André Nusselder: Interface Fantasy: A Lacanian Cyborg Ontology (2009)

Cyberspace is first and foremost a mental space. Therefore we need to take a psychological approach to understand our experiences in it. In Interface Fantasy, André Nusselder uses the core psychoanalytic notion of fantasy to examine our relationship to computers and digital technology. Lacanian psychoanalysis considers fantasy to be an indispensable “screen” for our interaction with the outside world; Nusselder argues that, at the mental level, computer screens and other human-computer interfaces incorporate this function of fantasy: they mediate the real and the virtual.

Interface Fantasy illuminates our attachment to new media: why we love our devices; why we are fascinated by the images on their screens; and how it is possible that virtual images can provide physical pleasure. Nusselder puts such phenomena as avatars, role playing, cybersex, computer psychotherapy, and Internet addiction in the context of established psychoanalytic theory. The virtual identities we assume in virtual worlds, exemplified best by avatars consisting of both realistic and symbolic self-representations, illustrate the three orders that Lacan uses to analyze human reality: the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real.

Nusselder analyzes our most intimate involvement with information technology—the almost invisible, affective aspects of technology that have the greatest impact on our lives. Interface Fantasy lays the foundation for a new way of thinking that acknowledges the pivotal role of the screen in the current world of information. And it gives an intelligible overview of basic Lacanian principles (including fantasy, language, the virtual, the real, embodiment, and enjoyment) that shows their enormous relevance for understanding the current state of media technology.

Publisher MIT Press, 2009
Short Circuits series
ISBN 0262513005, 9780262513005
Length 176 pages

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Palo Fabuš: Laschova teorie narcistní kultury jako inspirace pro mediální studia (2009) [Czech]

Práce se pokouší představit teorii narcistní kultury amerického historika Christophera Lasche jakožto inspiraci pro mediální studia. Činí tak analýzou vybraných mediálních teorií autorů Jeana Baudrillarda, Joshuy Meyrowitze, Neila Postmana a dvojice Brian Longhurst a Nicholas Abercrombie. Malá pozornost, kterou tyto teorie venují roli mediálního publika je zde interpretována jako bílé místo, které by Laschova teorie mohla zaplnit modelem narcistní osobnostní struktury.

Lasch ve své historické studii kulturních proměn ve 20. století vychází z rozpadu rodiny způsobeného psychologizací společnosti, vlivem reklamy a nástupem byrokratického paternalismu, který nahradil původně rodičovské funkce. Rodí se tak narcistní osobnost vyznačující se vnitřním psychologickým motorem sebe-nenávist a nutkavou potrebou obklopovat se iluzemi všemohoucnosti, která se projevuje vyhledáváním spektáklu a stažením se do sebe. Inspirativnost této teorie pro mediální studia je tak představena v podobe užitečného modelu pro analýzu médií v paradigmatu aktivních publik.

Klíčová slova: narcismus, Lasch, postmodernita, média, komunikace, Já, survivalismus, psychoanalýza.

Diplomová práce
Masarykova Univerzita, Fakulta sociálních studií
Vedoucí práce: prof. PhDr. Jiří Pavelka, CSc.
Brno: FSS MU, 2009

Lasch’s narcissism culture theory as an inspiration for media studies
The thesis aims to introduce the narcissism culture theory of american historian Christopher Lasch as an inspiration for media studies. It does so by analysing selected media theories of Jean Baudrillard, Joshua Meyrowitz, Neil Postman and Brian Longhurst with Nicholas Abercrombie. Little attention these theories draw to the role of media audience is interpreted here as a gap, which could be potentially filled by Lasch’s theory with its model of narcissistic character.
In his historical study of culture changes in 20th century Lasch starts from the dissolution of family inflicted by psychologization of society, influence of advertising and emergence of bureaucratic paternalism substituting rearing function of parents. Through these processes comes birth of narcissistic personality, which can be distinguished by inner psychological drive of self-hate and compulsive need to surround him- or herself with illusion of omnipotence manifested through seeking out of spectacle and drawing within. The inspirative potential of the theory is thus introduced in a form of a useful model for a media analysis within the active audience paradigm.

