Does the Internet Have an Unconscious?

Slavoj Žižek and Digital Culture

Clint Burnham

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501341304
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Informatik
• Subtopic: Digitale Medien

Does the Internet Have an Unconscious? is both an introduction to the work of Slavoj Žižek and an investigation into how his work can be used to think about the digital present. Clint Burnham uniquely combines the German idealism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Marxist materialism found in Žižek's thought to understand how the Internet, social and new media, and digital cultural forms work in our lives and how their failure to work structures our pathologies and fantasies. He suggests that our failure to properly understand the digital is due to our lack of recognition of its political, aesthetic, and psycho-sexual elements. Mixing autobiographical passages with critical analysis, Burnham situates a Žižekian theory of digital culture in the lived human body.

1

Does the Internet Have an Unconscious?

This chapter is a way of beginning to think about a psychoanalysis of the digital, or of the Internet, by engaging with those concepts via the broadest and most central theorizations of “the unconscious” in Freud, Lacan, and Jameson. Each theory of the unconscious (or the position of the unconscious, or the political unconscious) helps us to think about not only what we know about the Internet (what we talk about when we talk about the Internet) but also how the role of the digital in contemporary culture (the role of email in the police procedural, or the user experience of passwords, or the question of painting in a digital epoch). I begin with the question, in Freud, of whether the Internet has an unconscious, or whether the Internet is the unconscious. I then turn to the spatialization of the unconscious and the Internet, via Lacan. In both cases, it is fair to say that the way in which the Internet contains what we forget, or do not know that we know, tells us something about the unconscious or how the unconscious functions or is sited in the contemporary moment. Then, in examining the nexus of painting and sexuality via Jameson’s politics of the unconscious (and discussing the paintings of an artist who compares paint to DNA-bearing sperm!), I offer an example of reading cultural objects via the unconscious as a structure.

Freud

Freud begins his 1915 paper on “The Unconscious” with the assertion that everything that is repressed is in the unconscious, but not everything in the unconscious is there by dint of being repressed—this is on the first page of the essay; so the mechanism of repression is important, and not just because the composition and publication of this paper, in early 1915, followed closely on that of the paper on repression in the same year, nor, I would argue, because, as Freud himself declared in “The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement,”¹ repression was the cornerstone of psychoanalysis (as Strachey notes in the introduction to “Repression” [SE XIV, 143]).

Freud anticipates our digital age when he uses terms like “data” and “system”: and so I would like, here, to parse Freud’s text as a theory avant la lettre of how we relate to the Internet, a relating that perhaps has to do not only with how it functions as our writing machine but also with memory. And so he also remarks that, as an example of the unconscious, we are familiar with “ideas that come into our head we do not know from where, and with intellectual conclusions arrived at we do not know how” (SE XIV, 166–167)—as if he were looking at his inbox or Facebook page. How did that spam get in here? Is she my friend (one can trace the hint of negation in even asking that question)? Too, when Freud describes the topography of the unconscious, which both is and is not a physical or anatomical space (and even before the essay gets to that very interesting Freudian notion of censorship), his discussion of the localization of aphasia and other cerebral activities brings to mind not only local issues of RAM and other forms of computer memory but the more global issue of servers and cloud computing, which both is and is not located in geographic spaces.

The spatialization of the unconscious becomes important for Lacan, as we will see, but is also raised when Freud wonders if an idea (or Vorstellung: idea, presentation, image), when it moves from the Ucs to the Cs, is recreated anew or is merely a fresh registration: that is, if the same idea can be in two places at once (SE XIV, 174). Such musings remind us of the transmission of an email, which begins as one’s typings on one’s own computer or smartphone (or the server on which the email program resides), and then is copied from server to server to end up at its recipient. And the question of an anatomical location for the mind is similar to the technological fallacy that bedevils digital thought today (but see also debates on plasticity).²

Freud returns to the problem of “a continuous laying down of new registrations” (SE XIV, 192) later in the essay, in part VI, “Communication between the two systems” (SE XIV, 190–195), arguing that “to every transition from one system to that immediately above it … there corresponds a new censorship” (SE XIV, 192). Thus, “derivatives of the Ucs. become conscious as substitute formations and symptoms” (SE XIV, 193) but in the process having to circumvent two levels of censorship: the level between the Ucs. and the Pcs. and then that between the Pcs. and the Cs.

I wonder—and this is speculative—if these two levels of censorship may be viewed as qualitatively different. A contemporary example may be found in Johns Hopkins cryptography professor Brian Green’s experience of censorship (documented in The Guardian); writing about the National Security Agency’s (NSA) codebreaking activities, he was told by his department head to remove his blog from the university server (where it is mirrored) and not, remarkably, by Google, where he hosts it on blogger.com. Following Freud’s logic, the Google site is the unconscious (Ucs.) and the university site the preconscious (Pcs.).

