Through both this developmental and this structural model, psychoanalysis enacts an unprecedented science of mediation: a study of how language and norms inform desires; how desires can only make themselves legible in the distortions of parapraxes, dreams, fumbles, and symptoms; how the self is not self-evident but rather a product of social relations. With its conviction that psychic experience is socially produced, psychoanalytic theory can help explore the ways that circulation impresses upon the psyche: an overemphasis on instantaneous fluid exchange, an overabundance of images, an overweighting of presence, and overvaluing of identity can all preclude or fore-close the functioning of the symbolic. Representation slackens, and an unintegrable real impends. Immersion in the imaginary initiates all kinds of psychic dischord, from fantasies of self-possession and delusions of wholeness, to refusals of the other and proliferating dualities, to paranoiac gusts and polarized fluctuation. Each of these disorders vividly characterizes contemporary media culture and contemporary algorithmic logic.
Anna Kornbluh
