregard, from feelings of falling short: Pressing
and yet directionless, for ultimately it is only ever about the next round of seek-
ing attention and affection or acclamation, from whomever it may be.
4. The Self in Digital Worlds Entrepreneurial
Like Test
... you get notified on your phone or through Facebook Because of eh mes-
sages um you know how many Likes you get a message for a Like or a
Comment eh and, of course, you follow that so cause you just always
go to Messages and, well of course you look at the photo to see how many
Likes it has (Tom, 16).
Brckling (2016) describes the categorical imperative of our times as a
maxim with the invocation Be entrepreneurial! Every single person is called
upon equally to think in the logic of the entrepreneurial self (ibid.), to focus
on lifelong profit, customer satisfaction and success, and to act flexibly and be
prepared to take risks. This way of life is the result of permanent competition
and continually demands further and enhanced, ultimately never-ending ef-
forts at optimization. In this context, optimization generally means the con-
tinual orientation towards improvement and extending or crossing boundaries,
the creation of relationships (with others and with oneself ) within the logic
of investment and anticipated returns, and keeping our options open (in case
returns might be higher elsewhere) (King et al., 2014). Yet no amount of effort
is able to quell the fear of failure: Because one can assert ones position only
for the moment and only in relation to ones competitors, no one can simply
rest on their achievements. Todays recipe for success is tomorrows path to ruin
(Brckling, 2015: 10).

Self-presentation, then, must always be focused on drawing maximal at-

tention to oneself and showing oneself in the best possible light, and this is all
the more true, we might add, in digital contexts: Successful digital self-pres-
entation must be permanently controlled and renewed. In a teaching research
project within the scope of a seminar at the University of Hamburg, interviews
with adolescents were conducted about what it means to them to post images
of themselves on social networks. The results of these explorations underscore
the degree to which precisely this logic of optimization and the figure of the
entrepreneurial self were implemented in the youths digital self-presentation
practices.
The adolescents maintain, organize and balance their self-presentations
with painstaking attention to detail, like an entrepreneur monitoring his profits
daily. They look precisely at which images are received by viewers and how,
through using particular hashtags and technical possibilities and finesse, they
can manage to artificially raise the number of Likes (if you like me, Ill like you)
and new products, i.e. images of themselves are tested and evaluated constant-
ly. There was also a continual process of optimization in their self-presentation,
designed to sustain an audience, i.e. the attention and gaze of others, to increase
their numbers and win their loyalty.
Interviewer: What do you think would happen if you were to suddenly stop
posting photos?
Bianca: Well, if I suddenly dont post, eh, any more photos at all, the first thing
that would happen is I would lose all of my followers (laughs)
I: Oh no (laughs)
B: No thats bad Id lose all of my followers right off the bat.

I: And having followers is extremely important, right, that you have lots of
them?
B: Yes
I: Why?
B: I dont know, I mean, I dont really know. most followers arent even people
I know. They arent even friends of mine. Yeah, I like, actually I only think the
followers are important so, well, so they just see what kind of photos I have and
so and I dont know.

I: But you would probably be sad if, lets say, half of your followers would cancel
their subscription suddenly, right?
B: I would be really sad! yeah, that would be really stupid, eh, all that hard
work. I say hard work, but
I: Yeah
B: - Its really hard work to get that many followers.
These responses illustrate the extent to which the efforts of the entrepre-
neurial self to optimize must be permanently sustained in a very concrete and
practical sense. While this entrepreneurial logic is by no means limited to the
digital sphere, it is strikingly clear how much this work in the digital network
epitomizes the entrepreneurial ductus, the imperative of constant improvement
and performance and how, precisely by this means, adolescents are trained
and socialized, almost to perfection, in the relevant forms of entrepreneurial
behaviour.
At the same time the focus is on adolescents, here their fragility is pal-
pable, the neediness, even the self-doubt, which can hardly be hidden in this
presentation market place, for example, with the question, What would hap-
pen if the other saw the real me?
Some of the interviewed teens state that they regulate their feelings of self-
worth through posting images of themselves: When Im not doing well, I post
a nice photo on Facebook and if it gets a good response and lots of people like
it, it makes me feel better of course, the opposite is also true if something goes
wrong. Here are some excerpts from the interviews with the young men and
women:
Anna responds to the interviewers question, What do you think most peo-
ple, in general, or when you think of friends, want to achieve by posting images
in social networks?
Anna (18): Well, that other people have some kind of idea who they are. And
somehow you make an impression on them or something. And I think lots of
peoplewhen they post a photo, most likely want to show how good they look
I mean, no one actually posts a photo they look terrible in. I think that would
be cool, but no one does that. I think they more want to achieve, that they want
to create an image of themselves, what the others then think

Jule (18): Lots of people pretend to be something maybe to feel better about
themselves or edit [the photos] a lot. I mean, I know a few people who really do
a lot of that
Tom (16): Every day a new photo just to get those Likes
At the same time, there is shame about the dependence of self-worth on
these practices, wherein in the majority of cases it is clear we are dealing
with the creation of appearances, a construction.
Tony: And thats just somehow, in some way, totally stupid and I think, too, that
there is too much of that I meanI just dont think its good thatwell, on
Facebook everything is just so extremely faked and extremely embellished,
and that I just dont like it.
Insecurity creates a new need, or rather neediness continually reproduces
itself. The unambiguous experience of successfully proving oneself before the
other, before the gaze of the other, is lost in the digital vagueness, virtuality and
uncertainty of the relationship between self and other. The functions of failure
and success lose their foundation, as it were. Failure is not failure; it was only
the wrong image of my self, perhaps. Confirmation is not confirmation; it is
not recognition, since it was only an image and not my real face, as we see in
the thoughts of the young woman whose words form the title of this essay, If
you show your real face, youll lose 10 000 followers.
5. Conclusions Shame in Digitalized Relationships

This essay has examined the psychosocial and psychic ramifications of new
digital boundaries and constellations of shame, humiliation and shamelessness,
as they develop out of the disjunction of physical, communicative presence in
the wake of digitalized forms of communication. In particular, it has examined
the associated changes in functions and affective pitfalls of self-presentation.
Selected descriptions and statements from adolescents of the meaning of social
networks and their digital self-presentation illustrated mechanisms that are
operative in their practices with the gaze of the other on the net. Psychoana-
lytic concepts regarding the construction of subjectivity and the significance of
shame in the development of the psyche pointed to changes in developmental
processes in digitalized worlds.
In summary, the following conclusions can be drawn: Transformed constel-

lations intensify shame and fear of humiliation through social exclusion and
inadequacy (in the sense of loss of status or marginalization). Changed forms of
communication and the associated forms of relationships can increase the pres-
sure to conform and intensify the fear of marginalization. Those who do not
succeed at drawing the attention of others are always the ones who are ashamed
at the same time, the competition for attention in the digital world necessarily
grows ever greater.
The analysis further identified the dynamic of an often proclaimed, but
actually rather minimized, shame with regard to the virtual negation of the
significance of the physically present other, the gaze of the other, in the im-
mediacy of shared physical space (as the basis of self-reassurance). Put another
way, it is growing ever more acceptable, as it were, to shamelessly turn away
or withdraw from communication with or to never even turn towards the
physically present other.
Though often indirectly thematized by pointing to behavior of others, new
variants of shame for ones own dependence on attention from the digital,
physically absent other emerge, reflecting the urgent and simultaneously disap-
pointed hope to establish connections on the net in order to find confirmation
and feel a sense of belonging there.
Lastly, the essay turned its focus to the phenomenon of shame for the in-
adequacies of the virtual self a variant of shame arising in awareness of the
fact that neither the gaze of the other nor the digitally presented self has with-
stood a direct process of proving themselves. The gaze of the other in digital
communication is fleeting and wavering, while the self present on the net is a
constructed, in the best case, playful version of the self, but often enough a very
seriously considered construct with an eye to the significance of ones own posi-
tion and status in social groups, instrumentalized to regulate ones feelings of
self-worth. As such, it bears great potential for humiliation should the number
of Likes be too low, lower than for other people.
In keeping with Seidlers differentiation among various structural levels of
shame, this would concern a psychic constellation in which the self remains
concretistically dependent on affection and affirmation in order to avoid feeling
ashamed. Because these concrete attentions are, at the same time, volatile, the
fear of shame remains and continually grows.

Loss of status and shame related to exclusion, thus, takes on greater signifi-
cance the more the gaze of the digital other assumes responsibility for functions
or has this responsibility projected onto it (recognition, affirmation, the desire
for a sense of belonging) functions no longer fulfilled by the digitally-ab-
sorbed though physically present other, in particular, the primary care provider
in the process of growing up.

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Media Traumatization, Symbolic

Wounds and Digital Culture
Allen Meek1
Massey University, New Zealand
doi: 10.5937/comman11-11442
Abstract: Do media images really traumatize the public? If they do not, then why
do so many commentators from those commemorating the Holocaust to those analys-
ing the impact of 9/11 claim that trauma can be transmitted to specific ethnic groups
or entire societies? While these claims can be based on empirical data or used to justify
political agendas, psychoanalysis also continues to influence conceptions of collective
trauma and to offer important perspectives for evaluating these conceptions. This paper
explores these questions of mediated trauma and collective identity by tracing a neglected
historical trajectory back to the work of psychoanalyst and anthropologist Geza Roheim.
Roheim produced studies of Australian Aboriginal culture that applied the theory of col-
lective trauma outlined in Freuds Totem and Taboo. He also produced an ethnographic
film, Subincision, documenting an initiation rite, that was subsequently used in psycho-
logical studies of so-called stress films. Putting aside Roheims psychoanalytic interpreta-
tions of indigenous culture, psychologists used his film to measure the impact of images
of violence and pain. These studies from the 1960s have recently been rediscovered by
scholars of Holocaust film and video testimony. This paper seeks to recover the concept of
symbolic wounds developed in psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheims later commentary on
Roheims work. The mass media of newspapers, film and television have supported the
idea of cultural trauma shared by large societies. The concept of symbolic wounds that
enhance group membership and mobilize collective action may be more useful for under-
standing how violent and shocking images are put to more diverse uses in digital culture.
Keywords: trauma, stress film, symbolic wounds, September 11, ISIS, Black Lives
Matter
1

Media Traumatization, Symbolic Allen Meek
1. Introduction
Research on media traumatization has attempted to explain the psycho-
logical impact of images showing violent and catastrophic events (Holmes &
Bourne, 2008). Images that show pain and suffering can be understood to cause
pain and suffering for viewers, even if the experience shown and the experience
of seeing are understood as qualitatively different. Psychoanalysis has made an
important contribution to this area of research by explaining how identification
with traumatic images is driven by unconscious fears and desires, and how
the psyche protects or numbs itself against the impact of shock (Freud, 1920;
Lifton, 1967). Psychoanalytic accounts that emphasize the role of interior pro-
cesses of identification, however, have tended to be discounted in research that
focuses on the traumatic impact of media images as external stimuli. In order
to address this neglected perspective the following discussion seeks to recover
a conception of symbolic wounds from the works of psychoanalysts Geza
Roheim and Bruno Bettelheim (Roheim, 1950; Bettelheim, 1955). Roheim
and Bettelheim both argued, in different ways, that violence can have symbolic
value that enables social participation and group membership. The following
discussion proposes that media images can function as symbolic wounds invit-
ing active identification. I propose that discourses about media traumatization
have been dominated by the idea of cultural trauma, which depends on a one-
source-to-many-viewers model of mass media. The idea of symbolic wounds
better describes the situation made possible by digital media, where new com-
munities emerge in relation to images of violence and suffering, revealing how
such images can not only distress or desensitize but also enhance and empower
those who look at them.
Claims that media images can induce or transmit traumatic experience
have been made about photographs, documentary films, television news and
video testimony (Sontag, 1977; Felman & Laub, 1992; Hirsch, 2004; Neria,
Di Grande & Adams, 2011). These claims have been associated with the mass
media of print, cinema and television because they assume that a single source
of information is being received by potentially very large audiences. When
entire societies are likely to encounter particular images of violence and catas-
trophe then public figures, intellectuals and media professionals engage in the
discursive construction of cultural traumas (Alexander, 2012): when everyone
sees the same images they can be said to experience similar emotional responses.

Allen Meek Media Traumatization, Symbolic
Probably the most widely known example of this construction of a cultural

trauma is the narrative about Americans shocked response to witnessing the
events of September 11, 2001. The possibility that there has never actually been
such uniformity of feeling becomes more evident with the greater multiplicity
of images and narratives available on the Internet, showing that violent im-
ages invite a range of responses that include not only dismay and rage but also
inappropriate ones such as fascination and amusement. The shift to digital
technologies has allowed media users to navigate almost limitless amounts of
information, develop individual user profiles and participate in social networks.
The proliferation of media images and texts potentially available at any time or
place, along with the intensification of explicit violence and horror, make this
less predictable encounter with the traumatic image a significant feature of
media use today (Meek, 2010; Morpurgo, 2016).
Psychoanalysis can help us to understand how the social and cultural value
of symbolic wounds has changed in response to historical developments in
modern media. Freud understood identity formation in terms of the childs
relation to his/her parents in the private domestic space: the child internalized
parental authority in the form of the super-ego, which was understood by Freud
as specifically patriarchal and middle-class. In Freuds time parental authority
over the childs auto-erotic tendencies was commonly expressed through threats
of castration (Poster, 2006: 165168), a symbolic wound that structured cul-
tural identity through sexual repression. Mark Poster argues that because child-
hood development today is strongly shaped by media technologies, the private
relationship between a child and his/her parents has been displaced by the child
as a consumer and member of specific target markets. Young people now use
a diverse range of media, over which parents exercise limited control (Poster,
2006: 171173). This situation developed gradually in the second half of the
twentieth century, when private life was increasingly characterized by the con-
sumption of newspapers, magazines, television and movies. During this period
mass media assumed the role of constructing narratives about national identity
and collective traumas. The televisual nature of these traumas can be seen in
examples such as the 1961 Eichmann trial, the assassination of John F. Kennedy
and the 9/11 attacks. New traumatic images of war, famine and death became
available but remained centrally controlled and censored by corporate media.
In psychoanalytic terms these traumatic images could be understood as induc-

ing castration anxiety and thereby prompting identification with a national or

ethnic superego.
In the mid-1990s trauma studies suggested new approaches to the question
of media traumatization by bringing together psychoanalysis, psychotherapy
with Holocaust survivors, and recorded testimony in film and video. The influ-
ential work of Cathy Caruth and Shoshana Felman sought to recover forgotten
historical experience through the transmission of traumatic shock in literary,
film and video texts (Felman & Laub, 1992; Caruth, 1996). Psychoanalysis
explains traumatic experiences as overwhelming conscious understanding, al-
lowing the unconscious memory of the event to return in symptoms such as
nightmares, compulsive behaviours, and other neuroses and pathologies. By
analogy, these trauma theorists argued that extreme events resist understand-
ing at the time of their occurrence and reappear as symptomatic disruptions
in later representations of history. The emphasis on the collective experience
of catastrophe, however, implicitly leads us back to the question of media as
an apparatus of power. The political implications of identification with trau-
matic histories became clearer after the live transmission of the 9/11 attacks
on television, when many media commentators almost immediately made
claims about collective trauma for Americans (Trimarco & Depret, 2005: 30).
The superego effect of the state and mass media was revealed in subsequent
military interventions and intensified national security and social surveillance.
The televisual replay of numerous different video recordings made by private
citizens appeared to act out the experience of the events as an intrusive memory.
National surveys conducted after the 9/11 attacks led to claims of substantial
levels of stress and PTSD among the general population (Young, 2007: 28). In
this case psychological research appeared to directly serve the interests of a nar-
rative of national trauma.
Both these theoretical and empirical accounts of the psychological impact
of traumatic images assumed a single-source-to-multiple-viewer model. At-
tempts to understand the impact of traumatic images tend to assign roles of
perpetrator and victim, using actions in real life events to define a relation be-
tween media and viewer. Psychoanalysis, however, includes more complicated
accounts of relationships between perpetrator and victim, including fantasy and
guilt. Nevertheless, as Ruth Leys (2000, 2007) has shown, both trauma theory
and psychological studies of traumatic images have tended to reproduce the

model of impact from an external source and to discount the ways in which
trauma is also shaped by interior processes of imaginative investment and iden-
tification (which may not be limited to a single position or role). One way to
address this imbalance is to consider how viewers can make their identification
with images of pain and suffering the basis of socially transformative acts.
Cultural trauma narratives attempt to capture mass identification, but digi-
tal media are allowing and revealing a greater diversity of identifications with
symbolic wounds. For example, according to W. J. T. Mitchell, the 9/11 attacks
initiated a war of images that included the torture of detainees in Abu Ghraib
prison, the execution of Saddam Hussein, and the decapitation of hostages by
radical Islamists. But Mitchells account of this war of images, which he claims
is designed to shock and traumatize the enemy (Mitchell, 2011: 2), remains
within the logic of perpetrator and victim transferred onto media image and
viewer. In Mitchells analysis, the word trauma tends to connote an external
force or event impacting on a body or psyche and leaving an injury or wound.
Examples of more complex interactions with digital images as symbolic wounds
can be seen in political struggles such as the Arab Spring (Wallace, 2016: 80)
and Black Lives Matter. Images of violence and death that have been rapidly
disseminated through digital networks have provoked communities to engage
in political protest and resistance.
Concerns about the psychological effects of media violence need to be
understood in the larger context of modern experience. Walter Benjamins
adaptation of Freuds account of trauma in Beyond the Pleasure Principle
(1920) stressed that shock had become the norm (Benjamin, 2003: 318)
in metropolitan culture. Freud proposed that the perceptual apparatus devel-
ops a protective shield (Freud, 1920: 27) to insulate it from the potentially
damaging effects of intrusive stimuli. Only the experience of fright (a sudden
and unexpected disturbance) is able to pierce the stimulus shield and thereby
cause trauma. Benjamin made a parallel between the protective shield and the
camera, which mediates shock and thereby deflects any deeper psychological
impact. Ever since the invention of photography viewers have been adjusting
their perceptual apparatus to cope with visual shock, leading to an ever-increas-
ing intensity of media effects to capture viewers attention. The experience of
mediated shock in modern consumer societies has accelerated the destruction
of earlier cultural taboos and traditional values: what was shocking yesterday

may be just boring today or next week. Whereas the media-saturated viewer in
technologically advanced societies is often assumed to be morally jaded and un-
responsive to shock, digital technologies are allowing individuals and groups to
transmit and circulate images that can help to re-invigorate community belong-
ing and collective action. Images of police violence against African Americans,
for example, may be old news but recent events captured on mobile-phone
cameras and posted on the Internet have prompted acts of protest, mourning
and retaliatory violence.
2. Subincision
In the following discussion I want to reconsider debates about media trau-
matization by focusing on a specific film that has been used in research on stress
films: Subincision Rites of the Arunta, made by psychoanalyst Geza Roheim in
1937 while conducting fieldwork with the Aboriginal tribe in Australia. This
film has been repeatedly used in research studies for the purpose of deliberately
causing distress to American viewers (Lazarus et al., 1962; Horowitz, 1969).
None of these studies has considered the cultural significance of the ritual
shown in the film, which Roheim interpreted using Freuds theory of the primal
horde: the violence acted out the collective guilt for the murder of the primal
father by the younger males (Freud, 1913). In the 1950s, psychoanalyst Bruno
Bettelheim discussed the cultural practice of subincision in terms of sym-
bolic wounds allowing for self-transformations that enhanced social status
and group membership. What such psychoanalytic theories stressed, which was
discounted in later laboratory-based research on media traumatization, was the
ways in which violence could enable individual self-transformation and group
participation.
Digital culture has provided new evidence to suggest that symbolic wounds
can be seen as functioning in new technologically-mediated forms. Those who
required audiences to watch Subincision expected them to be disturbed by what
they saw. Today, however, a quick google videos search of subincision reveals
a sub-genre of pornography in which genital mutilation is presented to induce
sexual excitement and pleasure, even if for others it may be the object of horror
or disgust. Viewers may now use the Internet to access the decapitation videos
produced by ISIS, for example, and engage in a range of possible identifications
with this violent scenario. These videos are designed, as indeed were the 9/11

attacks, not only to shock but also to recruit. The Internet allows us to see this
range of different negotiations articulated in videos and commentaries posted
by non-professional users. For example, counter to the televisual narrative
depicting America as the innocent victim of a terrorist attack, the Internet has
helped to foster new political communities, such as the 9/11 Truth Movement,
that challenge the dominant account.
Jeffrey Alexander has described cultural traumas as wounds to social iden-
tity (Alexander, 2012: 2). In Subincision the wounds inflicted by genital muti-
lation define group membership. Psychological studies showed that the viewing
of Subincision also produced effects that suggested a shared experience of stress
in an entirely different cultural context. Today individuals interact with com-
munication technologies and information networks that allow more private
negotiations of thresholds of shock and potential psychological disturbance.
The wounds that serve as a basis of identity in tribal communities suggest that
violence may continue to define social belonging in more advanced societies,
if only in the increasingly dislocated and disembodied forms made possible by
technological media. In traditional societies ritual defines social membership;
in modern mass societies, mass media construct narratives about collective
memory and identity; in networked societies, images can prompt the forma-
tion of less centrally-controlled political communities. In each case symbolic
wounds play a role in mobilizing and managing group membership. Symbolic
wounds now perform an important function in alternative, subcultural and
counter-hegemonic narratives about identity in digital culture.
In the study that he led at the University of California observing the psy-
chological stress caused by watching a film, Richard Lazarus selected Subinci-
sion. Lazarus describes the contents of the film:
It depicts one of the important ceremonials of this tribe and very vividly
presents a sequence of crude operations performed with a piece of flint on
the penis and scrotum of several adolescent boys. The running length is 17
minutes and the film is silent. (Lazarus et al., 1962: 4)
Evaluating the effects of watching this film, Lazarus and his team used
personality assessment and measured skin resistance and heart rate and ana-
lysed urine samples to assess biochemical response (Lazarus et al., 1962: 4).
The screening was followed by a questionnaire-interview asking the subjects to
describe their responses to the film and recall what they saw. The participants
were recruited from psychology courses at the University of California. In their

concluding remarks Lazarus et al. suggest that further research might consider
what types of content produce stress in a given amount and pattern and in
particular classes of people, given the nudity of the natives and the homo-
sexual implications of their behaviour, and also what might happen if the
same subject watched the film over and over again (Lazarus et al., 1962: 30).
These directions for further research point to questions of cultural meaning and
social identity and of technological effects (possibly inducing desensitization)
that were excluded from consideration in this initial study.
In his 1969 study, Mardi Horowitz used Subincision again because of its
previous use in such experiments. He provides a more detailed description of
the films content:
The film setting is the Australian bush, and it depicts naked natives en-
gaged in a harsh puberty rite. Scenes of extensive penile surgery, bleeding
wounds, and adolescents writhing and wincing with pain are repeated sev-
eral times. The boys appear to volunteer for this painful procedure, which
is conducted by older men. (Horowitz, 1969: 554)
Both Lazarus and Horowitz mention the explicit visibility of the boys
genitals something that was taboo in television and Hollywood cinema in the
early 1960s (and indeed remains largely so today).
Fifty years later (perhaps due to the cultural impact of the 9/11 attacks) this
research was reconsidered in the new context of trauma theory. For example,
in his study of Holocaust films, Joshua Hirsch refers to the research by Lazarus
and Horowitz that uses Subincision as evidence that film viewing can lead to
symptoms of posttraumatic stress (Hirsch, 2004: 17). Hirsch combines this
proposition with the psychotherapeutic concept of vicarious trauma trans-
mitted from a traumatized person to a witness, loved one or family member.
Whereas he acknowledges that watching a film can be more emotionally re-
moved than a direct experience of trauma or contact with one who has had such
an experience, he nevertheless proposes that the effects of film viewing might
include shock, intrusive imagery, grief, depression, numbing, guilt feelings,
and loss of faith in humanity (Hirsch, 2004: 17). Hirschs own example of
film causing vicarious trauma is the footage taken during the liberation of the
Nazi death camps. Hirsch uses earlier research, in which visually taboo mate-
rial was used to disturb an American audience, to explain how these images of
emaciated, naked corpses and mass death were traumatic. Psychological studies
in which the cultural context was discounted are used by Hirsch to make much
larger claims about the cultural trauma of the Holocaust. These broader claims,
however, remain within the perpetrator-victim/media-viewer analogy.
Ruth Leys also refers to Horowitzs research in the context of discussing
the Holocaust. According to Leys, Horowitz distinguished between different
types of images, including memory fragments, reconstructions, reinterpreta-
tions, and symbols (Leys, 2007: 106). Traumatic images, therefore, need not
be understood as the literal trace of an event but can involve role-playing,
imagination and fantasy shaped by unconscious wishes, fears, and memories
(Leys, 2007: 108). Leys argues that the studies by Lazarus and Horowitz that
used Subincision also tended towards a literal conception of the image and em-
phasized the impact of external stimuli, thereby excluding from consideration
more complex models of identification (Leys, 2007:11112). This argument
could also be applied to Hirschs claims, which do not adequately address how
viewers see the Holocaust as part of their cultural identity. These arguments by
Hirsch and Leys draw out some of the wider implications of the research on
stress films and how it raises questions about historical context and unconscious
motivation.
In his discussion of the studies by Lazarus and Horowitz and the later
commentary by Leys, Amit Pinchevski emphasizes the central role of media
technologies, which tends to be downplayed in all of this research. Pinchevski
argues that the understanding of traumatic memories as intrusive images must
owe something to the film apparatus and presupposes the technical ability
both to record stressful events and to replay these events so as to reproduce
stressful effects (Pinchevski, 2015: 10). Pinchevski then moves from this
proposition to pose the question: Is it possible to be traumatized by watching
a catastrophic event on television? (2015: 10). Pinchevskis emphasis on the
role of media is important, but he tends to return to the problem of external
stimuli rather than internal identification. Both the psychological research of
the 1960s and more recent research in trauma studies has repeatedly returned to
Subincision. The following section considers how this film might also prompt us
to reconsider the notion of symbolic wounds as a way of understanding media
traumatization in digital culture.

3. Roheim, Bettelheim and the Symbolic Wound

The psychological studies of the effects of Subincision did not consider cul-
tural factors as a defining influence on viewers response. Nor did they acknowl-
edge that the man who produced the film, Geza Roheim, was a close associate
of Freud and that his study of initiation rituals in a tribal society was framed
by Freudian theories of group identity. Roheim did his clinical training at the
Budapest Institute of Psychoanalysis. His conception of psychoanalytic an-
thropology initially involved interpretations of folklore and mythologies, but
his ethnographic fieldwork in the South Pacific between 1929 and 1931 led to
specific studies of totemism in Australian Aboriginal culture. Roheim was heav-
ily influenced by Freuds theory that the totem animal used in sacrificial ritual
was a substitute for the primal father who had been murdered by the young
males in the tribe, who were envious of his sexual power over women (Le Barre,
1966: 272281; Robinson, 1969: 74146). The sense of shared guilt for this
crime led to the establishment of the incest taboo (Freud, 1913). Without at-
tempting to resuscitate Freuds theories of the primal horde, we must neverthe-
less acknowledge that the repeated use of this film opens up a range of questions
about cultural identity, cross-cultural understanding and social belonging that
have often been excluded from research on the media transmission of trauma.
Mediated trauma is intrinsically bound to these questions.
Roheims psychoanalytic interpretations of myth and ritual were completely
out of favour in the academic environment that later used his film of the sub-
incision rite to induce stress in viewers. An important difference between Ro-
heims interpretation and the psychological research that uses his film was that
he sought to understand Aboriginal ritual (if only from a Eurocentric, evolu-
tionist perspective) whereas for these researchers in the 1960s both the cultural
context and symbolic meaning were discounted in the research findings. The
historical context for research on stress films would have to include the mass
media of television and newspapers that, especially after the revelations of the
Nazi death camps in 1945, made available more shocking and disturbing im-
ages that pre-war censorship did not allow. This media exposure to violence and
catastrophe would further intensify as the 1960s progressed. This was also the
era of Cold War ideology and propaganda, with its campaigns of fear about the
bomb and mass destruction.

In his study of initiation rituals, Symbolic Wounds, Bruno Bettelheim dis-

cusses the use of subincision by the Arunta with specific reference to Roheims
research. He argues against Roheims interpretation of the ritual as sadistically
imposed by the male elders (as embodiments of the tribal superego) and argues
instead that symbolic wounds also enhance cultural identity and empower the
participant (Bettelheim, 1955: 124125, 173180). To support his argument
Bettelheim cites an example from 1950s America:
The contention that these physical traumata may be felt as painful but not
as cruel, and hence not as traumata in the psychological sense, seems sup-
ported by the experience of persons undergoing cosmetic plastic surgery.
Nobody I know has regarded such surgery as cruel; even the pain seems
reduced by the desire with which the operations are approached. (Bettel-
heim, 1955: 83)
Following the logic of Bettelheims argument one could also argue that the
emphasis on the subincision ritual being distressing for Americans to watch fails
to acknowledge the positive, enhancing value that the physical transformation
has for its participants. As Bettelheim explained, initiation is not only endured
and demanded by social hierarchies but is also invested with desire (1955: 93).
Bettelheim suggested an important perspective on the subincision ritual
that has been ignored in the subsequent research that uses Roheims film. If
the violence and pain shown in the film could be used to induce discomfort
for viewers, then the affirmative value of the ritual for the participants in the
film could also potentially be transferred onto the viewing experience. The
viewer might endure the stress provoked by a film or media image as a means
of self-transformation and group participation. This possibility is implied but
not directly acknowledged in Hirschs discussion of Holocaust films: such visual
documents can be used not only to transmit trauma but also in new contexts to
affirm Jewish identity through collective acts of grieving (Hirsch, 2004: 17) (or
to support more sinister identifications with the perpetrators). As viewers ne-
gotiate shocking images on the Internet or disseminated through social media,
they can choose to engage with the image in ways that are no longer framed by
the discourses of academic researchers, media professionals or politicians.
The second half of the twentieth century was characterized by the emer-
gence of narratives about collective identity linked with media images of war,
atrocity, genocide and terror. The breakdown of visual taboos and the political
uses of fear and terror have been accompanied by the refashioning of national
narratives around extreme events such as the Holocaust and 9/11 (Alexander,
2012). In the twenty-first century digital technologies are reconfiguring this use
of images and showing how smaller groups and communities can be empow-
ered rather than positioned as passive victims and docile subjects by corporate
media or the state.
4. Digital Wounds: After 9/11

Digital media allow a proliferation of traumatic images that generate a mul-
tiplicity of competing discourses and identifications. Newspapers and network
television are losing some of their monopoly on cultural trauma narratives. This
development is not all good news. For example, although television and cinema
have popularized the Holocaust as a cultural trauma, Internet users can more
freely engage with alternative narratives, such as Holocaust denial. A substan-
tial archive of video material on YouTube expounds conspiracy theories related
to national traumas such as the assassination of J.F.K. or the 9/11 attacks.
Universalizing claims about media traumatization are becoming less convinc-
ing due to growing evidence online that media images invite a wider range of
responses and interpretations.
When specific events, such as the 9/11 attacks, are given the status of
traumatic for large populations, they are elevated from just another image of
death and suffering to a cause of psychological stress or a cultural and political
crisis. The numerous video recordings made by ordinary citizens of the attacks
were subsequently captured by network television and orchestrated into a nar-
rative of national trauma. Images of the attacks were re-played obsessively on
television in the hours and weeks that followed them. This repetition helped to
establish the events as a social wound inviting collective identification. These
recordings, nevertheless, continue to have an afterlife on YouTube, revealing a
range of responses to the unfolding events that includes not only distress but
also conspiracy theorizing and even amusement.
Mitchell describes 9/11 as an attack on the collective nervous system,
producing a state of panic, anxiety, or depression, or even worse, in a psy-
chotic state, generating hallucinations and paranoid fantasies (2011: 52). Here
Mitchell ascribes a collective psychological state to the American people. But it
would be more accurate to see what he calls a war of images as conforming to

a logic that is a long established feature of technologically mediated societies.

The ISIS decapitation videos are a clear example of this logic: they present an
image of otherness or barbarism, a kind of absolute threat to Western civilized
values. Yet in their presentation styles, their use of digital cameras and editing,
their production of high definition images and musical soundtracks etc., they
participate in a visual language that is also used in advertising, music videos
and numerous other audio-visual genres. They do not necessarily pose a trau-
matic intrusion into the collective nervous system or a penetration of collective
psychological defences. Rather they participate in a cultural system of image
consumption attracted and repelled by shock and voyeuristic fascination. ISIS
decapitation videos use ritual slaughter to make a symbolic challenge to West-
ern hegemony. The correct response to these videos in the West is outrage and
disgust. But these executions of hostages are performed in the name of many
innocent victims of Western military interventions in the Middle East. The
videos act out the traditional sovereign power of God and state and in doing so
invite others to dedicate their lives to a political struggle. These images, deemed
traumatic for Western viewers, can also be understood as symbolic wounds
inviting positive identification for those who support physical violence as a
challenge to Western interests and interventions in the Middle East.
Images of violence and catastrophe are consumed, self-censored and ne-
gotiated as a regular occurrence for the contemporary media user. For most
media users psychological defences are relatively secure unless the violence or
catastrophe poses some immediate threat to their lives or loved ones. Discourses
about the psychological vulnerability of large populations can be seen as part
of the apparatus of surveillance (Meek, 2016: 145) but they also invite viewers
to self-examine and regulate their consumption of stress-inducing images. In
a neoliberal society where individuals are required to manage higher levels of
risk and therefore also higher levels of fear and anxiety, the media user learns to
monitor his/her own resilience, coping mechanisms and levels of distress. The
assumption of research on media traumatization appears to be that it measures
psychological damage and social cost. But shock and trauma can also be a gain,
marking a transition into a new identity and increasing the power of the body
and the group to sustain itself despite experiencing physical or psychological
distress.

This potential for traumatic images to function as symbolic wounds mobi-

lizing political action became clear in the Arab Spring. In June 2009 Ned gh
Soltn was shot during election protests in Iran and her subsequent death, two
minutes later, was recorded and posted on the Internet. She became an icon
of the political struggle in Iran. In 2010 Khaled Said was beaten to death by
police in Egypt. The image of his battered face was recorded on a mobile-phone
camera by his brother and circulated to thousands of other phones. A Facebook
group We are all Khaled Said was also established (Howard & Hussain, 2011:
38). The new digital image-producing technologies and social networks allowed
traumatic images to challenge the authority of the Arab states. The violence per-
petrated by the state against the people could be transformed by digital media
into symbolic wounds mobilizing struggles for democracy. Established media,
particularly the Al Jazeera television network, also played important roles in
these political movements. But it was mobile cameras that made it possible for
ordinary citizens to capture and circulate traumatic images in ways that eluded
the control of the state (Khondker, 2011: 678).
Distinctions between victim, perpetrator, witness and bystander remain
important for understanding the shifting subject positions of traumatic identi-
fication (Kaplan, 2005: 2), but the relations between these different positions
can be complex. To support acts of violence and their technological recording
and transmission for political purposes requires identification not only with the
perpetrators, but also with those other victims in whose name the violence is
perpetrated. Recording and transmitting images of suffering and death may be
done out of sympathy with the victims, but can also be used to justify further
acts of violence. Looking at any image of violence and suffering may be driven
by mere curiosity or voyeuristic desire. What the term symbolic wound po-
tentially contributes to our understanding of this shifting dynamic of suffering,
perpetrating and witnessing is that wounds have symbolic currency, transmit-
ting cultural meanings about social membership. The meaning of pain is not
traumatic in any single sense but is unstable and transformative. To under-
stand mediated trauma we need to move beyond the fundamental distinction
between who induces and who suffers pain. Once violence and suffering are
recorded and transmitted to viewers the images enter a new symbolic economy
that allows for various positions of identification, interpretation and responsive
action.

In America digital media have also made more visible the violence perpe-
trated by the state against African Americans. In 2016, the shooting and killing
by police of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota
were both recorded on mobile-phone cameras and posted on social media,
again leading to widespread protest and further violence. Castiles actual death
was streamed live on Facebook by his partner Diamond Reynolds. The pro-
tests against the killings of African Americans by police have become associated
with the increasing public visibility of Black Lives Matter (BLM), a civil rights
movement that began on Facebook in 2013. This use of communication tech-
nologies made visible to a potentially unlimited viewing public what many had
known about for decades. The killing of African Americans by police, whether
judged lawful or not, acts out the states power over life and death. The videos
that show this exercise of state power provoke others to challenge the legitimacy
of this violence. As a contemporary civil rights movement BLM is distinguished
from its forerunners by its dissociation from established organizations like the
church and Democratic Party and by its lack of reliance on charismatic leaders
such as Martin Luther King or Jesse Jackson. BLM is a decentralized movement
that emphasizes localized action but, as in the Arab Spring, it retains links with
corporate media. Celebrity singer Beyonc posted messages about the shootings
of Sterling and Castile on her website and Black Lives Matter appears as graf-
fiti in her Formation music video. The movement has spread to other coun-
tries, for example Australia, where it addresses similar issues for Aborigines.
5. Conclusions
The dominance of centrally controlled media such as newspapers, cinema
and television made possible the wide dissemination of narratives about col-
lective trauma that were linked to specific images such as those of the Nazi
death camps or the Vietnam War. The 9/11 attacks saw a transition to a new
multiplicity of recordings of the event made by ordinary citizens that were later
orchestrated in presentations by television news and documentary. More recent
developments such as the Arab Spring, the emergence of Black Lives Matter
as an international movement, and the propaganda videos produced by ISIS,
show that traumatic images can be captured by groups and used to mobilize
political struggles that challenge hegemonic power.

Psychological research on media traumatization involved deliberately in-

ducing stress by showing violent and taboo images to unprepared audiences.
This research was extended to entire populations after the 9/11 attacks. Psy-
choanalytic perspectives on the transmission of trauma using photographs
and audio-visual media suggest a more complex understanding of cultural
identification. Academic developments informed by psychoanalysis in trauma
and Holocaust studies, however, have often tended to reproduce the model of
trauma as external stimuli impacting on viewers. Developments in digital cul-
ture allow us to see a more proactive production and mobilizing of traumatic
images by a more diverse range of individuals and groups. The idea of symbolic
wounds as a means of self-transformation and group participation may offer a
useful corrective to the dominant idea of cultural trauma.
Individual media users and social networks share potentially shocking or
disturbing images as a means of constructing social identity. What research
in the 1960s called stressful can now be seen as enhancing knowledge, social
participation and pleasure. Modern visual media has played a significant role in
redefining political identity through images of violence and catastrophe. Digital
media technologies are enabling new modes of social and political participation
in which traumatic images define what constitutes a threat, what is permissible
to look at, what can be endured and what can mobilize collective identification
and political struggle.