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Bernadette Wegenstein: Getting under the skin: the body and media theory (2006)

The body as an object of critical study dominates disciplines across the humanities to such an extent that a new discipline has emerged: body criticism. In Getting Under the Skin, Bernadette Wegenstein traces contemporary body discourse in philosophy and cultural studies to its roots in twentieth-century thought—showing how psychoanalysis, phenomenology, cognitive science, and feminist theory contributed to a new body concept—and studies the millennial body in performance art, popular culture, new media arts, and architecture.

Wegenstein shows how the concept of bodily fragmentation has been in circulation since the sixteenth century’s investigation of anatomy. The history of the body-in-pieces, she argues, is a history of a struggling relationship between two concepts of the body—as fragmented and as holistic. Wegenstein shows that by the twentieth century these two apparently contradictory movements were integrated; both fragmentation and holism, she argues, are indispensable modes of imagining and configuring the body. The history of the body, therefore, is a history of mediation; but it was not until the turn of the twenty-first century and the digital revolution that the body was best able to show its mediality.

After examining key concepts in body criticism, Wegenstein looks at the body as “raw material” in twentieth-century performance art, medical techniques for visualizing the human body, and strategies in popular culture for “getting under the skin” with images of freely floating body parts. Her analysis of current trends in architecture and new media art demonstrates the deep connection of body criticism to media criticism. In this approach to body criticism, the body no longer stands in for something else—the medium has become the body.

Publisher    MIT Press, 2006
Original from    the University of Michigan
Digitized    Oct 3, 2008
ISBN    0262232472, 9780262232470
Length    211 pages

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Patricia Ticineto Clough: Autoaffection. Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology (2000)

Explores the connection between new theories, new technologies, and new ways of thinking.

In this book, Patricia Ticineto Clough reenergizes critical theory by viewing poststructuralist thought through the lens of “teletechnology,” using television as a recurring case study to illuminate the changing relationships between subjectivity, technology, and mass media.

Autoaffection links diverse forms of cultural criticism—feminist theory, queer theory, film theory, postcolonial theory, Marxist cultural studies and literary criticism, the cultural studies of science and the criticism of ethnographic writing—to the transformation and expansion of teletechnology in the late twentieth century. These theoretical approaches, Clough suggests, have become the vehicles of unconscious thought in our time.

In individual chapters, Clough juxtaposes the likes of Derridean deconstruction, Deleuzian philosophy, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. She works through the writings of Fredric Jameson, Donna Haraway, Judith Butler, Bruno Latour, Nancy Fraser, Elizabeth Grosz-to name only a few-placing all in dialogue with a teletechnological framework. Clough shows how these cultural criticisms have raised questions about the foundation of thought, allowing us to reenvision the relationship of nature and technology, the human and the machine, the virtual and the real, the living and the inert.

Publisher U of Minnesota Press, 2000
ISBN 0816628890, 9780816628896
Length 213 pages

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Chris Murray (ed.): Key Writers on Art: The Twentieth Century (2003)

Key Writers on Art: The Twentieth Century offers a unique and authoritative guide to modern responses to art. Featuring 48 essays on the most important twentieth century writers and thinkers and written by an international panel of expert contributors, it introduces readers to key approaches and analytical tools used in the study of contemporary art. It discusses writers such as Adorno, Barthes, Benjamin, Freud, Greenberg, Heuser, Kristeva, Merleau-Ponty, Pollock, Read and Sontag.

Publisher Routledge, 2003
ISBN 041522201X, 9780415222013
Length 314 pages

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Peter Weibel (ed.): Beyond Art: A Third Culture. A Comparative Study in Cultures, Art and Science in 20th Century Austria and Hungary (2005)

