What am I taking about (in my previous post)? The unconscious! Must be madness, absolutely madness. There’s no room for the unconscious in our digital, networked culture. It’s been replaced by the Anti-Oedipe of Guattari/Deleuze, rhizomes, communication theory, cognition, CBT, nano technology, biology, medicine, quick fixes, instant gratification, anything that can be seen and comprehended – immediately. No in-sight, only sight.
In 1982, Jauss proposed the term geniessen in his Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics to identify aesthetic pleasure. It was a reaction against Adorno’s “aesthetics of negativity,” which he rejected as “aesthetic purism,” as well as against the Barthesian pleasures of the text which, in Jauss’ words, is the “French counterpart to Adorno’s aesthetics in certain aspects” (29).
Jauss’ critique emphasizes the communicative character of art in which he finds aesthetic pleasure. Pleasure, he argues, is produced by affects and is as such the foundation for communication, thus, pleasure of communication is art’s social function (35).
Pleasure is produced by affects and is the foundation for communication. This sentence might just as well be applied to the social web. Is the social web a geniessen, a geniessen in communication?
In his new series of essays “Ecology: A New Opium for the Masses”, Slavoj Zizek quite provocatively claims that ecology is the new opium to ease our ever-present neurotic fear. Can’t help but linking this to my previous post on the misbehaviour of American psychology. Ecology - free of social tension, outlet for social tension, buy into our programme of an ecological society, consume. Play on our neuroses, and we’ll recycle….
[net]textualities is our common name for all the different kinds of digital writing that exist today. Letters are no longer carved in stone, the Word died with post-structuralism. Instead we have texts that flow between expressions, media, software and platforms, 'the play of the signifier' in action.
