Aristotle, Performativity, and Perfect Friendship in Shakespeare

From childhood, most of us have been taught that our “identity,” both how we see ourselves and how others see us, is shaped at least in part by our friends: “you are the company you keep,” as the cliché goes. Experience will teach us that not all friendships are the same, much less equal, even if we never hear of Aristotle and his tripartite scale of friend-types. His categories were of course born of the classical world but, true to fashion, remain valuable barometers for measuring individual identity and desire in friendships. They’re useful, too, in understanding Shakespeare’s characters and their motivation. Traditional, formalist readings of his plays have long offered us neat and clean ways to understand a character’s dramatic function—a foil, an adversary, a confidant, and so forth—and further, to see the role one character plays in the development of another. The drawback, though, is the rigidity of the approach: once a character is assigned a function or a label, it sticks. Shakespeare’s best characters, though, are not static. More recent critical opinion, specifically that advanced by practitioners of Queer theory, suggests that we look less at structural function and more at process, or “performativity,” in character relations. The drawback here is that characters can appear to have no defined formal function, and Shakespeare’s best characters do. In Much Ado, Claudio says that “Friendship is constant in all other things / Save in the office and affairs of love” (II.i.175-6). He seems to know more than we do as readers: friendship is both fixed and fluid, and so too is individual identity within the relationship

The Social Sinthome

Much of the critical discourse on social media misidentifies its problematic features as bugs, or problems to solve. Supposed solutions to these problems tend to focus on individual actions. We should delete the apps, own our own data, never click on recommended videos, and realize that we are the product. But if predatory algorithms succeed by individuating people—selling people “choice” and “options” as it harvests user data—then an entire online ecosystem arranged through the logic of that design can neither be meaningfully challenged nor effectively understood at the level of the individual alone. Transformative action addressing social media can only occur after we understand it at the nexus of where the group impinges on the individual. I revisit one of psychoanalytic theory’s primary gambits, interrogating the effect the social has on the individual psyche, to examine the fact of the social itself as a problem. Working from this premise, this essay has two ambitions: 1. To show that social media is always already a site to see the psyche as understood by Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, meaning that social media is space for the psychoanalytic conception of the psyche prior to any intervention on behalf of psychoanalytic theory/ theorists; and 2. To show what we gain by reflecting that argument back on to psychoanalytic theory itself

Reality beckons: metamodernist depthiness beyond panfictionality

It is often argued that postmodernism has been succeeded by a new dominant cultural logic. We conceive of this new logic as metamodernism. Whilst some twenty-first century texts still engage with and utilise postmodernist practices, they put these practices to new use. In this article, we investigate the metamodern usage of the typically postmodernist devices of metatextuality and ontological slippage in two genres: autofiction and true crime documentary. Specifically, we analyse Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being and the Netflix mini-series The Keepers, demonstrating that forms of fictionalisation, metafictionality and ontological blurring between fiction and reality have been repurposed. We argue that, rather than expand the scope of fiction, overriding reality, the metamodernist repurposing of postmodernist textual strategies generates a kind of ‘reality-effect’

Psychoanalytic Seriality as Media Theory: From Freud's Couch to Yours

It might pass as either a trite or trivializing observation to say that serial narratives cause trauma. The fact of the matter is, they do. At the time of this writing, one need only to think back at the audience uproar that the final season of HBO’s Game of Thrones incurred.1 In fact, to celebrate the series’ 10th Anniversary, HBO released a trailer celebrating its divisive eighth season. The initial announcement and release of the trailer was covered by The Hollywood Reporter , which had to shut down the comments section within 24 hours as the two-minute summary clip “seem[s] to have re-traumatized fans” who, again, demanded HBO remake the final season of the hugely popular show.2 Viewed this way, the series finale to Game of Thrones is less a definitive conclusion and more the designated site of an opened woun