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The Other Self in Free Fall:

Anxiety and Automated Tracking Applications
Christopher Gutierrez1
McGill University, Canada
doi: 10.5937/comman12-11285
Abstract: Recent scholarship on the rise of automated self-tracking has focused on

how technologies such as the Fitbit and applications such as Nike+ demand that the
user internalize the logic of contemporary surveillance. These studies emphasize the dis-
ciplinary structure of self-tracking noting that these applications rely on logics of self-
control, flexibility and quantification to produce particular neoliberal subjects. Follow-
ing these readings, this paper considers the central role that anxiety plays in motivating,
and maintaining, the subjects desire to understand the self through automated tracking
systems. I will elaborate on this anxiety in three defined sections. Firstly, I will provide a
brief overview of the relationship between anxiety and affect developed in both Freuds
and Lacans work on anxiety. Secondly, I will consider how the particular aesthetic
principles of two applications, the Nike+ running application and the Spire breath
monitoring application, afford the production of anxious digital selves by drawing on
the emerging digital aesthetic of the free-fall in order to create a simultaneous distancia-
tion and conflation of the embodied self and the digital self. Finally, I will consider how
self-tracking applications represent a particular affective loop, fuelled by the subjects
insatiable jouissance, which drives a never-ending anxious attempt to reunite the subject
and object. Ultimately, it is from within these practices of digital self-construction that
we can most clearly identify both an everyday anxiety of the self and emergent subjectiv-
ity and aesthetic of the present.
Keywords: anxiety, affect theory, automation, self-tracking, quantified self, aesthetics
1

Anxiety and Automated Tracking Applications Christopher Gutierrez
Thats not it is the very cry by which the

jouissance obtained is distinguished from the
jouissance expected (Lacan, 1998: 111).
1. Introduction
The beginning of the Quantified Self movement is commonly attributed to
the publication of a widely circulated 2010 editorial by Gary Wolf in The New
York Times Magazine. In this article, The Data-Driven Life, Wolf sets out
the general idea for a new form of living guided by the numeric possibilities of
emerging tracking applications. These applications, he explains, allow for an in-
creasing quantification of our personal lives as, Sleep, exercise, sex, food, mood,
location, alertness, productivity, even spiritual well-being are being tracked and
measured, shared and displayed (Wolf, 2010). While Wolf was writing prior
to the arrival of many of the most popular tracking applications available today,
basic tools such as the FitBit, Nike+ and Garmin Running Trackers, and even
rudimentary digital pedometers, would all be clear examples of the many tech-
nologies of the quantified self. From within this ever-increasing field of tracking
applications and personal data, Wolf argues that the Quantified Self movement
offers an opening for self-understanding: it transforms the banal everyday into
a matrix of information and infographics, and it presents the subject with the
visual means to apprehend the self. This chain from data collection to visual
representation is what ultimately connects many diverse applications within
the category of the Quantified Self. As Whitson explains, The unifying meth-
odology of QS [the Quantified Self ] is data collection, followed by visualization
of these data and cross referencing, in order to discover correlations and modify
behavior (Whitson, 2014: 346).
There is then a particular gap that is always-already proposed in the Quanti-
fied Self movement wherein the subject necessarily separates, and aestheticizes,
an image of the self as an object. This gap is clearly articulated as a type of in-
scription a movement where the self is written and reproduced as the object
of inquiry. The practice of writing the self is not a particularly new one; rather,
as Foucault explained, it can be seen in the journaling practices of first and
second century Rome (Foucault, 1997: 207). From within these practices it be-
comes apparent that inscription functions in both the role of the Other for the

Christopher Gutierrez Anxiety and Automated Tracking Applications
singular subject and as a mode of entry into the depths of the self, as Foucault
makes clear how writing reveals the practice of ascesis as work not just on ac-
tions but, more precisely, on thought: the constraint that the presence of others
exerts in the domain of conduct, writing will exert in the domain of the inner
impulses of the soul (Foucault, 1997: 208). The space developed through in-
scription whether it be created through the self-reflective practice of journal-
ing or through the automated writing of the tracking app reveals an attempt
to distance the self from the self, to transform the subject into an object, and to
discipline, and aestheticize, our own selves.
Importantly though, the difference between the journal and the tracking
app is a profound one: the application is itself automated and self-producing.
Where the journal involves a necessary step back, an ongoing negotiation be-
tween the subject and its imagined ideal self that might be best understood
as the therapeutic construct of the subject as object, the tracking application
does this work of distanciation and evaluation for the subject. In this way, the
emergence of the quantified self involves new forms of subject production, new
affective regimes of experience and new aesthetics to match our altering sense
of ourselves. How, we might ask, does automation rewrite our experiences
of therapy? How does affect circulate through automated asocial, and social,
networks?2 How does it blur the lines between the subject and object? Between
the self and other? How does the image of the self emerge when this image is
tagged, tracked, circulated and reproduced on different screens? If, as Lacan has
made clear in his work on the Mirror Stage, we find the image of our ideal self
in the ambient experience of the world and the knowing gazes of the Other,
how might these mechanisms be transformed by their digital and automated
reconstruction?
It is from within these questions that this paper finds its genesis. Put simply,
I argue that what is revealed in the attempts to aestheticize the self through
tracking applications is a novel anxious subjectivity of the digital era. If, as
Lacan has argued in the recent English translation of his seminar on Anxiety,
There is no auto-analysis, even when one imagines there is. The Other is there
(Lacan, 2014: 22), then much of the power of self-tracking lies in its ability to
blur the lines between subject and object, to allow the subject a sense of mastery
of the self, and to create the illusion of auto-analysis. Inscription, as the mode
2
For a discussion on the relationship between automaticy and affect theory, see Blackwell, 2014

through which this sense of division is created, provides a conduit for the pro-
duction of anxious objects and, rather than quelling the subjects uncertainty,
it is in this perceived mastery of the self that anxiety develops further. In this
way, the automated tracking application constructs a type of secondary self, a
projected digital self that is both the object of anxiety and the object-cause of
desire one and the same in Lacans reading of anxiety (Lacan, 2014: 40).
2. Anxietys Objects, or, Anxiety as Affect

In order to make sense of the particular contemporary moment, to try and
tease out the illusory therapeutic logic of the self-tracking application that is
couched in this larger history of writing, separating and mastering the self, it is
worthwhile returning to another historic construct that blurs the lines between
the self and its other, namely, psychoanalysis intertwined relationship with anx-
iety and affect. This relationship begins close to where it will end in this paper,
with a declarative uncertainty that, as revealed in Sigmund Freuds The Prob-
lem of Anxiety, explains that, Anxiety, then, is in the first place something
felt. We call it an affective state although we are equally ignorant of what an
affect is (Freud, 1936: 69). For Freud then, anxiety is necessarily affective, but
the true meaning of this feeling, and of affects in general, remains almost pur-
posefully unclear. Likewise, Lacans 1962 seminar on anxiety offers little in the
way of a taxonomy or rigid definition of affect and instead presents us with only
an explanation of what affect is not: It is not Being given in its immediacy, nor
is it the subject in raw form either. It is in no respect protopathic. My occasional
remarks on affect amount to nothing but that (Lacan, 2014: 14). For Lacan,
affect is felt but not experienced by the senses, it is necessarily unknown, and it
is not tied clearly to the subject proper. This negative definition is paralleled in
his reading of contemporaneous research on affect that he catalogues as being
based either on analogy or categorization (Lacan, 2014: 1920). Categorization
lumps together varying affects within specific categories whereas analogical re-
search compares the function of affect across different levels of biology, sociality
or psychology. Both, he argues, fail to grasp the nature of affect.
Rather than categorizing or comparing, affect is best understood for Lacan
as the function of the key in which The key is the thing that unlocks and, in
unlocking, functions. (2014: 21). In his habitually paradoxical language here,
Lacans argument is quite simply that affect reinforces itself by being generative;

affect is both a cause and effect, it circulates and regenerates through its circula-
tion. As such, Lacan understands affect as less specific, and more atmospheric,
than categorical or analogical research would allow. Affect is something both
within and without the subject; it is, he argues, unfastened, it drifts about.
It can be found displaced, maddened, inverted, or metabolized, but it isnt
repressed (2014: 14). Here Lacan is in agreement with much contemporary
work; affect is found in the social, it affects us, it pushes us, it moves bodies
and compels motion.3 Where he veers off course from much of the current
thought on affect, and where the anxiety of affect theory (or anxiety in gener-
ally) actually emerges is in affects relationship with language. As he explains, if
affect is unfastened and never repressed, What are repressed are the signifiers
that moor it (2014: 14). Following Lacans work on the relationship between
language and desire, we see here the emergence of a logic that will run through
the remainder of his seminar on anxiety: if affects are unfastened, drifting and
atmospheric, and the signifiers that we use to describe them are repressed, and
if anxiety is an affect, then we cannot understand anxiety in the words we use
to describe it. Rather, we must look to anxietys objects for a sense of direction.
In his own search for anxietys peculiar object, Freuds final influential theo-
ry of anxiety, from Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926), makes explicit the
connection between anxiety and affect.4 As an affect, Freud identifies anxiety
as a signal and as a response from the ego to danger that produces particular
symptoms and inhibitions. Importantly, the danger-situation to which anxiety
responds is largely based on early childhood traumas, and for Freud, the help-
lessness of birth acts as a prototype for anxiety.5 The helplessness of being born,
of being torn away from the mother and thrown into the air, initiates an undy-
ing desire for love in the subject. As Freud explains, The biological factor of
helplessness thus brings into being the first situations of danger and creates the
need to be loved which the human being is destined never to renounce (1926:
3
In Intensities of Feeling: Towards a Spatial Politics of Affect Thrift outlines four major schools of affect theory
phenomenological/embodied, psychoanalytic, Spinozian/Deleuzian, and Darwinian all united by the fact that
each of them, depends on a sense of push in the world. (Thrift, 2004: 64).
4
Freud offered two distinct theories of anxiety throughout his work. The first, from 1895, largely identifies anxiety
with an accumulation of energy generated from failed sexual experience. The second, from 1921, posits that anxiety
is a particular signal for the imminent arrival of a dangerous situation.
5
Freud is both rejecting, and building atop of, Otto Ranks theory that anxiety is based fundamentally on birth.
While Freud is sympathetic to this idea, he sees birth not as the initial anxious situation, but rather as prototypical
affective state that changes over the life course. See Freud, 1926: 152 for a clear explanation.

99). This desire for love that is initiated alongside a prototype for the anxious
moment is ultimately opened up by, not so much the unknown of the world,
but the absent. Corporeal, biological and psychic helplessness, all experienced
at birth and repeated again and again throughout life, work in tandem with
the absent object of desire to meld phobia/desire/anxiety into an inextricable
knot. Freud isolates three particular early childhood phobias, being left alone,
being in the dark, and finding a strange person in place of the one in whom the
child has confidence (the mother) (1926: 75), as being key to anxiety, as they
replicate this particular feeling of helplessness in tandem with a moment of loss.
That is, each of these moments reveals the helplessness that is felt in the loss of
the object of desire.6 Anxiety then is not just without an object, it is located in
the very helplessness of this without-ness, in the very possibility of loss itself.
Anxiety in this reading ultimately produces repression it pushes back as
a type of defence to the danger-situation of loss and represses these original
traumas. Thus it works as a signal that invites investigation to locate the root
cause of its origins. Lacans reading of anxiety follows Freuds affective base
but eschews Freuds desire to unearth, through language, a solution to anxiety.
Rather, Lacan looks towards anxietys particular inexpressible qualities to fur-
ther understand the equally inexpressible cause of desire. Here Lacan reverses
one of Freuds original ideas. Where Freud defines anxiety in opposition to fear,
as it has a quality of indefiniteness and lack of object (Freud, 1895: 100),
Lacan declares that anxiety is not without an object (Lacan, 2014: 89). This
seemingly simple reversal makes use of a litote, a negation aimed to produce its
inverse, to amplify the importance of anxietys object into something more than
a simple object. As Lacan explains:
This relation of being not without having doesnt mean that one knows
which object is involved. When I say, Hes not without resources, Hes not
without cunning, it means, at least for me, that his resources are obscure, his
cunning isnt run of the mill. (2014: 89)
6
The link between birth, helplessness and desire for the mother is, of course, well established within Freuds psychic
universe. The biological role played by the mother in maintaining sustenance is repeated in Freuds psychic economy
as a link between anxiety, helplessness and desire that is obviously reminiscent of Irigarays reading of Heideggers ab-
sent women and air. As Freud writes, The striking coincidence that both birth anxiety and the anxiety of the infant
alike claim separation from the mother as their prerequisite needs no psychological interpretation; it is simply that
the mother, who in the beginning had satisfied all the needs of the foetus through her body mechanisms, continues
after birth as well to exercise in some measure this same function, although by other means (Freud, 1926: 77).

To be not without an object reveals the object as something opaque and

obscure; the object is there, but unknown and perhaps unknowable. The re-
lationship between anxiety, affect and language is made more clear here as it
begins to line up with what Lacan calls the objet petit a the object-cause of
desire. Put simply, for Lacan the object of anxiety and the object of desire are
one and the same.
Throughout his seminar on anxiety, Lacan makes clear that the objet petit
a is a type of trace, a remainder, from the subjects encounters between the im-
aginary and symbolic realms (Lacan, 2014: 6264). Just as the objet petit a is
inscribed in the image of the whole self first encountered in the mirror stage
an image that Lacan poignantly reminds us is always confirmed by the Other in
the infants quick sideways glance over its shoulder its transition to the object
of anxiety relies on this central location within the self. It is in this movement
that the subject looks to the Other for confirmation that we can see the logic
and structure of desire and anxiety where, as Lacan explains, with this nu-
tating movement of the head, which turns towards the adult as if to call upon
his assent, and then back to the image, he seems to be asking the one support-
ing him, who here represents the big Other, to ratify the value of this image
(Lacan, 2014: 32). Ratifying the value of this image seeing the whole self and
then looking over at the Other to confirm this wholeness instigates the cycle
of desire and anxiety where the objet petit a, this remainder from the imaginary
whole self that we can never realize, is displaced and thought to be found in
the Other. Desire is transposed onto the Other, when ultimately the objet petit
a is in fact the subject. In this way, we are our own objects of desire, our own
objects of anxiety, but we look towards the Other for satisfaction.7
This chain is an endless one. The object of desire is the impossibly whole
self, forever lost when the imaginary realm is drawn into the symbolic and at-
tached to the field of the Other. Anxiety enters into this chain as a different
object, one that works:
By the model of the cut, of the furrow, of the unary train, of the there it is,
which in operating always remain tight-lipped the tight lip or lips of the
cut which become a closed book on the subject, unopened letters sending
him off again under closed seal to further traces. (Lacan, 2014: 76).
7
Lacan makes this relationship clear in the final lecture of this seminar, explaining that, The sole path on which de-
sire can furnish us with that wherein we shall have to recognize our selves as object a in so far as, at the end-point,
an end-point that is doubtless never reached, it is our most radical existence only opens up by situating the a as
such in the field of the Other (Lacan, 2014: 337).

It is, in this sense, an object that emerges where there should be none. The
uncertainty of the object is understood as a type of furrow of still closed lips; it
is, as Renata Salecl has made clear, not the lack, but rather the absence of lack,
i.e. the fact that where there is supposed to be lack, some object is present (Sa-
lecl, 2004: 14). The object is an opening in the liminal points of contact with
the Other, where we encounter the furrowed lips of the Other and, expecting to
see a lack that mirrors our own, we instead encounter a crack in the realm of the
symbolic; we encounter something. Anxietys object becomes overwhelming in
these moments precisely because it is a type of potentiality within the world of
language where, Signifiers turn the world into a network of traces in which the
transition from one cycle to another is thenceforth possible (Lacan, 2014: 76).
It is in this position of transition, as the furrow before the opening, as the
cleave in the lips that opens to further language, that anxietys affective role is
made clear. As Lacan further argues, anxiety is a type of presentiment, a before
that opens up to a coming experience:
Anxiety is this cut this clean cut without which the presence of the
signifier, its functioning, its furrow in the real, is unthinkable its the
cut that opens up, affording a view of what now you can hear better, the
unexpected, the visit, the piece of news, that which is so well expressed in
the term presentiment, which isnt simply to be heard as the premonition of
something, but also as the pre-feeling, the pre-sentiment, that which stands
prior to the first appearance of a feeling. (2014: 76)
The formula at work here that anxiety is a type of presentiment, a pre-
feeling felt before a feeling is known or describable is clearly drawn from its
status as an affect. As an affect, this sense lines up with much contemporary
work where, for example, affect is what makes feelings feel. It is what deter-
mines the intensity (quantity) of a feeling (quality) (Shouse, 2005) and it is
here that anxietys radical relationship to affect should be rethought as, what is
revealed in the anxious moment is affects force as a type of predisposition, and
further, affects force as that which structures our approach to an object.
In particular, to return to Lacans equation of the object of anxiety with the
object of desire, it is necessary to remind ourselves that the petit object a is,
to be conceived of as the cause of desirethe object [that] lies behind desire
(2014: 101). As the object of desire and the object of anxiety are one and the
same in Lacans reading, what is revealed here is that both anxiety and desire
are affects that emerge from within the space of the subject, and further, that
both anxiety and desire are affects that propel us forward into the world. We
are pushed forward in pursuit of our desires and we experience anxiety precisely
at the moment where we encounter the objects of this desire.8 The result is an
affective loop, a continuous circle, an unending pursuit of jouissance and of das
Ding.9 This pursuit is one that necessarily goes unfulfilled, as Adrian Johnstone
has made clear:
The jouissance expected is an illusory, mythicized full satisfaction,
namely, the re-finding of das Ding, the decisive final quelling of the inces-
sant clamoring of the drives. However, what the subject always gets (i.e. the
jouissance obtained) is, at best, a pleasure that falls short of the idealized
standard. (Johnston, 2002)
In place of fulfillment, the pursuit of jouissance will always fail to satisfy
us. As we approach the petit objet a, as we are propelled forward to what we
imagine as our ideal selves revealed through the other, we are struck by anxiety.
What, we might wonder, would it mean to encounter ourselves? What would it
mean to finish the project of the self? In this possibility of lack fulfilled, in the
possibility of a lack of lack, we encounter anxietys object. Like das ding itself,
the centrality of anxietys object is also its very exclusion.10 In this way, anxiety
is best understood as an affect, as that which guides and directs our approach
to our selves and our objects of desire. Just as the satisfaction of jouissance is
endlessly deferred for another object, anxiety endlessly defers its own object.
Anxiety functions as both an opening and impediment then it emerges along-
side desire to move the subject forward, but it equally emerges as this desire is
necessarily impeded and unfulfilled. As we approach ourselves in writing and in
language, as we begin to track ourselves and automate our writing, we consist-
ently fail to grasp that whole self and are left anxious and incomplete.
8
A brief note to thank the anonymous reviewer who made this important distinction clear. In as much as the object of
desire and the object of anxiety are equated in Lacans seminar on Anxiety, it is necessary to make explicit the role of
jouissance in this relationship as it helps to understand the habitual drive of anxiety and, for my own work, it helps
to understand the ongoing repetitions of digital technologies.
9
Lacan introduces his reading of das Ding as a particularly affective object in Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis
where he notes that this object is one that functions beyond the signified and is, characterized by primary affect
prior to any repression (Lacan, 1992: 54). That is, like anxietys affective relationship, das Ding is necessarily outside
of, or before, language. It is an affect prior to significations repression.
10
This paradoxical situation is made clear by Lacan when he notes of his own diagrams of das Ding, Simply by writ-
ing it on the board and putting das Ding at the center, with the subjective world of the unconscious organized in a
series of signifying relations around it, you can see the difficulty of topographical representation. The reason is that
das Ding is at the center only in the sense that it is excluded (Lacan, 1992: 71).

3. In Free Fall: Self-Tracking and Anxious Aesthetics
3.1. Case 1: The Nike+ Running App

Opening up the Nike+ Running App reveals a specific sociality to self-
tracking, an Other that is always projected onto the screen alongside the self.
The launch screen is a top-down image of a pack of runners moving forward
(See Image 1), the home screen gives a cumulative total of your statistics (num-
ber of runs, total miles run, Nike fuel consumed) and a list of the recent totals
of any other contacts who use the app (See Image 2), and the menu screen fol-
Image 1: Opening Screen Image 2: Comparison

of Nike+ with Other Users

lowing any run offers a number of ways to

share your statistics on social media.11 This
sociality is both central to, and masked by,
the apps tracking functions: by using both
the GPS monitors and the accelerometers
and gyroscopes built into contemporary
smart phones, the app is able to keep a con-
stant record of your movement; it is able to
constantly and automatically write your self
and to track that self against an Other.
From within the application, a couple
of small taps will draw on this self-writing
to give further visual details regarding the
specifics of each run. Going over my own
recent history, I click on a run from May
13th, 2016 and I get to see a map of my
route, a reminder of the too-many-miles
run in the same old pair of shoes, and a
smiley in this case not quite smiling or
frowning that announces how I felt that Image 3: Map of Recent Run
day. (See Image 3). Like the launch screen
that opens the app with an image of a pack
of runners taken from above, in these visual representations of physical activity
the experience is transformed from something corporeal to something top-
down and cartographic: the feeling of the street is replaced by the knowledge
of the map. In this way, the Nike+ Running app splits the user into two parts:
subject and object, user and data, self and other.
In so doing, the app draws on an emergent aesthetic of urbanism and digital
space. This aesthetic is not the one defined by De Certeaus (1984) traditional
binary of the street and the birds eye view, but rather it pulls on the surveil-
lance view from nowhere and everywhere, from satellite images and Google
maps, and from the amorphous network of images consumed everyday on
11
Within the larger logic of cross-platform synergy, Nike has developed a proprietary energy measuring unit - Nike-
Fuel - to replace calories across its many different applications. Nike fuel works then as a universal way to measure
all kinds of activity - from your morning workout to your big night out (What is Nike Fuel?, 2016) that functions
and syncs across multiple applications.

smart phones and tablet screens.12 This new view and emerging aesthetic is most
clearly defined in Hito Steyerls article In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on
Vertical Perspective wherein she follows the rise of new satellite and tracking
imagery against the withering horizon of linear perspective to note that, for
many people today the simulated grounds of aerial imagery provide an illusion-
ary tool of orientation in a condition in which horizons have, in fact, been shat-
tered (Steyerl, 2011). A sense of control and stability is given over to the user
in these cartographic moments as they come to mask the fact that, Time is out
of joint and we no longer know whether we are objects or subjects as we spiral
down in an imperceptive free fall (Steyerl, 2011). This logic is clear in the mo-
ment when any given run is open on the Nike+ app. The cartographic image
begins with a quick animation, a slow rotation and zoom in on the space of the
map that mirrors the more familiar animation used by Google maps when a
user shifts from street view back to a top down map.
In this way, Nike+ capitalizes on both the free-fall of our contemporary mo-
ment and the sense of control given over to surveillant and top-down imaging.
On the one hand, the app invites the user to move away from the embodied
sensation of running by replicating the slide from the street to the satellite, a
slide that has become a familiar sensation in the contemporary moment and
thus draws on its users knowledge and comfort with their own digital selves.
On the other hand, the application always necessarily conflates the subject-
on-the-screen with the subject-in-the-flesh through a combination of what
Alexander Galloway has referred to as the diegetic and non-diegetic aspects of
video game action where the diegetic action advances the first-person narrative
of the game and the non-diegetic, off the screen action, of the user establishes
the conditions of game play (Galloway, 2006: 68). Together then, it is in the
embodied action of the runner that the narrative of Nike+ unfolds as each
physical step taken and mile run allows the application to accumulate numeric
values and, simultaneously, with each topographic representation of a previous
step the application posits both a stable ground and a stable self over which the
user has both distance and mastery.
Thus, the Nike+ application blurs the line between the user and their image,
between the self and its object, through a repeated conflation of the physicality
of the subject and object alongside a repeated distanciation of these two forms.
This repetition of conflation and distanciation of subject and object, of self and
12
For De Certeaus different views of the city, see De Certeau, 1984: 9395.

self-image, is itself mirrored in the affectivity of anxiety in psychoanalysis. Where

Freud sees anxietys affective power located in the potential loss of an object, in
the space of without-ness, we can see this anxiety within the separation of the self
and its screen-based object. And where Lacan sees anxiety in the very presence of
the anxious object, in the space filled by the Other where there should be none,
we can see the anxiety produced through the repeated conflation of our digital-
self with our embodied self. That is, in the very moment where the application
proposes the equivalency of the data produced on the screen and the embodied
self, we encounter ourselves on the screen and we encounter the Other, in the
form of automated writing that confirms our digital selves, in the data we have
produced. The screen becomes a liminal space in this reading - it is the place of
contact between two parallel selves and, in the vocabulary of the Mirror Stage,
it is both the mirror and the glance over the shoulder. Anxiety emerges precisely
in this moment where we expect to find a gap, a lack that is common to the self
and the Other, but instead we encounter a confirmation of the relationship be-
tween the diegetic and the non-diegetic; we encounter an object, a complete self
confirmed in data, where there should be none.
3.2. Case 2: The Spire Breath
Equally though, we see this anxiety producing distanciation and conflation
of the self repeated in the aesthetic constructions of a multitude of other self-
tracking applications. The Spire breath tracking application provides perhaps
the clearest example of this automated anxiety as it uses a separate monitor to
track the non-diegetic breaths of the subject-in-the-flesh for any symptoms of
emotional discord in order to advance the diegetic imagery of the subject-on-
the-screen. Spire, an application that aims to help its users breathe better in or-
der to unlock the ability to control our emotions, fears, and keep a clear mind
(Spire, 2016) works by having the user wear a small monitor that keeps real
time statistics of their breathing rates and a log of all of their previous breathing
habits (See Image 4). Under Spires guise, even habitual breathing can become
a habit to work on and, when a user begins to speed up their breathing, the ap-
plication alerts them to their developing corporeal stress and invites a conscious
intervention.13 In this way, Spire functions as a type of pre-sentiment; as a warn-
ing symbol of upcoming anxiety.
13
Habit plays an important role here as the repetition sought by the user of self-tracking applications is, of course,
essential to the collection of data for the producers of these applications. For more on the relationship between habit
and data, see Chun (2016: 372).

In this space, anxiety takes on a spe-

cific form of futurity that mirrors Freuds
reading of a central symptom of anxiety,
anxious expectation, which he describes
in a series of gendered examples:
A woman, for instance, who suffers

from anxious expectation will think of
influenzal pneumonia every time her
husband coughs when he has a cold,
and, in her minds eye, will see his fu-
neral go past; if, when she is coming
towards the house, she sees two people
standing by her front door, she cannot
avoid thinking that one of her children
has fallen out of the window; when she
hears the bell ring, it is someone bring-
ing news of a death, and so on while
on all these occasions there has been
Image 4: Spire Breathing Log no particular ground for exaggerating a
mere possibility. (Freud, 1926: 92)
Just as Freuds expectant subject invites anxiety through a specific orien-

tation through a mode of apprehending the world that always opens to a
catastrophic future the Spire breathing app positions anxiety as an expectant
state. That is, it posits the body as an alarm for arising anxiety that the subject
can ultimately control. Spires claim to therapeutic power comes from a deeply
cognitive understanding of the ability of the mind to control the body then, as
their promotional website explains, Respiration is the only autonomic func-
tion you have control over (Spire, 2016), and it thus aims to transform anxi-
ety into actionable data for the subject. As anxiety emerges as data the subject is
invited to address its habitual nature, to track out the patterns, similarities and
geographies of their anxiety and to seize control of these habits.
Curiously though, this cognitivist approach ultimately returns to the affec-
tive nature of anxiety. As Freud again makes clear, the slide between objects in
the moment of anxious expectation, the movement from a cough to influenza

and from a doorbell to death, is a transformative one that reveals the atmospher-
ic nature of anxiety; it is, he writes, as if a quantum of anxiety in a freely floating
space is present, which, where there is expectation, controls the choice of ideas
and is always ready to link itself with any suitable ideational content (Freud,
1926: 92). From within this quantum of free-floating anxiety we see that the af-
fective and predictive power of anxiety comes from its role as a pre-sentiment: it
emerges prior to its objects, it is an orientation and an approach to the world.
Following this, as research into the slide between anxiety and anxiety disorders
has routinely shown, there is a clear form of embodiment where the anxious
subject is overly aware of their own anxiety and Spire, in its constant system
of monitoring and alerting, externalizes and visualizes this anxious orientation
as a data set.14 Thus, in the logic of the Spire breathing application, the experi-
ence of anxiety is predictive as both a data set it is trackable, monitorable and
understood as preventable and as an affect it is a looping pre-sentiment that
reproduces anxious expectations and anxious orientations.
In order to assure its users that Spire can ultimately interrupt the recurrent
anxieties that the application is itself visualizing, Spire relies on a topographic
record for the user it pinpoints the location of an anxious moment and repre-
sents that back to the user as a GPS located dot on the map (See Image 5) to
provide a sense of distanciation and objectification from the self. Just as Nike+
relies on blurring the lines between subject and object through both a confla-
tion and distanciation of the two, Spire equally transposes the automaticity of
affect and anxiety into the control of cartography. This slide, from the run to
the satellite and from the breath to the map, operates like the function of the key
in Lacans reading of anxiety in that it is both in line with the emergent digital
aesthetic of self-tracking and is constantly creating and enacting the very mode
of aestheticization that has developed in response to these same technologies.
In this way, Spires ability to track the autonomic functions of the body and
to transform these functions into a data set that offers the promise of control
reveals the anxiety of a broader contemporary moment it reveals how the ha-
bituated and repetitive conflation of the digital and embodied self, the unend-
ing movement between subject and object, opens up to a new digital aesthetic
marked by a sense of in-betweenness and an ongoing free-fall.
14
As Clark and Beck have made clear, Individuals prone to panic are oriented toward selectively attending to internal
somatic or mental processesThe orienting mode in panic disorder is primed towards rapid detection of interocep-
tive cues that could represent an immediate and imminent danger to survival (Clark & Beck, 2010: 289).

The decision to offer satellite visions

of anxious moments and miles run of-
fered by both Spire and Nike+ works
specifically within this digital aesthetic
as it attempts to transform the perpetual
sense of movement and free-fall into the
uncertain possibility of stability. That is,
these applications draw on our grow-
ing familiarity and comfort with seeing
the world from above to replicate our
belief in the stability of the ground and
to confirm the stability of the self in the
world. Again, as Steyerl has argued, this
view functions through the supposition
of stability while, in fact, it moves sub-
jectivity away from the ground and into
the liminal space of the screen:
many of the aerial views, 3D nose-

Image 5: Spire GPS Map dives, Google Maps, and surveillance
panoramas do not actually portray a sta-
ble ground. Instead, they create a sup-
position that it exists in the first place. Retroactively, this virtual ground creates
a perspective of overview and surveillance for a distanced, superior, spectator
safely floating up in the airThis establishes a new visual normality a new
subjectivity folded into surveillance technology and screen-based distraction.
(Steyerl, 2011)
The stable ground of Google Maps and surveillance panoramas is less illu-
sion than it is uncertainty here; it is not false, but it is not consistent either. In
Steyerls reading, this emergent digital aesthetic of the free-fall is built on an
ever-present anxiety and an ever-present supposition of stability.15
15
Steyerl presents this particular aesthetic against a longer historical backdrop based around the shift from linear per-
spective to the perspective of the free-fall. In this way, she is able to present the contemporary moment as one that

In the discursive and aesthetic construction of self-tracking applications

this same logic underlies the users supposition of the self. That is, just as sur-
veillance and mapping applications rely on the uncertain possibility of stable
ground, the drive behind the self-tracking application relies on the uncertain
possibility of a stable self. As Morozov makes clear:
Members of the Quantified Self movement may not always state this ex-
plicitly, but one hidden hope behind self-tracking is that numbers might
eventually reveal some deeper inner truth about who we really are, what we
really want, and where we really ought to be. The movements fundamental
assumption is that the numbers can reveal a core and stable self if only we
get the technology right. (Morozov, 2013: 307)
Within the logic of self-tracking, the self is revealed to be an uncertain sup-
position. There is certainly a belief in its existence, but this belief both fuels and
is fuelled by the repetitions of the self-tracking application; it is fuelled by a
belief that with the right level of precision we may ultimately capture ourselves
on the screen. The desire here is both pragmatic, a question of fitness and well-
being, and existential, a question of who we really are and what we can be. Both
Nike+ and Spire demonstrate the aesthetic connections between these novel
forms of self-construction and new mapping and surveillance technologies
because, just as the they posit a stable horizon, a ground that the subject could
theoretically run and breathe on, they equally posit the possibility of a solid
grounded self. In this way, self-tracking applications work through an aestheti-
cization of the self that is necessarily a question of both proximity and distance:
by pulling on this new digital aesthetic of the free-fall and the non-space, self-
tracking applications are able to extract an image from our most embodied ex-
periences running, sleeping, eating, breathing in order to offer a potentially
malleable, digital version of those experiences.
We are presented then with a paradoxical anxiety: the movement to con-
struct a second self within the field of an emergent digital aesthetic is fuelled
by an anxiety to create distance between the self as subject and the self as ob-
ject, yet it equally maintains an ongoing anxiety by consistently impeding this
distanciation, by consistently reminding the user that the digital self and the
is different from the past as the traditional rules and logic that govern linear perspective are revealed to be without
grounding. In this way, the present is characterized by a sense of free-fall, a groundlessness, and an uncertainty that
is both frightening and potentially liberating. See Steyerl (2011).

everyday self are somehow one and the same; they are somehow conflated. The
diegetic and non-diegetic cannot be pulled apart; the screen is the liminal space
between selves it is simultaneously mirror and Other. Further to this, as Lacan
makes clear with regard to the object of anxiety and the object of desire in
this case the anxiety emergent from the desire for the digital self on the screen
and the confirmation of that idealized screen self there is no distance between
the self and the object; movement between the two is not possible, you are a,
the object, and everyone knows that this is what is intolerable (Lacan, 2014:
103). In this way, the anxiety behind the desire to distance the subject (the run-
ner, the body) from its object (the digital profile, the satellite) is an anxiety of
impediment; it is the moment when movement is reduced to agitation, a kind
of inexpedient-tentative running in place and when affect is known by a more
specific name; it is called anxiety (Copjec, 2006: 96).
What is ultimately revealed through this arrested movement, through the
moment when running is transformed into stationary data, is the uncertain
supposition of both the self and of self-analysis that fuels the contempo-
rary moment. The images of the self produced by the tracking application, a
spectral self, a self in process and a self in translation, only accrue meaning with
their constant repetition. But this same repetition reveals the very falsity of the
whole self as, through its proliferation and automated production, the data of
self-tracking is a form of writing the self: an inscription and an attempt to exert
control on the self in order to create a narrative map towards a different future
and a different person that will necessarily never exist. Anxiety emerges in this
writing because of both the desire to move towards that future and the impedi-
ment to this movement.
4. Conclusion: There is No Auto-Analysis

In Lacans understanding of anxiety, inhibition is most clearly about the
halting of movement but impediment is a more complex form of blockage
(Lacan, 2014: 10). For Lacan, impediment draws its force not from simply
stopping the subject; rather it works as a type of ensnarement where it implies
the relationship between one dimension and something that comes to interfere
with it and which, in what interests us, impedes not the function, a term of
reference, not movement, which is rendered difficult, but truly and verily the
subject (2014: 10). Impediments power is that it exists as a threshold with-

held the subject is arrested between possibilities, between one dimension and
something else and the subject is caught within itself. Just as anxiety presents
itself as the cut, as the space between furrowed lips, and as the possibility of at-
taining the real, impediment reveals itself as a similarly liminal space.
In the case of the obsessive patient, for example, Lacan notes that impedi-
ment produces anxiety precisely at the level where the subject is uncertain about
the meaning of an act, where the object of desire is unclear and in-between dif-
ferent registers, and where, He didnt know it was that, and this is why, at the
level of the point at which he cant impede himself, he lets go, namely, the to and
fro of the signifier that posits and effaces by turns (2014: 319). As desire moves
the obsessive subject forward, he becomes anxious just as he cannot stop him-
self and he gives himself over to the infinite chain of discourse; he gives himself
over to writing, to inscription, to the construction of an imagined Other. As a
reminder that the signifier is itself a trace of the lost remainder of the whole self
that drives desire forward, the obsessives relationship to impediment and anxi-
ety reveals how automated self-tracking fuels an insatiable slide into anxiety.
As we work to separate an idealized digital self from our selves in the name of
auto-analysis that is, as we look for the cut, or the distance that would allow
us access to our true selves we are left chasing an uncertain object of desire
that is, again as Lacan has reminded us, that very self we are fleeing from.
Fantasy steps in here as our guiding principle as, in these moments of anxi-
ety, we look for a plane of consistency, a space of stability to cover our uncer-
tainty.16 In this way, the rise of automated self-tracking gestures to something
far beyond our own individual anxieties; it gestures to a collective fantasy, to an
emerging aesthetic and logic of the present that is part of the larger structure
of feeling of the present. In this way, thinking through the prevailing mood
for self-tracking can provide a way to articulate the shaping and structuring
effect of historical context on our affective attachments (Flatley, 2008: 18).
That is, the mood of self-tracking can give us a larger sense of how the struc-
ture of communicative capitalism, animated by Jodi Dean in her work Blog
Theory (2010b), best illustrates our psychic experience of the ongoing present
situation. As an envelope that holds the subject in place despite ceding them a
sense of political agency and mobility, communicative capitalism is, for Dean,
the materialization of democratic ideals in the contemporary information and
16
Renata Salecl makes clear that fantasy emerges as a way to make sense of, and assuage, our anxieties, explaining that,
Fantasy is a way for the subject to cover up the lack of by creating a scenario, a story that gives him or her consist-
ency. However, fantasy also helps prevent the emergence of anxiety (Salecl, 2004: 14).

entertainment networks necessary for globalized neoliberalism (Dean, 2010a:

21). This materialization relies explicitly on the circulation of affect to ensure
the subjects repeated participation and engagement. Building upon Lacans
theory of drives, Dean sees this present form of capitalism as one that thrives
not because of unceasing or insatiable desires but in and as the repetitive in-
tensity of drive (2010a: 30). It is through habituation, through the the repeti-
tion and ongoing participation of the subject in the capitalist sphree, that they
come to intuit their own place within this network. Even as a model of online
participation and communication, Dean most clearly gets to the heart of our
fantasy of participation and communication in everyday life by articulating the
excessive, and modulated, repetition that keeps a subject attached to modes of
being and that propels our participation in the present. As she explains:
Insofar as affect as a movement designates a doubling of an image, utter-
ance, perception, or sound into itself and something else, we can account
for the affective discharge or reflexivized communication. The additive
dimension of communication for its own sake designates an excess. This
excess isnt a new meaning or perspective. It doesnt refer to a new content.
It is rather the intensity accrued from the repetition, the excitement or
thrill of more. In the reflexive doubling of communication, the enjoyment
attached to communication for its own sake displaces intention, content,
and meaning. The something extra in repetition is enjoyment, the enjoy-
ment that captures us in drive, and the enjoyment communicative capital-
ism expropriates. (Dean, 2010a: 39)
Dean draws out the doubling of affect and its parallelism with the doubled
object of communication, the image, utterance, perception or sound, where
this mirroring is established as the communicative object is repeated, forward-
ed, passed along through the network. While she is obviously imagining a more
literal doubling of the object in online communication the forwarded image
of, say, a cute cat is doubled not just as affect in the subject and as information
on the screen, but also as information received and transmitted out the exces-
sive that ensnares the subject in the loops and ebbs, and anxieties and pleasures,
of online forwarding is not unique to one structure of communication. That
is, this excessive doubling is mirrored in the self-tracking applications doubling
of the self: at once subject and object, satellite and body, experience and data.
And the fantasy of self-tracking is that it can both end, and maintain, this
doubling. Self-tracking in this mode of anxiety is an affective tool for judgment
and a mode of evaluating the self; it is a distancing aestheticized in the quanti-

fied numbers and satellite views of a self. In this distancing, self-tracking pre-
sents itself as an automated fantasy Other, where, just as the infant enthralled
by their image in the mirror looks over their shoulder to confirm this image
with the Other, automated tracking is a form of affective looping where this
writing works by summoning up a companion in the imagination in order
to feel the pressure of the others gaze (Dean, 2010b: 50). The affective force
here, between the self as writer and the imagined and inscribed self as object, is
transformed into an automated relationship that only furthers an appearance of
objectification and, thus, operates as the anxious push that moves the self away
from the subject in order to gain the critical distance necessary to pass judgment.
To this end, the act of self-tracking mirrors the act of faltering online communi-
cation and, in writing the self through automation it opens up to jouissance and
to a specific hope for erasure of the self. There is, as Eugenie Brinkema makes
clear, a masochism at work in the reflexive pronoun, in the myself of ourselves:
A special form of masochism hinges on the problem of a reflexive pronoun
in the movement from I like to be hurt to I like to hurt myself, lost is the
logic of intersubjective desire (the implied by you of masochism proper),
and gained is the signifier that represents me to the statement (my own
myself ). In this movement, a supplement appears: the doubled I/myself
found only in the second instance. Agent of desire in iteration one becomes
agent of desiring annihilation in iteration two, but, significantly, what is
effected in the second sentence is a split the gashing cut of the diagonal
slash that forever holds apart I/myself. (Brinkema, 2009: 131)
This masochism, as a type of desire to annihilate the self, is the masochism
of self-help books and of therapeutic discourses; it is the masochism of living
in and through the neoliberal present.17 This is very much the initial desire,
the first affective push that produces our need to self-track. But when this
desire becomes automated when the writing writes itself, when the journal
becomes a sensor, and when the Other is replaced by the split my/self desire
is transformed into jouissance. There is no end to the chain of desire that could
be quelled by reaching an ideal imagined object and we are all transformed into
obsessives. Unable to stop ourselves from this automated writing, the desire to
17
This form of masochism is perhaps best understood as part of larger projects to create narratives of self-reliance
that have become a means for living through, and coping with, our contemporary neoliberal moment. For a clear
description of the rise of these narratives of the self, see da Silva (2014).

control the self is transformed into a habitual loop of jouissance; we no longer

know what object it is we are pursuing, and we are left pursuing our own desire,
we are left doubled.
Repetition becomes essential to our means of self-tracking precisely be-
cause, as Dean argues, The blockage or stuckness of anxiety, then, is at the
same time the repetitive, circular movement of drive (2010b: 118). Like the
obsessive whose own impediment transforms anxiety into the infinite chain of
writing and language, or our own desire to self track that cannot impede this
same slide, Dean reveals Lacans larger claim that anxiety is at the centre of the
movement between jouissance and desire.18 That is, the desire that sets us forth
in our attempts at self-tracking a desire to know our true selves, a desire to
become our idealized and perfect whole selves is very quickly transformed
into the jouissance that drives us towards our unreachable objects of desire, our
objet petit a. Where we imagine we are in control of this digital self, automated
tracking reveals it to be an insatiable loop, a never-to-be-completed mode of
inscribing the self that necessarily inserts us back into the infinite chain of the
signifier. Without an end in sight, our pleasure is infinitely impeded and we are
left chasing ourselves in perpetuity.
This, then, drops us right back into the free-fall. As Steyerl has made clear,
in the moment of falling, you will probably feel as if you are floating or not
even moving at all (Steyerl, 2011). The impediment of anxiety, the stuckness of
our uncertainty blocks the hopeful move towards an idealized self and we, the
subject-on-the-screen and the subject-in-the-flesh, end up ensnared together,
caught in a type of free-fall. When we are faced with both an uncertain ground-
ing and uncertain self, when the aesthetic of self-tracking and the anxiety of
auto-analysis meet headlong, the sensation of falling becomes equally uncertain
because Falling is relational if theres nothing to fall towards, you may not
even be aware that youre falling (Steyerl, 2011). Here the subject and object,
the runner and its data, the body and the satellite, the breather and their anxi-
eties, are caught falling together and, left with no possibility of distancing one
from the other, it becomes impossible to separate one from the other. Caught in
the loops of automated tracking we are revealed to be our own objects of desire
and our own anxious objects.
18
See Lacan, 2014: 320.

