Hashtag Mania or Misadventures in the #ultrapsychic

ABSTRACT

Taking the online symbol # (“hashtag”) as my guide, I conceptualize mania as a psychic space where collective and individual registers of meaning collide at warp speed with the effect of highlighting the uneasy but recursive intertwining of individual and collective object relations. I coin the term ultrapsychic to describe the transpersonal flow of objects between the individual and the collective as brokered by human and non-human meaning-makers in an ultra-broadband society. Ultra-subjectivity highlights the affects, definitional problems and crossed-temporalities that are in play when individuals negotiate in the collective to locate themselves among others in an intersectional matrix. By reviewing the philosophy that gave rise to the hashtag as well as its transformation into a taxonomic symbol, I return to mania’s uncanny collectivist quality and explore what happens when people who perceive themselves at-risk use a #cyberobject to risk self-disclosure in the collective.

Notes

¹ As I know to be true in the experience of the person I call Elmo (below) and that of others who endure manic episodes, mania is a remarkably frightening and destructive experience. In no way do I wish to romanticize it here or diminish its frightening and destructive qualities. However, in depathologizing “hashtag mania” and attempting to characterize its social potential, I am amending the often voiced argument that we are increasingly isolates in a neoliberal “manic society” (Peltz, 2005) largely because of our dependence on technology.

² Nor do field theories offer a corrective to the violence done to “phobogenic objects” (Fanon, 1952) when adopting a functionalist frame based on asymmetrical complementary roles (Hartman, 2018b).

³ Affect Theory (see Gregg and Seigworth, 2010, p. 2) amply describes “forces or forces of encounter” that are “born in in-betweenness and reside as accumulative beside-ness” but its exponents avoid speaking in terms of “just-rightness” (Hainsbury, 2011) or linking affect to unconscious object representations that in some way constitute identity. Lacanian psychoanalysts pursue “the social” primarily as a problem in linguistic self-representation given the constant proscribed by the Real. Neither approach features dissociation in relation to subjectivity and so never quite captures the fate of personal and collective objects in identificatory gestures.

⁴ During the U.S. Senate hearings that preceded Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court, it was striking how many of my colleagues encountered patients suddenly linking an inchoate sensibility to a representation of themselves as a survivor or perpetrator of sexual violence.

⁵ The hashtag also never managed to cross propriety sites as intended. In this paper, I am less interested in the hashtag’s engineering failures than in its user experience.

⁶ Taxonomic classification is the computer equivalent of the relationship whereby S1, the Master’s unconscious desire becomes S2 the subjects’ (Lacan, 2007; Julie Leavitt, personal communication, 3/8/2017).

⁷ And my faith in that ontology assumes that Google hasn’t edited out the hierarchy of sites they taxonomically register that I do not wish to see: Fox News, Breitbart News, and so on.

⁸ Which unfortunately allows bots and annoying friends of friends to lurk Facebook feeds.

⁹ It is important to remember that the hashtag doesn’t have affect; it is affect so long as it remains a lacuna in the user’s YOU—the You being “an assemblage of an I and a profile or cloud of data traces that have more value than the I not only to economy and governance but increasingly to the sociality of users as well” (Clough, 2018b, p. 77). By comparison, an abbreviation like “lol” expresses affect as a meme. The hashtag has been appropriated by commedians like Stephen Colbert as a meme consequent to its datafication. #lol is then functioning as a signifier.

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Notes on contributors

Stephen Hartman

Stephen Hartman, Ph.D., is a co-editor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality and an executive editor for Psychoanalytic Dialogues. He teaches at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California and at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. He is a participant in the Collaboration for Research on Democracy and a contributor to the CORD Network blog.