Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Technology
Patricia Ticineto Clough
Language: English
Pages: 216
ISBN: 0816628890
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: The Philosopher of the Second Reich
Basic Writings of Existentialism (Modern Library Classics)
A History of Philosophy, Volume 5: Modern Philosophy: The British Philosophers from Hobbes to Hume
A Discourse on the Method (Oxford World's Classics)
the formation of the unconscious first begins to condense onto itself and project itself onto the world. The prose poems, therefore, are not just about my unconscious; they are about the unconscious of others, which has come to haunt mine. In this sense the prose poems are about the openness of the unconscious, or about the opening of my unconscious to encrypting the unconscious of others. In two of the prose poems I do not appear as myself so much as in and in between the sound and feel of
preontology or hauntology that put ontology close to what Derrida describes as the shared "history of psyche, text, and technology."35 What is this shared history that Derrida takes up instead of ontology, a history about which he nonetheless equivocates, suggesting that what the history produces is neither "absolutely" nor "thoroughly new"? What can be made of this pull toward and away from history, toward and away from ontology—this "aporia of time," which is produced when the thought of the
failing, therefore, to recognize the specific historicity given with teletechnology. All this leaves lameson with an understanding of teletechnology given in terms of postmodernism that ceaselessly frames the real, and therefore empties it of every meaning other than that of the revealing and the concealing of its framing. To confirm this understanding, lameson finally approaches television, but still not quite directly. He approaches television by way of video art as an example of postmodern
very precisely reproductive technology itself."62 He also proposes that reproductive technology, first seen by him in the Warhol painting and then in video art, more clearly, is a matter of machine time, or the machining of time. Yet, having seen in video art the becoming of reproductive technology as productive technology and that, therefore, video art makes more apparent that time is machined and is inextricable from different technical substrates, Jameson nonetheless does not go further. He
thought of pure repetition given: to think repetition without origin and without end, letting loose the unconscious from its embodiment in the subject of the modern western discourse of Man and thereby to reach for a cultural criticism that goes beyond, while going through, the unconscious thought given in the joining of Marxism and psychoanalysis. It is not clear what future will come beyond the future given with the unconscious thought of teletechnology. It is being written; no doubt somewhere