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Digital Feminisms and the Split Subject: Short-

circuits through Lacans Four Discourses
Alison Horbury1
University of Melbourne, Australia
doi: 10.5937/comman12-11347
Abstract: This paper takes the emergent field of digital feminisms as a case for
thinking about the ways in which Jacques Lacans theory of the four discourses that of
the master, hysteric, university, and analyst can contribute to our understanding of the
subject in digitally mediated communications. Lacans theory is useful in articulating
the relationship between the feminist subject, knowledge production, and the modes of
enjoyment that structure speech particularly where feminist discourses are animated in
digital communications. As a protest discourse, feminist discourse has been equated with
the productive discourse of the hysteric, but once institutionalized, I argue, it takes on
the structure of the university discourse, bypassing the critical phase of the analyst. Digi-
tal feminisms offer a particularly reflective case for understanding this structural shift as,
with no gatekeepers, nothing impedes the personal becoming political in digitally medi-
ated spaces. Here, the structure of feminist discourses is amplified, exposing the dynamic
affects in different discursive positions that obfuscate communication and make true
dialogue problematic. Drawing on Lacans theory of the four discourses, I map some
of these affects as digital feminist discourses shift into the position of knowledge (what
Lacan calls S2), where they are divided cut off from their own experience and enjoy-
ment and positioned to address the jouissance of the Other. In this, I hope to show how
Lacans theory of discourse offers a means of understanding the frustrations felt in much
digitally mediated communication.
Keywords: digital feminisms, the subject, Lacan, discourse of the hysteric, discourse
of the university, jouissance, knowledge, affect
1

Digital Feminisms and the Split Subject Alison Horbury
1. Introduction
This paper offers a theoretical consideration of the ways in which we might
understand digital feminist discursive practices through Jacques Lacans theory
of the four discourses articulated in seminar XVII (2007). Within Lacans
theory of the four discourses that of the master, hysteric, university, and
analyst feminist discourse has traditionally been equated with that of the
hysteric (Bracher, 2006) for, as I elaborate in this paper, it is a protest discourse
associated with social, political, and epistemological change. This protest takes
on many forms, from every-day rejections of social norms, to more theoreti-
cal rejections of the language used to create those norms. The work of criture
fminine is perhaps the most literal example in that it identifies with hysterical
speech where it is perceived to be the only legitimate form of female discourse
within phallocentric cultures, and mobilizes this discourse of protest to articu-
late a radical womans political aesthetic (Dane, 1994: 241). In protesting the
status-quo, feminist discourse (as with hysterical discourse) speaks an epistemic
desire: it generates a desire for knowledge. Yet even in its early association with
hysterical discourse seen by many as a proto-feminist protest (Showalter,
1987) feminist discourse has drawn on personal, subjective experience to
protest the status quo. Drawing on Lacans theory of discourse, I show how the
affective quality of this knowledge (and aesthetic) production creates counter-
productive conflicts within feminist discourses that are exacerbated in digitally
mediated spaces.
Digital technologies have provided a particularly useful stage for feminist
protest, where platforms like Twitter can aggregate isolated voices into col-
lective political movements. An emerging field of scholarship engaged in the
study of what I broadly call digital feminisms canvases a variety of feminist
discourses and practices that use digitally mediated platforms and services to
mobilize feminist agendas, protest, and praxis. With some speculating that the
affordances of digital media technologies have generated a fourth wave of
feminism (Phillips & Cree, 2014: 938) that challenges mainstream media rep-
resentations of a post-feminist era (Gill, 2016: 613), this field of scholarship has
focused on organized hashtag feminisms (Portwood-Stacer & Berridge, 2014)
and networked communities in the form of blogs, as well as activist and peda-
gogical websites, YouTube channels, tumblrs and memes (for example, Baer,
2016; Fotopoulou, 2016; Khoja-Moolji, 2015; Pruchniewska, 2016; Scharff,

Alison Horbury Digital Feminisms and the Split Subject
Smith-Prei, and Stehle, 2016; Seidman, 2013; Taylor, 2011; Thrift, 2014; Vivi-
enne, 2016). Included in these forms of digital feminisms are moments when
feminist discourse is invoked (and re-distributed) in digitally mediated spaces
to express feminist knowledge and assert feminist identities in ways that may or
may not be organized or intended forms of feminist praxis or pedagogy (see, for
example, Dobson, 2015; Keller, 2016; Thelandersson, 2014). Indeed, within
the age of media convergence it can be difficult to separate digital feminist
discourses activism, protest, and praxis from offline discourses given that
digital platforms and services allow for the promotion, sharing, and pedagogic
redistribution of some of these offline (or analogue) activities. Despite their
intention or origin, then, digital feminisms share common characteristics with
the discourses and praxis of non-digital feminisms, such as disparities in the
production of feminist knowledge with considerable debate over their authen-
ticity and definitional positions. Such characteristics are enhanced, however,
through digital technologies, platforms, and services because these technologies
give voice to disparate discourses and agendas, and allow them to be widely
shared and distributed. Nowhere is this more evident than in the contrasting
tumblrs Who Needs Feminism? and Women Against Feminism, where
privileged and marginal voices are mobilized into conflicting forms of protest.
Indeed, the proliferation of feminist discourses in digitally mediated spaces
sees the blend of amateur, professional, and celebrity voices create and imagine
feminism for the new millennium with a contrariness indicative of the post-
feminist era (see Horbury, 2015).
Yet where digital technologies promise the ability to subvert the political
and economic hierarchies of media industries, the resulting frustrations in digi-
tal feminist communication often seem inexplicable. While tentatively celebrat-
ing the revolutionary possibilities of the digital sphere (to overcome barriers of
distance, difference, time, generation, knowledge, economics, and power in
the production of feminist discourse) feminist scholarship is equally cautious
in detailing the emerging threats to this utopia (see, for example, Baer, 2016;
Cole, 2015; Dobson, 2015; Keller, 2016; Khoja-Moolji, 2015; Pruchniewska,
2016; Thelandersson, 2014; Vivienne, 2016). The tenor of this scholarship nev-
ertheless tacitly invokes both user and producer of digitally mediated culture
as a fantasy of Enlightenment thinking, where digital feminists are perceived
to be the perfect produsers who challenge the hierarchies of traditional media

industries. Undermining this fantasy of a rational subject of discourse, however,

is the production of radically inassimilable ideas denoted in the rise of toxic
Twitter wars and feminist in-fighting over the authenticity and legitimacy of
feminist knowledge (see Thelandersson, 2014). The provocation of trolls within
digital feminist communities contributes to this discord and, I suggest, reveals
the particular composition of feminist knowledge in this space.2 For where trolls
contest the legitimacy of feminist knowledge (for amusement or malicious
enjoyment), this can, as Ganzer observes, replicate feminist in-fighting (2014),
where it exposes the role of affect in knowledge, discourse, and communication,
as I explore in this paper.
Drawing on a variety of digital feminist discursive practices that are illustra-
tive rather than exhaustive, I sketch some observations regarding the effects of
these practices where they shift from the productive discourse of the hysteric
to that of the university in the construction of an ideal feminist identity online.
In particular, I introduce Lacans theory of discourse to explore the impact of
this shift on the productive character of digital feminisms as well as the experi-
ence of subjects occupying this position. In addition to the institutionalization
of feminisms within the academy, the sheer volume of production afforded by
digital technology and the erosion of distinctions between amateur, profes-
sional, academic and celebrity voices brings a symbolic weight to feminist
knowledge production in digitally mediated spaces where I argue, it takes on
the status of the big Other, or S2 in Lacans matheme. Identification with it
demonstrates, I suggest, the way in which feminism becomes a signifier consti-
tuting onscreen identity; it functions to support idiosyncratic subjects, offering
a consistency via the guarantee of the big Other in S2. Challenges to this signi-
fier then, effectively act as a challenge to the subjects stability: as an attack on
the screen that supports the fantasy of the subjects rational, symbolic existence,
especially where the attack addresses feminist knowledge. Moreover, where
feminist knowledge-as-S2 becomes the ideal-ego of the agents online identity,
the agent of this structure occupies the discourse of the university in Lacans
schema, a split subject, cut-off from the subjective truth of their experience.
The split subject speaks from the position of feminist knowledge to address the
other who now occupies the position of object a in the matheme what is lost
2
I take Jonathan Bishops definition of trolls as agents who deliberately antagonize other individuals or communities
online with the aim of drawing them into a futile debate, either anonymously for personal (sadistic) pleasure, or
publically in the spirit of communal humour (2014: 810).

to the subject, jouissance. Here, the agent of digital politics can be caught in
the screen of the big Other, which alienates them from the truth of their own
experience and where jouissance appears in the form of the Others enjoyment.
1.2. Why Psychoanalysis?

To introduce psychoanalysis to the topic of digital feminisms may appear
especially problematic, for though the analysis of women in various media
spaces was initially informed by the psychoanalytic ideas taken up in second
wave feminisms, Judith Butlers epistemic turn in Gender Trouble (2008) has
reoriented this scholarship away from such engagements (see Horbury, 2015:
45). This leaves the field, as Peter Dahlgren has observed (2013), of media and
communication studies more generally, with a subject assumed as a product of
the Enlightenment: a rational being whose flexible and contingent persona is
nevertheless not informed by any unconscious desires, conflicts, or fantasies.
This assumption is incredibly problematic for feminist media studies, where,
as I have argued elsewhere (Horbury, 2015: 41), the subject of this scholarship
texts for women and the audiences for them over time become informed
by the ideas of feminist scholarship. Here, the triangular network of influence
that has formed between critical feminist discourses, public cultural com-
mentary, and the dramatization of women in media texts can no longer be
untangled or imagined outside of their relationship with one another (Horbury,
2015: 8). Where feminism is popularised in cultural production it is then ab-
sorbed back into feminist analysis and integrated into new feminist discourses,
perhaps explaining, as Gill notes (2016), the confusing reemergence of feminist
ideas in mainstream media alongside post-feminist sensibilities. Moving into
the digital sphere only increases this triangular relationship as the line between
textual user and producer becomes blurred, as does the line between academic
and amateur production of feminist knowledge albeit a blurring of an already
permeable boundary. Nevertheless, any study of communication must take into
account the subject of that communicative act be it the producer or receiver
of that act and, as Marshall Alcorn succinctly puts it, [t]o understand speech,
as opposed to language, one must understand what it means to be a subject
(1994:23). This is not to say that psychoanalytic thought offers a complete
solution to the study of communication; rather, it constitutes a significant per-

spective that is absent from many efforts to theorize the subject of communica-
tive praxis.
While psychoanalytic ideas have been entertained in media and commu-
nication studies, the scepticism with which they are treated and largely cir-
cumvented in the classroom is perhaps, as Roger Silverstone suggests, because
the shift from clinical theory and practice to cultural critique is fraught with
obfuscation and the too-easy elision, often, of the particular and the general,
as well as the arbitrariness (masked as theory) of interpretation and analysis
(1999: 11). Due to the complexly nuanced positions produced in the last sixty
years of feminism in the West, what I sketch here may appear similarly limited.
It is difficult to speak of or attempt to analyse let alone theorize feminist dis-
courses in a general sense without appearing to reductively overlook important
differences in theory and praxis, and I do not want to suggest that all utterances
made by feminists fall into my analysis. I want to introduce Lacans work on the
subjects discourse, however, to consider the unconscious dimensions of (some)
digital feminist discourses in the hope that these insights might be useful in
understanding the ways in which digital communications more generally can
be both productive and unproductive when the speaker inhabits or speaks from
differently motivated subject positions.
2. The Four Discourses

Lacans seminar XVII (1969-1970) develops a formula for thinking about
the subject and their relation to discoursethat goes much further than actual
utterances (2007: 13) to try and understand the relationship between the
subject and language (symbolic meaning and the world of shared knowledge),
between the subject and their unconscious and, consequently, between the
subject and their unique mode of (unconscious) enjoyment. Notably, Lacans
articulation of the four discourses is framed within his critique of science
(Themi, 2014: 108) where it illuminates the limits of Enlightenment thinking
that informs both feminist discourses and much media and communication
theory. Both discourses assume, at the very least, that a subject (of media texts
and producers of texts) is cognizant of their enjoyment and rationally invested
in communication. Yet, paraphrasing Lacan, Susan Barnard reminds us that, as
knowledge and jouissance are inextricably linked even in ideal communica-
tion (e.g., a complete text or an entire oeuvre), interpretation confronts the

limits constituted by the particularity of the subjects jouissance the way in

which a given subject gets off on (in this case) a text (2002: 3). Lacans under-
standing of the ways in which particular subject positions enjoy or gets off on
different types of texts though seemingly an obvious point that readers come
to any text with very different interests, motivations, and strategies of reading
(Barnard, 2002: 3) is particularly useful in contemplating digital feminist dis-
courses because feminist discourses produce both a field of discursive knowledge
that one may be drawn to on the basis of a certain enjoyment and, when this
knowledge is identified with, a speaking position related to a particular mode of
enjoyment. The modes of enjoyment implicated in this speaking position offer
an insight, I suggest, into the conflicts produced in digital feminist discourses.
In articulating something of the relationship between the subject and
language knowledge, the unconscious, and modes of enjoyment Lacans
work also formulates something of the social bonds we form with each other
(Themi, 2014: 108). The four discourses are thus useful because, as Mark
Bracher puts it, they offer the means, respectively, of understanding four key
social phenomena that correlate to the four positions of the university, master,
hysteric, and analyst: that of educating, governing, protesting, and revolution-
izing (1994b: 107). These four positions and phenomena have the effect of
mobilizing ordering and repressing, in turn, four key psychological fac-
tors knowledge/belief, values/ideals, self-division/alienation, and jouissance/
enjoyment (Bracher, 1994b: 109). Lacan uses a matheme to represent the
four discourses (see Figure 1), while the underlying schema of each discourse
the functions of each position regardless of which discourse is in play are
outlined in Figure 2.
Discourse Discourse of Discourse of Discourse of

of the master the university the hysteric the analyst
S1 S2 S2 a $ S1 a $

$ a S1 $ a S2 S2 S1
Figure 1: The four discourses (Lacan, 2007: 69)

agent other

truth production
Figure 2: The formula of discourse (Lacan, 1999: 17)
In the top left position is the operative agent of the discourse (Lacan,
2007: 169), which, in the masters discourse is identified as S1 (see Figure 1),
the signifier that stands in for the subject who has entered into language and the
symbolic realm of meaning (the Symbolic in Lacans tripartite register of experi-
ence, Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic). Tim Themi notes that while this agent
might be likened to the subjects conscious mind or ego (2014: 109), Lacan
also refers to this position as a site of desire (see Figure 4), and thus denotes the
operative function of the unconscious in the agents actions and discourse for,
in Lacans terms, the agent is someone who is caused to act (2007: 169: my
emphasis). Beneath the agent, or as Lacan puts it, beneath the bar that sepa-
rates what is known from what is unknown to the subject, is the site of truth,
that which is relinquished upon entering into language and the Symbolic order
of symbolization that defines one as a subject (see Themi, 2014: 109). In
other words, though the subject is realized through a signifier (S1) that repre-
sents a subject, and nothing but a subject, for another signifier (Lacan, 2007:
478), it is incomplete: the signifier is not reducible to the subject of knowl-
edge because there is something underneath (Lacan, 2007: 48). This some-
thing underneath, Themi notes, is not necessarily something the agent is aware
of (2014: 109) but, significantly for feminist discourses (as I will elaborate later)
it constitutes sexual knowledge or knowledge of the drives (Lacan 2007: 93)
in Freudian terms id or libido. This truth beneath the bar of the agent in the
bottom left position (see Figure 2) is what the subject knows without knowing
(Lacan 2007: 93) and denotes the subject divided by language, which Lacan
represents through the symbol $ (see Figure 3).
master signifier knowledge

subject jouissance
Figure 3: Formula for the subject of discourse (Lacan, 2007: 92)

desire Other

truth loss
Figure 4: The effects of each position in the formula (Lacan, 2007: 93)
In the top right position of the underlying schema is the role of the Sym-
bolic order, the field or network of signifiers that constitute the socio-symbolic
realm (see Figure 3): language and its production of knowledge, what is already
there prior to the subjects being (Lacan, 2007: 13) represented as S2. One of
the practical advantages of Lacans schema is its ability to identify what each of
the four discourses produces for, relative to whichever discourse is in the posi-
tion of agent, the bottom right position denotes the product of that speaking
subjects discourse (see Figure 2).
In the masters discourse (see Figure 1), the agent looks towards S2, the
position most associated with work (see Lacan, 2007: 169), but the product
or result of this discourse is object a, or jouissance, an excess of enjoyment or
pleasure beyond normal limits. That is, the price of being situated as an agent,
as a master, is the loss of jouissance. One labours towards the field of S2, but
must relinquish certain parts of ones desire to do so; this is what Lacan identi-
fies as symbolic castration, which separates our pure being in the world from
the mediated experience enabled through the acquisition of language. Such a
process requires letting go of being (unmediated existence), in order to mean
something in symbolic terms, which effectively creates a divided subject ($).
What is useful in understanding the structure of the masters discourse then, as
Lacan puts it, is that the master is an illusion because any master is symbolically
castrated (2007: 128). Themi notes that the quality of lost jouissance in the bot-
tom right position (see Figures 3 and 4), can contain anything pertaining to
a loosening of the means required to sustain a masterly position (2014: 109)
and, moreover, might be seen as potentially destructive to the order of things
(from work, for instance), because this jouissance
signals what remains of, and what can lead to, the most intense or
anguished type of desire we have, luring us back beyond the usual limits
of the pleasure principle to repeat some kind of ruinous, nonproductive,
nonutilitarian lossto the point of masochism, Lacan adds, or maybe
even death. (Themi, 2014: 110)

The danger associated with this mysterious jouissance in the form of object
a, the cause of our desire, is animated in many noir films, for example, where
the lure of the enigmatic fatale figure can see the hero or heroine in the case of
neo-noir risk all for the possibility of attaining lost enjoyment. The discourse
of the hysteric, however, has a different relationship with enjoyment.
3. The Discourse of the Hysteric & its Product

As a discourse of protest equated with challenging social, political, and epis-
temological norms, feminist discourse correlates to the hysterics discourse in
Lacans theory (see Figure 1), where its industrious product (the bottom right
position) is knowledge: S2 (Lacan, 2007: 33). I want to canvas some of the ways
we might gain a new appreciation of the mechanisms of feminist discourses
where they operate through the hysterical structure, before considering how
these discourses operate in digitally mediated spaces. For it is the knowledge
product of digital feminist discourses that exacerbates conflict in online spaces
because it addresses the Other with a response that is symptomatic of a problem
sexual difference and what Lacan calls the no sexual relation rather than a
solution. Sexuation for Lacanians designates the process of situating oneself in
relation to sexual difference, but does not follow a strictly essentialist or reduc-
tive process of establishing gendered identities upon biological differences that
might aim or result in complimentary couplings. Psychoanalysts identify mas-
culine and feminine subject positions distinct from the sexed bodies that inhab-
it these positions, but these terms do not correlate with commonly understood
notions of gender in feminist and queer theory. As Barnard puts it, in Western
discourses gender and sex are largely framed in terms of either natural science,
phenomenology, or forms of sociohistorical analysis and cultural studies where
the emphasis is on the symbolic rendering of the body and experiences of em-
bodiment that are socially constructed (2002: 4). In contrast, masculine and
feminine positions in Lacanian psychoanalytic discourse refer to ones position
vis--vis the Other, and the type of jouissance one is able to obtain (Barnard,
2002: 5), the process of which sexuation may include (but is not limited
to) identifications with sexed bodies and social positions. Lacans famous state-
ment that there is no sexual relation (see 1999: 63) more aptly refers to this
dynamic, in that masculine and feminine subjects (psychical structures) strive
towards different forms of jouissance: there is no correlation or complementary

symmetry in their aims. Simply put, they do not relate to what their partners
relate to in them (Barnard, 2002: 8).
This non-relation is at the crux of the discourse of the hysteric. The agent of
this discourse ($) speaks as a divided subject above the bar, where the discord-
ance between Symbolic and Real of experience is never adequately resolved
through language, but is expressed openly and painfully (Bracher, 1994a: 7).
The product of this structure, S2 (the bottom right position), is unconscious it
is a discourse that signifies beneath the bar. As Julien Quackelbeen et al. note,
the hysteric has a relation to truth that is quite unique because their speech
produces the unconscious truth of the subject which is not a question of the
truth of facts [] but of the truth that determines motives, that defines what tor-
ments the subject (1994: 134; my emphasis). For the hysteric is one who has,
however tentatively or temporarily, refused to identify with the available master
signifiers one who has refused symbolic castration and instead speaks their
suffering from the position of the divided subject where, as Alicia Arenas et
al. put it, language tears up the body (1994: 148). Bracher observes that the
hysterics discourse takes its name from cases of hysterical neurosis in the clinic,
denoted in symptoms that speak to the subjects refusal to embody literally,
to give his or her body over to the master signifiers that constitute the sub-
ject positions that society, through language, makes available to individuals
(1993: 66). In speaking from the position of division, the hysterics discourse
is subsequently structured as a question a demand to the Other in the form
of the master signifier (S1) occupying the top right position (Quackelbeen et
al., 1994: 133): what is a woman? (Lacan, 2000: 175). For Lacan, the speech
of the hysteric assumes its sense only as a function of a response that has to
be formulated concerning this fundamentally symbolic relation (2000: 170),
between the Real of the body (its partial drives, impulses, and desires), and the
representative possibilities of this body in the Symbolic.
In speaking as agent from the position of a divided subject, the hysteric
thus draws attention to the tenuous agency of the subject of discourse for the
hysteric speaks, as agent, from the lack and gaps in knowledge, language, and
being (Ragland-Sullivan, 1992: 164). The hysterics discourse subsequently
exposes the no sexual relation: that ones personal mode of jouissance does not
necessarily find its counterpart in the Other. Yet this (unconscious) knowledge,
and the problem of representing Woman in the universal (capital W) within

the Symbolic, can lead to the cult of Woman where, as with much feminist
discourse from the second wave, the hysteric unceasingly look[s] for this non-
existent signifier (Quackelbeen et al., 1994: 132). As Lacan reminds us, Sig-
mund Freuds famous question what does a woman want denotes a definite
article; it is not Woman in the universal but [a] woman which locate[s] the
question at the level of desire (2007: 129).
The association of feminism with the discourse of the hysteric is not un-
controversial given that many (if not most) feminist discourses reject Sigmund
Freuds work on hysteria. As Lisa Appignanesi and John Forrester observe, the
first wave of feminist historiography painted the hysteric as a victim of male
institutional power at a time when social structures were undergoing signifi-
cant upheaval such that the hysteric was situated as a front line casualty of the
intensified war of men on their womenfolks aspirations and protests towards
equality (2000: 68). Elaine Showalter (1987: 160) thus describes the hysterics
protest as protofeminism where, similarly, as a response to the restrictions im-
posed on women within nineteenth century bourgeois circles, hysteria has been
described as feminism lacking a social network in the outer world (Hunter,
1983: 485). One might assume, then, that there are no more antiquated hyster-
ics given the loosening of restrictions on women resulting from the widespread
impact of feminism and other social upheavals in the West. Indeed, some might
argue that feminism is the solution to the nineteenth-century womans prob-
lems, if not contemporary problems regarding sexual difference.
Yet the links between feminism and hysteria continue to manifest in their
mutual interests interests that speak to the ways in which (some) feminist
discourses, as hysterical discourses, are cathected to conflicts regarding social
and symbolic values surrounding sexuate positions. That is, some feminist
discourses speak (protest) in symptom form and thus perpetuate rather than
resolve the individuals unconscious conflicts. Appignanesi and Forrester point
out (2000: 689), for example, that many first wave feminists were caught
up in temperance and social purity movements effecting a protest towards
male sexual immorality in much the same way as the hysteric, who, identifying
with the morality of bourgeois values, protests sexual immorality cannot be
avowed in their own being (see also Goldstein, 1982: 325). That is to say,
the hysterics discourse is caught up in conflicts between ideals and desire in
Lacanian terms, between S1 and a (Bracher, 1993: 66). This conflict is evident

in contemporary forms of feminist in-fighting over appropriate sexual ethics

in sex-work and pornography; here morality is leveraged against desire because
desire is often only attributed to men (see Horbury, 2015: 52, 1301), mirror-
ing the hysterics relation to the master. For where the hysteric has refused the
process of symbolic castration, the master has accepted it in order to occupy the
position of master and has thus accepted (to some extent) their humility as a
subject of discourse (to be motivated by unconscious desire), while the hysteric
refuses, attempt[ing] to cover up the humiliation that the symbolic finally
brings, via their Imaginary (Quackelbeen et al., 1994: 131). Arguably, where
a feminist discourse appears overly puritanical towards sex and sex-work, they
might be said to be speaking from this hysterical structure that refuses to be
humiliated by desire, and builds a moral defence against it in their imaginary.
But the Imaginary register is not necessarily shared or recognized by others it
does not directly equate to the Symbolic. For while the signifiers of language
belong to the Symbolic, what is signified is situated in the subjects imaginary
order (Evans, 1996: 83). Any solution to impasses between Real and Symbolic
forged in ones Imaginary, then, are sutured to ones idiosyncratic experience as
a subject and the modes of enjoyment structured therein. The Imaginary realms
of feminist discourses where they inhabit the hysterics structure consequently
become significant sites of discord.
4. Feminist Discourses in Digitally Mediated Spaces

In feminist discourses from the second wave onwards, the equivalence with
hysterical discourse continues in that the hysterics resistance to the status quo
forms common feminist practice (Leavy, 2006: 31). Moreover, like Freuds
hysterical patients, feminist discourse addresses the status quo (the Symbolic
order or Other) with a question regarding its ability to represent, symbolically,
their being. As Bracher puts it (1993: 67), feminist criticism protests with ver-
bal discourse what Freuds hysterical patients (most of them women) protested
through the physiological discourse of their bodily symptoms. And where
feminism has drawn on psychoanalysis is precisely to question the status of the
position woman and its construction through language (for example, Butler,
2011; Grosz, 1990). Within digitally mediated feminist discourses, the problem
of sexual difference continues to be the subject of protest and debate. Much of
this discourse is composed of slippages and equivocations between the rejection
of sexual difference in pursuit of equality in terms of power (status and financial

recompense) and the reassertion of difference in claims of special victimhood.
Yet repressing difference for power can be counterproductive because beneath
the bar of this discourse is the question of equality as regards desire and enjoy-
ment (pleasure). For example, much feminist discourse has been generated in
digitally mediated spaces in response to Instagrams censorship policy on female
breasts, menstrual blood, and pubic hair. The Guardians feminist columnist Jes-
sica Valenti articulates a common feminist protest in response to this inequality
of representation (2015), arguing that the visibility of female anatomy and bod-
ily functions is only censored when they break with representations of woman
vis--vis feminine masquerade. Different social taboos placed on the visibility
of breasts/chests, menstrual blood/semen/excrement, body hair and pubic hair
are all subject to intense scrutiny and debate within the online comments on
this article (see Valenti, 2015), while the rebellious female body (the excessive,
leaking, hairy, un-groomed body of feminist clich) is promoted as a more au-
thentic embodiment of Woman. This assertion of Woman is nevertheless still
a victim of inequality for, as Valenti rhetorically laments: [w]hen will society
accept womens bodies? (2015). Here, the function of taboo and its relation to
desire is eschewed in pursuit of a sexuate equality that does not exist, while, as
Lacan puts it, for the hysteric what is in sexual knowledge is entirely yielded up
as foreign to the subject (2007: 93). That is, the tenor of this debate assumes
the structure of the hysterics discourse that interprets feminine masquerade as
an identification point offered by man (the patriarchy, the master, social media)
that is rejected no, thats not [Woman] while the lack of a universal signi-
fier for Woman is attributed to someone else: its not my problem, its societys.
Valenti expresses this, for example, by pinning her own and other womens
discord to the one who must take responsibility (men), in her claim that [s]
ocial media is protecting men from periods, breast milk and body hair (2015).
Here, the truth of the hysterics complaint her symptom manifests in
an address to the Other (Quackelbeen et al., 1994: 134), where the hysteric,
dominated by her question nevertheless makes of the master the slave of the
work concerning that question (133).
Consequently, a large part of feminist discourse in digitally mediated com-
munication where it aligns with the hysterics structure is addressed to the mas-
ter signifiers occupying S1 in the top right position in an address that openly

challenges the status of S1 and nominates the hysterics particular mode of

jouisance in this social bond. These addresses offer a challenge to the presumed
mastery embodied in S1 produced through the deconstruction of subjects
inhabiting this place: that is, the patriarchy, white male privilege, and toxic
masculinity. Online feminist columnist Ellena Savage succinctly states that,
[p]atriarchy isnt other men: its you (2015), because to a greater or lesser
extent misogynistic behaviour is something that every male friend of mine
has at some point been guilty of (2015). As such, Savage demonstrates how
feminist discourses refuse to be enthralled by master signifiers and systems
of knowledge and respond with a show of $, the experience of alienation,
suppression, exclusion (Bracher, 1993: 67). This address to patriarchy exposes
the enjoyment structured in the hysterics discourse as it relates to the master,
where the hysteric seeks castration of the idealized father, who yields the mas-
ters secret the flip side of which is an enjoyment in privation, that is, the
jouissance of being deprived (Lacan, 2007: 99), because the hysterics discourse
is a matter of knowing what? Of knowing at what price she herself is this
person who speaks (Lacan, 2007: 34).
Yet this is where the master comes into being as a product of the hysterics
discourse, as a fantasy that there is one subject who is not divided so much
so Lacan suggests, that you have to wonder whether this isnt where the inven-
tion of the master began (2007: 129). For the masters supposed knowledge
(of sexual difference) allows the hysteric to cherish (however unconsciously) a
belief in Woman. Because if no signifier for Woman exists, how can equality
with regard to the signifier of sexuality exist (Quackelbeen et al., 1994: 135)?
For Quackelbeen et al. (1994: 134), the discursive production of the hysteric
becomes a teaching about the object and the fundamental fantasy. The un-
conscious truth beneath the bar of the hysterics discourse is a fantasy that a
sexual rapport can exist (Quackelbeen et al., 1994: 134). Indeed, the fact that
the sexual for a human being is in principle without relation in no way stops
the hysteric from dreaming of the contrary that there is no sexual relation,
but there should be one (Quackelbeen et al., 1994: 134; my emphasis).
We can observe this fantasy of S1, where patriarchy stands in for the master
that the hysteric creates, in popular second wave feminist theory taken up in
digital feminist discourses. Jane Gallop (1982) has noted, for instance, that
within some second wave uses of psychoanalysis there is an effort to master the
theory explaining womans privation while the emphasis is on identifying the

master of this theory to castrate because, as Lacan suggests, the hysterics desire
is ultimately for a master who know[s] lots of things, but not so much that
he does not believe she is the supreme price of all his knowledge because she
wants a master she can reign over so that he does not govern (Lacan, 2007:
129). The jouissance in mobilizing psychoanalysis in this way enjoyment
in the fantasy of a master and in castrating him manifests in some digital
feminist film criticisms that draw on Laura Mulveys male gaze theory (1989),
to reiterate how the structural fantasy of woman-as-object of the gaze in film
and screen media secures the masculine subject in his privilege. Feminist blog-
ger film reviews, for instance, often revel in lambasting male directors who
perpetuate this structural fantasy, and detail (with an intensity of jouissance) the
actresss embodiment of it (see Leab, 2011), simultaneously exposing the fragil-
ity of the masters position while ensuring that Woman actress or blogger is
the supreme price.
The hysterics discourse thus sets a trap for the Other (the master) where
what signifies in the hysterics speech (beneath the bar) calls out the Others
impotence (Arenas et al., 1994: 148), which is observable in digital feminist
discourses encouraging masters to realize their castration and identify with the
hysteric. A blog post in Scum Mag entitled, so your dick isnt perpetually hard
(Muscat 2013), for example, invites men to accept their castration, rather than
invest in the fantasy of themselves as masters. But in this, as Bracher suggests,
receivers of the hysterical message are also alienated by being summoned to
produce master signifiers and knowledge in response to the others division ($)
rather than in response to their own want-of-being (a) (1993: 68).
The underlying conflict between public ideals and personal (unconscious)
desire in the hysterics discourse effectively (re)emerges in digitally mediated
(public) feminist discourses speaking from this position. As Colette Soler ob-
serves, as a consequence of feminist ideals sexual difference is repressed in
efforts towards making public spaces unisex[ual], while the hysterics ques-
tion is played out elsewhere, in the closed field of the sexual relationship where
sexual difference remains irreducible (2002: 53). That is, the unconscious
(personal) mode of the hysterics discourse regarding the signifier Woman con-
flicts with the public pursuit of equality at the level of (feminist) ideals because
this requires the suppression of sexual difference. Digitally mediated communi-
cation makes this schism more immediately problematic because digitally me-
diated interfaces erode the distinctions between public and private discourses.

5. Making the Personal Political

This conflict between ideals and desires plays out in digital feminist dis-
courses where the pedagogical structure of digital feminisms creates conflicts of
difference that result in internal policing over the shared territory of feminist
knowledge, because this knowledge production is grounded in the immediacy
of the personal. Insofar as the affordances of digitally mediated technologies
make personal storytelling more widely available to those without access to
commercial media production, digital forms of storytelling have been widely
credited with emancipating under-represented identities (Vivienne, 2016:
3). Equally, the thorny issue long affecting feminist politics of internal dif-
ferences and conflict is, according to Urszula Pruchniewska, overcome through
the shareability of information and archive functions that allow women to
work together across their differences (2016: 739). Yet, where digital femi-
nisms produce a greater volume of content and erode the differences between
amateur, professional, scholarly, and celebrity voices they create greater and
seemingly more vicious moments of conflict. Indeed, the affordances of this
space promote a personal discourse that, where it seeks to be political, is nev-
ertheless not accountable. Susan Greenberg notes, for example, that within
debates theorizing digital Web 2.0 discourses, [t]he perception that personal
feelings are true and real because they are unmediated remains a popular and
persistent one, and overlaps with the popular understanding of authenticity
as trueness to the self (2001: 166).3 Within this frame of blogging culture,
feminist discourses can more easily slip into hysterical structures that speak in
symptom form because much blogging approximates a process of thinking out
loud that borders on a stream of consciousness (Greenberg, 2011: 157), and
is particularly pertinent to the production of truth in the hysterics discourse.
Where the emphasis on emotion and personal experience constitutes a
particular feature of blogging practice, it opens the way for the affective pro-
duction of the hysterics discourse to be taken for truth. Soler (2016: 61) points
out that where language and the signifier intervene into ones being to produce
the subject, they come to define that status of the jouissance for that speaking
being, including the production of affects that are particular to him as well
as those produced through the socially bonded discursive positions (61) such
3
As Krger suggests (2016), documenting ones affective experience is often an implicit requisite of participation in
digitally mediated social platforms.

as the hysteric and master. The power of affects, Soler notes, is that they are so
immediately felt that they are very convincing (2016: 2) to the point that
they bring a hue of reality in which the subject recognizes themselves (105).
Nevertheless, affects are not direct signifiers carrying meaning or information;
rather, they work through metonymy and displacement, sliding from represen-
tation to representation and, as such, do not carry any epistemological value
but designate [a] false obviousness (Soler, 2016: 911). Because to the one
who is affected, [affects] are plainly obvious, it is easy to (mis)take affect as
ones own truth (Soler, 2016: 105). While critical affect theory examines a
wide range of affective states, for Lacan, anxiety angoisse or anguish is one
of the most important affects for the hysteric, because in its signalling of an
encounter with the Real (see Lacan, 2014), it can denote a failure in the field
of discourse (Soler, 2016: 25). This failure of discourse can, I suggest, play a
motivating role in the feminist incitement to discourse, which is evident in
female traditions of diary-writing.
Where feminist blogging recalls traditional forms of diary-writing particu-
lar to women and girls (see Keller, 2016), we can see the ways in which some
digital feminist discourses adopt feminism as a signifier that nominates their
affective experience. This signifier legitimates the subjects affect and seemingly
produces a truth about experience. Where digital feminisms provide a feminist
toolkit for young women (see Keller, 2016; Seidman, 2013: 553; Thelanders-
son, 2014: 528), for example, they offer a means a vocabulary and structure
to name and express their experience. The pedagogical and public aspect of this
toolkit equates with feminist pedagogy as a protest [hysterical] pedagogy that
seeks, as Bracher puts it, recognition from the other regarding their division
as a subject (2006: 96). For instance, in her study of girls blogging, Jessalynn
Keller quotes a young bloggers coming out as a feminist: I want to write
about life from my perspective a feminist teen just trying to make sense of
the world and hopefully appeal to others who feel the same way Renee,
Sunday June 27, 2010, blog post (see 2016: 18). Greenberg suggests that the
increasing role of emotion and subjectivity in the public sphere typically
work[s] to connect facts and feelings and the manipulation of the reader to
respond in a prescribed fashion (2001: 1524). As Renees quote attests, then,
the personal, confessional element found in much feminist teaching and writ-
ing (Bracher, 2006: 96) is a sign of authenticity but one where affect structures

logic. For it is not that drawing on private emotions in public spheres is an

unstructured discourse but, rather, that forms of confessional journalism de-
liberately craft feelings to communicate them in a controlled and deliber-
ate way, so as to connect those feelings to argument and thought (Greenberg,
2011: 1556). The slippage made possible then, when personal affect becomes
political discourse, leads to considerable internal conflict in digital feminisms.
5.1. Affective Discourse: Diversity, Conflict, & Policing

An outcome of making the personal political would seem to be distin-
guished above all else by the conflicts and in-wars between different feminist
fractions, built upon different feminist affective knowledge, literature, and
pedagogic exchange, all of which is amplified in digitally mediated communi-
cation where there are few gatekeepers to the discursive production of feminist
knowledge. For instance, Fredrika Thelandersson notes that on Tumblr
feminist debates often turn into seemingly never-ending processes of call-
ing out and blaming users for offensive terminology and ignorance of vari-
ous groups. [] Much of the discussion is based around policing other
participants about what theyre doing wrong instead of encouraging them
for what is being done right. (2014: 528)
Equally, toxic-twitter wars between feminist commentators, activists, and
scholars tend to be overtly hostile and insular, reflecting feminist arguing in
general (Thelandersson, 2014: 527). The hysterical structure of some digital
feminist discourses might account for this, in that the hysterics discourse is a
symptomatic demand to the other, the master, who is called, obliged, sum-
moned to produce the response (Quackelbeen et al., 1994: 133). When the
address is intercepted by another hysteric, however, a problem emerges; as
Bracher notes, where feminist discourses are structured as protest (hysterical)
discourses, they can support socially destructive forms of identity politics that
pit different groups against each other in a competition for recognition as the
greatest victim (2006: 97). That is, the affective quality of feminist knowledge
invites individuals to perceive their own affective truth as the most legitimately
and painfully alienating, denoting, as Soler observes, the dissident affect
of discourse where enjoyment produced in the social bond (such as shared
feminist values) can be discordant from the enjoyment characteristic of each

individual in their relation to language, their unconscious, and the symptoms

and fantasies that follow (2016: 104). Subsequently, the disparity between one
person and another, in terms of the Imaginary, explains the absence of true
dialogue that befalls us despite all our ideals of communication (Soler, 2016:
1045).
The intensity of discord in digital feminist discourses might thus be un-
derstood to stem, at least in some instances, from the discordance between
individual discursive affects where, as Soler puts it, the others affects seem
strange and sometimes unbearable because they conflict with ones own af-
fective truth (2016: 105). The hashtag #YesAllWomen, is a good example: it
seeks to anchor womens collective experiences (Cole, 2015: 3567) in a social
bond but does so in a way that, as with other feminist hashtagging, assimilates
differences of class, race, and history into already-circulating discourses about
girls and women (Khoja-Moolji, 2015: 3489; see, also, Pruchniewska, 2016:
1). The resulting conflicts see feminists hailing other feminists who appear as
masters (by contrast), demanding to have their victim status their painful di-
vision as a subject, and refusal of master signifiers recognized by the other. For
a feminist to be subject to the Others discourse, then even that of another
feminist can generate or even reproduce certain affects such as indignation,
protest, anger (Soler, 2016: 26). Such disparities also elucidate how in some
instances feminist discourse can appear to other feminists as an external an-
tagonist if not master obfuscating the search for Woman (Quackelbeen et al.,
1994:132).
Consequently, the pedagogical structure of digital feminist discourses the
invitation to identify with alienated subjectivities, the toolkit for naming af-
fect and hailing masters can have damaging effects on both other feminists
and the masters addressed. As Bracher suggests, the inherent danger of pro-
test pedagogies is that one is asked to identify with the teachers desire for a
new master signifier such that one is effectively coerced to identify with
someone elses S1 (2006: 97). In this, we see that where digital feminist dis-
courses invite one to participate in the deconstruction and exposure of the
deficiencies of the master or the master signifiers, they tend to encourage, the
repression of ones own feelings, impulses, or qualities (Bracher, 2006: 97).
The sentiments of the Women Against Feminism tumblr denote a resistance
to such identification, the tenor of which might be summarized as: I dont

necessarily want to be included in claims of (all/current/past) feminisms on the

basis that I identify as woman because such claims do not match my affective
experience. The hysterics cutting down of masters thus includes other women
who, in rejecting feminism, identify with feminine masquerade, as well as other
feminists who, by invoking dissident forms of feminist knowledge, undermine
the individuals affective truth, as toxic feminist twitter wars attest.
5.2. The Hysterics Knowledge: A Revolution in Discourse?

