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

Obsessional neurosis as private religion and the mediation of collective reflexivity by the internet

From Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred, by Richard Boothby loc 263:

Freud’s point of departure is the baseline resemblance of religious ritual to the quasi-ceremonial fastidiousness of obsessive behavior. “We shall not expect to find a sharp distinction between ‘ceremonials’ and ‘obsessive actions,’” he remarks. “As a rule obsessive actions have grown out of ceremonials.” In effect, obsessional neurosis is “a private religion.” Both cases, neurosis and religion, display a conspicuous attention to detail in which objects are handled with extreme care and actions adhere to a precise order and execution. Failure to re-create the prescribed form of the ritual triggers anxiety. Freud then moves quickly to identify the psychical mechanism that underlies the outward likeness. Both obsessive neurosis and religion are centrally concerned with renouncing gratification of the two most elemental drives, aggressive and sexual.

He goes on to write that “When an overabstracted ritual has become bloodless and moribund, it can be revitalized by ramping up the sensuous dimension of the experience” (pg 15). This suggests to me how the public character of obsessional ritual, even if characterised by the same displacement of the real object and corresponding partial satisfaction of the drive, can become an object of collection reflexivity in a way which has no parallel for individual neurosis outside of the therapeutic dyad. You can’t bring to mind your obsessions as objects for improvement (as opposed to registering it as a problem for which you seek help, creating the pathway into the aforementioned dyad) because its real nature is not present to consciousness. Whereas with ritual there is a shared component, that thing we do together on a Sunday morning (etc), which can be an object of reflection in quite a different sense.

However I wonder if the capacity of the internet to mediate collective reflexivity might change what I’ve claimed here. If we can have conversations about the things we jointly do, with a critical mass of others who share this disposition and abstracted from our face-to-face lifeworld, is there a parallel form of collective reflexivity opened up? Can the people who cluster together on the basis of shared experiences reflect on and seek to ameliorate those experiences beyond the therapeutic dyad? Does the internet facilitate forms of self-work beyond personal reflexivity? I’ve long believed it does and I’m realising I have a new language for making sense of what is going in here, which I lacked when I last tried to grapple with this question many years ago.

, , , , , , , , ,
, ,