Is the Internet an Event? Does it constitute, as Žižek argues an Event should, a reframing of our experience, a retroactive re-ordering of everything we thought we knew about the social but were ...afraid to ask Facebook?In this contribution, Clint Burnham engages with Žižek’s recent work (Less than Nothing, Event, Absolute Recoil) as a way to argue, first, that in order to understand the Internet, we need Žižek’s “immaterial materialism,” and, in turn, to understand Žižek’s thought and how it circulates today, we need to think through digital culture and social media. As regards the Internet, then, no cynical disavowal, no Facebook cleanses, no shutting off the wifi: les non-dupes errent, or those who distance themselves from social media and the like are the most deceived. Next: the Internet’s two bodies: digital culture is both the material world of servers, clouds, stacks and devices and the virtual or affective world of liking, networking, and the mirror stage of the selfie. And here we must confront the “obscene underside” of digital culture: not only the trolls, 4chan porn, and gamergate bro’s, but also the old fashioned exploitation of labour, be it iPhone assembly-line workers at Foxconn, super-exploited “blood coltan” miners in the Congo, “like farmers” in India, or social media scrubbers in the Phillipines, who ensure your feeds are “clean” of porn, beheadings, and other #NSFW matter. These last concerns, then, mean we also have to think about what Žižek calls the “undoing of the Event” of the Internet, the betrayal of the Internet, its diseventalization.This podcast is a recording of a CAMRI research seminar that took place at the University of Westminster on January 28, 2015.
Algorithmic Desire: Toward a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media offers an account of internet culture that draws as much on the Marxist theories of Fredric Jameson, Mark Fisher, and Maurizio ...Lazzarato as it does on the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and Slavoj Žižek (the last of whom falls into both camps). This essay emphasizes that through line for readers of Rethinking Marxism who may be skeptical of the book's psychoanalytic insights. In this reading, the perverse subject of social media, who cynically "knows very well" that they are wasting time on their phone, is also a potential activist, as shown not only by the role that social media has played in Iran, in the Arab Spring, and in Black Lives Matter but also in how we are "subjected" by the algorithms of our desire.
Jameson with Lacan Burnham, Clint
Historical materialism : research in critical Marxist theory,
03/2021, Volume:
29, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Abstract
What does it mean to bring Marxism and psychoanalysis together at this conjuncture? Such a project has been a throughline, arguably, for Fredric Jameson's work for the past four decades. In ...this review-article, I read his chapter on Lacan and Hamlet for how it helps us to understand, not only how Jameson's ruminations on desire and neurosis highlight the social tendencies in Lacanian theory (for example, the notion that desire is the desire of the other), but also how that relationship throws new light on both the Marxist project and psychoanalysis proper.
...as long-term care facilities begin to see patients die of the disease and hospitals reserve beds for COVID-19 patients, other medical procedures are postponed and visitors to patients are severely ...restricted (Pandemic Experience). Street protests in Vancouver by the Falun Gong religious group have targeted, and continue to target, China as the origin of the virus, while media reports in the Falun Gong-associated Epoch Times in May 2020 associated the pandemic with mainland China and the CCP1 Second, with respect to hospital and long-term care facility visits, that it is not only that family members may transmit the coronavirus to patients (or the other way around). ...the visit is read in the context of racialized pandemic violence, where the singularity of a scandalous politician, and of a plague victim's ethnic hybridity, stand in an uneasy relation (or, to be properly Lacanian, non-relation) to protest politics. ...the visit is circumscribed by instances of a novelistic discourse that itself "breaks out" in buboes-like utterances, meta-linguistic speech acts like trigger warnings and land acknowledgements which, external to the novel proper, are akin to how Juliana Chang characterizes the Lacanian unconscious: "a most foreign element, consisting of signifiers from the Other as the Symbolic order" rather than "embodying the subject's innermost truth" (23).