The hysterics discourse is considered vital to the production of knowledge
in the analytic situation as the subject is required to pass through it in analysis
to produce the desire to know (Lacan, 2007: 34). Yet, though this discourse
produces knowledge, it does so beneath the bar. Therefore, though feminist dis-
courses have transformed some aspects of the public and private spheres in the
West, these changes do not necessarily satisfy; object a the truth of what mo-
tivates, what torments the subject remains beneath the bar and the hysterics
product is largely un-analysed. In addition, because the hysterics discourse is a
desire for an unsatisfied desire, no response from the Other (in either public
or private reform) will ever match the enjoyment produced in the hysterical
structure (privation). As a result, the hysterics discourse does not produce a
(personal) revolution or transformation of discourse (a positional turn in the
matheme) that occurs through the discourse of the analyst (see Figure 1).4
Where digital feminist discourses take feminism as an identity bearing signi-
fier, moreover, there is a slippage between the personal and the public/political
product of this discourse. The hysterics (socially bonded) discourse produces
knowledge excluded from the symbolic, while in the private analytic scenario
this knowledge is recognized as that which the hysteric has excluded or not
found a way to include in their S1: object a.
Despite this unresolved schism, the discursive product of feminism where it
is taken as truth denotes, as Bracher suggests, the production of a new canon,
a new tradition to be taught, which effectively functions as an authoritarian
and establishment pedagogy (Bracher, 2006: 97). Feminisms knowledge prod-
uct published and disseminated through various public institutions such as
the university is now amplified through the critical mass of digital feminisms
4
Indeed, Soler argues that psychoanalysis is really what the hysteric needed, because it agrees to recognize the
enigma of sex and assumes responsibility for it (2002: 53).

where it sustains the authority of personal experience. In other words, the in-
dustrious product of feminist discourse creates the foundation of a new S2: the
discourse of the university.
6. The Discourse of the University:

Feminism as S2 & the Split Subject
What distinguishes the discourse of the university from that of the hysteric
is that, where the hysterics discourse poses a question, the discourse of the uni-
versity presumes an answer: knowledge. The subject occupying this discourse
speaks from a position of authority, invoking knowledge in a way that might be
likened to Michel Foucaults theorizing of discourse, where certain utterances
are regulated by a field of ideas and practices that determine the conditions
of existence for this utterance (2005: 30). As Renata Salecl puts it, in the dis-
course of the university utterances always refer to some field of knowledge;
they purport to be justified by proofs and arguments (1994: 163). In digital
feminist discourses, then, we often see the subject assume answers via reference
to the production of feminist knowledge (S2) gleaned from feminisms insti-
tutionalization and increasing prominence in digitally mediated spaces. The
affordances of digital technology allow such knowledge to be appropriated, re/
produced, and distributed without, necessarily, going through formal processes
of fact-checking or critical evaluation. In terms of sheer numbers, this re/pro-
duction and distribution of feminist discourses/knowledge is given a symbolic
weight. Where it takes on the status of S2, it is taken as knowledge that gives
its speaker authority. The Who Needs Feminism? tumblr, for example, not
only reasserts and produces feminist discourse, but also functions (in part) to
school others on feminist knowledge and praxis with an authority grounded in
its university setting (see Siedman, 2013: 557). Similarly, Shenila Khoja-Moolji
notes that some digitally mediated feminist practices offer a sense of collec-
tivity within a knowledge space that presumes a certainty about the lives of
girls (2015: 348). In effect, digital feminist discourses slip from the hysterics
discourse into the discourse of the university where feminism not only be-
comes a signifier of identity (a new S1) from which the subject speaks, but also
a signifier that bears the weight of knowledge, S2, enabling the subject to speak
with tacit authority.

The discourse of the university is, in Lacans schema, largely associated with
the discourse of science, which offers the grantee of the big Other formerly held
by religion. David Corfield observes that science, in taking the place of God,
provides a limit of authority for the subject one they would willingly cross
significant ethical lines for (2002: 196200) such that, when the author-
ity of science goes unquestioned it can become equated with or approach
the super-egoical effects of the installation of the paternal metaphor (2002:
199).5 The problem, as Lacan puts it, is that the discourse of science leaves no
place for man (2007: 147) it leaves no place for the subject constituted in
language with unconscious fantasies, libidinal drives, or desire. Where feminist
knowledge-as-S2 becomes the ideal-ego of the agents online identity, the agent
of this structure is, according to Lacans schema, a split subject (2007: 104,
148), cut-off from the subjective truth of their experience because both S1 and
the divided subject ($) are beneath the bar. For when speaking in the discourse
of the university, Bracher notes, one relays personal history, and reflections on
that history through reference to external knowledge that promotes an ideal-
ego considered worthy of attention from others (1993: 69).
A good example of feminist discourse speaking from the position of S2 on
digitally mediated platforms is Lena Dunhams pronouncements about her
experience at the Met Gala across her e-newsletter, Twitter, and Instagram ac-
count. On the basis of feminist knowledge Dunham reported that Odell Beck-
ham Jr. (seated at her dinner table) was not interested in talking to her because
she failed to embody a form of feminine masquerade or present herself as an
object for (his) male gaze (Dunham, 2016, 02 September). In this, Dunham
invoked feminist knowledge-as-S2 to relay a personal experience with the as-
surance she knew what Beckham was thinking as he looked at her: Do I want
to fuck it? Is it wearing a yep, its wearing a tuxedo (Dunham, 2016, 02
September; my emphasis), positioning herself as an (unworthy) object for the
gaze but a worthy subject of feminist discourse. Dunhams subsequent apology
further shows us how feminist knowledge-as-S2 allowed her to be split-off from
her own subjective truth. As she put it, she used feminist knowledge as a screen
for her personal insecurities and made totally narcissistic assumptions about
5
Corfield (2002: 196200) refers here to Milgrams experiment, where one subject is asked to inflict a lethal electric
volt on another in the name of scientific research, comparing it to Gods demand that Abraham kill his only son.

what he was thinking, then presented those assumptions as facts (Dunham,

2016, 04 September).
Dunhams discourse also demonstrates how, where feminism-as-S2 comes to
constitute an onscreen identity that provides super-ego ideals for the subject, it
seemingly guarantees a subject that can be exempt from critique. Yet this signi-
fier is unstable, not simply because it leaves the subject in ignorance of their
particular enjoyment through which they experience themselves as a subject,
but also because the product of the hysterics discourse is a symptom. This slip-
page perpetuates the symptom in an effort to confront and resolve a phenom-
enon, for with a new authoritarian pedagogy (pedagogy of the master), one is
inculcated into the discourse based on the assumption that the best way to
understand a phenomenon or solve a problem is to devote oneself to reading
and interpreting the writings of the master (Bracher, 2006: 88). In addition,
Dunhams response illustrates how knowledge is contained in different ways
and in different layers within the subject, [such that] it easily produces con-
flict (Alcorn, 1994: 41). The hysterical structure, for instance, is the product
of an internal conflict between the subjects ideals and their partial drives and
unconscious desires. But when the product of this discourse is identified with
as in the case of feminism-as-S2 one identifies with a symptom and takes it
for truth. As such, though mastering a field of knowledge can feel empower-
ing, identifying with knowledge valued for its social currency rather than its
ability to solve problems in the subjects private realm (Bracher, 2006: 91) can
result in a restricted relation to self-knowledge and, ultimately, a breakdown in
communication.
It is here that challenges to this signifier in the form of other feminist dis-
courses or external trolling can act as a challenge to the subjects stability: an
attack on the super-ego ideals that support the on-screen fantasy of the agents
symbolic existence.6 Indeed, where trolls challenge feminist knowledge, they
expose the dissident affects in the subject speaking from feminism-as-S2: the
gap between the subjects idiosyncratic mode of enjoyment that may already be
in conflict with the super-ego ideals of feminist thought. For where feminism
is a product of the hysterics discourse, feminist knowledge signifies what is
inassimilable within the hysteric subject, what remains steadfastly unconscious
6
This could, perhaps, be likened to the structure of the mirror phase in Lacans work, where the subjects relation to
a specular mirror (in this case screen) image offers a sense of mastery counter to the reality of ones alienated being
(for a concise summary of Lacans mirror phase, see Evans, 1996: 115116).

in the symptom of the hysterics speech: sexual difference. Consequently, one

can observe the unstable ground the subject occupies when speaking from the
discourse of the feminism-as-S2, and can perhaps explain the quick and often
violent that is, emotionally affective discourse whenever this S2 is subject to
criticism.
6.1. The Enjoyment of the Other

Although not exhaustive of all digital feminist discursive practices, these
formulations might explain some of the frustrations felt in forms of digital fem-
inist communication, and I want to finish this paper by briefly considering how
the addressee of feminism-as-S2 is important to the effects of this communica-
tive exchange. In the discourse of the university, the agent addresses object a,
the vessel to be educated in the knowledgeof S2; however, in digital spheres in
particular, the Other is not necessarily acquiescent to this social bond. Bracher
notes that we begin life in the position of object a, a yet unassimilated piece
of the Real that is an object for the desires of those around us, particularly our
parents (1993: 562) who can be tyrannical in their imposing of knowledge
values or beliefs on us. In digitally mediated spaces, however, the subject occu-
pying this place would have already assumed an identity in the Symbolic, and
would not always be receptive to the knowledge values addressed to them. Put
in context, where the addressee of those speaking from feminism-as-S2 ques-
tions feminist knowledge discourse irrespective of motivation they attack
the imaginary solution produced in the hysterics discourse: the suppression of
sexual difference and symbolic castration.
Lacan suggests that the neurotic (in this case, hysteric) assumes that the
Other demands his castration (Lacan, 2006: 700), such that the neurotic
maintains a defence against castration particularly where it might serve the
jouissance of the Other. As the Dunham example suggests, much digital femi-
nist discourse reflects this preoccupation with the Others enjoyment particular-
ly where the question of sexual difference and feminine masquerade is invoked.
The self-portrait by artist Rupi Kaur (2016) in which menstrual blood is visible,
for example, protests the image of feminine masquerade in social media that
offers enjoyment to the Other, and celebrates her refusal to feed the ego and
pride of misogynist society (quoted in Valenti, 2015: para. 45). Where the
agent of digital feminist discourses speaks from S2 then, they are alienated from

truth in the bottom left position (of themselves as a subject, their division, and
desire), such that object a appears to belong to the addressed Other. In this, the
Other embodiments of patriarchy, masters, or figures of toxic masculinity
constitute the feminist subjects object a, lost, or in this case, seemingly stolen
enjoyment. That is, what torments and motivates the subject appears in the
enjoyment of the Other. Dunhams comments about Beckham Jr., for instance,
are preoccupied with male enjoyment in feminine masquerade, admitting in
her apology that surrounded by models and swan-like actresses its hard not to
feel like a sack of flaming garbage (Dunham, 2016, 04 September). However
humbly phrased here, it is the imagined enjoyment of the Other that torments.
The short-circuit from the protest discourse of the hysteric to that of the
university is by no-means exclusive to digital feminisms, but where a protest
discourse bypasses the analyst, no genuine revolution in their discourse can oc-
cur; rather, the short-circuit perpetuates a politics of the symptom as a solution.
Therefore, where the affordances of digital communications the immediacy of
affective discourse, the relative accessibility and shareability of content facili-
tate if not exacerbate the process, digital communication merely contributes to
a pre-existing problem. In adopting an ideal-ego built upon anothers affective
discourse, the subject remains split-off from what motivates them, their desire,
and their enjoyment.

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generous critical reflection on the ideas developed in this paper.

YouTubers, Online Selves and the Performance

Principle: Notes from a Post-Jungian Perspective
Greg Singh1
University of Stirling, UK
doi: 10.5937/comman11-11414
Abstract: Of the many challenges facing the field of media studies today, the rapid
acceleration of the media ecosystem through which people communicate, share and in-
dulge, and seek escape from the tedium of everyday life, presents a set of specific problems.
The contemporary media landscape is both an extension and a continuation of more
traditional forms and objects for analysis, and also an arena that has, arguably, radically
redefined the discipline in terms of the innovations and stark changes to technology, in-
stitutions and financial arrangements that have shaped the world of media and commu-
nications as we know it. A key area in which post-Jungian approaches are well-placed
to accommodate is in the fast-changing field of online media celebrity. The meteoric rise
in popularity of YouTube vloggers has given new impetus to the fields of celebrity studies
and persona studies redefining the popular understanding of how celebrity status is
sought, conferred, and consumed; and ultimately, transforming how celebrity is defined
as a notion. Using critical inquiry as a method, this article discusses mediatised notions
of self, persona, and self-commodification from post-Jungian and relational perspectives.
The discussion from these theoretical perspectives will open vistas into the critical study
of digital, networked media, as well as affording the possibility of an intensification of
the critique from psychological and psychoanalytic perspectives on contradictions and
tensions present in such contexts.
Keywords: celebrity, YouTube, Jung, Marcuse, recognition, performance, self-

psychology
1

YouTubers, Online Selves and the Performance Greg Singh
1. Introduction
On 16th August 2007, a YouTuber calling himself shaycarl posted the first
of what would become several hundred videos (Fun with Helium and Pass-
ing Out). Subsequently, during the course of 2008, shaycarl incorporated his
family into regular posts. Over time, he also introduced viewers to his familys
lifestyle and domestic environment. The SHAYTARDS YouTube channel has
an impressive 4.8 million subscribers at the time of writing.2
Mirroring the transformation of rock star brands such as Alice Cooper, the
public entity (Shaytard) has become synonymous with an individual person
(Shay Carl Butler). This unlikely comparison illustrates the metonymic confla-
tion of public celebrity and private individual that often occurs in celebrity cul-
ture: fans and avid YouTube subscribers often refer to Butler simply as Shay-
tard, in the same way that fans refer to Vincent Furnier as Alice Cooper.
This practice outlines the continuity in the association of YouTube practices,
and celebrity culture in general. It also reflects the psychology of personality
in public life. In particular in online contexts, but also in celebrity culture at
large, personality is a shorthand for public entities of a kind that embody what
is understood in media studies and marketing discourse as media property or
brand presence, and all of the values associated with those terms.3
It is worth noting that, even with his impressive CV, Shay Carl Butler is
a virtual outsider in orthodox media studies. However, Lagore (2015) and
Lashley (doctoral thesis 2013) both write about the importance of Butler and
his work at the intersection of traditional media, television and celebrity stud-
ies perspectives. Having researched psychoanalytic studies of various schools, I
can find no mention of him or his various enterprises and in fact, at best, the
discipline offers wafer-thin coverage of Web 2.0 celebrity culture in general, just
as psychoanalytic approaches to celebrity culture in more established, vested
media such as television, cinema or publishing have often been found wanting.
Where psychoanalytic approaches have attempted to deal with the digital, as
2
November 2016.
3
Butlers main YouTube channel, SHAYTARDS carries links to ShayCarl, ShayLoss (a vlog dedicated to Butlers
weight loss journey over the course of several years), a dedicated website, as well as all of the major social media
platforms; Shay Merch the website hosting a clothing and merchandise store with connections to Trixin, an apparel
range owned by Butler; and Maker Studios, Butlers substantial convergent media production company, originally
set up in 2009 and acquired by Disney in 2014 for an amount reported to exceed $500 million dollars in cash, plus
options (Spangler, 2014).

Greg Singh YouTubers, Online Selves and the Performance
Balick (2014a) suggests, all too often thinking stops.4 Processes of engage-
ment, co-production and meaning-making in online communication practices
are part of the fabric of everyday lives in popular culture, but when thinking
continues (rather than stops) one can see clear parallels between these processes,
and the processes found in psychoanalysis, as well as various practices of rela-
tional and other therapies.
This implies that a meaningful dialogue between media studies and psy-
choanalytic studies on the interface between celebrity, technology and selfhood
in popular culture is long overdue. The aim of this article is to set up such a
dialogue in three directions. These directions work through a critical frame-
work of post-Jungian persona (1953) and Winnicotts false self (1956), Aaron
Balicks essays of relational psychology in the online world (2014a, 2014b), and
Herbert Marcuses work on the politics of recognition and performance (1955).
The first of these directions intends to map out, for non-specialists, the con-
temporary media ecosystem as an accelerated, convergent realm of connectivity,
particularly in relation to YouTube as the popular media platform for celebrity
existing today.5 I indicate salient issues where a post-Jungian perspective can
form insights into that ecosystem. The second direction will be to engage the
psychology of personality in terms of the way in which consumer-users engage
with and mobilise online identity in such accelerated contexts. This will be
done through a critical discussion of theoretical frames, including Jungs con-
cept of persona, Winnicotts notion of the false self, and the presentation of the
self in interpersonal exchange, applied in Web 2.0 contexts. The third direction
I wish to pursue considers how relational processes concerning the negotiation
of private and public lives in Web 2.0 contexts function to accommodate the
contradictions associated with apparent opposites in play (the opposites re-
4
As an aside, there is some crucial reflection as to why this happens psychotherapist Mick Cooper, for example,
identifies research that considers various kinds of online therapy, and the kinds of factors that impact upon its ef-
fectiveness (2008). One prevalent attitude regarding the effective therapeutic space is the psychotherapy room as a
space free of technological impingement; and it is therefore easily understood in this context why psychotherapy in
practice often views the social media world with suspicion as an invasion of psychological space that can get in the
way of the healing process. In my view, this is precisely the reason why a collection such as that found in this special
issue of CM seems like such a departure from orthodox subject matter for psychoanalytic studies and is entirely
justified as a crucial intervention in the field of digital media phenomena.
5
According to its own press release for statistics, YouTube has over a billion unique users; and every day, people watch
hundreds of millions of hours of YouTube videos and generate billions of views. The streaming service also reaches
more 18-34 and 18-49-year-olds than any cable network in the U.S. https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/en-GB/
statistics.html [Accessed: 28/10/2016].

ferred to here are experiential distinctions and similarities in online and real-life
identity). Here, I draw from Marcuses notion of performance principle his
attempt to account for the excess materiality associated with politics of recogni-
tion, and the need for the human psyche to accommodate this in dialogue with
reality and desire. The discussion in these directions will open critical vistas into
the study of digital, networked media, as well as affording the possibility of an
intensification of the critique from psychological and psychoanalytic perspec-
tives on the contradictions and tensions present in such media contexts.
2. Mapping Problems of an Accelerated Media Ecosystem

Of the many challenges facing media studies today, the rapid acceleration of
the media ecosystem through which people communicate and share, and seek
escape from everyday life seems to be central (see, for example, Cunningham,
Craig & Silver, 2016). This acceleration effect presents a set of specific prob-
lems. While the contemporary media ecosystem is both an extension and con-
tinuation of more traditional media forms, it has also redefined the discipline
of media studies in terms of thinking about how innovations in technology
and their relationship with end-user behaviours shape the world of media and
communications as we know it. Sherry Turkle (2011) and danah boyd (2012)
have both used the term always-on to describe a state of persistent, semi-
permanent connectivity where being part of a network connected to people and
information, wherever and whenever, is assumed. This state has transformed
both the character and immediacy of social interactions, and fundamentally, a
sense of who I am, and where that I might exist.
This situation precipitates a major concern for media studies scholars who
are interested in psychological and humanist approaches to media. My own
perspective is shaped by innovations in the field of post-Jungian depth psychol-
ogy and its potential to provide an understanding of the psychic, unconscious
and archetypal processes at work in the production and consumption of cul-
ture. Whereas post-Jungian ideas have been applied to a number of arts and
humanities fields, perhaps most successfully in film theory and criticism, there
are at present still very few post-Jungian or depth-psychological interventions
in the field of contemporary digital media cultures. Notable exceptions to this
include edited collections (e.g. Weitz, 2014), a special issue of The Spring Jour-

nal on the theme of technology, cyberspace and psyche (Winter, 2008), and
book-length studies (Balick, 2014b; and Singh (forthcoming).
A key area in which post-Jungian approaches would be well-placed is in
the fields of celebrity and persona studies. In particular, the meteoric rise in
popularity of YouTube vloggers (such as Zoella, Pewdiepie, Smosh, Caspar Lee,
Miranda Sings and shaycarl) has given new impetus to these fields, helping to
redefine the popular understanding of how celebrity status is sought, conferred,
and consumed; and ultimately, transforming how celebrity is defined (see Bires-
si & Nunn, 2010; Chen, 2016; Click, Lee & Holladay, 2013; Davis, 2013;
Driessens, 2013; Hill, 2014; Jerslev, 2014; Marshall, 2014; Rojek, 2015; Stever,
2011). Whereas a number of formative studies on YouTube, performance and
identity have facilitated debates in this area that are largely confined to ortho-
dox media studies concerns (Snickars & Venderau, 2009; Lange, 2014; Burgess
& Green, 2009), there are some efforts that focus on emotional and parasocial
connections (Walker Rettberg, 2008, 2014; Papacharissi, 2010, 2011; Baym,
2010). Because of its focus on archetypal and archetypical notions of persona,
post-Jungian thought can provide an insight into the dynamics of performance
of self, and of blurred public and private distinctions in collective psychological
encounters. Whereas there are studies on Youtube celebrities, and on YouTubes
emotional and relational aspects, there are few psychoanalytic perspectives.
Such perspectives might offer something valuable to the understanding of net-
worked media, particularly in its Web 2.0 iteration.
As Jose van Dijck writes, Between 2000 and 2006, quite a few media
theorists claimed that Web 2.0 applications exponentially enhanced the natural
human need to connect and create, and they declared early victory for the user
(2013: 10). Such an explicitly utopian discourse on social media empowerment
is noticeably less common in the current recuperative climate where increasing
and accelerating media concentration has led to the centralisation of a very few
massively-influential siren servers (Lanier, 2013). Therefore, YouTube, far
from being a Web 2.0-optimised pull medium where the produser is king
(Bruns, 2008), is in some ways significantly aligned with the push mechanisms
associated with concentrated, top-down broadcast media forms; and gatekeep-
ing practices more akin to vested interests of capital, than to democratic ideals.
According to Snickars and Vendereau (2009), since Googles acquisition of
YouTube in 2006, the discourses associated with the platform have changed

markedly from the championing of entry-level amateur productions of every-

day activities to a quest for quality content, with Google ushering in a new
era of monetisation as the no. 1 priority of 2009 (YouTube Fact Sheet, cited
in Snickars & Vendereau, 2009: 10). Of course, there is still no shortage of cat
videos and badly-framed clips of cute babies on the platform. However, in the
context of 2016, you are as likely to get this kind of content from an already-
known celebrity as you are from a member of the general public; and alongside
professionally produced content (that is sometimes feature length, rather than
mere clips), often on the same channel.
However, this tension between the Web 2.0 ethos of inclusion and the quest
for better content as a no. 1 priority merely refers to front-end, plug-in-and-
play consumer experiences. The back-end of these convergent media services
which are made up of massive amounts of personal data, held in datasets,
which are almost exclusively of a proprietary nature and ultimately unusable in
the hands of the ordinary end-user ensures that the average consumer has very
little knowledge of these processes, let alone has access to that data in a read-
able and usable form (Zelenkauskaite, 2016). This amounts to a systematized
abnegation of users ownership of their own personal information and, on the
part of the platform, is a systematically and structurally disempowering institu-
tional arrangement. It is reasonable to assume that the average consumer would
have little interest in pursuing such access: even with a basic awareness of such
arrangements of information flow, consumers of such convergent media forms
are satisfied6 with the trade-off of personal data for goods and services (Markos,
Labrecque & Milne, 2012). Furthermore, there are an increasing number of
studies that seek to deal with the aftereffects on users habits and attitudes
towards convergent Web interaction (Fuchs, 2012, 2014; Fuchs et al., 2014;
Meikle & Young, 2012; Hogan, 2010).
From these perspectives, the individual as such has become part of the content
being produced. Purpose-built algorithms designed to draw out data to increase
the efficiencies of reach and identify safe areas for investment only serve to ac-
celerate this direction of movement. In essence, the ordinary user is the prod-
uct. Content, in this sense, can be taken as front-end social media profile and
browser/click-through patterns, through mid-points of consumer profiling, to
6
At least, satisfied in the instrumental sense of receiving gratis access to key mass communications platforms, subject
to accepting terms and conditions.

back-end data production. In this way, contemporary media interaction has

taken on (to borrow from classic Marxian terminology) the appearance-form of
consumer-as-agent, which sublates a deeper, atomised version of consumer-as-
commodity, and tends to reduce the character of customer satisfaction to the
choice of trade-off: access to media services for a surrender of data. This is, es-
sentially, an estranged relationship with a set of popular practices and activities
to which users generally devote considerable amounts of their time.7 It renders
more holistic notions of labour, and indeed subjectivity, as unfit for purpose
(the purpose here being bottom-line leveraging of surplus value), unless such
labour and subjectivity can be wholly quantified.
3. Self-Presentation and the Public-Private:

Relational Perspectives
This process of the commodification of users has been the subject of
scholarly attention, as outlined. However, the related-but-separate notion of
self-commodification, where users self-identify publicly with specific lifestyle
choices, and document these extensively on platforms such as YouTube or in
connected social media, is more immediately relevant in the context of celeb-
rity YouTubers and their followers. For example, documenting ones FitBit data
or an Instagram of ones healthy breakfast, or vlogging about ones experience
of a fitness challenge are commonplace. This self-disclosure practice is also il-
lustrated when consumer-users post links to personal lifestyle material via the
comments section on a celebritys YouTube channel. This expresses, in a public
space, a parasocial commonality with that celebrity. Whereas distinct public and
private spaces do exist today, and are valued according to their own qualities,
there is also something new in the conceptual sense where public and private
distinctions are no longer upheld as conventions of social relationships, and in-
timacy is signified through a kind of public-private interchangeability on social
media platforms. In this latter scenario, we are dealing with worldviews aligned
to everyday mediatised experiences, negotiated through a sort of consent within
the relations of labour, consumption and exchange outlined above, and shaped
through values associated with celebritization (Driessens, 2012, 2013).
7
Krger & Johanssen (2014) discuss this at length in relation to alienation and digital labour.

Far from being a purely technological phenomenon in the conventional

sense, these issues are fundamentally tied to notions of identity and presenta-
tions of self in everyday life. However, these notions are amplified exponentially
in the context of interpersonal communications via YouTube and other Web
2.0 platforms that facilitate self-commodification through extensive online
documentation. This amplification reveals contradictions running through the
heart of YouTube as a platform for identity mobilisation, as seemingly opposite
notions of public and private are suspended, as are other seemingly dichoto-
mous elements such as the ordinary on the one hand, and the extraordinary on
the other.
Such tensions between public and private, ordinary and extraordinary, are
especially interesting in terms of YouTube celebrity because its effectiveness
often relies upon striking a balance between extremes. It emphasises at specific
moments one over the other, but more often than not extremes are held in a
delicate suspension. A basic requirement of vlogging is that it presents for the
viewer an ordinary person who can be related to on some personal level, at least
in the first few posts before the vlogger is established as a personality. Conven-
tions often include being framed in a talking-head shot, in an everyday setting,
making observations about the quotidian and being relatable to the audience.
This was the case with Shay Carl Butler. His pronounced physical transfor-
mation over time via a very public weight-loss challenge was matched by heav-
ily self-publicised changing family arrangements. New members of his family
were born into his publicly-viewable lifestyle, and alongside Butlers own vlog-
ging professionalization, his family members became professional vloggers too.
The contradictions of celebrity and everyday were also reflected in the choice
of environments within which the vlogs were produced from conventional
talking-heads posts to shopping trips in Times Square, and even more tellingly,
a vlog posted from a media industry award ceremony to which his whole fam-
ily was invited. The change in presentation (if not production values, which
remain resolutely DIY for the majority of his posts) reflects the mediatized
journey that shaycarl has undertaken since 2007. The contradictory elements
suspended in this celebrity-driven media ecosystem are intertwined spectacle
and everyday life, and public and private identities.
For Luke Hockley (2014), this flowing together of public and private
aspects of our identities, and the way we come to regard ourselves and others,

allows a psychological space of consideration for the messy, lived complexity

of social phenomena. I would take this further in suggesting that, in contem-
porary image-driven culture, and within the persistent connectivity associated
with the always-on, the way that humans as intersubjective beings tend to
engage in their dealings with one another amplifies this complexity. This lived
complexity is as important for spaces of imagination as it is for social spaces of
communication, and by extension, the co-produced relationships between indi-
viduals and groups in the social and imaginal realms. In the context of cinema
and cinema cultures, for example, Hockley (2014: 35) states that:
Jung used the term enantiodromia [] to suggest that opposites, far from
pulling in different directions, in fact turn out to run into each other.
When seen in this light it is apparent that the cinema is both a place of
psychological encounter yet equally provides a safe space for this encounter
to happen.
He writes that this pulling together of seemingly contradictory terms is es-
sential to engage the role of culture in determining the expression of collective
psychological encounters: [] in keeping with post-Jungian theory, which
aims not to establish a lack (as in Freudian and particularly Lacanian theory)
but rather to find a productive tension in bringing what might appear to be op-
posites together (Hockley, 2007: 14).
Perhaps the most productive tension in the context of YouTube personali-
ties and celebrity cultures is the blurred distinction between public and private
in the identification, construction and mobilisation of the self. The immediacy
and sheer speed of exchange, amplified through emotionally-charged celebrity
culture, and engaged with by consumers of popular culture who are not only
fans (and anti-fans, haters) of the celebrity figures themselves, means that
consumer-users tend to be adept with the discourses featured in the commu-
nicative practices of platforms. Things tend to escalate very quickly under such
intense circumstances. The GamerGate phenomenon illustrated this tendency
with alarming results.
GamerGate started out as a Twitter hashtag response to a viral blog post,
uploaded by software developer Erin Gjoni in August 2014. In the post (known
colloquially as The Zoe Post, and widely distributed on several online sites and
chat forums, including 4chan) Gjoni detailed his relationship with ex-partner
Zoe Quinn, an independent game designer. Subsequent commentary and re-
sponses from readers of this blog, mainly from the crossover of gaming culture
and Mens Rights Activism, led to allegations that Quinn had given a games
journalist sexual favours in exchange for a favourable review of her free-to-play
game, Depression Quest (Poland, 2016; Stuart, 2014; Kolhatkar, 2014). It later
transpired that the critic had never reviewed the game, but the train of events
spiralled out into widespread death and rape threats on several social media and
chat sites, doxxing (the publication of personal data of Quinn and members of
her family) and even the release of nude pictures of Quinn on so-called revenge
porn websites (Busch, Chee & Harvey, 2016). As Keith Stuart (2014) reported
in the Guardian at the time:
[] proponents of this movement say their key target is games journal-
ism. Gamergate complains about cronyism between certain writers and
developers []. The undercurrent, however, has always been darkly misog-
ynistic. The victims of Gamergates ire have mostly been female developers,
academics and writers.
Although it has largely disappeared from popular cultural view, GamerGate
has remained more than a mere Twitter hashtag. For Shaw and Chess (2016)
it is a constellation of website activities across Tumblr, redditt, the 4chan
and 8chan forums, the subject of memes, and also of crucial importance to its
longevity, a persistent presence across several YouTube channels. The voracity,
extremity and self-belief, for example, that Gamergaters have displayed in their
dedication to discrediting female videogame developers, critics and commenta-
tors is deeply troubling in its aggression (MacCallum-Stewart, 2014; Poland,
2016). Well-known examples of this practice of trolling-as-a-lifestyle goal in-
clude the relentless attacks upon Tropes vs. Women in Video Games Youtuber
and Feminist Frequency vlogger, Anita Sarkeesian (Kolhatkar, 2014; Chess &
Shaw 2015). Indeed Mens Rights Activist YouTubers such as NateTalksToY-
ou, Thunderf00t, and dozens of others have devoted entire YouTube series to
discrediting her work; comments on their posts often appear to endorse cross-
ing multiple social boundaries to attack Sarkeesian on a personal level, punctu-
ated with sexually violent language towards her or her family (Poland, 2016).
The position of Sarkeesian as a public intellectual rests upon her profession-
alized use of Web 2.0 technologies to pursue and leverage audience reach. Her
success is such that demands for content have seen Sarkeesian crowdfunding
future work through Kickstarter campaigns. This itself has led to criticisms of
her work ranging from drifting away from her video essay DIY roots, to criti-
cisms of her using fans money for her own private gain (Kolhatkar, 2014). At
this purely technical level, Sarkeesian cannot win: her opponents use the same
productions conventions as weapons to undermine her position. At another
level, the professionalized nature of her opposite numbers is in itself astonish-
ing. Using the same levers and monetisation tactics as those attacked, these
YouTubers have established norms in harnessing parasocial mechanisms of both
identification and alienation to facilitate parallel careers.
They present as reality the logic of such right-wing critics relies on an
appeal to facts, logic and keeping things real to succeed. But even at a super-
ficial level, the levels of constructed self-presentation enacted by both bloggers
and commenters are similar. Sarkeesian, for example, presents as a public intel-
lectual and critic. Her critics, when forming full critiques of her work, tend to
use similar presentation techniques and conventions to present their cases. In
the Sarkeesian case, as in other right-wing YouTuber cases, this even produces
instances where fan videos are made in tribute to critics (e.g. dedicated to Na-
teTalksToYou) of so-called Social Justice Warriors. The point here is that the
escalation into what can only be described as hate-filled practices on free speech
platforms, ironically predicated on a perceived need to shut someone down, is
sped up through the capabilities of the platform itself, and through appropria-
tion of similar conventions to those used by the targets.
The parasocial involves the application of unsaid protocols informing ap-
propriate behaviours and responses in such contexts. In the case of a YouTubers
interaction with users, this is a one-way system in the first instance, particu-
larly in such massively popular cases as Shay Carl Butler. However, the public
and private distinction is not merely a matter of deception: it is an everyday
description of an interplay between a number of levels operating within social
encounters. Firstly, a number of conventions are invoked through a setting,
for example, affordances of the medium, comment-enabled exchanges; generic
codes and conventions associated with the content of the posted videos; and
discourse associated with the short forms of communication held to be stand-
ard in comments posted on YouTube, and the emotional discourses associated
with celebrity more generally (aspiration, admiration, infatuation etc.). Sec-
ondly, through what might be described as a proxemics of YouTube, social psy-
chology approaches serve to illustrate the added complexities of social context

cues, the level of communication fidelity, non-verbal communications clarity,

the absence of eye-contact in non-visual communications forms, and so on
(e.g. Sproull & Kiesler, 1986; Joinson, 2003). Thirdly, levels of trust and anxi-
ety management (Gudykunst, 1995) are made more complicated through the
character of emotional investment associated with fannish devotion to particu-
lar YouTube personalities. Finally, from a post-Jungian perspective, impression
management might be described as a normal, everyday pathology regarding
this misrepresentation.
In this sense we might consider the intersubjective dimensions of interper-
sonal encounters and the presentation of a version of oneself phenomena
described by post-Jungian and relational schools as the presentation of a mask
or false-self of some kind.
4. Jungs Concept of Persona

When Jung (1953; 1921/1998) described the notion of persona, he referred
to it as a psychological archetype of social adaptation. This persona is not false
in quite the same way as a fake, or as an inauthentic or imaginary construct,
or as a vehicle for intentional deceit.8 The main point in classic Jung is the
emphasis on the dangers of over-identifying with ones persona. He saw this as
coming at the expense of deep self-development in the sense of an unconscious
process. He also saw this in terms of the labels that are given us by others in
social situations labels that stick, and are internalised. It is not so much
the misrepresentation that is problematic here, but the proclivity for human
subjects to fully identify with the misrepresentations involved. Crucial to fully
understanding the presentation of self, therefore, is the acknowledgement of
the role of persona (the aforementioned mask or false-self ) in such contexts.
The key schools of thought in relation to persona and false self are the post-
Jungian and relational traditions associated with Winnicott (1956). For Aaron
Balick (2014b), the Jungian persona and the relational false self are expressions
of ego functions, because they both lie between internal experience (intrapsy-
chic) and the outside world (intersubjective); hence, they can both be conceived
8
Although, it is perhaps worth noting that deception might be thought of in the sense of a conceptual category re-
lated to aspects of all of these descriptions insofar as the archetype existing as part of the self s psychological defences
against both the degradation of the continuity of self, and social ineptitude.

as relational because they develop for the purpose of managing the space be-
tween self and other (2014b: 16).
Jungs own description of persona also reveals and emphasises the relational
aspects of this function. For Jung (1998: 99, my emphasis), the persona is a
[] functional complex that comes into existence for reasons of adapta-
tion or personal convenience, but is by no means identical with the indi-
viduality. The persona is exclusively concerned with the relation to objects.
The relation of the individual to the object must be sharply distinguished
from the relation to the subject.
This concern with objects is key to understanding the Jungian dilemma
of persona. In the first instance, the essence of persona is relational, in that it
forms an interface in the way people communicate and socialise. It enables the
functioning of interpersonal protocol in social settings. In this model of self-
presentation an individual can present to others a version of themselves they
deem appropriate to the given situation. However, the Jungian model empha-
sises the unconscious, psychic function of this versioning process vital for the
health of ordinary social relations and the psychic wellbeing of the individual.
This is because it is an ongoing process, occurring alongside and supporting
every social interaction within which we participate. It is at least the function (if
not exactly the same form) of what Winnicott (1956) described as a false self .
He wrote (1956: 387) that
This false self is in no doubt an aspect of the true self. It hides and protects
it, and it reacts to the adaptation failures and develops a pattern corre-
sponding to the pattern of environmental failure. In this way the true self is
not involved in reacting, and so preserves a continuity of being.
Jung made similar observations when he wrote that, as the social face an
individual presents to the world, persona is a complicated system of relations;
[] a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression
on others, and on the other to conceal the true nature of the individual (1953:
190).
Therefore, one may see similarities between Jungs notion of persona and
Winnicotts false self, where the hidden character of the encounter with selves
is elaborated. Not foregrounded, but made apparent, through a comparison
of these descriptions in both lines of thought is a discernible enantiodromic

running-together of an impression-intention and a concealment-intention. It

is true that concealment has negative connotations associated with deception
and acts of anti-social behaviour. However, concealment also provides for a hid-
ing, a protection, which, although present in Jungs notion of persona, is made
much more explicit in Winnicotts notion of false self. Both systems attempt to
account for the dialogical complexity of interpersonal presentation and impres-
sion management in social contexts, and Balicks work draws from the relational
aspects of both to create a three-dimensional sense of how these encounters
work in online social communications.
For Balick, persona is suited to the individual: even as it distorts the view of
the true self for others, it is never fully a false self that is presented. In this sense,
both Jungs and Winnicotts systems account for a relation to a partial accuracy.
Therefore, the term false is not intended to signify inauthentic. Inauthentic-
ity ought to be reserved for cases where the individual identifies with the false
self as if that is all there were. For Balick, Pathology develops only when the in-
dividual identifies with their persona at the expense of other attributes of their
personality: when they believe the persona to be the whole thing (2014b: 16).
It is not a straightforward matter to reconcile conceptualisations of persona
and false self as being the same in terms of form. Winnicotts false self is very
much an aspect of self that one might relate to the notion of identity, whereas
Jungs persona needs to be considered as a more fundamental adaptation arche-
type. Therefore, while it is fair to say that they are not the same, I would argue
that they are related nonetheless.9
This matter leads us to the second instance in Jung, and his concern with
objects specifically. Where there is over-identification of an individual with their
persona, as can happen in the everyday psychology of personality, this mis-
recognition has implications for the differentiation in consciousness between
individual and person, which Jung took pains to distinguish in his essay on
Psychological Types (1971). In human interactions, healthy personae are char-
acterised by both robustness and strong differentiation. However, social media
9
Some schools of relational thought, particularly Kohuts self-psychology (1977, and elsewhere), and Jacobys read-
ing of Kohut and Jung (2006) articulate the similarities and differences in these two conceptions with remarkable
clarity, using relational terminology to describe the articulation of self and identity. I have little space to dedicate to
this matter here. However, it is worth stating the value of Kohuts work in this regard as an under-explored area for
developing a robust theoretical framework for online identity. I discuss his work in more detail elsewhere (Singh,
forthcoming). I ought to acknowledge a debt of gratitude here to Luke Hockley, who introduced me to Kohuts work
some time ago.

communications have an in-built tendency for communication shorthand, and

this tendency systematically favours the personally convenient, and the im-
mediacy of identification with persona as a quick-response, easy version of the
self. On this basis, assumed versions of oneself and others have a tendency to
become estranged; and relations become objectified. This bears out in Luptons
work on the quantified self (2016), which considers the layers of objectification
and profiling in self-tracking processes ultimately governed through routines
of data automation, rather than necessarily through user agency. Self, in this
sense, is systemic and simulated, rather than expressed in any strong sense by
the user; and these routines are the governing principle at the data level in all
social media platforms, YouTube included.
The function of persona as social interface is a description of relational
aspects of interpersonal communication, and also has an intrapsychic func-
tion. As Balick notes: Both the [Winnicott model of ] false self and [Jungian]
persona function in an outside-facing way by utilising the reality principle to
prevent id-oriented aims (2014b: 16 [my emphasis]). Here Balick overtly
uses Freudian terminology to articulate tensions inherent in the self-identity
dynamic, where the self is partially founded upon basic drives something
Jungian psychotherapists sometimes refer to as affectivity.10 However, there are
further questions to be addressed regarding how these intrapsychic processes are
transformed in routines of a commodified-self. For example, how does this self
become sublated by relations between individuals and personae to appease the
needs of what might be described as a performance principle?
Balick makes a similar argument largely in the context of identity expression
though front-end profile information (status updates, field form information
in comments, etc.). However, a thicker description is possible regarding the
nature of this identification at the data level where the extent of consumer-
user agency is curtailed even further by regimes of automation and filtering that
go largely unchecked and are invisible to users. Not only is there a danger that
users will identify with the presentation on social media as the whole thing,
but social media itself, through its algorithms and filtering mechanisms, identi-
fies the profiled user as the whole thing. Innovations such as semantic media and
artificial intelligence may be ingenious, but they do not and cannot constitute
human consciousness as a recognising presence in the same sense.
For example, C.T. Stewart refers to affectivity as the primary motivation system in humans, the energy behind all
10
agency, expressed as innate affects (2008: 5).

