Lacan\u27s Cybernetics

This project explores the synchronicity of psychoanalytic and cybernetic practices from the mid-to-late nineteenth century by recovery and analysis of a shared material media culture. This project takes as a starting point the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who observed the affinity between cybernetics and psychoanalysis, “two roughly contemporaneous techniques,” related to the emergence of the two distinct types of sciences: exact and “conjectural.” I investigate their shared patterns of figuration in the two fields, before they developed significant, and even irreconcilable, differences. This project demonstrates that what Lacan discussed explicitly in the 1950s, particularly, in his “cybernetic” Seminar II, was an expression of a more implicit connection between cybernetics and psychoanalysis ab initio. It offers a media-archaeological account of the pre-history of psychoanalysis (or proto-psychoanalytic practices) that considers the development of the psychoanalytic technique both through and against the technological mediation. The final part of this dissertation switches from the subject of the architectural and institutional panopticon of the nineteenth century to the “interpassive” user-subject of the perverse panopticon of the social media network. My discussion resonates with the current concerns expressed both within academia and in the Lacanian clinic about the degree of mediation, the limits of surveillance, the capacity of the network to exploit the subject, the automation of the gadgets that manage our lives, and the symptoms produced by all these aspects of the human-machine assemblages or even the erasure thereof in the capitalist discourse of global economy

Contribution

Svitlana Matviyenko, Contribution to the discussion Metaverse Landscapes: Technology and Territory, ICI Berlin, 28 June 2023, video recording, mp4, 19:30 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e230628_2

FCJ-184 Interpassive User: Complicity and the Returns of Cybernetics

This essay discusses the notions of “extension” and “prosthesis” as two different logics and modes of being with technology. I trace the two terms to the work of Marshall McLuhan, influenced by the work of Norbert Wiener and Buckminster Fuller. I argue that the logic of softwarisation (Manovich, 2013) is similar to the logic of extension, while the logic of appification (IDC, 2010) is similar to that of prosthesis. I argue that these logics also map onto the logics of metonymy and metaphor. I explain why such a distinction is useful for reading mobile apps and the computing practices they enable. I conclude by raising questions about users’ complicity within the bio-technological cybernetic assemblage: What does the user of these technologies want? Is she able to confront her desire through their use? Why is the demanding swarm of parasitic ‘media species’, such as apps, so determined to get under the user’s skin

Lacan and the posthuman : prosthetic body in the works of Andy Warhol and David Cronenberg

Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on May 22, 2012).The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file.Dissertation advisor: Dr. Ellie RaglandVita.Includes bibliographical references."July 2011."[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] This dissertation examines the connection between the discourses of psychoanalysis and posthumanism. It focuses on the themes of humans' interaction with technology in the works of Warhol and Cronenberg made in the timeframe between 1960, the year the term "cyborg" was introduced, and today, when this term is being replaced by the notion of "posthuman." This work examines the shift from "cyborg" to "posthuman" and argues that it pertains to the change in perceiving the technologically enhanced body - from McLuhan's extended body in the 1960s to the prosthetic body in today's posthumanist account. Drawing on the work of Jacques Lacan, the dissertation critically addresses the technological determinism in the discourses of the posthumanities and identify it as symptomatic. Deciphering this symptom in the works of Andy Warhol and David Cronenberg, this dissertation unveils the mechanisms by which the subject maintains his or her identifications in the techno-age. This research argues for the necessity of a critical posthumanism without technology and see psychoanalytic posthumanism as one of these directions, defined by Lacan as "Psychoanalysis is not a humanism."--From short.pdf

Sensuous Extimacy: Sexuation and Virtual Reality. Taking on a Gender Identity in Second Life

