WHAT CAN PSYCHOANALYSIS TELL US ABOUT CYBERSPACE? (PART ONE)
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Jacques Lacan
17 min read
Lacan's concepts of the 'big Other,' the Master, and the Real are central to Žižek's analysis of cyberspace. Understanding Lacan's psychoanalytic framework is essential to grasp the article's core arguments about symbolic order and jouissance.
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Søren Kierkegaard
17 min read
The article extensively discusses Kierkegaard's relationship with Regine Olsen as a parallel to cybersex dynamics. Understanding Kierkegaard's philosophy of authentic existence, indirect communication, and his famous broken engagement illuminates the article's argument about desire and absence.
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Gaia hypothesis
16 min read
The article references Earth as Gaia in its critique of 'cyberevolutionism' and the blurring of nature/culture distinctions. Understanding the Gaia hypothesis helps readers grasp how organic metaphors are applied to digital networks and markets.
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THE RETREAT OF THE BIG OTHER
The Informational Anorexia
Today, the media constantly bombard us with requests to choose, addressing us as subjects supposed to know what we really want (which book, clothes, TV program, place of holiday...) - "press A, if you want this, press B, if you want that," or, to quote the motto of the recent "reflective" TV publicity campaign for advertisement itself: "Advertisement - the right to choose." However, at a more fundamental level, the new media deprive the subject radically of the knowledge of what he wants: they address a thoroughly malleable subject who has constantly to be told what he wants, i.e., the very evocation of a choice to be made performatively creates the need for the object of choice. One should bear in mind here that the main function of the Master is to tell the subject what he wants - the need for the Master arises in answer to the subject's confusion, insofar as he does not know what he wants. What, then, happens in the situation of the decline of the Master, when the subject himself is constantly bombarded with the request to give a sign as to what he wants? The exact opposite of what one would expect: it is when there is no one here to tell you what you really want, when all the burden of the choice is on you, that the big Other dominates you completely, and the choice effectively disappears, i.e., is replaced by its mere semblance. One is tempted to paraphrase here Lacan's well-known reversal of Dostoyevsky ("If there is no God, nothing is permitted at all."): if no forced choice confines the field of free choice, the very freedom of choice disappears.
This suspension of the function of the (symbolic) Master is the crucial feature of the Real whose contours loom at the horizon of the cyberspace universe: the moment of implosion when humanity will attend the limit impossible to transgress, the moment at which the coordinates of our societal life-world will be dissolved. At this moment, distances will be suspended (I will be able to communicate instantly through teleconferences with anywhere on the globe); all information, from
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