Burnham - Does the Internet Have an Unconscious?

Does the Internet
Have an Unconscious?

PSYCHOANALYTIC HORIZONS

Psychoanalysis is unique in being at once a theory and a therapy, a method of critical thinking and a form of clinical practice. Now in its second century, this fusion of science and humanism derived from Freud has outlived all predictions of its demise. Psychoanalytic Horizons evokes the idea of a convergence between realms as well as the outer limits of a vision. Books in the series test disciplinary boundaries and will appeal to readers who are passionate not only about the theory of literature, culture, media, and philosophy but also, above all, about the real life of ideas in the world.

Series Editors:

Esther Rashkin, Mari Ruti, and Peter L. Rudnytsky

Advisory Board:

Salman Akhtar, Doris Brothers, Aleksandar Dimitrijevic, Lewis Kirshner, Humphrey Morris, Hilary Neroni, Dany Nobus, Lois Oppenheim, Donna Orange, Peter Redman, Laura Salisbury, Alenka Zupani

Volumes in the Series:

Mourning Freud

Madelon Sprengnether

Does the Internet Have an Unconscious?: Slavoj iek and Digital Culture

Clint Burnham

On Dangerous Ground: Freuds Visual Cultures of the Unconscious (forthcoming)

Diane ODonoghue

Born After: Reckoning with the Nazi Past (forthcoming)

Angelika Bammer

The Analysts Desire: Ethics in Theory and Clinical Practice (forthcoming)

Mitchell Wilson

At the Risk of Thinking: An Intellectual Biography of Julia Kristeva (forthcoming)

Alice Jardine

Does the Internet
Have an Unconscious?

Slavoj iek and Digital Culture

Clint Burnham

This book is for Jeff Derksen, who knows I only do psychoanalysis because I have to.

Thank you to Mari Ruti for the early interest in this book; your belief in the project (your enjoyment of the symptom?) made it happen. Thanks as well to Haaris Naqvi and Katherine De Chant at Bloomsbury New York for the editorial stewardship, and to Vinita Irudayaraj at Integra in Puducherry for the copyediting and production. Special thanks to the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript. Thank you of course to Slavoj, Todd, and Anna for the generous blurbs.

appeared, in different form, in the proceedings of the first conference of the Canadian Network for Psychoanalysis and Culture (CNPC): The Freudian Legacy Today (2015). Thank you to the anonymous reviewers, and to the conference organizers: Dina Georgis, Sara Matthews, and James Penney.

A shorter version of appeared in iek and Media Studies: A Reader, eds. Matthew Flisfeder and Louis-Paul Willis. London: Palgrave, 2013. Thank you to Matthew and Louis-Paul especially for the comradely edits.

A version of was first published as the article Love and Sex in the Age of Capitalist Realism: On Spike Jonezs Her by Matthew Flisfeder and Clint Burnham from Cinema Journal, Vol. 57, No. 1, pp. 2545. Copyright 2017 by the University of Texas Press. All rights reserved. Thank you to the anonymous reviewers for their comments, and, again, to Matthew for the team effort.

A version of is forthcoming in After Lacan, ed. Ankhi Mukherjee. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thank you to Ankhi for the comradely edits, to the anonymous reviewer for the push to sharpen my discussion of the fragility of the big Other, and to Anna Kornbluh for the assist.

Talks from the material in this book were delivered at the Department of English, Simon Fraser University (Vancouver), the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (Kitchener), CNPC (University of Toronto), the Centre for Theory and Criticism (Western University), Incredible Machines (Vancouver), the International iek Studies Conference (Cincinnati), What is Documentary? (Portland), the University of Rijeka (Croatia), CAMRI at the University of Westminster (London), LaConference 2015 (Vancouver), and the LACK conference (Colorado Springs). Thanks to the organizers and audiences, and especially to Kelly Wood, Joshua Schuster, Mohammed Salemy, Katarina Peovi Vukovi, Christian Fuchs, Todd McGowan, and members of the Vancouver Lacan Salon. Thank you as well to the Urban Subjects collective for the Vienna residency, to my SFU colleagues in the Department of English, the Centre for Global Political Economy, Institute for the Humanities, and Office for Community Engagement. Thank you also to my students. Thanks to Alois Sieben for the index. Thanks, finally, to the anonymous reviewers on ratemyprofessors.com, who pointed out that I am an ageing hipster who tries to apply Lacan to everything: they are my sinthome!

This book is both an introduction to the work of Slavoj iek and a way to use his ideas to think about the digital present. My thesis throughout is that we need the unique combination of German Idealism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Marxist materialism to be found in ieks thought to understand how the Internet, social and new media, and digital cultural forms workhow they work in our lives, how their failure to work structures our pathologies and fantasies, and how our failure to properly understandour misrecognition ofthe digital is constitutive of the political (it is where we organize and what we abandon to organize in real life [IRL]), of the aesthetic (which is to say, art in the age of the digital simulacra), and of the psychosexual (the smartphone, nestled next to our genitals or wallet, as the site of trolls, passwords, lovers, and sexts). But it works in the other direction, as well: we need the Internet, digital culture, social media, and smartphones, to understand iek; to understand how his thought is structured; how his books work; how his reputation, controversies, and ideas circulate, are debated, disagreed with, dismissedbut never ignored.