Raiding the inarticulate since 2010

accelerated academy acceleration agency AI Algorithmic Authoritarianism and Digital Repression archer Archive Archiving artificial intelligence automation Becoming Who We Are Between Post-Capitalism and Techno-Fascism big data blogging capitalism ChatGPT claude Cognitive Triage: Practice, Culture and Strategies Communicative Escalation and Cultural Abundance: How Do We Cope? Corporate Culture, Elites and Their Self-Understandings craft creativity critical realism data science Defensive Elites Digital Capitalism and Digital Social Science Digital Distraction, Personal Agency and The Reflexive Imperative Digital Elections, Party Politics and Diplomacy digital elites Digital Inequalities Digital Social Science Digital Sociology digital sociology Digital Universities elites Fragile Movements and Their Politics Cultures generative AI higher education Interested labour Lacan Listening LLMs margaret archer Organising personal morphogenesis Philosophy of Technology platform capitalism platforms populism Post-Democracy, Depoliticisation and Technocracy post-truth psychoanalysis public engagement public sociology publishing Reading realism reflexivity scholarship sexuality Shadow Mobilization, Astroturfing and Manipulation Social Media Social Media for Academics social media for academics social ontology social theory sociology technology The Content Ecosystem The Intensification of Work The Political Economy of Digital Capitalism The Technological History of Digital Capitalism Thinking trump twitter Uncategorized work writing zizek

The metonymy of desire

From Bruce Fink’s A Clinical Introduction to Freud: Techniques for Everyday Practice:

We can’t go home again, we cannot have our primary caretaker and love object the way we believed we once had her or him (that is, with the sense of there having been no distinction between us, no boundary where one of us left off and the other began)—once we have come into being as individuals or subjects in our own right, such a sense of fullness, completeness, and blissful merger with another is no longer possible (except, perhaps, with the help of certain psychedelic drugs); henceforward we are doomed to always feel separate, incomplete, or lacking in some regard. Psychoanalysis can attenuate the intensity of this feeling, but can never eradicate it altogether (in the best of cases, it gives us the sense that such incompleteness is no longer of any interest or concern, other things we are doing being so much more compelling).

Loc 3257

All of us continue to feel all of our lives that something is missing, that there is always still something that we have not obtained, attained, or achieved, and this keeps us shifting from one field of study or endeavor to another, from one set of friends to another, from one favorite author or director to another, from one lover to another, from one gadget to another, and so on.

Loc 3267

This is an admirably clear formulation of what I take Lacan to mean by traversing the fantasy, finding an accommodation between drive and desire which enables the (neurotic) subject to enjoy their enjoyment: “in the best of cases, it gives us the sense that such incompleteness is no longer of any interest or concern, other things we are doing being so much more compelling”.

, , , ,