5. YouTube Celebrity, Reality Programming

and the Performance Principle
In this light, I contend that the commodified self, addressed through rou-
tines of automation (such as targeted advertising, suggested links, recommen-
dations and so on) experiences an estrangement from the world of the social
at the level of data profiling. There are a number of precedents outlining this
direction of argument (e.g. Krger & Johanssen, 2014; Andrejevic, 2011),
particularly in relation to affectivity. From my perspective, data profiling as a
practice and process actively encourages the Jungian pathology of persona iden-
tification; in classical terminology, this automated commodification of identity
comes at the expense of the soul or psyche of the consumer. In a less poetic
description it is an affront to the notion of agency in an everyday sense and
runs counter to assertions that participation in social media can lead to strong
freedoms of expression.
This is also the case at the more front-end level of online interpersonal
encounters, where the performed version of the self is the version presented
to, and acknowledged by, the other, in mutual exchange. There is a doubling
effect to the character of this estrangement where the individual over-identifies
with the false-self presented in interaction with other false-selves. In this way,
doubling occurs in an amplifying circle of estranged social relations and recog-
nition politics. This is a kind of compliance towards the state of affairs inherent
in the system, in which the compliant self carries with it the very real danger of
potential for misrecognition by individuals, groups and society as representative
of the whole thing.
The important issue is not so much the fact that people have a false self or
persona, but that SNSs are geared towards emphasising these aspects of inten-
tionality and agency over and above others. Whereas Jung and Winnicott ac-
count in different ways for the problems associated with over identifying with
persona and the false self, the converse is also true. We see this in the disinhib-
ited behaviours of fans commenting on their favourite YouTube videos, where
they open themselves up to the extent that they become vulnerable to uncaring,
toxic responses.11 Ultimately, this points to another dialectic in relation to
performed intimacies and public shows of affection in fans comments towards
Such practices of self-disclosure are the subject of a range of scholarly approaches to social media behaviours (boyd,
11
2014; boyd & Donath, 2004; Baym, 2010; Papacharissi, 2010; Walker Rettberg, 2008 and 2014), and so I will

their YouTube celebrities. The nature of this parasocial performance is con-

nected to the maintenance of a specific impression that adheres to conventions
of public presentation. This points again to the tension between authentic and
inauthentic, where distinctions between the private self and public persona are
marked by a perceived authenticity of the former, and a relative inauthenticity
of the latter. Erving Goffman, whose work is influential in the field of social
media studies, writes (1997: 2223 [Lemert and Branaman eds.]) that
In their capacity as performers, individuals will be concerned with main-
taining the impression that they are living up to the many standards by
which they and their products are judged. [] But, qua performers, indi-
viduals are concerned not with the moral issue of realizing these standards,
but with the amoral issue of engineering a convincing impression that these
standards are being realized.
There is a standardization or convention of behaviours, emphasising the
version of the self as performed to be the specific object intended for the other
partys attention, rather than standards in any moral sense. It has been pointed
out (e.g. by Athique, 2013) that this might in itself lead to a superficial or di-
minished interpersonal exchange, because of Goffmans implication that there
is an original self, lying at the heart of personality the performed version is
something quite apart. However, this does not fully engage the reciprocal in-
trapsychic nature of the versioning process as maintaining an accommodation
of inner and external worlds (within the social imaginary), and the space that
Goffman himself gives over to this reciprocation. Goffman goes on to state
that, At one extreme, one finds that the performer can be fully taken in by his
own act; he can be sincerely convinced that the impression of reality that he
stages is the real reality (1997: 95). This is, of course, an internalisation, of the
performed version of the self as the whole thing the very phenomenon that
both Jung and Winnicott guard against. The immediacy and semi-permanence
of the contemporary media ecosystem not only affords such practices, but ac-
tively rewards them.
This is found especially in practices of celebrity YouTubers themselves,
whose success often depends upon the creation of strong and stable mytholo-
gies about their own personal journeys an interaction standard as much as a
not explore them in too much detail here, except to observe the relatively obvious and underexplored avenues for
considering public displays of intimacy and disclosure from a post-Jungian perspective on the false self and persona.

skilled narrative to build fan viewership over the course of several videos. In
some cases, this journey can take years. It involves a performed, explicitly stated
conviction that one is on a journey; and this conviction in turn encourages end-
users to invest emotionally in the notion that they are sharing that journey a
telos embodied by the metaphor of a journey. In a protracted series of vlogs over
the course of several years, shaycarl gives his weight-loss journey extensive cov-
erage. These materials detail Butlers reflective experience of starting out, gain-
ing conviction and a sense of mission, achieving goals, overcoming stumbling
blocks and so forth. The conviction with which Butler dedicates himself to bod-
ily transformation is concomitant with his steady rise to fame. The corporate
mission to which he applies his efforts is both well-documented, and received
with enthusiasm amongst his fans. The more they engage with his work, the
more his fans are rewarded with further content. This might be said to be the
case for much of the transmedial content produced in the contemporary media
ecosystem, which is, by a general rule of thumb, reliant upon the convergence
of media platforms and the synergy involved at the level of industrial and cor-
porate convergence (Jenkins, 2006; Jenkins, Ito & boyd, 2015). However, in
the context of YouTubes specific role in Maker Studios output, these interac-
tions mask, at barely a hairs breadth, the underlying secondary effects of this
journey that all of the activity generates phenomenal amounts of data about
end-users, which is quantified into information, and is convertible into surplus
value of specific interest to YouTube as a corporate platform, and therefore
Maker Studios business model.
There are other kinds of performances in celebrity YouTuber activities.
Some are more discernibly theatrical and performative to the user-consumer
than the kinds of performances that are constructed as real (I refer to the
Shaytards here as a typical example of the latter). In such cases the performances
are presented as deliberate, and often, deliberately awful. The synthetic nature
of this may be summarised as parody or at the very least, a playful interaction
with the conventions and values associated with the platform, and the end-user
is both fully aware of the levels of performativity, and the direction in which
the joke is aimed.
A clear example of this kind of performance can be found in the work of
another popular YouTuber, Miranda Sings (played by Colleen Evans). The
function of Mirandas performance is not to deceive the audience, but to play

on conventions of reality programming forms. Mirandas shtick is to perform

popular songs, in an act where she is convinced of her popularity due to being
such a likeable YouTuber (she is purposively neurotic, over-sensitive, irritable
and generally unlikeable) and a pop star in the making (her renditions are de-
liberately awful). In this case, the target of the parody is both the concept of
YouTube celebrity itself, and the presentational form through which standards
impress their meaning through gesture, iconography, and generic convention.
In this sense, then, Mirandas persona is much more playfully in tune with
formal aspects of drag performance, and certainly operates at a level of camp-
ness that is both knowing, and excessive. Evans has her own YouTube channel
(PsychoSoprano),12 has produced vlogs specifically addressing the artifice em-
bedded in the Miranda performance e.g. make-up tutorials on how to emulate
Mirandas look (Becoming Miranda Sings! published Feb 22, 2013) and often
breaks the illusory authenticity of Miranda through appearing simultaneously
as both herself and Miranda, using split-screen technology.13
We may think about the nature of Evans performance in a number of ways,
operating at different levels in terms of interacting with the platform itself (You-
Tuber performance, end-user performance in comments etc.). However, one
might begin to take this interaction further, by considering Herbert Marcuses
notion of performance principle. This idea moves criticism towards the implica-
tions of how the technical mechanics of practices found in the interactions of
presentation, misrepresentation, quantified profiling and emotional investment
in YouTube engagements interact at the level of the psychological. His approach
lends itself to a political economic trajectory of the psychological projects that
find root in both Jung and Freud. The performance principle, according to
Marcuse, is the prevailing form of the reality principle (1955: 35) and can
therefore be said to characterise a development of Freuds original concept,
which dates back to his Formulations Regarding the Two Principles of Mental
Functioning essay (1911), itself claimed by Vannoy Adams (2004: 12) to be a
development of Jungs work, Concerning Two Kinds of Thinking (also 1911).
It is intriguing to think about Marcuses work in relation to firstly, the per-
formativity of social media interactions within routines of data automation and
12
As of October 2016, Miranda has featured in her new Netflix Originals series Haters Back Off.
13
For example, Miranda and Colleen Q+A, posted Feb 10, 2015; and Miranda and Colleen sing together! posted
Jan 31, 2013.

governance (i.e. a quantified self ) and secondly, the performance of self at the
level of subjective encounter (i.e. YouTube personalities). The way Marcuse de-
scribes his notion of performance principle could have been written with these
two factors in mind. He is worth quoting in full (1955: 45) here:
The performance principle [] presupposes a long development during
which domination has been increasingly rationalized: control over social
labor now reproduces society on a large scale and under improving condi-
tions. For a long way, the interests of domination and the interests of the
whole coincide: the profitable utilization of the productive apparatus fulfils
the needs and faculties of individuals. For the vast majority of the popula-
tion, the scope and mode of satisfaction are determined by their own labor;
but their labor is work for an apparatus which they do not control, which
operates as an independent power to which individuals must submit if
they want to live. And it becomes the more alien the more specialized the
division of labor becomes. Men do not live their own lives but perform pre-
established functions. While they work, they do not fulfil their own needs
and faculties but work in alienation.
As with most Marxian approaches, work in the sense that it is necessary to
subsist is superseded here by a kind of work that is surplus to that need the
digital labour of social media users, who produce monetised data sold at a
remove to third parties. Simultaneously, such labour is performed in relation
to another kind of work the labour of YouTube personalities and their pub-
lic relations teams, in co-ordinating the production of content and enriched
pathways to merchandising and third party sites and other revenue strategies.
Ironically, although the industrialized nature of this activity may be classed as
another kind of surplus work because of its inherent estrangement from the
products of individuals labour, it is also performed, in the sense that it serves the
purpose of professionalized activity for the individual personalities involved.
The distinction Marcuse implies between work that is needed for ones satis-
faction and work that is needed for the apparatus happens to coincide, fulfilling
the career needs of the YouTuber, and the profit needs of industrial sponsors,
of various descriptions. However, the instrumentalized relations through which
the YouTuber-as-a-worker tends to, and supports, the needs of the apparatus
involved (a content platform to generate user-interest for the purpose of mon-
etising their data) is doubly estranged when bringing the status of the other
YouTube worker (the end-user) as a product into the equation. If YouTubers

themselves are conforming to the needs of the apparatus through content
production and the performance of conventions associated with professional
vlogging, YouTube end-users are also conforming to their own assigned roles
as commodified objects. When applied to this relationship in social media
relations of production-consumption, one can see how the notion of perfor-
mance principle can help describe how desire is manipulated to establish what
Marcuse (1964) described as one-dimensionality the one-dimensionality of
a commodified self, or a false self, or, in the over-identification with persona as
the whole thing. The parasocial aspects of relationships formed in social media
contexts alone give rise to aspects of desire-fulfilment that are necessary as a step
(one among many) towards that instrumentality.
6. Conclusion
The extremes of performance of self that Goffman suggests are in some ways
deconstructed by the playful conventions of vlogging, such that whereas no-one
in particular is deceived by a performed act or character, we are also as audiences
no longer required to hold such performances in cynicism. Networks on You-
Tube become more like nebulae in that the apparatus through which to read
performances becomes ever more subtle and nuanced, just as the performances
themselves become more standardized and conventional over time.
In the final analysis, there are a number of political questions that need to
be addressed further. Political economy critique of the role of data profiling in
relation to the quantifying and commodification of selves in social media con-
texts has established itself in media studies (e.g. Dyer-Witheford, 1999, 2010;
Allmer, 2015). Parasocial approaches to social media interaction are also emerg-
ing as key themes for critical theory to develop (e.g. Bocarnea & Brown, 2007;
Click, Lee & Holladay, 2013; Stever, 2011). Theories of parasocial phenomena,
and the emotional investment built through such interpersonal relationships
with unknown and unknowable public personalities, tend not to feature in
political economy approaches and vice versa; and therefore neither paradigm
alone adequately foregrounds the social imaginary of connectivity within plat-
forms such as YouTube, as a rich psychosocial space for critical inquiry and
further exploration.

Data profiling as a process actively encourages what Jungian perspectives

consider the pathology of persona identification; and in classical Jungian ter-
minology, data profiling comes at the expense of the soul or psyche of the
consumer. There is a sense in which this description holds true in its poetic,
experiential sense. The trade-off argument in Web 2.0 discourse (goods and
services are gratis, with the proviso that end-users give up certain rights to con-
trol data associated with their activities, movements, opinions, meaning, and
even world-views) very rarely goes so far, except perhaps in circumstances where
critics take more polemical stances towards the status quo. Although there is a
danger here of reproducing the notion of an authentic/inauthentic binary, what
is needed, perhaps, is a holistic, enantiodromic approach to the notion of what
might constitute an inauthentic self, particularly in response to the need for
a more dynamic and dialectical consideration of self and identity relations in
online interpersonal communications.
In terms of a politics of recognition and the commodification of identity
mobilisation in online communications, there is a question concerning the
practices of versioning that YouTube practices seem to lay bare, as a goal-
oriented performance towards quantified status and the professionalization
of such performative practices. The character of professionalization of vloggers
primarily working on YouTube14 reflects the wider cultural shift in Web 2.0
from creating and expressing as aspects of democratised communicative prac-
tice, to the monetising and industrial recuperation of technologies and practices
as ends in themselves. This much has been commented upon and critiqued by
various segments of the political spectrum (Jenkins, Ito & boyd, 2016; Lovink
2011, 2016; Dyer-Witheford, 1999, 2010; van Dijck, 2013). What I hope to
have outlined in this article are three directions of the performance of online
selves that may be explored further, and in turn, for which post-Jungian and
relational schools of thought might shed further light.
14
Zoella, Sprinkleofglitter and other big-name celebrity vloggers in the field of fashion, lifestyle and cosmetics are
perhaps typical here.

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Acknowledgements
My thanks go to Dr Eddy Borges Rey at the University of Stirling for taking the
time to check through the drafts for this article, and also to Prof Luke Hockley for his
generous comments. A special note of thanks to Rachel Hyndeman for her excellent
undergraduate and postgraduate work, and giving me the benefit of her expertise re-
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to the Guest Editors of this special issue for inviting me to contribute.

A Digital Death Drive?

Hubris and Learning
in Psychoanalysis and Cybernetics
Colin John Campbell1

York University / OCAD University, Canada
doi:10.5937/comman12-11241
Abstract: This paper offers a critique of the fetishisation of the digital in Western
culture by bringing together Freudian and Marcusian psychoanalytic theory with Greg-
ory Batesons cybernetics. In particular, it correlates the cybernetic concepts of analog and
digital information with the psychoanalytic conceptual pair of Eros and Thanatos. The
psychoanalytic concept of the death drive appears through the cybernetic lens as a fetish-
istic tendency towards freezing or regressing to lower levels of complexity and sensitivity
of learning. With the help of Marcuse and Bateson, I understand the contemporary
prevalence of a digital death drive as an inhibition of learning in terms of the nature
of the digital and its severing from the analog context. By contrast, by reading Marcuses
concept of Eros as having multiple logical levels (Eros1,2,3) in the cybernetic sense and by
comparing these levels with Batesons multiple logical levels of learning (Learning1,2,3),
we come to see Marcusean erotic liberation or revolutionary love not as resulting from
simple acts or statements of rebellion against repressive socio-political norms, but rather
as being profound, lifelong learning processes, fraught with complexity and difficulty.
Keywords: analog, digital, cybernetics, Eros, Thanatos, psychoanalysis, trauma,

death drive, hubris, learning
1

A Digital Death Drive? Colin John Campbell
1. Introduction
It goes without saying that digital technologies are having an unprecedented
influence on social and political life across the globe today. With the internet
of things we approach a point of convergence between the media and every
other kind of technology. However, the fact that terms such as the digital, the
internet of things and virtual reality apparently do not go without saying in
the media today, and that on the contrary they are ubiquitous promotional
metaphors, suggests a psychoanalytic symptom, or even a fetish in the classic
sense (Freud, 1925/1989: 249-50). Arguably, the repetitive, quasi-magical use
of these words points to something happening at deeper psychic levels, some-
thing that has not been entirely worked through even something traumatic.
I believe this fixation runs much deeper than the technological develop-
ments of the last several decades. The un-worked-through discourse of the
digital today is the contemporary avatar of a much more ancient conflict
involving the relation between language and experience that spans the human
experience in its entirety and which has made for particular difficulties in the
history of western thought and psycho-social life. In some sense, however, this
conflict is coming to a head in the symptom of the digital fetish. In this paper
I propose that the fetishization of the digital is a symptom of what Sigmund
Freud (1920/1989: 618) and his interpreter Herbert Marcuse (1955: 22) called
the death instinct.
The death drive, Thanatos, is presented in Freudian theory as the antagonist
of the life drive Eros, which both Freud and Marcuse agree has in a sense been
suppressed in the process of civilization, due to the requirements of civilization.
In Eros and Civilization, Marcuse (1955) disagreed with Freuds pessimism re-
garding an alteration in the terms of this conflict, and argued that civilization
could be radically transformed in an erotic direction, such that the force of
Thanatos (expressed in wars, ruthless competitive acquisition, the glorification
of righteous cruelty and careless indifference to risk, etc.) would be to some
extent tamed or pacified by Eros.
For Marcuse this involved the problem of distinguishing between basic
and surplus repression, a task whose complexity has arguably been underes-
timated by some who cite him without much attention to the details of the
whole psychoanalytic theory of Eros and Civilization. It is in order to illuminate
this complexity of the digital as a socially and psychically repressive process

Colin John Campbell A Digital Death Drive?
that I am setting the Freudian-Marcusean psychoanalytic approach alongside

the cybernetic psychology of Gregory Bateson. In this frame, the death drive,
Thanatos, can be translated into cybernetic terms as the inhibition of learning.
Eros, on the other hand, comes into view as a continuous process of learning on
multiple logical levels. Cybernetics draws out explicitly the dimensions of learn-
ing that remain implicit in Marcuses erotic reorientation of Freud. Marcusean
theory in turn deepens cybernetics as a theory of multi-dimensional learning
and emphasizes the dangers of a digital fetish that reduces learning to the acqui-
sition of bits of knowledge, to competency and control.
2. Digital, Analog and Wholeness in Cybernetic Systems

Referring etymologically to the fingers, those ancient instruments of count-
ing and manipulation, the word digital as it is widely used today means a
black box in which digitization happens. Digitization is seen as an electro-
mechanical process that occurs inside the media and devices we label digital.
With help from the cybernetic scientist Gregory Bateson (1971), we can see
how this fetishistic use of the term serves to conceal the profound significance
of the digital to human culture in every age of technological development.
Batesonian cybernetics specifies that verbal language is the primary experience
of the digital: culture has always been an internet of minds.2 Digital comput-
ers are merely an extension (admittedly massive in scale) of our already-existing
linguistic activity. Digital communication comes broken into discrete manipu-
lable bits, like words or numerals. It is characterized by the arbitrariness of the
sign as it was formalized by Ferdinand de Saussures (2011) linguistic theory.
The digital can be generally described in terms of that form of communication
that fragments the whole into parts:
A signal is digital if there is discontinuity between it and alternative signals
from which it must be distinguished. Yes and no are examples of digital
signals. In contrast, when a magnitude or quantity in the signal is used to
represent a continuously variable quantity in the referent, the signal is said
to be analogic. (Bateson, 1979: 2278)
2
Indian-Californian scientist Vilayanur Ramachandran offers a theory of an internet of minds in relation to mirror
neurons in the brain, and in particular the theory of an evolutionary burst of mirror neuron development that oc-
curred in conjunction with the emergence of verbal language and complex tool use (see Ramachandran, 2009).

Sensory experience comes to us whole, without outlines, without catego-

ries or discrete delimitation. But from an early age verbal language extends the
fingers and hands in the sense that it facilitates the breaking of the world into
discrete objects of contemplation.3
Verbal language has the peculiar quality not only of fragmenting the whole
into parts, but also of counterfeiting and standing in for the wholeness of non-
verbal experience. The digital cut, in other words, can conceal itself while mak-
ing itself, by giving an apparently complete and seamless image of the whole
of something. The word something itself, the notion of a whole thing, is an
example of this peculiar quality, as if there is some thing that could be whole
in itself, sufficient to itself and not in dynamic, internal, outline-less relation to
the analog whole that exceeds it.
The way the digital cuts into the analog is exemplified in the contrast be-
tween a compact disc or mp3 recording and a magnetic tape or LP recording.
The sound produced by the analog LP is a direct transform of vibrations in the
needle. One can see (with a microscope) the waveform in the record groove
that is quite literally the impression made by the sound of the music, passing
through a needle, pulled across a wax template for the vinyl record. Analog
audio-tape transfers sound vibration into magnetic variations on the tape sur-
face in a similar fashion. However, with the advent of digitization, the pattern
of magnetic differences on the tape or disc ceases to have any direct perceptible
similarity to the sound, even under a microscope or via a magnetic image. As
digital, it has become arbitrary in something like Saussures sense meaning
that the data must pass through a series of algorithms to transform it back into
meaningful sound.
It is important to be aware that, depending on the level of resolution of
the digital sample, more or less information is inevitably lost in the process of
digitization. Digitization, in other words, is a process of abstraction and simpli-
fication. In moving from the noisy, ultra-high resolution patterns of the analog
to the grainier bit-rates of the digital, it is always necessary to specify a cutoff,
which is determined by the finite capacity of the processor and the practical
limits of time. Whether this cutoff matters to the human ear depends very
much on a host of contextual factors. One such factor is commercialization
3
The psychologist Daniel Stern reconstructs the experience of the prelinguistic and paralinguistic infant using an
impressive synthesis of experimental observation and linguistic experimentation in his Diary of a Baby (Stern, 1990).

where the criterion of the quality of the sound of music may be obscured by ease
of transmission-replication.
Digital communication can be vastly more efficient than analog and this
explains in large part the immense evolutionary success of humans, whose
linguistic extensions of experience permit an entirely new kind of adaptive
process: culture. However, adaptive efficiency comes with a psychic cost, in the
way it simplifies and cuts up the whole of experience. As we will see, the digital
cutoff bears a very intimate relation with the Freudian notion of trauma (Freud,
1920/1989: 607), a kind of cut or wound that can numb our experience of
the wound itself. The issue of abstraction for the purpose of transmission-
replication-exchange (at the expense of use-value) is also notably related to
Karl Marxs notion of the commodity fetish (see Marx, 1990). Indeed the whole
notion of the commodity is deeply dependent on the digital logic of discrete
countable units. Alternatively, in a Heideggerian vein, being digitized nature
becomes a standing reserve (Heidegger, 1993) that can be exchanged and
measured in identical units (whether it is in barrels or gigabytes). In Batesons
(1971: 365) terms, Freuds, Marxs and Heideggers overlapping concerns can
be summarized as the overextension or fetishizing of the digital and neglect of
the analogical ways of thinking and communicating. Digital communication is
not only profoundly useful; in fact in some sense that it defines human nature.
However, the digital fetish numbs us to the profound relation between body and
machine, technology and nature. It obscures the relation because it locates the
digital simply in the machine and not in relation to the linguistic processes of the
nervous system.
Of course, the digital fetish is a perfectly natural potentiality of digital
processes. Only a digital framework, after all, can produce the fiction of a digi-
tal entity contained in the limits of a machinesomething whole, complete
in itself, seamlessly self-contained. Gregory Bateson always insisted that, like
any communicational phenomena, the digital exists as a relation and in a con-
text, not as a simply located entity. For humans and all known mammals, this
context is an analog one; the sinuous and noisy contexts of our experience and
relationship cannot be digitized without loss. There is always a cutoff. A trauma.
Nonverbal gestures and signs are not arbitrary like words, and their mag-
nitude (the intensity of the expression) actually affects their meaning in a way
that is not the same as or even comparable to words for example as on the

printed page, surrounded by regularized-digitized white space. The word big,

displayed in the mostly digital context of a printed-displayed white page, is not
bigger than the word small. However, a face convulsed with emotion speaks
with a greater magnitude than one that politely indicates mild pity. The level of
the analog is that of gestures and signs that in a sense are continuous with our
whole comportment, our whole body-mind. In mammals particularly this is a
level of what Bateson (1971: 3702) calls relationship (a term which he some-
times uses interchangeably with relationships in the plural).This relationship
consists of the rich interplay of gesture, sound, touch and smell that encom-
passes mammalian social relations.4 Among humans, this continuous interplay
is usually unconscious. Human use of verbal language introduces a digital cut-
off by way of a sub- or super-system; verbal language samples the unspoken
level of relationship, and the set of samples shapes the larger part of what
we call consciousness. Consciousness is a map of or abstraction from what is
actually going on at the level of relationship, always with a limited resolution.
Using verbal-digital language, cybernetics tells us that we cannot not cut
off. Bateson emphasizes: we should not forget it! (1971: 42639). Forgetting
the cutoff leads very easily to a distortion of priorities and a steep loss of infor-
mation quality in the name of a quantitative gain in replication-exchange. The
flattening generated by quick summaries of complex relationships in simple
words (justice, crime, God, evil, agency, power, etc.) obscures the com-
plex structures of relations characterizing all mammalian social contexts, and
particularly human ones. The analog needs to be mapped as richly as is feasibly
possible for the sake of sane communication.
To sum up, according to cybernetic theory, digitization can be defined as
the action of fragmentation, an inherent part of the human neural constitution,
the part that deals in parts. Our perception of separate objects as such is made
possible by our capacity to name them, and with this comes the human capacity
for education and culture. All in all, the unique danger for humans is that our
conscious linguistic activities, always reducing the complexity of relationship,
might radically uproot us from the wholeness of the analog context. Human his-
tory is littered with cases of overconfidence in verbal formulations such as the
4
Bateson suggested that insects might use digital rather than analog communication for relationship; but this in
turn only highlights the profound intertwinement between the undigitized motions of the skinned-furred body
and mammalian social activity. See Problems in Cetacean and Other Mammalian Communication (Bateson, 1971:
364378).

enemy of my enemy is my friend, or you are either with us or with the enemy.
The fetish for the digital betrays an excessive confidence in the autonomous
power of digital machines and also in the autonomous power of verbal logic
in the brain without perceiving at all the intrinsic relations between machine
and verbal logic, and between logic, emotion, and the self-as-a-whole. A failure,
in other words, to achieve wholeness.5 This failure, radicalized and unaware of
itself as such, is what Bateson called hubris.
Figure 1: The Dynamics of the Ecological Crisis (Bateson, 1971: 491)
FAMINE
POPULATION
POLLUTION
TECHNOLOGY HUBRIS
WAR
5
Bateson clarifies his view of cybernetics as wholeness in Beyond the Double-Bind: But note that the word cybernet-
ics has become seriously corrupted since it was put into circulation by Norbert Wiener. And Weiner himself is partly
to blame for this corruption of the conception in that he associated cybernetics with control. I prefer to use the
term cybernetic to describe complete circuiting systems. For me, the system is man-and-environment; to introduce
the notion of control would draw a boundary between these two, to give a picture of man versus environment
(Bateson, 1978: 523).

3. Hubris: the Digital Death Drive

Hubris is Batesons label for the psychic structure that accounts for the
contemporary digital fetish. In classical Aristotelian philosophy hubris is a
kind of problem internal to the individual, an error of human frailty (Aristo-
tle, 1963: 238). Bateson generalizes the definition: hubris is an overestimation
of the capacity of the part to represent and/or control the whole. Hubris is
therefore equally the refusal to accept Alfred Korzybskis verbal mantra, what-
ever you say it is, it is not.6 Hubris is the belief that the word or map contains
all the detail of the territory, leading to what Korzybski called unsane modes
of human interaction, comprising ever-expanding territorial possessiveness, ag-
gression and murder.
Hubris comprises both the voice of Authority what Bateson refers to as
the top dogs or upper dogs and the voice of Challenge to Authority which
Bateson labels the underdogs (Bateson, 1971: 4267). It is Hitler when he is
a young, psychically wounded artist, and the same Hitler when he is stand-
ing astride Germany and presiding over the slaughter of millions. It is Marx in
1848, and Marx in October of 1961 at the site of the explosion of the Tsar
Bomb by the Soviet Union. It is the arrogance of corporate elites, but also the
tendency to view public life as invested with a much greater sense of control
and direction than actually exists. Hubris always fatally misunderestimates
the stochasticity of the fine-grained flux of the analog. It is the persistence in
believing, in the face of all experience, that the unknown unknowns will finally
be mastered. This is the substance of its repetition compulsion a failure to ac-
cept the digital cutoff. This failure, unable to accept itself as such, issues forth in
ever more simplistic, polarized and binary renderings of the social context that
remain as tragic today as they were in ancient Athens.
There is a rich theoretical link between Batesons cybernetic-holistic-gener-
al-semantic concept of hubris and Freuds concept of the death drive, the ob-
stinate and aggressive antagonist of the life-drive, Eros, destructive to the self as
well as others, expressed as a compulsion to repeat (Freud, 1920/1989: 604).
6
Korzybski and his associated general semantics movement deeply influenced Gregory Bateson. Science never
proves anything, and The Map is not the Territory are the first two lessons that every schoolboy should know,
according to the first section of Batesons magnum opus, Mind and Nature (Bateson, 1979: 2731). To help correct
for the sometimes-low resolution of that particular digital form we call North American English, Korzybski would
apply a set of subscript numerals (1n, n meaning wherever we stop counting) to any given term. I am employing
this device here to help envision a simultaneity of the psychoanalytic and cybernetic visions (Eros1,2,3 and Learn-
ing1,2,3).

In the present cultural conjuncture, a prevalent form of the compulsion is to

repeat the label digital with ever-higher amplitude and ever-lower resolution.7
The prevalent digital fetish is not only a symptom of trauma in the individual
psyche, as both Freud and Herbert Marcuse surmised (Freud, 1929/1989; Mar-
cuse, 1955), but it is also operating at the level of human civilization generally.
I want to suggest that looking at the problem through the Batesonian-cyber-
netic and the Freudian-psychoanalytic lenses simultaneously has the virtue that
Bateson attributed to binocular vision (1979: 6970). The duplication of an
information receptor (an eye for example) at a slight distance, seeing the same
object from only a slightly different position, results in not only additional or
redundant information, but also a multiplicative and qualitative increase: the
perception of depth.
The task of this kind of back-and-forth translation between the Freudian
death drive and Batesons digital hubris is challenging because Freud and Bate-
son developed their psychological theories in fundamentally different scientific-
practical contexts. Cybernetics tends to model whole systems in which every
part is explicitly-simultaneously influencing every other part. The separation
of the system into parts appears as a digital-linguistic abstraction that cybernet-
ics makes explicit as part of its process-thinking, distinct from and related to
the analog context. The complex distinction and link between the part and the
whole is sustained in cybernetics monistically, by way of mathematical notation
and terminology, which in particular has to do with the organization of parts
and wholes in sets, patterns, etc. Freud, for his part, presents a quasi-mythic
dualistic system whose elements, as eternal antagonists, are separate and in-
separable at the same time. It is as if, we might say, Freud fuses or con-fuses the
digital and the analog where cybernetics distinguishes them; or equally, that
Freud begins from a perspective of analogical wholeness where cybernetics, due
to the analytical nature of its language, risk minimizing or even missing the
traumatic quality of its own way of thinking.8
Nevertheless, the deep intuitive insight in Freuds images of the mythic an-
tagonism between Eros and Thanatos, drawn equally from folklore, literature
and his patients character structures, often brings him very close to cyber-
netic notions of positive and negative feedback, of self-amplifying and self-
7
As T. W. Adorno (2005: 65) wrote, Always speak of it, never think of it.
8
In The Cybernetic Brain, Andrew Pickering (2010) writes, One can almost say that everyone can have their own
history of cybernetics.

correcting systems. This is especially evident in Beyond the Pleasure Principle,

in his treatment of Breuers notions of freely mobile and bound or tonic
cathexis (Freud, 1920/1989: 611), which clearly resemble positive and negative
feedback respectively. A nascent notion of homeostasis is implied in Freuds
discovery that the life instincts are conservative in the same sense as other
instincts in that they bring back earlier states of living substance; but they are
conservative to a higher degree in that they are peculiarly resistant to external
influences (Freud, 1920/1989: 615). Freuds discovery of the unconscious
clearly anticipated and influenced Bateson, who in 1967 declared that, people
are self-corrective systems. They are self-corrective against disturbance, and if
the obvious is not of a kind that they can easily assimilate without internal dis-
turbance, their self-corrective mechanisms work to sidetrack it, to hide it, even
to the extent of shutting the eyes if necessary, or shutting off various parts of the
process of perception (Bateson, 1971: 429).
According to Freuds final hypothesis, as expressed in Civilization and its
Discontents (Freud 1929/1989), the telluric duel of Eros and Thanatos traps
humans in an irresolvable double-bind. Unrestricted Eros threatens social
bonds, because it constantly induces fresh claims and desires, destabilizing fixed
relationships and character features. Thanatos appears from the beginning as
a craving for stillness and order and the cessation of tensions. But Thanatos
unchecked would be a desire to return to the womb and ultimately to regress
behind life itself, to become inorganic (Marcuse, 1955: 25). By the very same
token, the root of all social bonds is ultimately libidinal, and it is Eros that
makes it possible for humans to combine organic substances into ever larger
unities (Freud, 1920/1989: 616).The action of Thanatos in the interest of the
social order has the simultaneous effect of weakening it, just as the expansion
of erotic relations can also produce their disintegration. The death drives forces
of aggression help form the ego, but they also form the very entity (superego)
that most threatens the stability of the ego. The superego emerges as animal
righteousness, (Bell & Horowitz, 2016: 74), compulsive rage at the perceived
impurity of the other.
To repress or not to repress is Freuds translation of the Shakespearean
double-bind, to be or not to be. Freud remained pessimistic and ambivalent
about this dilemma in 1929, as the ideas and actions that would lead to an at-
tempted Final Solution to the Jewish problem in Europe began to materialize.
Repressive controls are unavoidable corollaries of the maintenance of normal

social ties, controls whose traumatic intensity Freud found that many people
were unable to sustain individually, and which could lead to explosive violence
socially and politically, in a kind of blowback or revolt of nature (Horkheimer,
1947). Freuds interpreter Herbert Marcuse summarizes: The work of repres-
sion pertains to the death instinct as well as the life instinct. Normally, their
fusion is a healthy one, but the sustained severity of the superego constantly
threatens this healthy balance (Marcuse, 1955: 53).
4. Wholeness the Hidden Trend in Marcuse

In Eros and Civilization Herbert Marcuse (1955) claimed to have found
a hidden trend in Freud. Marcuse found grounds for a distinction between
basic and surplus repression that would permit the loosening of certain civi-
lized restrictions deemed surplus to the basic requirements of responsibility and
survival:
while any form of the reality principle demands a considerable degree
and scope of repressive control over the instincts, the specific historical
institutions of the reality principle and the specific interests of domination
introduce additional controls over and above those indispensable for civi-
lized human association. These additional controls arising from the specific
institutions of domination are what we denote as surplus repression. For ex-
ample, the modifications and deflections of instinctual energy necessitated
by the perpetuation of the monogamic-patriarchal family, or by a hierar-
chical division of labour, or by public control over the individuals private
existence are instances of surplus-repression pertaining to the institutions
of a particular reality principle. They are added to the basic (phylogenetic)
restrictions of the instincts which mark the development of man from
the human animal to the animal sapiens. The power to restrain and guide
instinctual drives, to make biological necessities into individual needs and
desires, increases rather than reduces gratification: the mediatization of
nature, the breaking of its compulsion, is the human form of the pleasure
principle. (Marcuse, 1955: 37)
The utopian dimension of Marcuses theory is a direct corollary of the basic-
surplus distinction: our experience of the double-bind of repression is that of
a particular historical era; it is not necessarily a universal human experience.