Austria and Hungary in the 20th century were nations that made enormous achievements in the formal sciences and arts: abstraction, logic, mathematics, physics, positivism, psychoanalysis, cybernetics, constructivism, economics, art, media art, and concept art. Art and science are usually divided into two different cultures, and nations, too, are seen as having separate ones. This book delivers a new model of consilience and convergence of art and science by closely studying in a material historical way by using a multitude of original papers and contributions, photographs, documents, bibliographies, biographies, and survey essays, the mutual influence of art and science in Austria and Hungary. In fields ranging from Gestalt psychology to Quantum physics, from constructivism to theories of vision, from holography to cyberspace, we discover a multitude of ideas, books, movements and personalities that have deeply influenced the world. Richly illustrated, the book is a nearly invaluable sourcebook, in which a new method, resembling more a CD-ROM narration than a dictionary, has been used to map an unknown horizon of knowledge. Those involved in the history of science or art and in the field of cultural theory, will find an incomparable frame of reference and information. They will discover not only genius, talents and themes they have not been aware of, but also a new model of culture, a third culture. The book is graphically and structurally user-friendly with a synopsis for each chapter, models, diagrams, images, corolaries and index etc.

Publisher Springer, 2005
ISBN 3211245626, 9783211245620
Length 616 pages

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Robert Donald Romanyshyn: Technology as Symptom and Dream (1989)

The development of linear perspective in the 15th century represented a radical transformation in the European’s sense of the world, the body and the self. Robert Romanyshyn’s book examines the claim that the development of linear perspective vision was and is indispensable to the emergence of our technological world. It does so by telling the story of how an artistic technique has become a cultural habit of mind.

Publisher Routledge, 1989
ISBN 0415007879, 9780415007870
Length 254 pages

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Félix Guattari: The Three Ecologies (1989/2000) [English/Portuguese]

Just as rare species are disappearing at an alarming rate, so whole areas of human thought, feeling and sensibility are becoming extinct through the power of an infantalizing mass media and the social exclusion of the old, the young and the unemployed. Extending the definition of ecology to encompass social relations and human subjectivity as well as environmental concerns, Guattari argues that the ecological crises that threaten our planet are the direct result of the expansion of a new form of capitalism and that a new ecosophical approach must be found which respects the differences between all living systems.

A powerful critique of capitalism and a manifesto for a new way of thinking, The Three Ecologies is also an ideal introduction to the work of one of Europe’s most radical thinkers. This edition of The Three Ecologies includes a chronology of Guattari’s life and work, introductions to both his general philosophy and to the work itself and extended notes to the original text.

English edition
Translation by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton
Publisher Athlone Press, London, 2000
ISBN 0485004089, 9780485004083
Length 174 pages

As três ecologias
Portuguese edition
Translation Maria Cristina F. Bittencourt.
Edition 11
Campinas, SP: Papirus, 1990.
ISBN 85-308-0106-7

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Wilhelm S. Wurzer (ed.): Panorama: Philosophies of the Visible (2002)

The new electronic age has seen a radical transition from book to screen, a development which has obscured the fact that it is not what we see which matters but how we see what we see. We live in a time when the visible needs to be retheorised. Panorama presents a broad analysis of philosophies of the visible in art and culture, particularly in painting, film, photography, and literature. The work of key philosophers–Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas, Barthes, Blanchot, Foucault, Bataille, Derrida, Lyotard and Deleuze–is examined in the context of visibility, expressivity, the representational and the postmodern. Contributors: Zsuzsa Baross, Robert Burch, Alessandro Carrera, Dana Hollander, Lynne Huffer, Volker Kaiser, Reginald Lilly, Robert S. Leventhal, Janet Lungstrum, Ladelle McWhorter, Ludwig Nagl, Anne Tomiche, James R. Watson, Lisa Zucker.

Publisher Continuum International Publishing Group, 2002
ISBN 0826460046, 9780826460042
Length 254 pages

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Avital Ronell: The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (1989)

The telephone marks the place of an absence. Affiliated with discontinuity, alarm, and silence, it raises fundamental questions about the constitution of self and other, the stability of location, systems of transfer, and the destination of speech. Profoundly changing our concept of long-distance, it is constantly transmitting effects of real and evocative power. To the extent that it always relates us to the absent other, the telephone, and the massive switchboard attending it, plugs into a hermeneutics of mourning. The Telephone Book, itself organized by a “telephonic logic,” fields calls from philosophy, history, literature, and psychoanalysis. It installs a switchboard that hooks up diverse types of knowledge while rerouting and jamming the codes of the disciplines in daring ways. Avital Ronell has done nothing less than consider the impact of the telephone on modern thought. Her highly original, multifaceted inquiry into the nature of communication in a technological age will excite everyone who listens in.

