Book Announcement by Patricia Ticineto Clough (USA)
My book, The User Unconscious: On Affect, Media, and Measure, has been published by the University of Minnesota Press (2018). The book explores how using the internet and social media as well as the operation of tracking and sensing devices produce data beyond human consciousness and perception and therefore call for us to reconsider the meaning and function of the unconscious. The book also includes experimental writings interweaving unconscious processes and critical theory in the age of datafication.
The User Unconscious: On Affect, Media and Measure extends my work begun in Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Technology (University of Minnesota Press, 2000) to address the affects of so-called big data on unconscious processes, the body, subjectivity, and sociality. The book draws on works of media scholars, philosophers, and psychoanalysts to describe the operation of digital media and the algorithms that generate and distribute data mined from our use of the internet and social media as well as the environmental data from tracking and sensing devices – that is, the data of nonhuman agencies. These agencies operate in ways that go beyond human consciousness and perception, creating what is called “the trauma of code”: an experience of “the too-muchness” of data, or, more correctly, what can never ever be experienced directly but which nonetheless affects us.
The User Unconscious proposes that this experience that cannot ever be experienced is producing an “I” composited with its data traces and environmental data beyond consciousness and perception, extending the body beyond the organism and allowing for bodily sensibilities that are human and other-than-human. This “I” is set in the changes wrought partly by big data in governance (especially preventive policing), economy (especially financialization), and sociality (especially the prominence of social media), raising questions of race, gender, sexuality, age, and ability. Drawing on psychoanalytic theories of trauma and the nonhuman, The User Unconscious asks psychoanalysts to undertake further exploration of unconscious processes in this age of big data.
Link to publisher: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-user-unconscious
Patricia Ticineto Clough, PhD
Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies,
City University of New York
Psychoanalyst, practicing in New York City
Member of the Training Committee of Institute for
Contemporary Psychotherapy
140 Riverside Drive 8N
New York, NY 10024 USA
Email Patricia Ticineto Clough