What appears necessary for civilization today might be discarded tomorrow

as surplus. Controls on erotic activity, e.g., the rigidity of the institution of
marriage, family structure, norms of public behaviour, etc. might all be greatly
relaxed in a future social context where the energies of the death instinct called
up for sustaining surplus repression have cooled off. In Batesonian terms, we
could say that Marcuse is theorizing a release from the digital fetish, and his
great refusal (see Marcuse, 1964: 2557) of repression can be interpreted as a
refusal to accept the hubris embedded in actually-existing social institutions.
Basic repression would then be the result of a trauma made humanly necessary
by the inevitable digital cutoff. Surplus repression, which is not at all humanly
necessary, results from the forgetting of that trauma and a spiraling feedback loop
of ever-steeper losses of resolution in communication of all kinds.
However, what might seem to be an elegant or convenient solution to the
Freudian double-bind distinguishing the basic from the surplus and discard-
ing the latter is subtended by Marcuses complex meditation on the relation
between Eros and Thanatos. Having extended the Marxist concept of surplus
value into the psychic-instinctual realm, Marcuse does not seem satisfied. Rath-
er, in Marcuse as in Freud, The ultimate relation between Eros and Thanatos
remains obscure (Marcuse, 1955: 27).
The complexity of Marcuses investigation in Eros and Civilization seems
at times undermined by apparently simple binary formulations: Domination
differs from the rational exercise of authority (Marcuse, 1955: 36). This and
a general spirit that might be summarized as let Eros prevail, overemphasized
and under-thought, can obscure the importance of some of Marcuses more
ambiguous philosophical ruminations. Marcuses exasperated attention to the
complex paradoxes generated by the Eros-Thanatos binary can be cut off in
the interest of building solidarity for the progressive side. If one reduces Mar-
cuses meaning to a slogan such as be realistic and demand the impossible, he
can be easily assimilated to such tragic and spectacular figures as Guy Debord
and Slavoj iek, brand names for viral symbolic-insurrectionary violence that
explodes throughout social media today.9 On the global-celebrity academic
9
The atmosphere of simmering rage that one often finds in social media brings to mind Freuds pessimism: And
now it is to be expected that the other of the two Heavenly Powers, eternal Eros, will make an effort to assert himself
in the struggle with his equally immortal adversary. But who can foresee with what success and with what result?
(Gay, 1989: 772).

stage, Marcuse is reduced to a footnote in the ongoing history of the insurrec-

tion of the underdogs.
But perhaps this simplification should not surprise us. After all, Marcuses
theoretical solution to the double-bind of surplus repression only places us in
another double-bind. The civilized psyche is a product of surplus repression.
This means that the death instinct colours its whole experience, along with its
judgment and its relations with others. How, if ones life has been damaged
(Adorno, 2005), can one be sure that a given mode of conduct judged to be
surplus-repressive, really is surplus? Marcuse makes it clear as mud: [I]n the
history of civilization, basic repression and surplus-repression have been inex-
tricably intertwined (Marcuse, 1955:38). Marcuses extended meditation on
this problem, which includes his warnings about the repressive desublimation
i.e., what appears sexually liberatory might actually serve the forces of sur-
plus repression seem to cut against any easy sloganizing of Marcuses theory
of political resistance. A resolution to the conceptual tension this generates in
relation to his affirmative invocation of Eros remains a hidden trend in Eros and
Civilization.
It should be clear that the point of bringing Marcusean theory into con-
versation with cybernetics is not to refute Marcuses (or Freuds) privileging of
Eros over Thanatos. On the contrary, I think Bateson implicitly affirms Freudo-
Marcusean Eros in cybernetic terms, conceptualized as a process of learning
operating simultaneously on multiple verbal and nonverbal levels. Cybernetics
does not refute or radically exclude the Eros-Thanatos binary as a map, but
rather sets up another way of seeing the organism alongside psychoanalysis,
where we begin with a unified monistic structure of inner relations, nota duel
or mythic antagonism. Let us see what depth can be generated with a binocular
view of the Freudo-Marcusean notion of instinctual liberation and a cybernetic
concept of learning.
5. Eros1,2,3 and Learning1,2,3

To make more explicit what is hidden in Marcuse, I am employing sub-
script numerals (1n) as my application of a linguistic device developed by Alfred
Korzybski in Science and Sanity (1948), which he called the index. I am using
this device to account for the fact that the Freudian term Eros, as Marcuse
uses it in Eros and Civilization, is very much multiordinal. To say a word is
multiordinal is to say that it refers to different logical levels in an ascending

nesting scale of wholeness. For example, point is different from line, line is
different from surface, and surface is different from cube, etc. but nevertheless
point, line and surface are all contained in the higher-dimensional wholeness of
the cube. Freudo-Marcusean Eros similarly refers at once to a pulsating flux of
partial drives demanding gratification, as well as to the integrating forces that
bind the Ego, and yet further to a kind of generalized energy of cohesion in the
organism and (at a higher level of abstraction) among organisms.
Unbound primary Eros1 is a violently unpredictable flux, almost indistin-
guishable in many manifestations from Freuds infamous oral aggression, the
desire to consume the loved object. However, Eros1 also refers to the primary
experience of continuity of being with the mother and is at the root of all social
bonds. Eros1 seems to be dominated by what Bateson might call positive or
regenerative feedback loops that shatter the stable operation of homeostasis.10
Eros1 is, as it were, a steam engine lacking a governor in the properly cyber-
netic sense of control-through-responsiveness. It corresponds to the experience
of the human baby who intermittently explodes in hallucinatory traumatic
screams and dissolves in blissful oneness with the mother, and who is otherwise
unable to fend for himself until a relatively advanced age (relative to other
mammals). Eros1, the level of fragmentary and partial drives, can be immensely
destructive if it produces a conflict within the whole that contains it. The hu-
man infant requires a maternal or parental agency outside of it as its governor.
In this fragmentary, incoherent form, Freud and Marcuse would say that
Eros can become Thanatos. In a Korzybskian-Batesonian framework, speaking
multiordinally, we can designate the fragmentary partial drives as Eros1. Eros2
would be of a higher logical order, a structure that binds together the partial
drives or more precisely, that is those drives, in a higher-order structure and
in this way makes the human being capable of responsibility to others. This can
be described in psychoanalytic terms as repressive in the sense that it represents
a stage of greater self-control that evolves out of conflicts at the level of Eros1,
involving crucial altruistic experiences of failure, self-sacrifice, etc. With such
a multiordinal map of the psyche we gain a sense of depth: we can sense why for
10
See Cultural Contact and Schismogenesis for Batesons account of how positive feedback cycles within and be-
tween individuals disrupt psychic and social stability (Bateson, 1971: 6172).

Marcuse Agape (responsible, self-sacrificing, divine love) need not be seen as

the opposite of Eros. Rather it is Eros organized at a higher logical level:
nothing in the nature of Eros justifies the notion that the extension of
the impulse is confined to the corporeal sphere. If the antagonistic separa-
tion of the physical from the spiritual part of the organism is itself the his-
torical result of repression, the overcoming of this antagonism would open
the spiritual sphere to the impulse. The aesthetic idea of a sensuous reason
suggests such a tendency. It is essentially different from sublimation in so
far as the spiritual sphere becomes the direct object of Eros and remains
a libidinal object: there is change neither in energy nor in aim. The notion
that Eros and Agape may after all be one and the same not that Eros is
Agape but that Agape is Eros may sound strange after almost two thou-
sand years of theology. (Marcuse, 1955: 210)
Not only does Marcuse reject the tradition of replacing Eros with Agape; he
goes further, to the point of suggesting that Eros at the higher levels is Agape,
that its wholeness is marked by an erotic as well as empathic (and traumatic) en-
counter with suffering, whether in the other or in the self with Thanatos. The
ambiguity and mystery of these formulations can be reduced, or seen freshly, if
we imagine Marcuse as wanting to replace the traditional notion of moralizing
Agape afflicting Eros with guilt, with a notion of Eros as a structural process
operating simultaneously at differing logical levels.
Eros1, a bundle of partial drives incapable of sustained empathy with others
and lacking a character structure, corresponds to the Freudian id and to pri-
mary process. Eros2 corresponds to normal character development, the erec-
tion of a structure of controls that Freud recognized as repression of Oedipal
ambivalence, the development of secondary out of primary process, feelings of
guilt and self-worth etc. Marcuse is not advocating the liberation of Eros1 as
against the controls and responsiveness characteristic of Eros2. Rather, to put
it in cybernetic terms, Marcuse aims to achieve Eros3. Eros3 would reform and
bind the energies of socialization in a yet-higher-order structure. Eros3 would
feature deepening awareness of the multiordinal structure of Eros(1,2,3)as well as
of the double-binds encountered at the level of Eros2 in a socially fragmentary
context. Discourses of self-worth would be supplanted by notions of self as a
constellation of learning experiences.

This tripartite structure of Eros(1,2,3)can be provisionally mapped onto Bate-

sons theory of levels of learning (Bateson, 1971: 279308).11 Learning1 is then
the acquisition of bits or fragments of information (corresponding approxi-
mately in humans to Freuds primary orality, Eros1). Most, if not all, living
beings appear capable of this form of learning. Learning2, which Bateson also
called deutero-learning, is learning how to learn bits of information by organ-
izing them in sets. This development is routinely accomplished by most higher
animals and by humans after the age of about three, and indeed is ingrained in
us as a set of self-correcting, relatively static features of the kind Freud called
character(1908/1989: 2937):
It is said that Mr. Jones is dependent, hostile, fey, finicky, anxious, exhibi-
tionistic, narcissistic, passive, competitive, energetic, bold, cowardly, fatal-
istic, humorous, playful, canny, optimistic, perfectionist, careless, careful,
casual, etc. In light of what has already been said, the reader will be able to
assign all these adjectives to their appropriate logical type. All are descrip-
tive of (possible) results of Learning2(Bateson, 1971: 2978)
Character formations are stereotyped and self-correcting habits of which
we are mostly unaware, because they form the context of how we learn to
learn. Character formations are inevitably at work in humans in every in-
stance of the operation of conscious purpose. This corresponds to the level of
the Ego and of Eros2.
What would correspond to Marcuses distinction between basic and surplus
repression in Bateson would consist not in acquiring a piece of information
about the nature of politics (Learning1). Nor would it consist in acquiring
a new way of acquiring pieces of information about social and political life
(Learning2), the level where a great deal of ideological critique comes to rest. It
would require learning new patterns of learning to learn, or Learning3. Learn-
ing3 is an order of magnitude more complex than Learning2, an exponential and
not additive expansion, which would be experienced as a continuous dynamism
in a new dimension whose existence could not be inferred from the contents
of Learning2. Bateson said that a normal human adult would encounter Learn-
11
We might, for example, provisionally ignore the difference between love and learning. After all, Bateson defines
learning as change, and love continually changes us if it does not change us in each moment it is more than likely
bound at the level of character or a partial drive (Eros1 or Eros2). For more on Batesons theory of levels of learning
see The Logical Categories of Learning and Communication (Bateson, 1971: 279308).

ing3 as an event of supersession of lifes difficulties, a conversion experience,

an overall opening of the self beyond the egos conscious purposes that Bateson
called the larger system.12 This would in turn involve a profound analog-digital
integration, a quantum leap forward in the capacity of language and conscious-
ness to map social experience richly, without forgetting the traumatic cut digital
language applies.
In practical terms, looking at Marcuses basic-surplus repression distinction
through a Batesonian lens, we may have a clearer sense of why it is not sufficient
merely to transmit or receive the correct political information, from the cor-
rect wing of the spectrum, as if one wing holds a monopoly on repressiveness or
responsibility. What is needed is a fundamental flexibilization of ways of learning
to learn, a flexibilization that shatters the narrow fixation of a few behaviour
patterns (avaricious acquisition, neurotic co-dependence, limitless self-evalua-
tion, self-justification and vilification of the hated other, etc.).We need to tran-
scend the narrow fixation on the acquisition of information and control where
the digital (inside or outside our skin) is fetishized as the whole of learning.
We need to shake loose this digital fetish that operates as the commodities as
much as it operates among them, and this requires a fundamental and dynamic
epistemological shift connecting the level of self to the level of the larger system,
encompassing self-in-society and in turn society in the whole biosphere.
6. Learning4 and the Political Problem of Wholeness

But this is to point to what we might call Eros4, corresponding to what
Bateson labeled as Learning4 which, as he conjectured very briefly, might be
achieved at the level of the evolution of an entire population or the biosphere in
toto (Bateson, 1971: 293). It seems plausible enough to compare what Bateson
means by Learning4 (i.e. a fundamental transformation of terrestrial mind and
nature via the overcoming of hubris) with what Marcuse means by revolu-
tion, which he explicitly articulates in terms of the liberation of nature from
12
Bateson describes Alcoholics Anonymous as an organization aimed at helping its members to undergo the difficult
process of Learning3 as the only effective way to transcend addiction patterns. The first step is admitting I have a
problem and that I cannot solve it, that I must appeal to a Higher Power than my own judgment for aid. A shatter-
ing of fixed patterns of Learning2 can result in psychic breakdown, a reversion to Eros1 in Freudian terms; hopefully
it may activate higher order learning patterns such that multiple patterns of Learning2 can be noted and compared
in the self. The unicity of the self is both abandoned and consummated as the Wholeness of Self-in-contact-with-
Higher-Power (Bateson, 1971: 309337).

domination. And yet Bateson explicitly distanced himself from the Marxist
identification with class schismogenesis and certainly never endorsed any idea
of revolution. We have seen that the Freudo-Marcusean theory of instinctual
liberation bears many implicit similarities to the Batesonian theory of learn-
ing, and that the surplus repressive double-bind (how can I eliminate surplus
repression from within a surplus repressive context?) can be traversed, if not
undone, by approaching the entire psychic structure in terms of multiordinal
levels of organization (Eros1,2,3). We thereby move from a quasi-mythic binary
system (Eros v. Thanatos) to a monistic multiordinal system typical of cybernet-
ics.
The difference between Freudo-Marcusean theory and Batesons is not
erased. A relation has been established without eliminating the difference,
which is necessary to maintain the depth for the binocular vision of Batesons
metaphor.13 For just as Marcuses text may be vulnerable to a reduction to insur-
rectionary romanticism, misguided acts of provocation, interminable vindictive
self-righteous blame, etc., cybernetics is vulnerable to what the radical Leftist
group Tiqqun call the cybernetic hypothesis. Tiqqun remark incisively on the
socio-political significance that Batesons theory has had in practice:
Under the influence of Gregory Bateson, the Von Neumann of the so-
cial sciences, and of the American sociological tradition, obsessed by the
question of deviance socio-cybernetics was aimed, as a priority, towards
studying the individual as feedback locus, that is, as a self-disciplined per-
sonality. Bateson became the social editor in chief of the second half of
the 20th century, and was involved in the origins of the family therapy
movement, as well as those of the sales techniques training movement
developed at Palo Alto. Since the cybernetic hypothesis as a whole calls for
a radically new physical structuring of the subject, whether individual or
collective, its aim is to hollow it out. It disqualifies as a myth individual in-
wardness/internal dialogue, and with it all 19th century psychology, includ-
ing psychoanalysis. Each person was to become a fleshless envelope, the
best possible conductor of social communication, the locus of an infinite
feedback loop which is made to have no nodes. The cybernetization process
13
There is in fact another possible approach that I do not have time to cover in this paper, namely treating Freuds
confrontation of Eros and Thanatos, as a lived experience of a mythic archetype, in the therapeutic relation, as itself
a formation of Eros3, albeit one whose necessarily social dimension was expressed in more tragic and ambiguous terms
than in Marcuse, for example in Civilization and its Discontents.

thus completes the process of civilization, to where bodies and their emo-
tions are abstracted within the system of symbols. (Tiqqun, 2001: Section
III, para. 1)
Batesons relational theory of the psyche, for example, as interpreted and
practised by some family therapists, has dissolved from Learning3 (patients and
communities learning dynamically about the way mental illness is learned in
social contexts) back into Learning2 (moral judgments of families see par-
ticularly Bateson, 1978: 231ff). This in turn may have helped clear the field for
that simplest and most invasive of technological psychic controls, the pharma-
ceutical-commodity form (Learning0). This inertia, it might be argued, resulted
from Batesons failure or refusal to articulate clearly a specifically socio-political
distance between his notions and those of traditional morality, civilized values,
etc.14 Mary Catherine Bateson has questioned her fathers refusal to commit
himself to political action, which she conjectures may have derived from war
trauma:
I believe that Gregorys rejection of political action came out of his World
War II experiences, when politics were directed toward the defeat of an ene-
my, and Gregorys own role in psychological warfare involved the deliberate
corruption of communication. Thus, I see him rejecting an action program
that, by defining purposes and particularly the purpose of victory, would
embrace a deliberate blindness. We have, however, in our heritage from the
Greeks, side by side with the idea that politics are about domination and
power over the other, the idea that politics are about conversation that the
process benefits from disagreement and difference. (Bateson, 1991: 320)
On the other hand, to describe contemporary global politics as a conver-
sation seems rather optimistic at least more so than it may have seemed in
1991.In this damaged life (Adorno, 2005) the spiritual or internal dimen-
sions of the struggle may sometimes be more important or all that is possible in
a given time and place. Contrasting Batesonian psychology with Lacanian psy-
choanalytic theory, Gad Horowitz notes that in Batesons work hubris remains
a systemic-ecological-epistemogical-cognitive issue and that Bateson does not
directly confront the inevitable traumatic incursion of language into Being
(Horowitz, 2016).
This failure or refusal arguably places Bateson close to the pessimistic position of Freud, though he does not occlude
14
the social dimension of the ego as much as Freuds quasi-mythic language can do or be made to do.

What do we see when we look simultaneously through cybernetic and psy-

choanalytic lenses? That partial Eros (Eros1 and Eros2) can be destructive as
well constructive to wholeness. That a correct course to liberation cannot be
given in its entirety, complete and whole, in any non-contradictory language.
Perhaps it must begin and end with questions rather than answers:
Perhaps there is no single vision that everyone should agree on; perhaps
the essential wisdom will be woven through the discourse of diverse com-
munities. Perhaps I am right only by virtue of being contradicted, but
whoever drowns out my words, for whatever reason, is surely wrong. The
central achievement of political action and education may be the broad-
ening of political agendas, the acceptance of new patterns of relevance.
(Bateson, 1991: 320)
Then again, cybernetics reminds us that information can be most easily
corrupted by the addition of more and more information, ultimately resulting
in insignificant noise. Too much noise impedes the articulation of the higher
dimensions of relevance.15 So it would be surely wrong to allow Marcuses
chilling last words in Eros and Civilization to be swallowed up in a cybernetic
sea. They are truer than ever today:
Theology and philosophy today compete with each other in celebrating
death as an existential category: perverting a biological fact into an onto-
logical essence, they bestow transcendental blessing on the guilt of man-
kind which they help to perpetuate they betray the promise of utopia. In
contrast, a philosophy that does not work as the handmaiden of repression
responds to the fact of death with the Great Refusal the refusal of Or-
pheus the liberator. Death can become a token of freedom. The necessity
of death does not refute the possibility of final liberation. Like the other
necessities, it can be made rational painless. Men can die without anxi-
ety if they know what they love is protected from misery and oblivion.
But even the ultimate advent of freedom cannot redeem those who died in
pain. It is the remembrance of them, and the accumulated guilt of man-
kind against its victims, that darken the prospect of a civilization without
repression. (Marcuse, 1955: 2367)
15
Mary Catherine Batesons response to Klaus Kippendorffs pessimism about political communication, recorded as
part of her introductory lecture for Cybernetics in the Future the 2014 conference of the American Society for
Cybernetics, Washington D.C. (M. C. Bateson, 2014), illuminates the issue of cutting through the noise of global
political discourse (Kippendorffs comment occurs at 1:02:40 in the video, Batesons reply follows).

References
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ton.
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lacans-marcuse/.

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https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/tiqqun-the-cybernetic-hypothesis.

The Female Target:

Digitality, Psychoanalysis and the Gangbang
Diego Semerene1
Brown University, USA
doi: 10.5937/comman11-11218
Abstract: The essay culls from classical texts and personal experiences of libertine
intimacy with strangers to address age-old academic blind spots regarding group sex as a
recurring fantasy and sexual practice.What is brought forth is a Freudian and Lacan-
ian analysis of the relationship between contemporary desire and digitality through the
gangbang as articulated on digital platforms. The focus is on digitally-assisted gang
bangs involving a transvestite and several heterosexually identified males, and what such
events reveal about digital medias and heterosexualitys demands. The author argues
that this sexual configuration is a re-enactment of the great misdeed, which Freud
recounts inTotem and Taboo as the mythic primordial killing of the Father by the band
of brothers. This symbolic occasion is described as the genesis of social organization and
re-emerges as a form of mourning the disappearance of the fleshly body as new media
turn it into digital code. Such a codification of the body awakens anxieties around the
fictitious conflation between penis and phallus. In the face of the digital, man outsources
his phallic power, which is suddenly required to be represented corporally at all times,
to a virtually organized multitude that is willing to sacrifice freedom in the name of
the group, and the legitimation of hetero-masculinity that it can presumably grant. The
gangbang also appears as a digitally mediated opportunity for old fantasies of aggression
and expiation to articulate themselves without putting the white male heterosexual body
on the line.
Keywords: psychoanalysis, digitality, digital culture, rape culture, gangbang, group

sex, trans, cross-dressing, cruising, death drive
1

The Female Target: Diego Semerene
Because there are three, one of them can watch

what the other two are doing together. () Or,
because there are three, two can worry about the
third, for instance the one lying down.
Lydia Davis, The Cows
1. The Phallus as Collective Trompe Lil

In the summer of 2009, I attended a conference in France entitled The
Unconscious and Sexual Identity, organized by a Lacanian research group. The
room was filled with renowned panelists, mostly practising psychoanalysts, and
the moderators were celebrities in the field. The ideas raised were theoretically
fascinating, but the comments were anodyne, and the discourse rather techni-
cal. For an intellectual space whose language was supposed to be desire, nothing
indicated that we were speaking about bodies and bodily practices. It was as if
in the name of rigor, erudition or decorum, concepts had to be handled with
latex gloves no matter, or precisely because of, how messy they were, as if not
to taint, or implicate, the bodies of their handlers.
That is until a lone woman in the audience raised her hand and punctured
the protocol. Her very physicality felt conspicuously out of sync with the well-
coiffed multitude that surrounded her. Her red hair was too voluminous to be
tamed into place, her skin slightly weathered, her demeanour unapologetic.
Without hesitation, she delivered a response about womens bodies being me-
diators of sex between men, heterosexualitys most fundamental schema, by
claiming that feminine mediation became most literal in the gangbang.
In a conference about sexual identity, on its third day, that had yet to con-
sider something other than the heterosexual desire of the couple, apart from
its supposedly opposite homosexual counterpart, which simply confirms it,
the womans speech caused no visible commotion. Yet it worked as a Pandoras
box opening, the kind that makes others feel guilty, if not intellectually dis-
honest, for not having initiated such a move sooner. One comment, and its
straightforward delivery, introduced the body as a living organism among many

Diego Semerene The Female Target:
potentially ugly, porous, dishevelled, disgusting, leaky, horny, smelly,2 and un-
interested in its intactness into the domain of a legitimate object of inquiry. 3
The womans comment cracked open the limits of the discourse as its recog-
nizing the gangbangable body the body as gangbangable meant a recogni-
tion of the body in practice, that is, the body that wants too much, too much
and all at once, the body that wants because and despite. To see this body and to
speak it is to expose oneself as an animating agent of such a body. It is to refuse
the omniscience and distance associated with a masculinist position, which we
may call criture masculine: a masculine way of writing bodies out without risk-
ing disclosing the status of ones own. To render the gangbang public meant
implicating her self in a sexual multiplicity that is loud and obtrusive, that is, in
the terrain of the unavowable, the disgusting, the not-so-catholic noises (Giard,
2014).
Virginie Despentes (2006) recognizes in collective male laughter a seminal
sign of the brotherly multitude that enacts a gangbang, the brotherhood on
which the gangbang depends, but also the general (rape) culture a methodi-
cally arranged gangbang in its own right. Despentes notes that mans attempts
to live up to the myth of the phallus always fall short, regardless of the various
technologies he may use to mimic a convincing phallicity, such as artificial
limbs in their literal and symbolic forms (Despentes, 2006: 37). This phallic
failure thus begets stratagems of denial and the interpellation of the group as a
way to masquerade absence, inability and frailty.
The phallus depends on a complex network of technologies to hold itself up
in a spectacular non-fragmentary fashion. One way of forging a believable phal-
lus, or a sense of it, is through the coming together of a number of men who
unite in strength superior to any single individual and remain united against
all single individuals, which amounts to the constitutive dynamic of civiliza-
tion (Freud, 2011: 53). For Freud, artificial limbs, so to speak, [are] quite
2
Gayle Salamon, via Merleau-Ponty and Freud, reconsiders identity and the drive, and sexuality more generally, as an
atmosphere, an odor, a sound, or a leading towards which points to past and future and spans multiple temporalities
(Salamon, 2010).
3
The body is, for Foucault, a volume in perpetual disintegration (Foucault, 1977: 148). Its condition as always
already disintegrating gains explicit status with online representation of the cruising body, as it is pulled apart and
back together, cropped into limbs and re/de-contextualized by the self who makes it anew and the other to whom
such bodily compound is supposedly addressed. Fictions of intactness are at the center of Guy Debords concept of
spectacle in a way that echoes the digital sex session as a specular and spectacular technology of disavowing the frag-
mentary existential condition of the body, evolving into a world where even the deceivers are deceived (Debord,
2014: 1).

magnificent when equipped with all his accessory organs; but they do not grow
on him [on man] and they still give him trouble sometimes (Freud, 2011: 59).
Following this logic of gender configuration, Preciado sees the impossibility
for man to ever nurture a link of solidarity with someone other than another
man (Preciado, 2008: 318).4 This solidarity, that of the brotherhood that the
gangbang displays so palpably, is exclusionary, as all solidarities, and rests on
the inferiority of women, enabling men to laugh among themselves the loudest
laughter, made louder through numbers.
Despentes calls collective rape, also driven by the gangbang ethos of non-
consent and masculine multiplicity, masculinity through multiplicity, a war
strategy that promotes one groups virilization over another (Despentes, 2006:
35). Mans soldier-ness is thus literalized in the temporal juxtaposition that the
gangbang performs: The battalion is not dispersed through time, kinship and
geography (from father to husband, for example). It is not even housed inside
an inbox with thousands of emailed photographs from potential, rejected and
done-and-discarded digital lovers, but all at once in the same space with a clear
and palpable target keeping their multiplicity from becoming one (Despentes,
2006: 37). The gangbang is thus an apparatus of death-driven brutality in the
repertoire of what Haver calls orthosexuality (Haver, 1996: 3), and Javier Sez
and Sejo Carrascosa name the feathers of heterosexuality, alongside genocide,
nuclear terror, racism, misogyny, sports, engines, alcoholism, gangs and risk
(Sez & Carrascosa, 2011: 119).5
For Jonathan Dollimore, the terrain of the unavowable the not-so-
catholic configurations, temporalities, noises, and smells too often suggests
anxiety if not aversion (Dollimore, 2001: 367). This surfeit of a body (of
orifices, blood, piss, vomit and overpowering hunger), excised from theoretical
work and from conference rooms alike, shares a kinship with one of the most
significant repressions of academic writing about sexuality, namely, disgust
(Dollimore, 2001: 367). Disgust, which is excessive, as it trespasses on the limit
of good taste, has a critical organizing function for sexual identity, practice,
4
Jack Halberstam notes the complementary relationship between men in his reading of the film Dude, Wheres My
Car? (Leiner, 2000) arguing that before the menace of castration and humiliation, the dudes face their obstacles as a
team, a unit, a collective, and each functions as the others phallus, or weenie. Patriarchal power takes, then, at least
two: one to be the man and the other to reflect his being the man (Halberstam, 2011: 66).
5
Sez and Carrascosa also include shouting, pushing and spitting in the roster of the obsessive rituals of het-
erosexual masculinity (Sez & Carrascosa, 2011: 120).

politics and discourse: the sexuality of some straight men is organized around
a barely concealed contempt for, but also a fundamental disgust with, women.
Crudely, they fuck them despite or because of not much liking them
(Dollimore, 2001: 368).6 In a gangbang scenario, the bonding of the brothers
is achieved through the formation of an ambivalent target it is wanted and
reviled in unison, and its desire must be explicitly addressed through and for the
group, as its annihilation (Dollimore, 2001: 371).
There is a silent etiquette that governs sexual noises and academic confer-
ence rooms, which not only polices the excitation/disgust divide, or composite,
but also genders them: Loud moaning feminizes the subject as it indicates the
too-much of desire that the subject is simply too weak to contain. The gang-
bang ensures that excess of desire is evenly distributed by the number of men
in the space, whereas the feminine body is made extra vulnerable to libidinal
excess by being that much lonelier in a room full of strangers. It is as though
in a war whose victory and defeat are pre-determined by the sheer quantity, or
asymmetric force, of those on one side and the sole target on the other side.
That is, precisely the type of war currently fought across the globe, whose drone
logic turns the battlefield into a hunting ground, doing away with the tradi-
tional relationship between sovereignty and borders.
Contemporary digital culture demands a certain priapism from bodies. This
is a perpetual interpellation of bodily visibility that male subjects have histori-
cally not enjoyed, or have historically not been demanded to put forth. Self-
display, when it comes to clothing, for instance, was progressively renounced
by male bodies starting in the 18th century through Industrialization in what
scholars have called The Great Masculine Renunciation. This meant that wom-
en became responsible for marking and flaunting class and gender difference
through adornment, granting men protection from the perils of self-exposure.
Masculine bodily presentation became progressively self-effacing, sober and in-
conspicuous: the very cut and colours of the male suit have remained virtually
unchanged for hundreds of years when compared to womens dress.7
6
Susanna Paasonen remarks that heterosexual pornography tends to revolve around female bodies as desirable yet
somehow disturbing, disgusting, or even abject. I would argue that the abject-ness of the feminine object is a pre-
condition for it to reach desiring status, which, as Paasonen suggests, works to maintain a safe distance between
subject and object through disgust so that the first cannot be swallowed by the latter (Paasonen, 2011: 216).
7
For a critical account of The Great Masculine Renunciation (see Silverman, 1986).

We can thus see that there is something quite new and unsettling for men
to suddenly, through the demands of constant digital representation of their
bodies (that ultimate site of phallic failure), find themselves interpellated by
the position of being-looked-at. When they are finally asked to represent them-
selves bodily, even if such a demand does not do away with their ability to look,
new strategies for managing the threat of phallic undoing emerge. Furthermore,
men are forced to come up with new ways to over-compensate the emptiness of
that undoing, as well as new narratives for denying the sameness that the phal-
lus aims to mask.
The forging of the mirage of the phallus goes necessarily through the group,
not only in the scene of the gangbang, which the digital makes practical, if not
probable, but in the many ways men pose for selfies, which consistently involve
pointing at other men in the frame (particularly in workout culture selfies):
men making sure their hands are always rigid, never resting, never pointed at
themselves but at the bodies of their fellow men. In the absence of other men,
social media selfies of men often include phallic props, such as these mens cars,
trucks, alcoholic bottles, dogs, joints, bongs or protein supplements.8
In a gangbang setting, the perpetual rigidness is both material, through the
help of active accomplices, and aural, through noises of a specific kind like the
sound from slapping the (t-)girl on her bottom, the audible comments to the
other men, and their collective laughter. These noises are elicited as if to remind
the men that they are a brotherhood but also individuals, albeit circling around
the same target: They have not merged into oneness, which would feel inces-
tuous, homosexual and ensnaring.9 The exchange of such sounds works like a
call-and-response game where the others reply will always be a confirmation of
what sense the sex scene has for its agents: a we are all in this together, which
further alienates the (t-)girl and puts her in her place of ensnarement.
Catastrophe, or the dreaded failure to abide by the fantasmatic regulations
of heterosexual intercourse, is never too far away, as even the cleverest necropo-
8
For Alison Winch and Jamie Hakim, an obsession with muscular male bodies online is necessitated by a politics of
austerity that literally strips men of being able to boast material goods. They are left with their bodies to work on
and display as a plea for symbolic legitimization and cultural belonging (Winch & Hakim, 2017, forthcoming).
9
The complete loss of individuality is precisely one of the most fundamental necropolitical technologies granting men
in a position of power Western heterosexual white cisgender males the luxury of omniscience and omnipotence.
Entire populations are managed, and marked to die, through the very process of losing their status of human subjects
and becoming masses to be occupied, through surveillance, migration, institutionalized violence or drowning with
their sinking boats (see Mbembe, 2003).

litical techniques risk malfunctioning. Failure hovers over, always awaiting, in

the process of undermining the sex scene (Giard, 2015). The disgust that the
figure of the gangbang is supposed to elicit in a woman in the general culture is
constitutive to her, for she is supposed to yield, not yearn. Her response to the
spectacular cowardice that brings joy to the supposed agents of the scene must
be one of only partial consent, which makes the gangbang an essentially rape-
like spectacle. Due to the sheer difference in numbers the active multiplicity
against one single presumably passive body confirms, in the most scopophilic
ways, the asymmetry that codes, and drives, the scene of the gangbang. The
gangbangable body cannot completely long to be gangbanged, or, at least,
shall not admit to it. Her loud moaning comes about as the aprs-coup of mans
ability to make woman speak not her pleasure, but the brutality of their own
bouncing off of her.
2. Caulking, Shutting, Sealing: The Hole and/in The Frame

The introduction of the gangbang in the conference room that worked as a
preamble to this essay spawned a new sense of academic integrity for me, one
that allowed the body proper, the body in practice, my own cross-dressing body
of the night before, my body of each and every night if sexual enjoyment is to
happen at all, the nocturnal body of the t-girl for solely sexual purposes, my
body, to be present, to be available, to be heard, to be smelled. Ironically, this
body is missing even in the pornography of every night, in my bedroom and on
my screens, obstructed by the ocean of men trying to penetrate its every hole,
bust the female target into pieces, or piece her into a target. In gangbang videos
and photographs, all one sees, after all, are mens backs and buttocks obstruct-
ing the visual evidence that a woman is there somewhere, if anything, to keep
the proximity of the male bodies from gaining homosexual status. If my only
entry point into this economy of heterosexual violence seems to be to dress up
as a girl and claim trans not as a stable identity, but as a technology, this also
tells us how much the digital discloses the fragility of the concept of sexual dif-
ference. The popularity of my online ads, where a t-girl looks for straight men
for a gangbang, points to the status of woman in the digital age, or perhaps
to the loss of womans body, which is mourned into the broader, less bounded,
category of the target which covers a larger area. Here the object (of desire) is
exposed, in all of its psychoanalytic glory, as a semblance, not a substance.
Scholars have argued that the digital is rooted in a binary logic in its back-
end, the actual code that mobilizes data flows and makes images appear in
highly pre-determined ways. By the time we interact with the manifested digital
content, much like what happens once sexual partners arrive at a sex scene like
a gangbang, all the chips are down. Tara McPherson (2012) has referred to this
binary structuring and archiving of data as a lenticular logic where two things
are never true at the same time, but remain necessarily segregated. Yet at the
level of affect digital networks are experienced mostly in a highly privatized
fashion, which can lessen the surveillance of the superego (while raising other
more institutionalized types of surveillance), allowing for desire to derail itself
back to its original queerness and away from its normativizing, orthodox and
orthopedic channels.
The abundance of the male butt(hole) in the frame of gangbang pornog-
raphy is excused as that excess is understood in the name of the overarching
objective of the scene: the utilizing of womans holes as if to deny ones own,
or rather, the spectacular confirmation of woman as a collection of holes to be
handled by a collection of men. The gangbang is an intimate (re-)erection of
borders. Such tinkering with a hole-infested body to be managed by the group
ends up producing the visual occlusion of the body in question in favour of a
visual overabundance of the male hole and its vicinity. If the target is virtually
kept from view, it must have been properly hit, claimed and occupied. At the
level of the very frame, a scene that is meant to perform and enhance the in-
tensity of an invincible phallus and to confirm the passivity of woman her
lack of wholesomeness produces an undeniably homo-sexual visual spectacle.
Through the devouring of womans holes (or, of woman into holes), which
leads to the curious exhibition of the male hole and its provinces as a collective,
another fantasy of hermetic masculinity is told.
Since the male ass may serve as evidence of a universal hole (the anus has no
gender, no race, no trans or cis status), it is generally disavowed through laugh-
ter and absence from the field of vision in non-pornographic conditions.10 Sez
and Carrascosa argue that male heterosexual subjectivity is based on a (male)
body whose mouth can be open but whose ass must be sealed, whereas women
10
On laughing as a violent kinship operation between men to the detriment of women, or femininity more broadly,
as it plays out in digital trolling see Phillips (2015).

can prop their asses open provided their mouths remain shut (Sez & Carras-
cosa, 2011: 73).
The anus and its vicinity function as signposts for this universal condi-
tion, that is, of the human body as an open wound, unbounded and perpetu-
ally exposed, that transcends genderization and other forms of border control.
Sez and Carrascosa note that the skin has pores and, through them, water is
exchanged with the environment. The stomach and intestinal walls are also
porous, and it is thanks to that very porousness that the nutrients of food can
be assimilated by the body. As a matter of fact, they argue, the survival of living
organisms depends on their systems being open (Sez & Carrascosa, 2011: 92).
Control of the anus, which is literally framed by the buttocks, may even
mark something like a point of subjectivation in the constitution of the
subject, which the gangbang aims to shut, like the fixing of a leak, in woman,
and disavow in men despite visible evidence to the contrary. The anus and its
vicinity overtake the frame while the men caulk the very small anatomic evi-
dence that props up naturalized fictions of a material female lack the vagina,
or its opposite, in the case of the t-girl (these two figures, with such different
genitals being so interchangeable in the scene of the gangbang is quite telling),
as if emptying their own anal-existential anxieties by filling woman up to the
brim.11 The heterosexist system hinges on the magnification of a small genital
difference so that woman functions as the absolute other (Sez & Carrascosa,
2011: 119).12 As one potential gangbang participant from Craigslist once put it,
I can beat that pussy up and I love to DP [double penetration] and really get
that slut airtight. The organizers of a Bay Area gangbang recently advertised on
Fetlife highlighted plans for a triple penetration (womans mouth, vagina and
anus filled by penises) and entitled that event an Airtight Party. And if gay
gangbangs are often scenes where pharmacological drugs such as crystal meth
and poppers are meant to relax the feminized bottoms sphincter we can pre-
sume that the looser the target the more room there is for it to be filled.
Human Rights Watch published a report on Iraq in 2009, which described
a gay extermination technique that involved cementing the victims buttholes
11
In a clarification that can help us understand the interchangeability of feminized bodies counting as the female target,
Jordan Crandall reminds us that drones, that ultimate embodiment of digital violence, have no windows, that is,
what matters is their function what they can do for/to us not what is inside them (Crandall, 2011).
12
For Fethi Benslama, concerted violence tends to ensue when rupture in processes of identification, or its threat,
specifically involves fellow beings who are ultimately rather alike (Benslama, 2016: 101).

with a potent glue of Iranian provenance, which could only be extirpated with
surgical intervention. The gay men would then be forced to drink diarrhea-
causing medicine and implode in a type of involuntary fecal self-bombing
devoid of any martyrdom. The torture and subsequent extermination would
be captured and promptly viralized through cell phones. Interestingly, the act
does not infect the assailants with the annihilating gayness that they impinge
on their victim, as if immunity to the feminizing lack could only be granted
through its violent pegging onto someone else ideally by a group. Here the in-
fectiousness of lack is contained and performed jointly through a physical pro-
jection that literalizes a symbolic and founding projection (of lack) already
made in the unconscious: it is woman who does not have it. A similar logic played
out in Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafis downfall as he was violated by a
sealing of sorts and also memorialized on video (extending the kin-making
to fantasmatic brothers who may not have been physically present to witness
it) by rebels shoving a stick up his ass. The identification between gay and
anal sex may be complete, but the torture centres exclusively around the bot-
tom gay, or the psychic labour of containing gayness in bottom-ness. It did not
occur to the Iraqi militia to castrate top gays or to extend gayness to those who
penetrate supposedly gay bodies (Sez & Carrascosa, 2011).
I once brought to the attention of my Gender Studies undergraduate stu-
dents the fact that a lot of them felt compelled to preface their blog posts with
as a heterosexual male before expressing their opinions. One (heterosexual
male) student, then, emailed me with an account of the following game, which
he described as a common elementary school prank between boys, to illustrate
his justification for the self-identificatory prefacing: it revolved around one
student placing his hand on a peers [sic] shoulder. For however long the hand
was left on the kids [sic] shoulder determined how gay the person was. The
game may seem harmless at the time, b/c it becomes a competition to remove
the persons hand from the shoulder as soon as possible. But when the punish-
ment for being slow or not reacting determines gayness probably stimulates
the crazed out defense mechanism that probably follows kids into adolescence.
(Personal communication, September 27, 2011).
In the gangbang, as the men act diligently to plug womans openings, to tag
openings as womans (whether their bearer literally be cis or trans, or gay bot-
toms the necropolitical is staged through clustering bodies into populations)
femininity carries a toxicity similar to the transmitting powers of gayness in the

childrens game described above: a hazard to be managed before our exposure to

it enlists us as one of them. When we talk about an object of desire, we are re-
ally talking about a cluster of promises we want someone or something to make
to us and make possible for us (Berlant, 2006: 20) As such, femininity and
lack are zoned off as the dangerous properties of the other while the male self
is further engulfed as a body amongst other male selves, guaranteeing a collec-
tively established signification to male self beyond a shadow of a doubt: if he
is gay I am gay and thus if he is not I am not. The male self is thus able to share
not just woman, or the labour of tagging a gay body as unquestionably other,
but the anxiety, and psychic precariousness, of maleness in general a category
dependent on the constant and brutal management of corporeal borders.
The anus as a site of heterosexual undoing is tamed in the gangbang through
the violent mission enacted towards the female target, said to be the driving
core of the congregation, like a drain, which excuses whatever exposure of
normally disavowed (male) lack, or hole-ness. The omnipresence of the male
ass in the frame in gangbang pornography and in the scene of the gangbang
in situ points to a flaunting of mans privileged position, the same kind of urge
to display ones fictitious immunity to lack produced and celebrated by the
group that governs so much online violence, such as harassment, stalking and
trolling. Since the target of mens gangbang assembly is so loudly (re-)inscribed,
the practice cuts them some slack, forgiving certain visuals and acts that may, in
a different setting, throw them into the perceived lack-ness of the homosexual.
Were this undoing ever to take place if the female target went missing, or
failed to do its job we could expect new differences to be forged amongst the
bodies that were left to count so that new targets, and new brotherhoods, could
emerge.
Masculinity is, clearly, not in the genitals or chromosomes, but in the suc-
cessful, and bound to at least partially failed, maintenance of an impenetrable
body. In the images that document and represent the gangbang, the gangbangs
fragments, the heterosexual male body has presumably never come this close to
being penetrated, as men boast of their unused cavities, brushing them against
the very tools that would potentially rupture their fantasmatically sealed holes,
and perhaps courting them as if to display their successful brush with their
own undoing, or death. They know they will survive because by the time wom-
an arrives she is already dead.