The book begins by calling close attention to the importance of the telephone in Nazi organization and propaganda, with special regard to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. In the Third Reich the telephone became a weapon, a means of state surveillance, “an open accomplice to lies.” Heidegger, in Being and Time and elsewhere, elaborates on the significance of “the call.” In a tour de force response, Ronell mobilizes the history and terminology of the telephone to explicate his difficult philosophy.

Ronell also speaks of the appearance of the telephone in the literary works of Duras, Joyce, Kafka, Rilke, and Strindberg. She examines its role in psychoanalysis—Freud said that the unconscious is structured like a telephone, and Jung and R. D. Laing saw it as a powerful new body part. She traces its historical development from Bell’s famous first call: “Watson, come here!” Thomas A. Watson, his assistant, who used to communicate with spirits, was eager to get the telephone to talk, and thus to link technology with phantoms and phantasms. In many ways a meditation on the technologically constituted state, The Telephone Book opens a new field, becoming the first political deconstruction of technology, state terrorism, and schizophrenia. And it offers a fresh reading of the American and European addiction to technology in which the telephone emerges as the crucial figure of this age.

Publisher U of Nebraska Press, 1989
ISBN 0803289383, 9780803289383
Length 466 pages

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Jacques Lacan: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English (2006)

Brilliant and innovative, Jacques Lacan’s work lies at the epicenter of modern thought about otherness, subjectivity, sexual difference, the drives, the law, and enjoyment. This new translation of his complete works offers welcome, readable access to Lacan’s seminal thinking on diverse subjects touched upon over the course of his inimitable intellectual career.

Translated by Bruce Fink
Publisher W. W. Norton, 2006
ISBN 0393329259, 9780393329254
Length 878 pages

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Friedrich A. Kittler: Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986/1999)

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the hegemony of the printed word was shattered by the arrival of new media technologies that offered novel ways of communicating and storing data. Previously, writing had operated by way of symbolic mediation—all data had to pass through the needle’s eye of the written signifier—but phonography, photography, and cinematography stored physical effects of the real in the shape of sound waves and light. The entire question of referentiality had to be recast in light of these new media technologies; in addition, the use of the typewriter changed the perception of writing from that of a unique expression of a literate individual to that of a sequence of naked material signifiers.

Part technological history of the emergent new media in the late nineteenth century, part theoretical discussion of the responses to these media—including texts by Rilke, Kafka, and Heidegger, as well as elaborations by Edison, Bell, Turing, and other innovators—Gramophone, Film, Typewriter analyzes this momentous shift using insights from the work of Foucault, Lacan, and McLuhan. Fusing discourse analysis, structuralist psychoanalysis, and media theory, the author adds a vital historical dimension to the current debates over the relationship between electronic literacy and poststructuralism, and the extent to which we are constituted by our technologies. The book ties the establishment of new discursive practices to the introduction of new media technologies, and it shows how both determine the ways in which psychoanalysis conceives of the psychic apparatus in terms of information machines.

Gramophone, Film, Typewriter is, among other things, a continuation as well as a detailed elaboration of the second part of the author’s Discourse Networks, 1800/1900 (Stanford, 1990). As such, it bridges the gap between Kittler’s discourse analysis of the 1980’s and his increasingly computer-oriented work of the 1990’s.

Translated, with an Introduction by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz
Publisher Stanford University Press, 1999
ISBN 0804732337, 9780804732338
Length 315 pages
Originally published in German in 1986 as Grammophon Film Typewriter by Brinkmann & Bose, Berlin

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Jacques Lacan: Television. A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment (1974/1990)

Here, Lacan points to the dependence of thought and the unconscious on the structure of language. He pits this relation against the notion of thought as grounded in a physical anatomy imagined as an objectified and highly assumptive unity of functions, a singular body. Such a singularity of subjectivity is predicated upon the chain of intersubjectivity, the bonds of civilization, in which it aquires definition. Thus Lacan recognizes that the Aristotelian notion of the subject as object supplies, at the level of the intersubjective, the means of its radical decentering, viz. :

“the ex-sistence [a holding outside] of one more subject for the soul.”