The usual problem, often as unacknowledged as the fact that the land on which one writes Lacanian theory is Indigenous territory, is that Lacanian theory may only awkwardly be able to fit into a ...political or social critique because: a) psychoanalysis is just a therapy game for the bourgeoisie; b) it's too wrapped up in private neuroses; c) Lacan's theory itself is so obscure that the working class or everyday trans person or Indigenous subject is unlikely to find it a workable text for their subjective or social needs. The "forced choice," as Lacan will later call it in Seminar XVII (Slavoj Žižek extends that trope) is akin to Robert Pfaller's discussion in On the Pleasure Principle in Culture regarding the delegation of guilt to the Other, a delegation achieved via "coerced games," or the "guilt of appearances," or "the naïve observer and a sense of guilt" (15-34). The social application of the essay may apply to today's political turmoil (as Badiou argues) but also, in a more theoretical sense, helps us to understand what Cindy Zeiher, in a recent talk, alerts us to with respect to Lacan as philosopher and the value of stupidity (surely not unimportant in discussing both the Trumpian right and its smug liberal Other). The set-up Jacques Lacan's essay "Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty" was first published, he tells us in a headnote to its appearance in the Écrits, in 1945; twenty-one years later, he adds: "May it resound with the right note here where 1 am placing it, between the before and the after, even if it demonstrates that the after was kept waiting faisait antichambre, Bruce Fink tells us is the original French so that the before could assume its own place put prendre rang}' (161). ft is not exactly clear what "the before and the after" refer to (in immediate terms, texts before this essay in the Écrits date from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s; in the long historical view, Lee Edelman points to the French occupation), but the suggestion of Lacan's other great theory of time, retroactivity or Nachträglich or pointde-capiton is hard to avoid, even if that is, on the one hand, an anachronistic reading of "Logical Time," while nonetheless, on the other hand, one sublimely permissible, given said headnote appearing après-coup? Baldwin's tropes also suggest a contradiction: if the record is there for all to read (that is, the record of racial violence is not hidden away in an archive), but "might as well be written in the sky," then that latter manifestation is both very public or readable (skywriting is a form of advertising, very easy to see) and also temporary, ephemeral (like that figure of right-wing paranoia, "chem trails").
From text to txting Paul Budra, Clint Burnham / PAUL BUDRA, CLINT BURNHAM
2012, 20120725
eBook, Book
Literary scholars face a new and often baffling reality in the classroom: students spend more time looking at glowing screens than reading printed text. The social lives of these students take place ...in cyberspace instead of the student pub. Their favorite narratives exist in video games, not books. How do teachers who grew up in a different world engage these students without watering down pedagogy? Clint Burnham and Paul Budra have assembled a group of specialists in visual poetry, graphic novels, digital humanities, role-playing games, television studies, and, yes, even the middle-brow novel, to address this question. Contributors give a brief description of their subject, investigate how it confronts traditional notions of the literary, and ask what contemporary literary theory can illuminate about their text before explaining how their subject can be taught in the 21st-century classroom.
[Un]Grounding Friederike Landau, Lucas Pohl, Nikolai Roskamm / Friederike Landau, Lucas Pohl, Nikolai Roskamm
2021, 202104, Volume:
34
eBook
Post-foundationalism departs from the assumption that there is no ground, necessity, or objective rationale for human political existence or action. The edited volume puts contemporary debates ...arising from the »spatial turn« in cultural and social sciences in a dialogue with post-foundational theories of space and place to devise post-foundationalism as radical approach to urban studies. This approach enables us to think about space not only as socially produced, but also as crucially marked by conflict, radical negativity, and absence. The contributors undertake a (re-)reading of key spatial and/or post- foundational theorists to introduce their respective understandings of politics and space, and offer examples of post-foundational empirical analyses of urban protests, spatial occupation, and everyday life.
Lacan and the Algorithm Burnham, Clint
CLCWeb,
12/2022, Volume:
24, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Exploring the development of algorithms in Lacanian theory, specifically the "R schema" in the 1950s, I argue that psychoanalysis, read through contemporary debates about the "algorithmic cult" of ...Netflix and other avatars of popular culture, can be said to reveal the inhuman, machinic essence of subjectivity. The etiology of algorithms, mathemes, and other formulae and diagrams in Lacan's oeuvre has been under-studied, in part because for some readers they are not as attractive as his more bravura flourishes of word play as exegetical excess, and in part because they derive largely from the 'hard' structuralist moment of his work in the 1950s, largely eclipsed in Lacan studies by interests in the 'Late Lacan' period of the Sinthome, the knots, jouissance and the semblant. Here I extend (and refine) arguments I began in Does the Internet Have An Unconscious, determining that algorithms in Lacanian theory help us understand the split subjectivity of internet discourse.
PDF
![[Un]Grounding](http://api.summon.serialssolutions.com/2.0.0/image/isbn/XR4PS5YY4K/9783839450734_383945073X_3837650731_9783837650730/small "[Un]Grounding")
