Notes on Psychoanalysis and Technology, the Psyche and the Social

ABSTRACT

Whatever difficulty might arise in discussing the relationship of psychoanalysis and technology, the discussion inevitably will touch on another relationship that is difficult to discuss: that between the psyche and the social. There will be no easy way to simply establish the distinctiveness of or the relationship between the terms. They are so profoundly interimplicated in each other that some approach other than “establishing a relationship” is needed. This essay pursues this relationship via a discussion of psychic mechanism with attention to historical shifts in media and social technologies of control.

About the contributor

Patricia Ticineto Clough is a professor of sociology and women’s studies and currently is teaching in Performance Studies at New York University. She has published widely, most recently her book The User Unconscious: Affect, Media and Measure. She is a member of the Training Committee of ICP, faculty at ICP and NIP, and a practicing psychoanalyst in New York City.

Notes

¹ Although this is a way to understand the “free market economy” as separate from state control, which also gives a relative autonomy to civil society institutions, such as the family, the military, the school, etc., a critical perspective recognizes that this is an ideological understanding, one promoted in fact by civil society instituitons, which function to interpellate the subject to this ideological understanding, which includes the fiction of the autonomous or sovereign individual subject of the nation. To speak of the diagram as informing this liberal arrangement is not to reduce the diagram to it, but rather to mark the dynamism of the arrangement, opening it to change.

² By datafication, I mean to point to the inseparability of digital media use from the production, circulation, and analytics of massive amounts of data, referred to as big data.

³ Here, finanicialization is one aspect of what has been called a neoconservative neoliberalism. Financialization is that aspect that most depends on, indeed, is inseparable from datafication and a globalized digitized network. In many descriptions of neoconservative neroliberalism, however, there is not enough focus on its social technology and what change that technology, as a feature of a diagram, might allow. Foucault’s courses of the late 1970s on neoliberalism are an exception, as they focus on the technicality or mechanisms of control or what he calls security in the functioning of neoliberal governance in relationship to economy. See Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitcs: Lectures at the Collège De France 1978–1979 (2008).

⁴ Nikolas Rose points to the importance of Winnicott’s work of the 1940s and 1950s in “shaping the private self,” or giving force to the idea of inner life formed in the early interactions of the mother and infant. At the same time that Winnicott promoted “the natural expertise of the normal mother and her child,” he also established “a perceptual system and a vocabulary by means of which mothers (and others) could speak about and evaluate their selves and their emotions and relations” (1989, p. 408). This inner life or private self belongs to the disciplinary diagram, while opening up to the diagram of control that would reconfigure the psyche/soma in relationship to mind, as discussed in the following.

⁵ While Hansen and what follows point to environmental affectivity from which the body arises and with which it remains in touch, it also is the case that the the body-as-organism is opened from within by digital technologies, as these have made possible the circulation of parts of the body—organs, blood, cells, tissue—outside the organism, pointing to an opening of the body-as-organism from inside and outside, raising a question of the skin.

⁶ I thank Ann Pellegrini for asking me to address the way in which environmental calamity is affected by worldly sensibility. Without detailing a response, what I think is at least suggested is that the human subject’s responsibility is not outside originary technicity of being and that this responsibility is humbled but not vitiated by the other-than-human modes of thinking and understanding. A rethinking of the unconscious and therefore consciousness is made necessary.

⁷ For Laplanche, the mother’s implantation leaves “enigmatic messages.” Although the implantation drives the infant to make translations, there will be no recovering of an original content. This is because the messages are unconscious to the mother as well as the infant. They are sexual in that the sexual is thought to be enigmatic. I have added race, gender, and class to propose that we should not distinguish the sexual from these other aspects with which the sexual is inextricably implicated, depending on historical or cultural instances. In anycase, it can be imagined that in the effort to translate the enigmatic, these other aspects would become elaborated and therefore mustbe the concern of criticism.