The Other-Than-Human and the “User Unconscious”

ABSTRACT

Expanding on psychoanalysts’ treatment of online interaction between analyst and analysand, I take up digital media and computational technologies in terms of their more general transformation of the liberal configuration of state, economy, and civil society. From this perspective, I indicate the subjectivity that is being constructed and the indeterminate potentiality (or temporality) of its unconscious, what I call the user unconscious.

Notes

¹ Bach (2016). This essay was first delivered at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute in 2007.

² See Hartman (2011a, b, 2012).

³ Hartman (2017).

⁴ Bratton (2015).

⁵ Hansen (2013).

⁶ The increasing reference to Whitehead rather than Heidegger in studies of digital media has to do with the understanding, contra the Heideggerian perspective on technology, that in fact it does matter which technology is being studied. Steven Shaviro (2009) has wondered what critical thought might have been if Whitehead instead of Heidegger dominated studies of science and technology. He concluded, “Heidegger flees the challenges of the present in horror. Whitehead urges us to work with these challenges, to negotiate them” (p. x).

⁷ Hartman (2017), pp. 163, 167.

⁸ Chun (2016), pp. 2–3.

⁹ Chun’s (2016) discussion of leakages as constituent rather than an exception to the operation of social media opens to a larger discussion of hacking and breaching that have become ordinary activities of everyday life even at the highest levels of governance.

¹⁰ Searles (1960).

¹¹ Grand (2003).

¹² Focusing on the later works of Merleau-Ponty, Hansen (2013) argues that a worldly sensibility or a self-sensing world prior to human consciousness was recognized in the later works of Merleau-Ponty and points to what he described as “the flesh of the world” or what Hansen refers to as “a worldskin.” Given the operation of digital media in bringing us a worldly sensibility, Hansen argues that embodiment can no longer be contained in the organism.

¹³ Wynter (2007).

¹⁴ Nancy (2000).

¹⁵ Chun (2016), p. 163.

¹⁶ Chun (2016) is referring to Jean Luc Nancy (1991). Originary multiplicity needs further discussion as it is an ontological stipulation that is understood to precede intersubjectivity, that very central concept in psychoanalysis.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Patricia Ticineto Clough

Patricia Ticineto Clough, Ph.D., is a professor of sociology and women’s studies. She is a practicing psychoanalyst in New York City and a member of the training committee of the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy. She is the author of Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology and editor of The Affective Turn and forthcoming in March 2018, The User Unconscious: Affect, Media and Measure.