When people meet they apologize for their bodies: their bodies are never perfect, never adequate, and never quite behave exactly how people want them to. Today it seems that the virtual reality of cyberspace offers itself as an effective medium that can transport its users into a different universe, freed from the burden of the body and from the necessity of any such apology. The quickly growing number of the networking users demonstrates the rising demand for a new kind of symbolic realm, whether it be in the form of the user-friendly layout of a website or the appealing architecture of a simulated space, where one can easily inscribe oneself by obtaining a two-dimensional profile or a threedimensional digital body.This paper addresses one of today’s myths about cyberspace that pictures it as a realm where users can discover their “true selves” or acquire new identities (and especially sexual identities), and by performing them, users may eventually become what they have created on-line. Today we inquire about the role of digital media in shaping and channeling sexual desires, dynamics and identifications attached to encounters with and through media technologies. I use Jacques Lacan’s theory of a subject and his theory of the three orders of the imaginary, symbolic and real to interpret the logic of sexuation (or taking on a gender identity regardless of biological sex) in virtual reality. Drawing on Lacan’s concept of “extimacy” that helps to escape a bipartition between interior and exterior, my paper focuses on a series of displacements occurring in and through cyberspace, exploring the dynamics of sexuation as it occurs in the 3D world of Second Life (www.secondlife.com)

The Posthuman Body in the Works of Andy Warhol, David Cronenberg and Matthew Barney [abstract]

This presentation was made during the session "After the Body: Is It Still Human?"Abstract of a presentation given at the 2008 Body Project conference at the University of Missouri-Columbia.Today, it has been assumed that in the mixed reality of virtual and physical realms, the body is not perceived as a whole. The instances of how the unity and homogeneity of the body is challenged by technology come in a great variety: application of cosmetics, pilling off dead skin, erasing the wrinkles, fighting with cellulite (on a micro-level), as well as plastic and cosmetic surgery, reshaping the body and/or its parts (on a macrolevel). Due to our interaction with technology, the imaginary wholeness of the body despoils. The body is perceived as open to modification. This traumatic acknowledgement concerns the realization of fragmentary nature of the body, the issue that has been always in focus of Lacanian psychoanalysis

Cyberwar and Revolution. Below the Radar podcast

On this episode of Below the Radar, our host Am Johal sits down with Svitlana Matviyenko, an Assistant Professor of Critical Media Analysis at SFU’s School of Communication. Her work and research focuses around topics such as political economy of information, digital militarism, social and mobile media, infrastructure studies, history of science, cybernetics and psychoanalysis. In this conversation, Svitlana talks about digital militarism on a global scale, the impacts of cyberwar on users today, and what is in store for the future of cyberwar

Producing the Subject of Deportation. Filtration Processes during the Russia-Ukraine War

The essay theorizes the “filtration process” executed by the Russian forces on the temporarily occupied Ukrainian territories that Ukrainian citizens undergo prior to their forceful deportation to the territory of the Russian Federation. The essay broadens the timeframe of “filtration” from interrogation to various logistical steps, including the digital and biometric data collection in so-called “camps,” for instrumentalization and reification of deported civilians as data subjects

Cyberwar and Revolution — with Svitlana Matviyenko

On this episode of Below the Radar, our host Am Johal sits down with Svitlana Matviyenko, an Assistant Professor of Critical Media Analysis at SFU’s School of Communication. Her work and research focuses around topics such as political economy of information, digital militarism, social and mobile media, infrastructure studies, history of science, cybernetics and psychoanalysis. In this conversation, Svitlana talks about digital militarism on a global scale, the impacts of cyberwar on users today, and what is in store for the future of cyberwar

FCJ-179 On Governance, Blackboxing, Measure, Body, Affect and Apps: A conversation with Patricia Ticineto Clough and Alexander R. Galloway

The work of Patricia Ticineto Clough and Alexander Galloway is well known to anyone whose research concerns matters of affect and biopolitics, software, networks and gaming, interface culture and communication, political economy of media and information, the systems of measure and control addressed in the contexts of French theory, feminist and speculative thought, Marxism or psychoanalysis. We were lucky to have them among the keynotes for our Apps and Affect conference, where their talks sparked an interesting exchange that impacted a number of the conference conversations. Afterwards, I suggested to Patricia and Alex that they elaborate on aspects of their discussion, this invitation resulted in the following conversation, which took place via email between April and December 2014