In Who’s Afraid of Gender? Judith Butler offers the notion of a “phantasmatic scene”:
In referring to a “phantasmatic scene,” I adapt the theoretical formulation of Jean Laplanche, the late French psychoanalyst, for thinking about psychosocial phenomena. For Laplanche, fantasy is not simply the product of the imagination—a wholly subjective reality—but in its most fundamental form has to be understood as a syntactical arrangement of elements of psychic life. Fantasy, then, is not just a creation of the mind, a subliminal reverie, but an organization of desire and anxiety that follows certain structural and organizational rules, drawing on both unconscious and conscious material.
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Butler frames it as the scene in which anxieties are mobilised to constitute nascent movements: anxieties are organised into imagined nemesis which the people must counter-organise against. But I’d be inclined to read this in terms of the epistemic chaos of platform capitalism, suggesting the stage upon which these scenes can be constructed. How does epistemic fragmentation create the pieces out of which such a scene is furnished? Or does it constitute the scene itself? Or does the contemporary scene within which the neo-right is coalescing emerge at the intersection between the pandemic and the epistemic chaos of platforms?
Mark Carrigan 