Abstract
Jodi Dean’s Blog Theory is a successful attempt to psychoanalyze today’s media practices. The book is structured into four chapters, each devoted to the analysis of modern dynamics on the Internet, ranging from the economic impact of blogging to the political impact of networking. She makes use of Lacanian theory mainly through Slavoj Žižek’s interpretation of it, which may make it more difficult for some to understand. Despite this potential obstacle, one inevitably gets a feeling of reading a fresh piece of work on the Internet; Blog Theory does not take for granted the World Wide Web’s liberating or democratizing elements. This is a book avowedly written from a critical standpoint, a book that explores how the Internet reproduces communicative capitalism and its interests by entrapping individuals in circuits of drive. The result is the creation of what Dean refers to as ‘whatever beings’ (p. 66), individuals with diffuse and interchangeable personalities who interact in affective networks that simulate belonging in a social group.
Dean’s central claim is that communicative capitalism is the general context in which the perverse dynamics of drive (the will to start something again) take place through widespread media practices like Googling and Facebooking. Media practices in communicative capitalism are not only ephemeral and fast, but also ubiquitous and banal in most cases. For Dean, these practices entrap the Internet user in never-ending circuits of intensive surveillance. Drawn from Foucauldian theory, the surveillance that characterizes social networks is, for Dean, also internalized by social actors, so in addition to the State and the Internet as a whole, surveillance is carried out by individuals themselves on their peers on websites such as Facebook and Twitter (p. 18). These circuits capture us with extraordinary strength as they are based in the jouissance, the double enjoyment of controlling and of being controlled that causes anxiety if one does not pursue the jouissance (p. 92). Moreover, Dean goes beyond the formal conceptualization of communicative capitalism, which exploits communication in the same way that industrial capitalism exploited labor. For Dean, the fragmented nature of modern media practices prevents individuals from grasping society as a totality, and thereby from critically thinking about the social order, as fragmentation implies distraction and disengagement.
The decline of symbolic efficiency is a pivotal element which gives structure to the whole idea of communicative capitalism on the Internet. This Žižekian concept leads us to the disappearance of ‘the big other’, which states that there is no authority in charge, nor mobility, as the efficiency of symbols is lost. This failure of transmission produces the impossibility for totalizing cyberspace, as it reduces everything to mere personal opinions, which are also hardly understandable. All this translates as the idea of the Internet as an element that permits people to freely express ideas, but it is equally true that the Internet is a potential tool for great repression, and for Dean, it is currently working in this way. This becomes clear when Dean takes into account the history of the Internet and conceptualizes the New Communalist movement as a displaced mediator – a term which ‘designates mediators whose functions have been displaced from what appears (retroactively) as their previous role’ (p. 27). As the ‘Master signifier’ disappears, individuals are captured in the circuits of drive, in which the most important element is itself the process of pursuing a goal. The perversion of the Lacanian objet petit a in communicative capitalism compels individuals to pursue on the Internet ‘the truth’ or the ‘ultimate knowledge’. However, the final goal does not exist as such; the pursuit is what we truly enjoy, so once the individual achieves the goal, she or he begins the whole process again, and becomes a slave of the circuits of drive.
Furthermore, it is clear that, for Dean, within communicative capitalism the content of communication is no longer important, but the communicative dynamics themselves matter a great deal. Her critique of the Internet certainly brings a breath of fresh air to the indulgence of comments and opinions in technology magazines, which claim that the Internet is the ‘democracy of the future that we are experiencing now’. Nevertheless, three critiques can be applied to Dean’s account of the Internet. First, as already mentioned, parts of her book may be challenging due to the use of jargon and very technical concepts. Certainly this is not a book for everyone. Second, I believe Dean seldom links theory with empirical evidence, although she does take into account the history of the Internet’s evolution. The examples she provides do not seem to offer satisfactory explanations for everyday online habits, hardly lightening her otherwise dense explanation of modern media practices. Third, Dean’s account is weakened by the ambiguity of some of its claims, and one has to ask: do people post on political forums only due to the systematic pursuit of the objet petit a? Cannot the Internet be used in order to challenge the prevailing economic-political system? Dean is right about the banalities of Facebook; it is replete with ‘kitty clips’ and memes that do not lead us to a critique of the social order. But it is equally true that Facebook is used to spread strikes and political mobilizations that have actual repercussions on the ‘real world’. Certainly Dean’s analysis is brilliant for its originality, but a reliance on only psychoanalytical theory might be its main weakness.