3. The Digital, The Multiple, and The Great Misdeed:

The Gangbang As Bereavement Ritual
The strategy of phallic production through male multiplicity is called upon
at a time of phallic crisis that digital culture launches by demanding that mens
bodies be exposed and exchanged constantly. Man has probably not been in
such a vulnerable position in relationship to his physicality since erecting
himself from the earth and adopting an upright position, which made his
genitals, that before had been covered [by a bent-over gait], visible and in need
of protection against feelings of shame (Freud, 2011: 66).13 This demand can
only sustain itself through representation (digital or otherwise), outsourcing
(to racialized others, to the group, or to weapons), and pre-emptive refusal to
perform, or to perform alone. The gangbangs male multiplicity feasting around
a t-girls body may, for example, project not just lack, but the penis specifically
as a potentially malfunctioning tool as womans exclusivity since the feminine
body in the middle bears a malfunctioning penis: The devouring of a disarmed
bomb, or the salvaging of a downed drone. When drones crash, in fact, their
owners are often reluctant to admit proprietorship.14 A Craigslist lover once put
it in a text message, as he inquired about my own penis: I like to see it flapping
out of control while Im in control!
While pornography itself is based on an erection-penetration-ejaculation
circuit culminating in the money shot, contemporary digital culture is driven
by an erection-erection-erection circuit with the demand for actual penetration
anxiously hovering over it. As a networked system with an endless potential
for cruising, from one hyperlinked node to the next, the Internet fosters and
sustains arousal. It is only invested in its resolution inasmuch as it gives way to
its re-ignition. This drive towards an excitation that never finishes echoes a neo-
liberal ethos that fits nicely with fantasies of invincible masculinities. Websites
need traffic, not respite. This is a promise only a team of agents an entire army
of drone pilots can keep, with its multiple bodies, turns and shifts. There are
ways beyond the group, or the gangbang, to manage the weight of the priapistic
demands of the digital, and neoliberal ideals of productivity Sez and Car-
13
Freud describes this moment as a time when visual stimuli became paramount, and a new life form began. He also
associates this with a lowering in value of the sense of smell. (Freud, 2011: 78)
14
For a poetic-political reading on the erotics of drone crashing, The shiny drone, the smashed drone, see Crandall
(2011).

rascosa suggest fisting as a technique for the perennial erection of a genderless

member, for instance. The fist and the anus show sexual difference, which dom-
inant systems depend on, to not be so evident, and perhaps not even relevant
(Sez & Carrascosa, 2011: 111).15 We can see one way of dealing with the
digital injunction for phallic exposure in the frequency with which men post
photographs of themselves working out online with hashtags such as #loading,
#beasting and #beastmode, along with peptalk-like captions that seem to solely
address other men, not women, and refer to their bodies as profit-driven ma-
chines immune to feeling. The hashtag here assumes the feminine function as a
kin-making device linking men but only remotely.
The viral broadcasting of rape also works like an increasingly popular way of
managing the burden of priapistic circuits. Here certain men are quick to not
only attack, but also boast about committing assault, documenting their crimes
and publicizing them. This is true for the Steubenville rape of 2012, when
members of a football team dragged a 16-year-old girl almost naked from
party to party, while she was unconscious and promptly fondled, fingered,
and urinated on by at least two boys, and this was then shared by many more
through the Internet. A larger group, dubbed the rape crew, took pictures and
videos of the dead living body, which they then posted on Twitter, Facebook
and Instagram. In one particularly disturbing video, a young man cracked jokes
about the ongoing actions, claiming they raped her quicker than Mike Tyson
raped that one girl (Chun, 2016: 97).
We see a similar logic in many other cases where boys cannot keep them-
selves from raping, but very specifically, from sharing the rape, when making
the rape public through viral broadcasting becomes the most fundamental
aspect of the act. The pleasure seems to be in the flaunting of the others body
as a gaping wound for which one is responsible, which promptly takes the gaze
away from possibly surveying ones own body and the potential wounds, or
holes, inherent to it. To rape collectively, to rape with and for the network, to
gang-rape digitally, becomes more important than any physical, or sexual qua
sexual, pleasure the abuse could trigger in the rapist. Stanford University rapist
Brock Turner, who served three months in jail for his crime, took the time to
snap a picture of his victims breast mid-act to share with his swim team bud-
Paul Preciado also points to the fist, and any human limb, as equivalent (if not superior) to the penis sexual function
15
(Preciado, 2000).

dies. The Vanderbilt University rape case also illustrates this, as Brandon Van-
denburg and his friends literally gang-raped an unconscious girl and still took
a video and pictures to share with those who could not take part in the event
live. Images of surveillance cameras that became widely available on Youtube,
showing the young men dragging the unconscious girls body (the girl is often
unconscious would it matter if she was trans, a gay bottom or a doll?) from
place to place add a chilling layer to the story, as reaching some kind of fantasy
of notarized airtight masculinity is worth more than ones freedom. One is will-
ing to risk anything but to remain outside masculinity guaranteed through and
for the group.
In 2016, a group of around thirty men raped a 16-year-old girl in a favela in
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Thirty was still not enough to assuage the mens drive to
gang-rape, as they promptly shared images of the violence online, most notably
on Twitter, where a video of a man sticking out his tongue in front of the girls
bloodied body/corpse, post-rape, was accompanied by lines such as, this is
where the train passed by hahaha, these chicks are too easy, and, hahaha the
train really wrecked this one (Moraes, 2016, my translation).
The highly precarious ways of managing the burden of priapistic circuits in
the digital, exemplified above, refer us all the way back to what Freud described
as the great misdeed that laid the foundation of human sociality. Freud ex-
plains the ambivalent relationship contained in sacrificing the Father by linking
his murder with the death of the totemic animal in clans where the killing of
such an animal was so occasional that when it happened it was undergirded by a
holiday ethos, a ritual of loud festival gaiety that accompanied the temporary
lifting of a prohibition. In a culture of rape, it seems as if assaulting the female
body, or the body made female through assault, would hardly constitute an
event such as the parricide described by Freud. In such a dynamic of gendered,
or gendering, banality of violence, the thrilling holiday ethos lies in the circu-
lation of the act of cruelty, not in the act itself. The flow of data here mirrors
and dramatizes the violent rush put forth through what certainly can feel like
unlimited bottomless dissemination.
The murder in Freuds account of the great misdeed, or its mourning, could
only be carried out by the various members of the group, never by one single in-
dividual. The effects of the feast could thus be multiplied at the level of fantasy
and the guilt involved was promptly relieved through sharing. If the sense of

individual force gains priapistic dimensions through collective circulation, the

guilt derived from violence simultaneously diminishes. A sense of kinship was
reiterated as these brothers in death celebrated and lamented, as they dreaded
some kind of retribution for having killed the animal. We can see how electing
the animal as the object of sacrifice enabled the murder to be repeated infinite
times, whereas a Fathers death is unrepeatable. This brings forth a convenient
economy of substitution where there will always be an easily accessible target to
hit, which is at play in the interchangeability of girls and t-girls in the gangbang
scene. In this manner, the t-girl appears as the ideal object of desire, able to trig-
ger the kin-making destructive response from the gangbang men, now brothers,
while keeping the subsequent need to mourn to a minimum.
In Freuds scene, the brothers may have joined forces to overthrow the Fa-
ther, but they were still each others rivals among women as the post-murder
guilt drove them to institute the prohibition of incest, perhaps the most maim-
ing wound ever inflicted throughout the ages on the erotic life of man, turning
their eyes away from the mother and towards representatives of her semblance,
that is, women more broadly (Freud, 2011: 74).16 Totemism worked as a pallia-
tive settlement, helping the brothers to deal with the anxiety stemming from
having killed the Father by keeping his surrogate the totemic animal safe,
while justifying that, had the Father treated the brothers themselves as they treat
the totem, they would not have had to kill him. It was thus in death that the
Father was most obeyed.
Since, for Freud, the totemic animal is a substitute for the Father, this scene
of kin-making murder and mourning illustrates not just the interchangeability
of objects-cum-targets (and certainly, of their materiality) but also childrens
contradictory feelings towards the paternal figure, who is both venerated and
despised, envied and feared (Freud, 2013: 129). Freuds account and expan-
sion of the Darwinian conception of the primal horde suggests that a new form
of technology, a new weapon, might have enabled these brothers to finally
rebel against a Father who kept all the females for himself and [drove] away
the growing sons. This new technology would have brought the brothers a
16
A Facebook posting by a recent Craigslist lover, ahead of the 2015 Superbowl, illustrates some of these points, Hav-
ing played both soccer and football, I recently happened to witness and be a part of something that would not be in
my best interest to mention in detail, but what I got out of it is what my coaches, bosses and fraternity have preached
to me all throughout my life...no one person is bigger than the team...no one person should ever feel or act as if
they are...a team is always one... one focus, one goal, and should always work as one, both mentally and physically
(Personal communication, 2015).

feeling of superiority, giving them the push needed to put their feelings (of vio-
lence) into practice and eat their victim raw, like cannibalistic savages (Freud,
2013:129).
If we extend the great misdeed further as a blueprint for the thrilling dy-
namics at stake in the gangbang scene, we can see how this switch of targets
from the actual Father to his bestial representative suggests that the t-girl is a
rather seductive target for the gangbang feast. The t-girls dubious status si-
multaneously is and is not woman makes it particularly easy for men to toggle
between the appropriateness of the target as an object woman enough to merit
destruction but not woman enough to produce guilt. Let us also remember
that by the time the t-girl enters the scene, her penis is already dead. In fact,
the deadness of the penis, at least in its status as a fleshly surrogate for the phal-
lus, is the t-girls raison dtre. The fashioning of the gangbangs target as a t-girl
at once dramatizes the eminence and irrelevance of sex in the drive to destroy
and to repair. Genitalia, that presumed gendering guarantor, are either blocked
from view (by the multitude of male asses in the frame and the fact that only the
targets ass can be used) or rendered nonsensical, or rather, non-lenticular (many
things are true at once). The gangbang then is not a parricide or a matricide; it is
a violent response precisely to the anxieties that genders lenticular logic begets.
For Russell Grigg (2014), mourning is, in fact, not about losing the object
but commemorating it. He stresses the way in which mourning insists in pre-
serving the semblance of the object considering its materiality may be missing,
as in death. Mourning is, then, a commemoration of semblance (of smells, of
mannerisms what counts as the object). It is crucial that this commemoration
be at once private and public, as we can see in the various rituals of bereave-
ment including, I am arguing, the gangbang and totems such as the AIDS
Memorial Quilt. Thus, while, for the congregating men, the gangbang can be a
perfectly liminal site for a primal settling of accounts in the public and the pri-
vate, for the gangbanged subject herself (the t-girl in the context of this essay) it
can be an opportunity to render her private position public, to seek legitimacy
by inscribing her woman-ness publically (yet privately), particularly when her
woman-ness is not sufficiently passable to be taken out into the socius some-
what safely as is the case here, with t-girls who only cross-dress for the purpose
of sexual encounters with heterosexually identified men.

While the great misdeed revolved around the killing of the Father, Melanie
Klein (1988) reminds us that human subjectivity is founded on violent fanta-
sies of destruction directed at whoever the caretaker is, along with feelings of
guilt for having destroyed, even if just in fantasy, that which guarantees ones
survival. I am arguing that while the great misdeed was a highly gendered
event, the affects that made it possible, along with the affective reactions that
it caused (mourning, guilt, and destructive reparation), speak to an actually
non-gendered drive to destroy and replace, to kill (as much as possible) and to
mourn (as little as possible), to congregate and to topple, to ruin and to repair,
and, most importantly, to make reparation by ruining by ruining again.
Sez and Carrascosa argue that sexual binarism and the myth of the heter-
osexual-reproductive couple cannot operate in the domain of the anal, which
defies its genitally dependent logic. The anal also questions another binarism,
the one that divides human beings into heterosexuals and homosexuals (Sez &
Carrascosa, 2011: 56). They refer to Paco Vidartes ethics of anality (analtica),
a counter-cerebral ethics of solidarity more urgent, honest, carnal, cruising,
animalistic, prone to the basic necessities of those whose asses stick up in the
air () (Sez & Carrascosa, 2011: 66). For Vidarte, this ethics would suck
in everything and give nothing back in exchange, usurping all that falls in the
vicinity of our black hole. An analethics is thus a bottom-centric scatologi-
cal response to mans priapistic fantasies of bottomless violence. This ethics of
anality is a barebacking ethics from the vantage point and for the benefit of the
gangbangable body, where LGBT militancy would try a very different politics,
in which all would go inside, all would be received, all would be allowed to
penetrate so that we would release shit and farts ().
This new queer politics would embrace the reality of sex, and not its realness,
by surrendering to the inexorable instrumentality of bodies and their one-sided
needs of circulation, refusing exchange, dialogue, and negotiation (Sez &
Carrascosa, 2011: 69).
We might imagine how this analethical stance can spill over onto (social)
dynamics beyond the sex scene dynamics that shape the gangbang, but are
not necessarily infected back by it. This is an active anality where the ass gets to
choose its objects and functions, and it chooses all. Here the ass speaks back to
genitalized sexual difference, universalizing the subject as a wounded subject of
a lack whose sheltering, or hospitality, defies and signifies passivity and open-

ness. In this analethic economy, brotherhoods would be disarmed because by

extending kinship to all anus-bearing subjects there would be no-one else left
to become a target.
4. Surrendering to Semblance,
Retreating to Bottomlessness
On the libertine French site Netechangisme, several of the profiles feature
duos and groups of male friends who share the same single account as they look
for potential (female and trans) partners together even if the interface itself
only allows for joint accounts featuring one male and one female. Troifoisplus
(Threetimesmore), for instance, presents itself as 3 young men (19, 21 and 23
years old): Mathieu, Sofiane and Enzo for single or group encounters for pro-
viding women pleasure. In the users comments associated with their account,
where past lovers can leave performance reviews akin to those on Yelp, leagour-
mande (greedy Lea), a t-girl, praises the men as being an equipe de choc, that
is, a dream team, or more literally, the type of helmet and body armour worn
by police forces responsible for dispersing crowds. One of their techniques is
to line up along the extremities of a street, as though they form a wall, and to
move slowly towards the congregated men. Bukkorgang is one of several profiles
that call themselves organizers of threeways, gangbangs (pluralit masculine),
cuckold sessions, and back-to-back blowjobs (pipalachaine), that is pipes la
chaine. Pipes means blowjobs in French and la chaine means one after the
other but also assembly-line work.17
The Brazilian roda de samba also illustrates the dynamic behind the gang-
bangs equipe de choc in its labouring woman (and man) into being an example
of what Preciado calls a cybernetics of power, in which power circulates through
shared performative fictions that are transmitted from body to body like electric
loads (Preciado, 2008: 317). The roda de samba is a manifestation of working
class culture, normally associated with the slums of Rio de Janeiro. It tradition-
ally consists of various male musicians sitting in a circle, drinking, riffing and
improvising songs not unlike a jazz jam session. The lyrics to these sambas tend
to sing the praises of traditional gender roles and the female form with im-
promptu and rhyming double entendres that lead to male laughter and bonding.
Jc-lyon, who organizes regular events feature one woman + transvestite + 3 or 4 bisexual friends (35 to 60 years
17
old), claims to have a stock of about fifteen buddies so it is easy to find some that are available.

While the men sing, women dance in the middle of the roda (circle) of men
holding their instruments. The womans function in the roda de samba is that of
a travelling target, a mobile eye-candy somewhere between a spinning top and a
rotating bottle in a truth-or-dare game that keeps the men from having to stare
at one another.18 As an excitation and shielding device, she is a reminder and
a justification of the mens congregated multiplicity. She brings them together
whilst keeping them from sticking together. Hers is a prophylactic function,
maintaining mens relational status and barring contagion.
The gangbangs exceptional status it is an event that is at once heterosexual
and queer speaks to the totemic feast as its excitement also lies in the rarity of
its manifestation. We tend to think of the gangbang as an unusual event, in its
violence, excitement and frequency. The gangbang is a carnivalesque holiday. As
a Craigslist responder told me in Las Vegas once, in order to justify his asking
me if he could bring his buddy along to my hotel room, We are in Vegas, so
we are like, what the hell, lets fuck a shemale together.
The gangbang works as an air pocket in the quotidian chokehold of a sys-
tem of otherwise draconian maneuvering in which the Father is as dead as he is
ironclad as a ghostly presence. The Fathers absence is his deification, turning
him into a coding metastasis, which instructs everything, bringing cohesion
from scene to scene into a sequence, in a way that his non-virtual presence
never could. To the question, What is the father? Freud replies, It is the dead
father. (Freud, 2011: 135). His annihilation is the guarantee that he will never
arrive to vex the virtues held up by His image. Ironically, a Fatherless society
becomes a patriarchic one (Lacan, 2006: 688).
What Freud calls the inciting factors of the primordial disposing of the
Father, guilt over the Fathers murder and defiance over his authority, have last-
ed through generations as a kind of damned inheritance, or a symbolic DNA.
This is illustrated, for instance, in the persistence of religion and monarchies
throughout history, with their god and godlike fatherly figures, and the repeti-
tive rituals without end associated with them. For Lacan, the Fathers castration
leads to him being nothing but a number, which is indicated quite clearly
in dynasties (Lacan, 1971: 14). The gangbang functions, then, as an uncanny
re-appearance. When considering the uncanny, Freud stresses the element of
18
Netechangisme user pachour22 tells me, my goal is that you become my sex toy for myself and my friends. Private
communication in chatroom, retrieved from Netechangisme.com (2014, February 20).

an unsettling return of something familiar, which had been kept hidden. He

also relates the uncanny to infantile fantasies of the double (an imagined lost
twin sibling a child may imagine), which the gangbang multiplies into triples
and more, and which appears as an insurance against destruction of the ego,
a denial of the irreversible power of death (Freud, 1919: 9).19
The manifestation of ambivalence that drove the brotherly rebellion against
the Father, as we have seen, simultaneously reconciles and re-enacts the murder
for which the brothers seek expiation; as in the law of retaliation in which a
murder can be atoned only by the sacrifice of another life, which can also work
as a blueprint for understanding the addictive function of cruising writ large,
and barebacking in particular. In his seminal essay Matan a Una Marica (A
Faggot Is Being Murdered), Perlongher (1997: 36) lists gay hate crimes and
AIDS as outsourced rites of sacrifice and penitence that produce a pragmatic
eradication of otherness and the (not so) secret pleasure that accompanies it.20
The bodily sites that remind the subject of his own lack, that is, of his own
death, what Haver (1996: 12) calls the bodys lamellae (i.e., the ears, the va-
gina, and above all, the anus) are violently stuffed in another disavowing coup.
When the gangbanged body is that of a t-girl, the aim comes into focus more
clearly, as she represents not only anality, but also liminality itself. As a visibly
wounded site, the t-girl is the gangbangs ultimate target as a symbolic and
material bearer of the very failure of corporeal integrity of the so-called self .
The gangbanged body being that of the t-girl is also exacerbated, as she repre-
sents bodily lamellae (she is a hole, one hole is all she has), by associations with
infection and otherness itself , which Haver links to the said lamellae as
unsettling surfaces that are both inside and outside () (Haver, 1996: 12).21
In the gangbang scene not only is the power of the penis, the representative
of the phallus in practice its fictive animation multiplied by the number
of them in the room, but the introduction of a third (and fourth, and so on,
through physical or digital sharing) male body in the session legitimizes the t-
Juliet Mitchell (2003) argues that siblings (in reality and in fantasy) introduce the child to seriality and death anxi-
19
ety: Where do I go now that there is another one of me?

20
Fethi Benslama sees in the figure of the ber-muslim (surmusulman) terrorists for whom the kinship-making
injunction to attack is not about becoming but regressing to the past, a similar kind of expiation through annihila-
tion, or sacrifice, [s]uch terror aims to reveal a destructive force that dreads nothing () (Benslama, 2016: 19, my
translation).
21
On the ears as unsettling lamellae, we might recall the multiplicity of mens laughter during a gangbang, and their
conversations amongst themselves as though a (t-)girl was not in the room.

girl further as a her, and not a gender-neutral you. One man is thus able to refer
to the t-girl by addressing someone else, forcing the gender-defining pronoun
she to be uttered, whereas if there were only one man and one t-girl in the scene,
the gender-neutral you would be the only pronoun possible language failing
to wound the t-girl enough to publicly inscribe her as woman. That is an event
of language with incredible (meta-)physical consequences in which bearing
(the make-up, the accouterments, the lack) is being. As such, the same event
can hold vastly distinct functions as it works as a re-enactment for the man but,
at the same time, as the t-girls first entrance into the symbolic system in some
ways founded by the great misdeed.
Like fire starters, the male multiplicity locks the t-girls feminine position
into place once her mediating presence locks them into relation. The pussy is
never yoursIts just your turn! says the Internet meme.22 As one Craigslist
trick said to another right before cumming inside me, This bitch would be a
niggas best friend in jail. Here, this bitch holds the gender notarization
function that a she guarantees when the t-girl is stuck not before man but
between men.
This setup authenticates the t-girl as a woman through the male multitudes
speech. When one man addresses another man in reference to her, he performs
not only the function of speaking to or about someone but, and most impor-
tantly, a way of approaching another such that one presumes who the other
is, even the meaning and value of their existence, as Judith Butler puts it in
response to an unarmed black man addressing the (police) State with Black
Lives Matter, a way of saying You white police officers recognize my/our
humanity! (Butler, 2015).
In the gangbang, where a multiplicity of men (re-)gender a (t-)girl into place
by the uttering she or her, and by sharing her body as they would a meal, the
tone they use to hail each other reveals a belittlement of the negotiated feminine
object-cum-female target. This belittlement reiterates she-ness as a filament, if
not a net, safeguarding the men from taking each other for a she (Butler, 2015).
If the gangbang is thus an event in language in which ambivalence is
resolved, the digital is a network where age-old anxieties over ambivalence
re-emerge, bearing the trace and the veering of their original violence but also
teeming with opportunities for the re-claiming, or re-coding, of that very vio-
22
Retrieved from http://memegenerator.net/instance/53728866.

lence. The gangbang, and the gangbang with a t-girl as its target in particular,
is at once reactionary and subversive; it laughs with and laughs at the coding
that makes its engendering possible. The gangbang is realistic. It makes good
use of the code, computational and psychic, in order to find pleasure where it
can. The gangbang does not re-write; it reads between the lines. The gangbang
is ultimately trans-sexual, even if a t-girl is not its literal target, for its very dy-
namic exposes the functional role of each body, any body, in a sexual encounter.
Driving the gangbang is a politics of survival where even if, or especially if, the
materiality of the body is seen to deny such survival from the t-girl: bodily
functions matter, not matter itself. Matter disappears, only fantasy is left, along
with bits of bones, mounds of flesh, holes (avowed and disavowed), and the
promise of never-ending fluids, like an entirely repaired spring-like breast that
never dries up.
I have pointed to the male collective as the agents of what we could call an
archaic and infantile need to destroy and to repair, to destroy as a way of mak-
ing reparation. I have also established the figure of the digitally enabled t-girl
as a spectre of re-signifying creativity, enjoyment and the hacker ethic. As such,
the backend of networked communications (the digital) is not only intimately
entwined with the backend of psychic structures (the unconscious) but they
also abide by mirroring architecting powers and emanate corresponding ana-
lytical value. The digitally mediated gangbang is an emblematic instantiation
of the networks own orgiastic relationship to the data flows that constitute it.
The gangbang is, then, a case of the heterosexual symbolic running at once at
its most normative and its queerest, allowing unprecedented access to the way
dominant forms of code perform themselves and to imagining techniques of
enjoyment in the face of the pre-determining propensity of all code. The gang-
bang bugs the system without bringing it to a halt, making room for non-uto-
pian possibilities of enjoyment that make a mockery of the body as a bounded
individual entity and of the future as something other than a cock-blocking
operation (Shah, 2015).

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Chaosmic Spasm: Guattari, Stiegler,

Berardi, and the Digital Apocalypse
Mark Featherstone1
Keele University, Keele, UK
doi: 10.5937/comman12-11501
Abstract: In this paper I explore the intersections of digital media, psychoanalysis,

and the subject through reference to Felix Guattaris notion of the chaosmic spasm, which
the Italian philosopher Franco Berardi picks up in his work and most recently his book
And. Guattaris idea, which appears in his Chaosmosis, designates the fatal acceleration
of the media semio-universe towards spasm, or apocalyptic collapse, and the emergence
of some new form of schizoid organisation. Following an exploration of Guattaris idea,
and a broader discussion of its relationship to his wider thought and Anti-Oedipal
collaborations with Deleuze, I consider how Bernard Stiegler may be seen to provide
a meta-historical account of Guattaris concept of the spasm in his Technics and Time.
According to Stieglers account, the hyper-acceleration of media forms results in a process
of disorientation and de-subjectivization where the individual is destroyed because of
their inability to situate themselves in social, symbolic, structures that have collapsed
towards hyper-rational, meaningless forms. In Lacanian terms, psychosis becomes a kind
of generalised condition. In response to this generalisation of madness, Stiegler imagines
the need for a new politics of knowledge and grammar that is able to suture individuals
back into wider social systems and provide the kind of secure, careful, space that D. W.
Winnicott writes about in his work on play. In order to unpack what this politics of cul-
ture and knowledge might comprise, I turn to Guattaris work on schizoid subjectivity,
or endless subjectivization without subjectivity, and Berardis contrast between financial
semio-capitalism and poetry, in order to suggest an ethical mode of thought and cultural
expression that might capture the political core of Stieglers vision and paint a picture of
what human thought might look like on the other side of the new media apocalypse, the
chaosmic spasm.
Keywords: chaos, meaning, globalisation, new media, psychoanalysis, subjectivity,
apocalypse, Guattari, Stiegler, Berardi
1

Chaosmic Spasm: Guattari, Stiegler, Mark Featherstone
1. What is the Chaosmic Spasm?

How can the concept of the spasm, which describes muscular over-stretch
and a sudden painful compensatory contraction, capture the experience of
contemporary new media globalisation? In this article I take the idea of the
spasm, and more specifically Felix Guattaris (1995: 135) notion of the chaos-
mic spasm, to explore the reality of subjectivity in contemporary new media
society. The concept of the chaosmic spasm appears at the very end of Guattaris
final work, Chaosmosis, which explores the possibility of the translation of the
chaos of processes of globalisation into some kind of territorialised fundamental
thought able to support a liveable form of subjectivity. Guattari writes:
Psychoanalysis, institutional analysis, film, literature, poetry, innovative
pedagogies, town planning and architecture all the disciplines will have
to combine their creativity to ward off the ordeals of barbarism, the mental
implosion and chaosmic spasm looming on the horizon, and transform
them into riches and unforeseen pleasures, the promises of which, for all
that, are all too tangible. (1995: 135)
In this context the chaosmic spasm describes the transitional moment
where nonsensical chaos folds over into meaningful complexity that can be
effectively integrated into a new mode of schizoid human subjectivity that is
sensitive to endless change and uncertainty. For Guattari (2009), this mode of
subjectivity-endlessly-in-the-making, which he calls subjectivization, is the only
way to live with the kind of complexity that global capitalism or, in his words,
integrated world capitalism has thrown humanity into. However, it is not that
Guattari thinks that complexity is problematic or unliveable in itself, because
what we find in his Three Ecologies (2014) is a vision of the potential, which is
implicit in the recognition and experience of complexity for humans, to truly
come to terms with the ecological truth of their existence on earth. The prob-
lem of global complexity and the new media universe, which has emerged since
Guattaris death in the early 1990s, is, therefore, not simply about complexity
in itself, but rather the kind of wide open tech world into which it throws the
post-modern subject, a world without effective coordinates or cultural signposts
to enable proper, liveable, subject formation. It is this cold, unliveable, techno-
capitalist world that Guattari wants to over-turn through the chaosmic spasm,
which indicates the apocalyptic collapse of human significance in a blizzard of

Mark Featherstone Chaosmic Spasm: Guattari, Stiegler,
empty communication and the possibility of a new way of making meaning

that is able to express humanitys place in the world, where the world is built
upon an understanding of ecological being on the earth. In order to explore
Guattaris (1995: 135) idea of the chaosmic spasm more fully, in the first part
of this article I unpack the concept in conversation with Arthur Krokers (1993)
theory of spasm from his book of the same name, before moving on to consider
the development of global processes since Guattaris death in the early 1990s.
The point of this work is to situate Chaosmosis (1995), which, it seems to me,
theorised the potential collapse of integrated world capitalism and the rise of
a new symbolic order based on a fully realised recognition of ecological inter-
dependence, in the history of global capitalism and the development of what
Hardt and Negri (2000) talk about in terms of empire in the period since the
1990s.
Specifically, here I refer to two events, (1) 9/11 and the subsequent war on
terror and (2) the global financial crash and consequent world recession, which
might be read through the lens of Guattaris (1995) theory of the chaosmic
spasm since what they can be seen to represent is the moment when the over-
reach of empire became apparent and the spastic phase of globalisation that we
currently occupy started to take effect. Apart from social and political mani-
festations of this spastic phase which we might understand through reference
to the rise of nationalism in America, where Donald Trump has suggested the
withdrawal of the land of the free from the world stage, and similar phenomena
in Europe, where opposition to the project of European integration has seen
the UK vote to leave the EU we can also trace the impacts of the failure of the
global symbolic order that emerged in the late 1980s / early 1990s in the rise of
a range of individual psychopathological effects, including depression, despair,
anxiety, and outbursts of sadistic violence. We can find examples of these kinds
of psychological responses to what we might call global psychosis brought
about by the failure of the symbolic system of Guattaris (2009) integrated
world capitalism everywhere in contemporary society. Against the depression,
despair and anxiety brought about by the apparently meaningless world, many
have sought to escape into repetitive addictive behaviours that are able to of-
fer relief from the chaos of life, while others have fallen into suicide or suicidal
violence projected onto constructed enemies. Perhaps this is how it is possible
to understand the continuum between the savage violence of Islamic State in
Syria and Iraq, which is concerned with resistance to the collapse of the Islamic

psychological world under the pressure of western modernity, and the suicidal
violence of European Islamists and so-called lone wolves who take up the cause
of Radical Islam in order to rage against their worlds. What the European Is-
lamists in the UK, France and Germany are playing out is their own suicidal
response to the collapse of their worlds through the lens of a global and, beyond
this, cosmic struggle between good and evil that can give their acts significance.
In this respect, it would be correct to say that the European Islamists are men-
tally ill, since their violence is based upon a paranoid fantasy of escape from the
horror of the meaningless present into a meaningful future premised on the de-
struction of all others, but a mistake to imagine that theirs is somehow simply
an individual pathology that is not founded upon a wider cultural condition
of complexity, chaos and the collapse of symbolic integrity (Benslama, 2009).
In order to illustrate this point, and further contextualise Guattaris (1995)
theory of complexity and chaos, I also seek to theorise the despair of the pre-
sent through a discussion of Bernard Stieglers (2011b, 2012, 2014b) work
on disbelief, discredit, default and the failure of the spirit of capitalism. What
matters here is that Stiegler locates the disenchantment of capitalism, and the
related rise of disbelief and despair that has led to general social collapse, in
the emergence of the final phase of late capitalism or what the Italian autono-
mist followers of Guattari write about through the idea of semio-capitalism
(Berardi, 2015; Genosko, 2012; Marazzi, 2008, 2011). According to Guattari
(2009: 244), and his Italian followers including Berardi and Marazzi, semio-
capitalism refers to the moment when capitalist value escapes materiality and
becomes lodged in the pure abstraction of sign. At this point all language be-
comes subject to the logic of commodification and valuation and there is no
meaning beyond the more or less calculations of relative price. In this context,
Stiegler (2011b, 2012) shows that the problem with late capitalism, and in this
respect lateness refers to the senility of the economic domination of the world,
starts when the symbolic order is reduced to the carrier of quantitative value
and no longer enables humans to properly articulate their experiences of the
world. When this happens language has no real, qualitative value but simply
measures productivity and profitability. This is why the symbolic order fails,
and centrally fails as a network able to support civilized subjectivity, with the
result that the subject falls into psychosis (recall that in Lacans work psychosis
names what happens when the subject fragments before the failed master signi-
fier and the symbolic order it structures) and a pathological, defensive mode of

subjectivity defined by aggression towards the external world, which becomes

necessarily threatening and destructive. In Stieglers (2012: 80103) work the
product of this process is the miserable dis-individual, a kind of destroyed self
that survives through violent acting out (or what he calls negative sublimation),
which becomes the principal means for the assertion of their existence in a
world that seems chaotic and meaningless. In order to illustrate this argument,
Stiegler (2012: 47) refers to the phenomena of the school shooting, for example
Columbine or Sandy Hook, where young men seek to take their revenge on the
cold world through the destruction of its future in young people and children.
However, we might also refer to the recent terror attacks across Europe, which
similarly represent violent expressions of an attempt to make meaning in the
world, and other explosions of apparently meaningless violence.
Building upon Stieglers work, I move on to take up this idea of negative
sublimation (2012: 6) and read it against Franco Berardis theory of the digital
apocalypse from his recent book Heroes (2015b), but also And (2015a), After
the Future (2011), and Uprising (2012). In Heroes, Berardi supports Stiegler
by showing how the collapse of the western cultural symbolic order under the
pressure of global capitalism has led to the destruction of individualism and
centrally the impossibility of individual action. Here, the collapse of the indi-
vidual able to make a difference, and the collapse of the hero who acts upon the
world, has led to the rise of a culture of violent anti-heroism, symbolised by the
violence of figures such as Anders Behring Breivik, who seek to create mean-
ing through notoriety and infamy. In much the same way that Stiegler (2012)
attributes the rise of this kind of rage and violence to the collapse of symbolic
systems able to ground meaningful subjectivity, in perhaps his most expansive
work, And (2015a), Berardi shows how new media globalisation has effectively
eroded human forms of communication and destroyed the possibility of the
articulation of significance in semio-capitalist representations of value. Under
these conditions, Berardi (2015a) explains that there is no hope and no future,
since the subject is cast adrift in a sea of meaningless symbols of quantitative
value that makes it impossible to imagine the new on the basis of a vision of the
present and an understanding of the past. In this respect, Berardis individual is
truly lost in the existential sense of the word because they cannot locate them-
selves in the world on the basis that they have no real language to articulate
their experiences of the present.