This question of censorship—which is such a rich topic in Freud’s writing, and so important as a political analogon for repression—can also be compared to the sort of filtering of email that our contemporary technological dependence requires (I am thinking of spam filters, which I discuss elsewhere).³ This is by way of returning to Freud’s mark of the unconscious as a thought that comes “into our head we do not know from where,” for it is surely no accident that the question of tracing the origin of email should have become a major plot element in the so-called police procedurals (we only have to note the Freudian name that the Scottish crime writer Ian Rankin gave his detective: Rebus).

I am talking about the action of the fictional detective today.⁴ This literary figure has, in a neoliberal twist, retreated from the petit bourgeois freelancer à la Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe to the procedural, which genre features a policeman or detective employed by the state: Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch, Rankin’s Rebus, Jo Nesbø’s Harry Hole, etc. Here we encounter the bureaucracy of the procedure—forensics, bosses to be argued with, paperwork, and territorial internecine battles.

And in three Scandinavian procedurals in particular—Norwegian Jo Nesbø’s Nemesis (2002), Swedish Steig Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005, 2009, 2011, in both its novelistic and film versions), and the Danish television series The Killing/Forbrydelsen (2007–)—the question of email plays significant plot roles. Thus, in Nemesis, the detective Harry Hole receives emails accusing him of being present at a murder (which he was), and he pays an old friend to follow the trail of the emails to a server to Egypt, and thence back to his own cell phone, an updating, perhaps, of the 1979 horror film When a Stranger Calls (Fred Walton). Or in The Killing, a political candidate follows leaked emails back to his campaign manager. And in The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo, not only is the heroine, Lisbeth, a hacker who plants malware (and the novel heavily features Mac products), but the IMDb.com website for the American film features a viewer question asking, “Is it that easy to hack a person’s email account?” These procedural plot points may have been imbued with new relevance in the scandals over Hillary Clinton’s private email servers and allegations of Russian hacking, but it can perhaps be argued that such real-life versions of thriller plots merely illustrate the psychoanalytic weight of our fascination with email: surely the role of Russia today is in part a nostalgic way to return to Cold War narratives.⁵

The 2016 US elections notwithstanding, what is evident is, then, that this phenomenon is not merely a mirroring of everyday life (if mimesis was at work, then we would have characters in romance novels or avant-garde fictions engaged in the same pursuit).⁶ The novels, films, and television series fix or answer the question but also raise that anxiety because our anxiety with respect to email is also an anxiety about our unconscious, and its repression. This is key to my argument in this chapter: not only that we can only understand the digital with the insights of psychoanalysis, but that we can only understand psychoanalysis today via the digital.⁷

I am not making the argument that one should ignore the practices of state and corporate surveillance—although I find Bifo’s contention that privacy is a nineteenth-century bourgeois liberal fantasy compelling.⁸ But, as revelation follows revelation in the 2010s of the data mining of one’s personal information (which itself—that is, the ideology of a subject “owning” or “having rights to” one’s information—must be questioned and historicized), one certainly feels that there is a certain structural relentlessness on the part of such apparatuses. Perhaps what we need is a psychoanalysis of those apparatuses, of their perverse needs to compile all of one’s data.

Let us return to what Freud has to say specifically about the unconscious, and I am thinking here of the famous remark that the unconscious knows no contradiction. This is because the unconscious is the site of our desire, of our “wishful impulses,” which “exist side by side without being influenced by one another, and are exempt from mutual contradiction” (SE XIV, 186). I would argue that this lack of contradiction is also what is so prevalent—and annoying—about social media and online email web browsers: when Facebook or Gmail is up on our computer screen and we see our intimate thoughts (Facebook asks me, “How are you doing, what’s happening, how’s it going, what’s going on, how are you feeling, Clint?”) surrounded by ads for belly fat or ESL or gay photography. So here the unconscious of the Internet—via that shared characteristic of lack of contradiction—is due to how the algorithms work. For Facebook, ads are triggered by your profile information (if you like cookery, you will get cookbook ads) and your likes (“You are what you like,” as one online posting explains), whereas for Google ads they are triggered by your search terms.⁹ In both cases, then, we have precisely what Freud discusses in terms of the contents of the unconscious: wishful impulses—with the exception or caveat that we may not, in fact, like cookbooks, even if we clicked on that button (we may have used that search term because we wanted to buy one for our cousin for his or her birthday). Thus, when I go to Amazon, I am continually being offered books that I do not want, but that I bought for my son or my brother. That is the point—our subjectivity as worked out in our unconscious is not what we want others to think I am (the Imaginary: cookbooks vs. cultural theory; YA novels vs. police procedurals) but the Real of our desire (which is actually to please my brother or my son). It’s a matter of desire (Lacan), not taste (Bourdieu).