In fact, the physical symptoms of the hysteric, the invasion and disturbance of the body by obsessive thoughts, how to behave, what to say, testifies to the fact that the only relation thought has to the soul-body is one of a differentiating projective ex-sistence.
Lacan argues that the concept of the subject as a composite of thought and soul emerges from efforts to conform thought to the world, for which, under the sway of the aforementioned social bonds, the soul is held responsible. Lacan argues that the object of this responsiblity which passes for “reality” is, in fact, a fantasy, a “grimace of the real”, which simply serves an instinctual purpose: the survivalist perpetuation of thought.

First part of the book:
Jacques Lacan: Television
Translated by Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson
French edition © Les Editions du Seuil 1974
Some portions of this work © 1987 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and October Magazine, Ltd.
Published by W W Norton, 1990

Second part of the book:
Joan Copjec (ed.): A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment
Translated by Jeffrey Mehlman

Video of the televised lecture the book is based on
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Hal Foster: Prosthetic gods (2004)

How to imagine not only a new art or architecture but a new self or subject equal to them? In Prosthetic Gods, Hal Foster explores this question through the works and writings of such key modernists as Gauguin and Picasso, F. T. Marinetti and Wyndham Lewis, Adolf Loos and Max Ernst. These diverse figures were all fascinated by fictions of origin, either primordial and tribal or futuristic and technological. In this way, Foster argues, two forms came to dominate modernist art above all others: the primitive and the machine.

Foster begins with the primitivist fantasies of Gauguin and Picasso, which he examines through the Freudian lens of the primal scene. He then turns to the purist obsessions of the Viennese architect Loos, who abhorred all things primitive. Next Foster considers the technophilic subjects propounded by the futurist Marinetti and the vorticist Lewis. These “new egos” are further contrasted with the “bachelor machines” proposed by the dadaist Ernst. Foster also explores extrapolations from the art of the mentally ill in the aesthetic models of Ernst, Paul Klee, and Jean Dubuffet, as well as manipulations of the female body in the surrealist photography of Brassai, Man Ray, and Hans Bellmer. Finally, he examines the impulse to dissolve the conventions of art altogether in the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, the scatter pieces of Robert Morris, and the earthworks of Robert Smithson, and traces the evocation of lost objects of desire in sculptural work from Marcel Duchamp and Alberto Giacometti to Robert Gober.

Although its title is drawn from Freud, Prosthetic Gods does not impose psychoanalytic theory on modernist art; rather, it sets the two into critical relation and scans the greater historical field that they share.

Published by MIT Press, 2004
ISBN 0262062429, 9780262062428
455 pages

Key terms:
Max Ernst, Art Nouveau, Robert Gober, Medusa, Ornament and Crime, Wyndham Lewis, surrealist, psychoanalysis, primitivist, phallus, modernist, Hans Bellmer, Adolf Loos, Dadaist, Le Corbusier, apotropaic, Dada, Paul Gauguin, Paul Klee, vorticist

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Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980/2005)

A Thousand Plateaus continues the work Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari began in Anti-Oedipus and has now become established as one of the classic studies of the development of critical theory in the late twentieth century. It occupies an important place at the center of the debate reassessing the works of Freud and Marx, advancing an approach that is neither Freudian nor Marxist but which learns from both to find an entirely new and radical path. It presents an attempt to pioneer a variety of social and psychological analyses free of the philosophical encumbrances criticized by postmodern writers. A Thousand Plateaus is an essential text for feminists, literary theorists, social scientists, philosophers, and others interested in the problems of contemporary Western culture.

Translation and Foreword by Brian Massumi
Copyright © 1987 by the University of Minnesota Press
Eleventh printing 2005
Originally published as Mille Plateaux, volume 2 of Capitalisme et Schizophrénie © 1980 by Les Editions de Minuit, Paris.

Key words and phrases: deterritorialization, abstract machine, rhizome, body without organs, semiotic, haecceities, war machine, stratum, black hole, nomad, fascism, destratification, psychoanalysis, line of flight, Gilles Deleuze, molar, haptic, schizoanalysis, surplus value, Paul Virilio

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