When all that matters is productivity and profitability, experience becomes

meaningless. As a result, the future ceases to exist beyond the endless demand
to produce more and increase profitability, which is no kind of future at all be-
cause it fails to imagine the new. What, then, is the alternative to the dystopia of
global capitalism without a future? In the conclusion of my article I pick up Be-
rardis (2012: 134171) claim that escape from the horror of the late capitalist
nightmare of connectivity, complexity and chaos would have to entail the recla-
mation of language from the abstraction of finance and new media communi-
cation and the reengagement of a poetic approach to expression where language
becomes the carrier of embodied experience and perception in the world and
perhaps more importantly of being on the earth. In this respect, I think Berardi
(2012) can be read with Stiegler (2013: 98), who argues that escape from the
destroyed culture of the present resides in a new politics of knowledge, disci-
pline and cultural engagement. However, where I think Berardi (2012: 8) rep-
resents an advance on Stiegler is in his reference to the experience of the body.
Although he does not fully work out exactly what his embodied critique of
semio-capitalist abstraction would mean for the contemporary, my view is that
his target is what we might call the semiotic reduction of reality that tears lan-
guage out of communication with corporeal experience. In the semio-capitalist
world of Berardi (2012), and for that matter Stiegler (2014a), the problem is
that language has become subject to the logic of floatation and has no relation
to real experience. This is, therefore, why Berardis (2012: 20) notion of the
uprising is not simply about a taste for poetry, but rather concerns the creation
of new worlds founded in the articulation of experience and perception, and
Stieglers (2013) critique would benefit from the language of embodiment to
gloss his theory of cultural politics. In this instance, it is not simply that the
escape from the horrors of the permanent ruined present of late capitalism relies
on a kind of elite cultural politics, where there is more to life than work and
money, but rather that these cultural politics must reimagine the world through
the expression of lived experience on the earth. In this way, the world, or the
construction of a symbolic order able to sustain subjectivity, emerges from and
presupposes expressions of an embodied experience and perception of earth.
Finally, I conclude my article by returning to Guattaris (1995: 135) theory
of the chaosmic spasm, which I seek to contextualise in terms of the theory
of geo-philosophy, that he wrote about in his final work with Deleuze, What

is Philosophy? (1994). The point here is to show that what Guattari imagines
through the figure of the chaosmic spasm is a new ecological, terrestrial mode
of subjectivity rooted in the experience and perception of earth. Since ecology
is characterised by complexity, this new form of subjectivity could never form
around a static paranoid fantasy of self-identity, but would instead escape the
desperate need to assert defensive security through its ability to express experi-
ences and perceptions of an earth-bound existence in a new world that is sensi-
tive to what it feels like to live, suffer and imagine other ways of life. In this
way I show how this new reality, the reality of the subject endlessly made and
remade in the experience, perception and expression of life on earth and in the
world, is what Guattari (1995) imagines when he writes of chaosmosis. It is this
form of identification, which would render complexity liveable, that Guattari
(2009) thinks will emerge from the catastrophe of integrated world capital-
ism, and which both Stiegler (2009) and Berardi (2015a) explore in their own
works that are concerned with what we might call the contemporary new media
apocalypse. However, before I reach the point where I conclude in a discussion
of the ecosophical mode of subjectivity, I want to take up a discussion of the
concept of the spasm and the ways it is understood by first, the Canadian media
theorist Arthur Kroker (1993) and second, Guattari (1995), who complicates
the idea through reference to the concept of the chaosmic spasm.
2. The Chaosmic Semio-Capitalist Spasm

In his Spasm (1993) the Canadian media theorist Arthur Krorker explores
the other side of the virtual, new media utopia that emerged in the 1990s.
Written in the teeth of this utopia, where the limitations of reality itself seemed
to have collapsed before the virtual where everything seemed possible, Kroker
suggests that the problem of the new computational universe is that the pos-
sibilities that it might allow are firmly held in check by a technological concern
for functionality. Even though it may not have been immediately apparent, the
new utopia was never, in Krokers view, open to human possibility. Instead,
it was primarily concerned with the absolute expansion of a logical system
organised around digital data, and the representation and reconfiguration of
the world in instrumental terms. In this way, Kroker reverses Deleuze and
Guattaris (1987) idea of the body without organs, which was primarily about
the schizophrenic overcoming of the bounded organism in the terrestrial body
ecological, through the idea of the organs without a body (1993: 3646), where
all that matters is functionality and the kind of rationality that ends in the
nihilistic disenchantment of wider significance. The difference between these
two figures is, therefore, that while Deleuze and Guattaris (1987) formulation
seeks to found subjectivity in significance based upon the ecology of life, Kro-
kers (2003) virtual utopia attempts to escape the limits of terrestrial reality for
computational metaphysics and the flesh of earth-bound identity for the new
infinite space of the digital where life can be made and remade without concern
for boundaries. However, the problem with this new utopianism, which we
might call the final modern utopia based upon the strategy of escape, is that its
reliance on what Kroker (1993: 56) writes of in terms of a logic of floatation
was actually tightly bound in terms of its fanatical adherence to the instrumen-
tal rationality of digital universe. Here, everything can be reduced to the repre-
sentation of zeroes and ones. Although the virtual utopians often imagined the
infinite possibilities for novel experience that might be opened up by the new
computational reality of the internet, Kroker (1993: 7) writes of the great re-
cline of western civilization in order to illustrate the death of real experience in
easy, coded representations of reality. The truth of the new virtual utopia of the
1990s was, thus, in Krokers view a kind of laid back, exhausted stroll towards
the end of humanity. Slouching towards the apocalypse, Krokers (1993) vision
of the experience of spasm emerges in the abyss between digital ecstasy, where
everything seems possible on condition of its functionality, and earth-bound
decay, brought about by the abandonment of experience and perception in a
utopian fantasy of the absolute reach of numbers and digital data.
In Krokers (1993: 39) theory of the new world algorithm, where numbers
and data are the ontological truth of the reality of experience and perception, he
shows how purity becomes the central political category and mutations of new-
ness and unpredictability are destroyed in the name of functionality. The irony
of the virtual utopia was, in this respect, that it produced a kind of nightmarish
computational dystopia, what Kroker (1993: 160) calls a zero-culture, charac-
terised by a form of cyber-puritanism allergic to the thickness of the flesh, ex-
perience, perception, and more broadly terrestrial life itself. It is this situation,
where the virtual sphere of computation expands to the detriment of embodied
existence, which returns in the form of a kind of excremental remainder, that
Kroker captures in the concept of spasm. It is the same experience of spasm

that I think Guattari writes of in the final pages of his book Chaosmosis (1995:
135), where he opposes the hyper-rationalism of what he calls integrated world
capitalism to the reality of earth-bound existence and shows how the distance
between these two worlds finds its limit in the chaosmic spasm or momentary
phase transition, which sees one universe of (in)significance collapse before
some other vision of the world.
The problem of integrated world capitalism or semio-capitalism is, in the
work of the key thinker of the autonomists Christian Marazzi (2008, 2011),
that economic value is no longer related to things. Reading Marazzis (2008:
1369) work we can see that upon the deregulation or floatation of money by
Richard Nixon in the 1970s, there was no longer a solid relationship between
money and materiality (precious metals), which meant that money was able to
take flight from the world. But if the issue was the simple separation of value
and things, the problem might be one more concerned with the integrity of
money, rather than some wider crisis of meaningfulness itself, which might
have opened up utopian possibilities for the rearticulation of value. However,
what floatation, and the emergence of semio-capitalism, actually produced was
the colonisation of reality by the symbolic form of money that was able to trans-
form its idealistic redundancy into a virtue on the basis of its absolute commen-
surability. Herein resides the real catastrophe of semio-capitalism, integrated
world capitalism, and symbolic value for Guattari and later his autonomist
followers. It is not simply that money floats off into the metaphysical universe
of Platonic forms, but rather that it comes back in its redundancy to over-code
human and non-human reality and transform everything into an empty sem-
blance of economic value. The ultimate Platonic sleight of hand is, therefore,
the semio-capitalist reduction of terrestrial life to abstract value that becomes
(virtual) reality itself, which is then absolutely malleable precisely because it is
no longer real in the thick phenomenological sense of the term we might find
in the work of Merleau-Ponty (2012).
It is this situation that Guattari (1995, 2014) thinks has become unsustain-
able and unliveable for humans because they are essentially bound to the flesh
of the earth through their own bodies, which they cannot escape. Apart from
the violation of the thickness of things in the name of the infinity of abstrac-
tion, the catastrophe of semio-capitalism is that it destroys the fleshy integrity
of the symbolic order, which holds the subject in place through the provision

of a meaningful world, through its totalitarian reduction of communication

to rational calculation concerned with productivity and profitability. Thus the
two-fold problem of the dystopic system that Guattari (2009) writes about
in terms of integrated world capitalism is that it transforms the human life
world into a paper thin construct organised around empty capitalist objectives
focused on profitability and at the same time blocks the emergence of alterna-
tives to this meaningless universe through the transformation of economy
into a system defined by scarcity and the struggle for survival. Cast out of the
systems of significance that might enable social action, the individual collapses
towards the figure that Stiegler (2012: 80103) talks about through the idea of
the dis-individual, and humanity starts to resemble the form of animality that
Heidegger (2001) found poor in the world. In fact, the situation may be even
worse than this, since there is a distinct difference between the animal and the
dis-individual, which is that the animal occupies an ecological umwelt that or-
ganises its behaviour, whereas the dis-individual is thrown out of the meaning-
ful world into a kind of barren un-world that seems ecologically unsustainable
and unliveable. This is how, I think, integrated world capitalism penetrates
through to the level of subjectivity and essentially turns humans into zombies,
staggering through their environment in a liminal state somewhere between life
and death.
The zombification of the modern or post-modern subject has been brought
about by the reduction of the symbolic order to the level of a kind of instru-
mental command system that leads to the emergence of a hyper-rational subject
that cannot easily survive and is now on the verge of total collapse. In this re-
spect, the problem that the desperate dis-individual, or we might say post-mor-
tem subject, faces, is that the contemporary situation is worse than that which
Nietzsche (1961) imagined in the 19th century when he wrote of the horror of
Godless modernity, simply because the abyss of capitalism blocks the possibil-
ity of the bermensch through its transformation of reality into code. Here, the
situation of integrated world capitalism more closely resembles the horror-show
imagined by Weber (2001: 123) in the final pages of his work on the spirit of
capitalism, where the iron cage transforms society into a system of bureaucratic
rules and regulation devoid of wider significance, because the existential abyss
is always-already full of nonsense and there appears little room for the new.
However, I think that it is this condition that Guattari (1995: 135) considers

representative of a kind of transitional moment, where apocalyptic collapse

opens out onto the possibility of something else. This is what, in my view, he
captures in the idea of the chaosmic spasm, precisely because the present seems
entirely unliveable and unsustainable. Under these post-human conditions, the
chaos of global complexity which seems meaningless because of high levels of
post-human technological development, the lightning fast speeds of economic
interaction, and levels of inter-connectedness that mean that events seem to ap-
pear ex nihilo suggests the possibility of utopian innovation in the creation of
what Guattari (1995: 1011) calls a novel ethico-aesthetic paradigm. But how
would this new paradigm work?
Although Guattari is light on the precise detail of the possible emergence of
this new order, my view would be that it would occur through a necessary phase
transition from integrated world capitalism to a new ecological vision of the re-
ality of the world. Thrown out of the human world of significance into the post-
human quantitative un-world of balance sheets, the monstrous, de-subjectified,
dis-individual would need to return to the earth and to their experience and
perception of suffering in order to imagine a new world beyond the present.
Given the poverty of language available to the autistic un-self, they would need
to fall back on the most basic terms concerned with the expression of pain and
suffering in order to articulate their ethical opposition to the semio-capitalist
un-world and from there seek to represent the truth of schizophrenic subjectiv-
ity where the self only ever survives through its relation to others and its terres-
trial life support machine. This is, in my view, the kind of world that Guattari
(1995: 108) imagines and what he means when he writes of machinism in his
ecosophical works. In this context, machinism does not refer to the Heideg-
gerian nightmare of modernity from his The Question concerning Technology
(1977), where everything collapses before the instrumental rationality of the
machine organised around the world picture that enframes existence itself, but
rather the more ancient conception of technology captured in the term techne,
which suggests the sympathetic communication and coevolution of humanity
and environment that we also find in the work of Gilbert Simondon (2016).
Against this more ancient conception of technological machinism, which sug-
gests ecological communication and interaction, it is, I think, possible to argue
that the virtual utopia that Kroker writes of in his Spasm (1993) represents the
final stage in the development of Heideggers modern technological system

precisely because of the ways in which it uses, abuses and brutalises man and
nature in the creation of a totally integrated system organised around infinite
commensurability and endless exchange in the name of profitability.
While this model of technology is programmatic and static in terms of its
conception of change, what Guattari (1995: 108) imagines through the term
machinism is open, dynamic and defined by deterritorialisation. However, the
converse is also the case. Where the modern, and what would later become
the post-modern, version of technology seeks to escape all limits in the name of
abstraction and virtuality, Guattaris ecosophical notion of machinism commu-
nicates with other machines in the name of the creation of bounded sense and
significance in the otherwise chaotic un-world. In this respect, I think Guattaris
understanding of technology respects the limits of terrestrial space, which is
precisely what we find expressed in his theory of geophilosophy outlined in his
final book with Deleuze, What is Philosophy? (1994), even though this humil-
ity before ground is endlessly extended by the shifting nature of reality (the
chaotic un-ground) to produce a dynamic, fundamental thought in touch with
the abyss of experience, perception and earth. This is what Guattari (1995:
8087; 112) means by chaosmosis which refers to the way that chaos can
find a temporary form in a kind of fundamental thought that is simultaneously
able to make sense and respect the endless turbulence of reality that he at-
tempts to explain through a rearticulation of Freuds (2003) theory of the death
drive from his key paper Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Where Freud takes his
young relatives game of fort / da for a symbol of the basic inertia of being that
is endlessly repetitive of cycles of birth, life, and death, Guattari (1995: 7276)
points out that the first stage of the game (fort) may be taken to represent the
traumatic experience of chaos that the little boy orders through the second stage
of his play (da) in the name of the creation of sense in the world. While Freud
emphasises the essential trauma of being, which humans can never escape until
they flatline out of existence, Guattaris more optimistic reading of the work of
life concerns the way that humans are able to make meaning in the world in
order to organise their experiences.
It is possible to argue that Guattari (1995: 135) saw the potential collapse of
integrated world capitalism in the happy days of the late 1980s and early 1990s,
when the really existing communism fell before a capitalist future that seemed
to promise endless freedom and prosperity to those who had been locked out

of the American-led boom since the 1950s. When Frances Fukuyama (1992)
wrote of the end of history in the triumph of capitalism and George Bush I
spoke of the NWO (New World Order) of American power, Guattaris early
1990s critique of complexity seemed off the mark, simply because there was
a clear organising structure through which to understand the new globalised
world, which was defined by concepts such as freedom, democracy and pros-
perity. In many respects the virtual utopia of the 1990s, which saw the internet
become perhaps the most visible representation of processes of globalisation,
seemed to make these abstract principles virtually concrete, since it appeared to
enable endless freedom to communicate, consume and develop. The emergence
of Web 2.0 and social media further supported the fantasy of the virtual utopia
through the promise of a new kind of cyber-democracy and cyber-society and
in many respects it seemed that Marshall McLuhans (2001) media utopia of
the 1950s had been realised at the end of the 20th century. However, in much
the same way that McLuhans (2001: 4553) utopian story of global media
was qualified by his dark vision of the gadget lover, who makes up for their
loss of embodiment through the possession of the high tech fetish object, it
soon became clear that the virtual utopia was also a new disciplinary or, to refer
to Deleuzes (1997: 177183) famous essay, control space for the integration
of workers, who would now never stop working, and consumers, who were
similarly never out of reach for corporations desperate to increase their profit
margins.
In this way, the virtual space of absolute freedom, the abyss of possibility
founded upon the bright light of the screen, opened out onto a nightmarish
dystopia, a slack jawed world defined by trans-fixed cybernauts caught some-
where or nowhere between here, there and everywhere. Caught up in the virtual
un-world, where one could apparently float free of the ground of terrestrial
existence, even the promise of the social network where one could make mil-
lions of new friends, seemed to fail before the logic of commodification and
quantification, which saw friends become immaterial objects that one collects
in the name of the quantifiable popularity necessary to offset the void of real
life beyond the shiny, happy world of screen culture. In this respect it is pos-
sible to read what we might call the spasm of new media culture, which saw the
virtual utopia contract from its expansive utopian phase of absolute possibility
back towards a more dystopian realisation of the limitations of the immaterial

computational world, in terms representative of the evolution of the wider

culture of floatation from the 1990s through to the present period where there
seems to be no way to move forward, but through a return to the real world of
terrestrial bodies. The signs of this impasse have become clear since the turn of
the 21st century. According to Slavoj ieks (2009) exploration of the failure
of the final utopia of the 20th century in his book First As Tragedy, Then As
Farce, the first shock to the New World Order was 9/11, which struck at the
very heart of American economic power, and opened out onto the war on ter-
ror. Akin to Vietnam, which similarly proved that technological power can
never overcome territorial resistance, the war on terror was soon revealed to be
unwinnable, economically unsustainable, and perhaps even worse, enormously
destructive for the project of global integration, which began to freeze before
the translation of communication into its fearful other, contagion. On the back
of the shock of 9/11, the second shock to the virtual utopia took the form of the
global financial crash of 2008, which further undermined the semio-capitalist
project by showing that the creation of money from money ex nihilo was ul-
timately an unsustainable project: the repressed real would continue to return
from the abyss of materiality hidden from view by the shiny world of virtuality.
The deep economic problem that the crash revealed was essentially con-
cerned with Nixons floatation of money in the early 1970s; the subsequent
deregulation of finance and the rise of fractional reserve banking; and the over-
leveraging of available assets in the form of debts that turned out to be unsus-
tainable because of a lack of real economic activity. Of course, this process of
financialisation, which took place from the 1970s through the 1980s and 1990s
up to the crash in 2008 under the banner of neoliberal economics, was the mo-
tor of globalisation and what Guattari (2009) wrote about in terms of integrat-
ed world capitalism. When capitalism started to fail in the 1970s, because of a
crisis of productivity and a related lack of growth, floatation and financial in-
novation seemed to represent the way forward, because they allowed for the ex-
pansion of capitalism beyond the limits made possible by real production alone.
While this process organised around the virtual creation of money from money
for investment in innovation and financial profit was supposed to be made safe
by systems of securitisation, these structures could not prevent the near collapse
of the system in 2008 because of the abyss that had opened up between levels of
debt based in virtual money and the really existing value founded in the econ-

omy of bodies and things. At this point, the virtual utopia of free floating signs
came crashing back down to earth in the revelation of its economic limits in
reality. However, while the supporters of neoliberal financialisation have sought
to save the system, from the point of view that the problem of 2008 was an issue
of greedy bankers looking to make a killing from people who would never be
able to make their repayments, what Guattaris work and particularly his Three
Ecologies (2014: 2728) suggests is that the financial crash was less representa-
tive of a narrow issue of economic mismanagement and more concerned with
global ecological sustainability relating to first, the ability of humans to live in
a complex world where qualitative significance has been undermined by quan-
titative calculation; second, the possibility of society and social integration in a
world where people have lost touch with embodied language and the primary
good has become competition; and finally, the potential of the world to survive
the progressive destruction of the earth that sustains organic life by capitalism,
which, even in its virtual form where it seeks the elimination of materiality, lives
off the exploitation of planetary resources.
From the point of view of Guattaris (1995, 2014) ecosophical works, the
problem of integrated world capitalism and the virtual utopia is, therefore, far
more expansive than an issue of financial mismanagement and instead relates
back to the post-modern rejection of materiality in the name of the apparent
freedom of abstraction that has now run into its outer limits in the formation
of a bleak un-world that suffers the loss of its terrestrial body. In this sense,
it is possible to argue that the problem with the present is actually less about
the psychotic flight from reality into fantasy (the post-modern critique of
the hyper-real we find in Baudrillard (2010), for example) and more about a
schizoid break from the fantasy of virtual semio-capitalism that has occupied
people since the 1970s but has now run its course in the contemporary period,
which we might talk about in terms of post-mortemism defined by the chaosmic
spasm, the terror of endings, and existential questions about what comes next.
For Guattari and his autonomist followers, such as the contemporary German
thinker Gerald Raunig (2016), the answer to this question is, I think, that we
must seek to translate the lack of a post-modern virtual future, which finds rep-
resentation in the post-mortemism of the destroyed individual, into a potential
excess, which opens the otherwise closed, militarised self out onto others and
the earth itself in the form of the figure that Raunig calls the dividual. Where

Stieglers (2012) dis-individual represents the person who has lost their sense of
self founded in the ruined symbolic order and cannot think beyond the mean-
ingless present into the future for this reason, I think that the potential of the
dividual resides in the possibility of the conversion of ruined subjectivity that
knows nothing but pain and suffering into an ecological being founded upon
their ability to communicate their experience and perception to others on the
basis of their common occupation of earth-bound bodies. This is, in my view,
how the ecosophical response to spasm, which represents the painful, strained
relation between the virtual and the material might begin to find resolution
in the foundation of a new sustainable world based upon being on the earth.
In the final section of this article I propose to outline the longer history of the
spasm through reference to Stiegler (1998, 2009) and Berardi (2012, 2015)
before returning to Guattari (1995) to argue that the other side of the chaosmic
spasm must involve a return to the kind of ecological being he wrote about with
Deleuze in his theory of geo-philosophy (1994).
3. The Politics of Spasm

Although he never mentions the idea of spasm, it is possible to argue that
Bernard Stiegler (1998, 2009, 2011a) provides a pre-history of the concept in
his three volume work, Technics and Time, through his discussion of what he
calls disorientation. In the first volume of this study, The Fault of Epimetheus
(1998), Stiegler picks up Platos (2009) Protagoras, and specifically the myth of
Epimetheus (16-18), to oppose the Promethean reading of technology where
the machine represents a symbol of human superiority over the world. In order
to oppose this story, Stiegler refers to Prometheus brother, the comic figure of
Epimetheus, who forgets to make sure that humans are ready for entry into the
world. The fault of Epimetheus is that he provides every other animal with the
means of survival (claws, wings, sharp teeth, thick fur and so on), but forgets
about men, which means that Prometheus has to steal fire from the Gods in or-
der to give humanity a fighting chance in the state of nature. We know the rest
of the story, which concerns the punishment of Prometheus and the emergence
of techno-man, but the importance of the reference to Epimetheus for Stiegler
is less clear. It turns out that the importance of Epimetheus is that he illustrates
humanitys prematurity. We are always born too soon, inadequate, in a state of
default, and have to spend the rest of our lives (history) trying to make up for

this lack through technological development. At this point we enter familiar

Heideggerian (2001) territory, where we learn that the difference between ani-
mals and humans is that animals live in ecological harmony with nature while
humans have an uncanny world-forming relation to their environment, even
though Stieglers (1998) point is always to emphasise human lack. The rest
of Stieglers history, which develops through volume II of Technics and Time
(2009), revolves around what happens when technological evolution starts to
outpace humanity. When this happens the very mechanical organs meant to
support human life turn upon their creators and become monstrous things that
throw their former masters back into a state of inadequacy. In order to capture
this problem, which refers back to Heideggers (1977) critique of modern tech-
nology, but also Marxs (1998) work on estrangement and proletarianisation,
Stiegler (2009) explains that humans enter into a state of disorientation, since
they live in a high tech world beyond their comprehension. In other works, in-
cluding his book on youth and the generations (2010), Stiegler points out that
the neoliberal economy and the exploitation of communication in the name of
profitability exacerbate the problem of disorientation because the use of media
to capture consumers means that language is no longer available for mapping
the world and making sense. It is through this idea, which Stiegler (2014a) talks
about in terms of symbolic misery, that I think it is possible to connect his work
to the theories of the contemporary critics of semio-capitalism, such as Marazzi
(2008, 2011), who show how the potential of language to transmit human
significance breaks down before its neoliberal transformation into a means to
promote capitalism. When language no longer works to enable the translation
of real experience and perception into words suitable for communication with
others in the name of the creation of the world, humans effectively fall out of
the symbolic order and collapse back into a kind of psychotic state of nature.
Thus we encounter the experience that Guattari (1995: 135) writes of through
the idea of the chaosmic spasm.
Cast out of symbolic structures into near chaos, men become bankrupt,
in default, caught in a state of existential lack, and thrown back upon their
animality. This is the case even though we have seen that this connection of
the dis-individual and animality might be overly optimistic, since the animal
lives in harmony with the world, while the dis-individual occupies an uncanny,
monstrous un-world. However, it is precisely here, in the teeth of chaos, that

the possibility of the new emerges, because the destruction of the techno-
human and the birth of a new kind of post-mortem savage opens up the space
for a reconnection to experience and the expression of the perception of what
it is to occupy the position of earth-bound life. But Stiegler (2012: 4) is clear
that this will not be a painless process, since the contemporary moment has
become about the desperate attempt to hold on to the ruins of modern and
post-modern symbolic systems through addictogenic forms of identification
characterised by the primacy of drive over desire. For Stiegler (2010, 2012), this
situation comes about because late capitalism exploits the destruction of desire,
which necessarily relies on the integrity of human symbolic systems to create
meaningful objects, in the emergence of drive-based economics where the ad-
dictogenic nature of drive makes it possible to sell everything and anything on
the basis that this thing will fill the dark abyss at the centre of your life. Fol-
lowing Adorno and Horkheimer (1997), however, Stiegler is clear that drive is
a fatal (or indeed thanatological) machine, since its objective is the reduction
of the misery, pain and horror of the traumatic life lived in the un-world where
there is no safety, security, or sense of home in others or in the wider environ-
ment, but what it actually achieves is the augmentation of alienation, estrange-
ment and objectification. Against drive, which simply piles misery upon misery,
Stiegler (2013: 132133) states that educators must seek to engage in a battle
for the integrity of knowledge, thought and significance, but what he fails to ex-
plain is that these new cultural politics must prioritise the relationship between
language and other forms of expression and human experience, perception, and
being on the earth, because it is precisely this which has been lost in the horror
story of neoliberalism.
Following this train of thought, perhaps it is possible to put Stieglers (2013:
14) reference to Winnicotts (2005) theory of play, where the toy becomes a
symbol of security and safety and a container for meaningful interaction, in
conversation with Guattaris (1995) own extensive discussion of the object,
which turns the oedipal triangle of Daddy, Mummy, and Me into an ecological
dialogue between Self, Other, and the ultimate object, Earth in order to prop-
erly ground his account in a theory of earth-bound life. Moreover, my sense is
that this eco-phenomenological critique of the contemporary is also the hidden
basis of Berardis (2012, 2015) recent works, including And, which is subtitled
The Phenomenology of the End. In terms of explaining the problem of the end,

Berardi follows Stiegler in respect of his view that the end concerns the inability
of humans to effectively articulate a vision of the future that is qualitatively
different from the present. However, where Berardi (2015a: 9111) departs
from Stiegler is in the way he locates this problem in the politics of the global
network, which he explains through the opposition between conjunction, where
self and other meet in such a way that changes both sides of the interaction, and
connection, which he thinks dominates today, and comprises a programmatic
model of debased sociality where there is no deep engagement or transforma-
tive effect upon either person. For Berardi, conjunction represents true human
relationality, where individuals engage with each other empathetically on the
basis of their common occupation of a world and, beyond this, the earth itself.
By contrast, he writes of connection in terms of the simulation of interaction,
where engagement takes place through the medium of a technological network
that sets rules and regulations about how relationality should take place. In
other words, the interaction is already mapped out and planned, and its future
outcome is always already known. Berardi (2015a: 233331) points out that
this leads to, on the one hand, the autistic disassociation of self from others and
nature, and, on the other hand, the emergence of a kind of totalitarian or glo-
balitarian network where everybody seems to be friends with everybody else, on
the basis that the programmatic logic of commensurability ensures that nobody
would have a reason to not be friends with anybody else.
But the key point here is that this global negative friendship network (think
Facebook or Twitter) is a simulation that masks the reality of the monstrous
machine that alienates people from their ecological being in order to transform
them into tech-no-subjects who follow its programmatic logic on the basis of
their melancholic despair about their lost object of love the other, the world,
the earth itself. This is, essentially, Berardis (2015a) critique of new media,
which is that the network has become a machine for the provision of the simu-
lation of intimacy in a cold world where true intimacy has been banned by a
global, technological system that is allergic to the thickness of materiality that
necessarily refuses its own reduction to objective truth or quantifiable value.
Living in the cold technological un-world, it is no surprise that people cling to
their gadgets, which connect them to the global network that can provide a vir-
tual sense of home, and seek to lose themselves in connectivity and fantastical
cyber-space. The contemporary new media network has become a technological

surrogate, which was, for Avital Ronell (1989: 280), exactly what Alexander
Graham Bell unconsciously understood when he called Americas first tel-
ephone network, Ma Bell, in 1876. Thus, the new media network stands in for
mother, and provides the simulation of safety and security that human subjects
would have otherwise found in their real mothers, before the screen found its
way into every space in the home. However, the problem with this new media
Mom is that she is jealous and possessive. She seeks to capture and control
her children in ways that even Freuds (2003) original nightmarish engulfing
mother who comes to symbolise death never would. This is the case because she
knows she needs to keep them away from their real Moms, and beyond them,
their common global mother, mother earth. This is why techno-Mom traps her
children within cyber-space and what Berardi (2015a: 4148) calls cyber-time,
which requires the tech-no-subject to spend their life online in order to keep up
with the blizzard of communication flowing across the network and through
their inbox. For Berardi (2015a), this is the final form of futurism, the futur-
ism of the end times, because there is now no more space and no more time
for expansion to happen. Where space is concerned, processes of globalisation
meant that the earth became lost somewhere deep underneath the un-world
of late capitalism, where all that matters is work and shopping, but this soon
opened up onto the final frontier of time and the colonisation of every moment
by economic logic. Here, the difference between work and free time fell into
what we might call capital time, where every living moment becomes about
value creation, and beyond this the automisation of humanity, which comprises
the destruction of freedom in the necessity to work and consume. For Berardi
(2015a: 4157), it is this situation that has led to the rebellion of the embodied
mind in the endless list of mental health conditions that plague the contempo-
rary individual anxiety, depression, dysmorphia, addiction, and so on which
are, in short, psychological representations of spasm.
Finally, the condition of spasm, which is the focus of this article, has its own
kind of politics, which are concerned with the desperate attempt to escape from
the pain of estrangement. While many have sought to escape into pharmaceu-
ticals in order to speed up, slow down, get hard, or whatever other response is
necessary in order to survive the un-world, others have fallen into alternative
kinds of addictive behaviour. Regarding sex addiction, for example, Berardi
(2015a: 50) notes that the lonely cybernaut replaces real intimacy with the

simulation of sexual interaction in the consumption of hard-core Californian

porn straight out of the San Fernando Valley, where pumped up sexual super-
heroes fuck like machines in the name of a barren kind of pleasure that knows
no other. Ironically, Berardi (2015a: 6891) thinks that it is possible to trace
the hyper-sexualisation of contemporary culture, which objectifies the other in
porno scenes that strip back its phenomenological depths until there is noth-
ing left but a stupid lump of flesh, to the original American puritans because
they were the first settlers who turned against the organic world, the body and
the flesh because of its imperfections and relationship to sin. In a sense, this
explains the strange ambivalence of the online porn scene, which resides in its
simultaneous fascination and revulsion with the flesh, and the reason why the
sexualisation of tech-no-society seems to know no bounds. While techno-cap-
italism pushes ever further into abstraction, the destroyed subject seeks out es-
tranged representations of their former fleshy self only to lose this immediately
in cold mechanical fucking on screen that transforms the pornstar into a mind-
less thing, closer to Heideggers (2001) rock, which seems absolutely un-related,
than the animal poor in the world. The result of this immediate cancellation of
the pleasure that comes from intimacy in the horror of objectification on screen
is that the lost subject experiences the compulsion to push on ever further into
pornographic culture, concerned with the disappearance of phenomenological
depth in the transformation of bodies into data.
But what is the objective here? Surely the objective of the online porn addict
is the identification of what it feels like to have a body, to experience intimacy
with the other, and relate to them on the basis of a common experience of
the earth, without the engagement of bodies that are impure in the techno-
scientific semio-capitalist universe of abstract signs and symbols. Since this is
a fatal strategy, and there is no way to experience intimacy without some level
of carnal interaction, the estranged figures, which Berardi (2015a: 96110)
calls neo-humans fall into addiction and, in the infamous case of the Japanese
Hikikomori, or shut in, retreat back into media technology in a desperate at-
tempt to reach out to the world of others. But if this represents one side of the
politics of spasm, which Berardi (2015a: 311321) thinks will eventually result
in the emergence of a new form of neo-human readjustment, what he calls
neuro-totalitarianism, where the embodied self is totally aligned with the global
circuitry of semio-capitalism through the mapping and manipulation of neural

networks, the other side of the strained, stressed relation between technology
and humanity resides in Stieglers (2013) cultural politics, Berardis (2012)
poetic uprising, and ultimately Guattaris (1995) chaosmic creation of ecologi-
cal sense the ethico-aesthetic paradigm. Where Stiegler pushes for a form of
culture that might make life meaningful, and Berardi suggests the reclamation
of language from semio-capitalism in the name of a return to a poetic form of
language that is able to express human experience and perception in the world,
Guattaris ecosophy shows how the escape from the contemporary impasse will
not come through ever more virtuality, but instead requires a new eco-politics
that recognises the organic limits of the individual, the position of the individ-
ual within a society made up of others, and the dependence of this social world
of significance upon the earth, which ultimately supports life and cannot be
simply expended in the name of profitability. Thus, I think that it is possible to
read Guattari, Stiegler and Berardi together and ultimately understand their cri-
tiques of spasm culture through reference to Guattaris final work with Deleuze,
What is Philosophy? (1994), where geo-philosophy becomes a vehicle for think-
ing through a new ecological utopianism: a minor utopianism characterised
by humility rather than hubris, and a deep understanding of the ontological
truth of what we might call being on earth. The minor utopia is, therefore, the
hopeless hope found on the other side of the chaosmic spasm, which signals the
collapse of civilization into neoliberal barbarism, and the radical potential that
Guattari, Stiegler and Berardi similarly search for in the new media apocalypse.

References
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Guattari, F. (2014). The Three Ecologies. London: Bloomsbury.
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Marazzi, C. (2011). Capital and Affects: The Politics of the Language Economy.
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McLuhan, M. (2001). Understanding Media. London: Routledge.
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Nietzsche, F. (1961). Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One.
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iek, S. (2009). First as Tragedy, Then As Farce. London: Verso.


Authors of the Special Issue
Colin J. Campbell is a lecturer in communications, culture and ecological poli-

tics at York University and OCAD University in Toronto, Canada. His PhD
thesis (2008) focused on the contrast between the work of Georges Bataille and
Ren Girard, and the way in which their conflicting visions of violence both
preclude confronting ecological problems. He is currently writing a book on
the limits of occidental rationality as they appear in Guy Debord and Gregory
Bateson.
Mark Featherstone is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Keele University, UK. He

is author of Tocquevilles Virus: Utopia and Dystopia in Western Social and Politi-
cal Theory (Routledge, 2007), Planet Utopia: Utopia, Dystopia, and the Global
Imaginary (Routledge, 2017), and a range of articles in journals including Cul-
tural Politics and Ctheory.
Chris Gutierrez is a lecturer in the Department of Art History and Commu-

nication Studies at McGill University. He holds a PhD in Communication
Studies from McGill University, an MA in Media Studies from Concordia
University and a BA in Sociology from the University of Calgary. His current
research is on the intersections of psychoanalysis and digital media, on the af-
fective experience of loneliness and anxiety online, and on the limits of privacy
as a site for political mobilization.
Alison Horbury received her doctorate from the school of Culture & Com-
munication at the University of Melbourne, Australia, where she now teaches.
Following the publication ofPost-feminist Impasses in Popular Heroine Televi-
sion: The Persephone Complex (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), her current research
program builds a psychoanalytic ethics with which to investigate the aesthetics
of screen entertainment cultures.
CM : Communication and Media XI(38) 2016 CDI 269

Jacob Johanssen (PhD) is Senior Lecturer in the Communication and Me-

dia Research Institute (CAMRI), University of Westminster, UK. His work
revolves mainly around two themes: exploring psychoanalysis as a theory and
method for media audience research with a particular focus on affect, as well
as using psychoanalysis to think critically about contemporary digital culture
more broadly. His research interests include media audiences, reality television,
social media, affect theory, psychosocial studies, critical theory.
Vera King, Prof. Dr., is a full professor of sociology and psychoanalytic social
psychology at the Goethe University, Frankfurt/M, Germany and Managing
Director of Sigmund-Freud-Institute since 2016. She has been full professor for
socialization studies at the University of Hamburg (2002-2016). Together with
Benigna Gerisch and Hartmut Rosa she is conducting the transdisciplinary
research project Aporias of Perfection in Accelerated Societies, funded by
VolkswagenStiftung (Lost in Perfection. Impacts of Optimization on Culture and
Psyche, ed. by V. King, B. Gerisch, H. Rosa; Routledge, London, forthcoming).
Steffen Krger (PhD) is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Depart-

ment of Media and Communication, University of Oslo, Norway. He is devel-
oping critical, psychosocial approaches to media texts. In his current research
project, Online Interaction Forms, financed by the Norwegian Research
Council (NFR), he analyses forms of online interaction, applying the method
of scenic understanding (Lorenzer, 1970, 1986) to a variety of online environ-
ments discussion forums and social networking sites. Krger is contributing
editor of the journal American Imago Psychoanalysis and the Human Sciences.
Professor Iain MacRury is Deputy Dean, Research and Professional Practice

in the Faculty of Media and Communication at Bournemouth University. He
has published on social media, brand communications and psychosocial ap-
proaches to culture and everyday life. He was a contributor to two early studies
of mobile phones: On the Mobile: The Effects of Mobile Telephones on Social and
Individual Life (Motorola, 2000) and Call Girls (Motorola, 2003).
270 CM : Communication and Media XI(38) 2016 CDI

Allen Meek is Senior Lecturer in the School of English and Media Studies,
Massey University. He is researching psychological approaches to understand-
ing media, with a particular focus on trauma. He is the author of Trauma and
Media: Theories, Histories, Images (Routledge, 2010) and Biopolitical Media:
Catastrophe, Immunity and Bare Life (Routledge, 2016).
Diego Semerene is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern

Culture and Media at Brown University. Professor Semerene has published
widely in new media culture, digital sex practices, film criticism, queer theory
and psychoanalysis. His most recent work appears in Frames Cinema Journal,
Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture and Peninsula: A
Journal of Relational Politics. He holds a PhD in Cinematic Arts from the Uni-
versity of Southern California.
Greg Singh is Lecturer in Media and Communications and Programme Di-

rector of Digital Media, at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of
Stirling. He is author of Film after Jung: Post-Jungian Approaches to Film Theory;
Feeling Film; and the forthcoming Death of Web 2.0. He is currently working on
a mini-monograph, on Charlie Brookers Black Mirror for Routledges In Focus
series, and is Principal Investigator for the RSE Life in Data Research Network.
Candida Yates is Professor of Culture and Communication at Bournemouth

University and is Director (with Caroline Bainbridge, University of Roehamp-
ton) of the Media and Inner World research network. She has published widely
on the psychosocial and cultural dynamics of politics, emotion, gender and
cinema and is the author of The Play of Political Culture, Emotion and Identity
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

List of reviewers for 2016
Falko von Ameln (Germany)

Mick Broderick, Murdock University (Australia)
Marlo de Lara, University of Leeds (UK)
Birgitta Haga Gripsrudt, University of Stavanger (Norway)
Chris Hauke, Goldsmiths University of London (UK)
Liv Hausken, University of Oslo (Norway)
Brigitte Hipfl, Alpen-Adria University Klagenfurt (Austria)
Sun-ha Hong, Massachusets Institute of Technology (USA)
Jan Jagodzinski, University of Alberta (Canada)
Jacob Johanssen, University of Westminster (UK)
Anna-Maria Kanta, University College London (UK)
Matthias Kettner, Witten/Herdecke University (Germany)
Joanna Kellond, University of Brighton (UK)
Steffen Krger, University of Oslo (Norway)
Scott Krzych, Collorado College (USA)
Epp Lauk, University of Jyvskyl (Finland)
Mats Andreas Nielsen, University of Oslo (Norway)
Amit Pinchevski, Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel)
Ivana Radi Milosavljevi, University of Belgrade (Serbia)
Bonni Rambatan, Bandung Institute of Technology (Indonesia)
Ramon Reichert, University of Vienna (Austria)
Barry Richards, Bournemouth University (UK)
Pierre Schwarzer, Witten/Herdecke University (Germany)
Moritz Senarclens de Grancy, Sigmund Freud Privatuniversitt Berlin (Germany)
Robert Shaw, Newcastle University (UK)
Strahinja Stepanov, University of Novi Sad (Serbia)
Theodora Thomadakis, University of Roehampton (UK)
Igor Vobi, University of Ljubljana (Slovenia)
Aleksandar Vranje, Faculty of Political Sciences (Bosnia and Herzegovina)
Julie Walsh, Warwick University (UK)
Candida Yates, Bournemouth University (United Kingdom)

Instructions for authors
CM: Communication and Media (previously CM: Communication Manage-

ment Quarterly) publishes original and review papers in the field of communica-
tion studies, media studies, communication management, public relations and
advertising. Being the only Serbian journal in the field of communication and
media, CM: Communication and Media aims to establish links between domes-
tic and international research and to promote young researchers and their high
quality papers. Dynamic changes in the media landscape of Serbia and other
Balkan countries, as well as international media trends and challenges are in
special focus of the journal.
CM: Communication and Media publishes three issues per year.
Manuscripts should be submitted in electronic form through the platform

ASEESTANT (South East European Journals Production Assistant), following
journal guidelines:
http://aseestant.ceon.rs/index.php/comman/about/submissions.
The articles should not be published before (neither partially nor completely),
nor currently be considered for publication by any other journal or book, nor
should the submissions be a translation of previously published articles. All
manuscripts shall undergo a double-blind peer review. Call for paper is perma-
nently open, only special thematic issues will have special calls.

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ISSN 2466541X ISSN 2466-5452 (Online)

Thinking (with) the Unconscious in Media and

38, Vol 11 2016

cdi Alison Horbury

38, Vol 11 2016

Broj 38, godina XI 2016 38, Vol 11 2016

tampanje asopisa finansijski je pomogao

Publication of the Journal is financially supported

CM : Communication and Media = Komunikacija

Tri puta godinje. Tekst na srp. i engl. jeziku. Je nastavak:

Thinking (with) the Unconscious in

Keywords: digital media, the unconscious, psychoanalysis, subjectivity, the psycho-

CM : Communication and Media XI(38) 540 2016 CDI 5

6 CM : Communication and Media XI(38) 540 2016 CDI

CM : Communication and Media XI(38) 540 2016 CDI 7

attention to contradiction, incoherence, ambiguity, resistance and enjoyment

8 CM : Communication and Media XI(38) 540 2016 CDI

2. Digital Media and the Psychoanalytic Unconscious

CM : Communication and Media XI(38) 540 2016 CDI 9

[] The clear experimental documentation of unconscious thought, feeling,

2.1. The Psychoanalytic Unconscious

10 CM : Communication and Media XI(38) 540 2016 CDI

Whereas experimental evidence refers us to the existence of various kinds of

CM : Communication and Media XI(38) 540 2016 CDI 11

It is when looking back on embarrassing situations, such as those implied

CM : Communication and Media XI(38) 540 2016 CDI 13

2.2. Thinking (with) the Unconscious in Digital Media

their impact becomes increasingly important. With media technologies becom-

2.2.1. Online Disinhibition - An Exemplary Case of

CM : Communication and Media XI(38) 540 2016 CDI 15

16 CM : Communication and Media XI(38) 540 2016 CDI

CM : Communication and Media XI(38) 540 2016 CDI 17

suggested in this conflicted mixture of affordances is a form of subjectivity that

3. Mapping Psychoanalytic Research into

3.1. Critical Theory, Cultural Studies and Psychoanalysis

18 CM : Communication and Media XI(38) 540 2016 CDI

CM : Communication and Media XI(38) 540 2016 CDI 19

of the evolving media practices in dialogue with psychoanalytic and sociologi-

3.2. Feminist Media Studies

20 CM : Communication and Media XI(38) 540 2016 CDI

CM : Communication and Media XI(38) 540 2016 CDI 21

3.3. Queer Theory and Intersectional Studies

22 CM : Communication and Media XI(38) 540 2016 CDI

system of binary gendered bodies. Facilitated through digital media, it opens

3.4. Studies of Networked and Mobile Media

3.5. British Object Relations and Media Studies

24 CM : Communication and Media XI(38) 540 2016 CDI

3.6. Trauma Theory and Media Studies

3.7. Jungian and Post-Jungian Studies

26 CM : Communication and Media XI(38) 540 2016 CDI

3.8. Media Philosophy and Psychoanalysis

All of these authors diagnose a hyper-acceleration of globalised and mediatised

4. The Future of Psychoanalytic Media Research

28 CM : Communication and Media XI(38) 540 2016 CDI

CM : Communication and Media XI(38) 540 2016 CDI 29

30 CM : Communication and Media XI(38) 540 2016 CDI

CM : Communication and Media XI(38) 540 2016 CDI 31

32 CM : Communication and Media XI(38) 540 2016 CDI

CM : Communication and Media XI(38) 540 2016 CDI 33

ISSN 2466541X ISSN 2466-5452 (Online)

Broj 38, godina XI 2016 38, Vol 11 2016

2.2.1. Online Disinhibition - An Exemplary Case of

3. Mapping Psychoanalytic Research into

7. Potential Space: The Psychosomatic Underpinning

1. The Other in the Vastness of the Net Omnipresent,

2. Shame and the Gaze of the Other Psychoanalytic,