More recent revelations that Facebook ads were targeting anti-Semitic users confirm our thesis at this juncture: the Internet qua big Other is our unconscious, and it “knows” unconscious desires such as hatred and anti-Semitism.¹⁰ We must add, however, further provisos: first, the Internet today “weaponizes” those desires; secondly, hatred—the alt-right—is a metastasization of online misogyny and racism, as Angela Nagle argues;¹¹ and, finally, the Internet carries this out through what we might call—if not algorithmic injustice (as the Propublica series of articles calls itself), then perhaps what Matthew Flisfeder terms—the “ideological althorithmic apparatus,” or, as Lacan was arguing in the 1960s, the algorithmic unconscious.¹² This is to say that the problem may not be algorithms replacing humans (“machine bias,” another moniker from Propublica) but the inhuman algorithms within us.

For, as Freud writes in “The Unconscious” essay, “[t]here are in this system no negation, no doubt, no degrees of certainty”—which certainly seems inhuman (SE XIV, 186). But if the unconscious is machinic (we will come back to the machinic in Chapter 3), what can be said about its structure? Freud adds: “[i]n the Ucs. there are only contents, cathected with greater or lesser strength,” and this cathexis has a degree of mobility—such intensities can work through our old friends condensation and displacement—which figures Lacan will connect, via Todorov, to metonymy and metaphor, but can also be compared to the networking of links and hyperlinks. Return to Freud, the processes of the unconscious are timeless, “are not ordered temporally, are not altered by the passage of time; they have no reference to time at all” (187)—and they are based not on reality itself but on the nexus of pleasure-displeasure. Perhaps these last characteristics can be combined as a way of understanding the Internet: our clicks and links and likes move us around, via our pleasures or desire, through a timeless web (nothing ever goes away on the Internet, we are told) but also in a way that is a supreme time waster.

There is another, signal discussion in Freud’s essay on the unconscious, with which I want to close this portion of this chapter, continuing to develop ideas about our relation to email and the Internet: this is the distinction he makes between thing-presentations and word-presentations, or Sachevorstellung and Wortvorstellung. This occurs when Freud is distinguishing between schizophrenia and more common neuroses and hysteria, remarking on the over-cathexis or investment in the words themselves to be found in the schizophrenic patient. Thus, famously, a patient of Victor Tausk referred to her boyfriend as an “eye-twister” (Augenverdreher or deceiver [SE XIV, 198]) and so her eyes were twisted. Freud not only remarks that schizophrenics treat words in the same way as do dreams (the primary processes of condensation and displacement), but that the unconscious is the scene of thing-presentations, whereas word-presentations were only to be found in the conscious.

For do we not, in our relation with email, indeed treat it as a thing-presentation—not as the message that is contained in the email but as a thing, a thing that does not refer to anything else, a signifier. And so we keep “checking our email,” which is not checking off a list but rather obsessive-compulsive.¹³ This is to say that email, if it is a thing, may be the Thing, or das Ding, Lacan’s objet petit a, which offers a nice segue to our next thinker, who I want to talk about in terms of unconscious space of the Internet.

Lacan

Immediately at the beginning of his “Position of the Unconscious,” Lacan makes two important statements.¹⁴

First:

The unconscious is a concept founded on the trail [trace] left by that which operates to constitute the subject. (Écrits, 703)¹⁵

and then:

The unconscious is not a species defining the circle of that part of psychical reality which does not have the attribute (or the virtue) of consciousness. (Écrits, 703)

So, first of all, the unconscious is a concept—an idea—based on (founded on or forgé sur) something left over when the subject is created—that is, the that (a deictic shifter) “which operates to constitute the subject,” be it discourse, civilization, hegemony, ideology, capital, patriarchy, whatever, has something left over, and that leftover is the unconscious.

Secondly, then, for Lacan the unconscious is not merely not-conscious; it is not part of the circle (or the entire circle, in a Venn diagram)—it’s not what we’re not aware of, what we don’t know (or even, contra Žižek’s appropriation of Donald Rumsfeld, the unknown known); it is not a part of knowledge, at least not in this formulation—as Lacan goes on to say, anymore than the “un-black” (l’in-noir) is what is not black (Écrits, 704).

So in this situating of the unconscious as both not not-conscious and also not part of a circle, Lacan then adds that the unconscious did not exist before Freud. The unconscious involves the other in the clinical scene: psychoanalysts “constitute that to which the unconscious is addressed” (Écrits, 707) and perhaps not only the person of the psychoanalyst, the clinician, but also discourse—as the unconscious is “situated in the locus of the Other,” and thus is found “in every discourse, in its enunciation”—so the unconscious is addressed to the analyst, is in the Other, and is in every discourse and in every enunciation.

So now we are getting somewhere in terms of our topic, if we think of how we address the computer and how we are addressed by it, and a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Does the Internet Have an Unconscious?
• 2. Slavoj Žižek as Internet Philosopher
• 3. Was Facebook an Event?
• 4. Is the Internet a Thing?
• 5. The Subject Supposed to LOL
• 6. Her: Or, There Is No Digital Relation
• 7. The Selfie and the Cloud
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index
• Imprint