Description
Book SynopsisWide-ranging essays and experimental prose forcefully demonstrate how digital media and computational technologies have redefined what it is to be human
Over the past decade, digital media has expanded exponentially, becoming an essential part of daily life. The stimulating essays and experimental compositions in The User Unconscious delve into the ways digital media and computational technologies fundamentally affect our sense of self and the world we live in, from both human and other-than-human perspectives.
Critical theorist Patricia Ticineto Clough’s provocative essays center around the motif of the “user unconscious” to advance the challenging thesis that that we are both human and other-than-human: we now live, think, and dream within multiple layers of computational networks that are constantly present, radically transforming subjectivity, sociality, and unconscious processes.
Drawing together rising strains of philosophy, critical theory, and media studies, as well as the political, social, and economic transformations that are shaping the twenty-first-century world, The User Unconscious points toward emergent crises and potentialities in both human subjectivity and sociality. Moving from affect to data, Clough forces us to see that digital media and computational technologies are not merely controlling us—they have already altered what it means to be human.
Trade Review"The essays collected in The User Unconscious, each in its own way and together, are groundbreaking in that they brilliantly pose problems of affect, media, and measure as questions of memory, embodiment, and subjectivation in the datalogical era. Drawing on the best in critical theory, philosophy, and media studies, Patricia Ticineto Clough shows us how to intervene more effectively in the present configuration of digital media and computational technologies in the afterward of neoliberalism and biopolitics."—Amit S. Rai, Queen Mary, University of London
"Weaving together the analytical and the lyrical threads of her collective work, Patricia Ticineto Clough takes us to the originary technicity of an unconscious that starts experimenting with the nonhuman modalities of affect, media, and datalogics. These critical and poetic writings about the auto-affective reconfigurations of information governance are a compelling excursus into the political sensibilities for thinking technology today."—Luciana Parisi, Goldsmiths University of London
"This is a gorgeous collection of essays and poems from one of our finest thinkers of technology, affect, and biopolitics. Patricia Ticineto Clough pushes thought to new edges, always coercing the bounds between what can be known, not-known, and un-known."—Jasbir Puar, author of The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability
"If the most important part of a text on affect is the capacities it opens up for humans, then Clough is more than successful. By integrating personal narrative and poetry, she made this book more digestible and more human, which is ultimately the point."—Hyperrhiz
"The User Unconscious is extremely efficient in making syntheses, tweaks, and combinations of theories in the field."—Afterimage
Table of ContentsContents
Introduction
Notes towards A Theory of Affect-Itself
Patricia Ticineto Clough, Greg Goldberg, Rachel Schiff, Aaron Weeks, and Craig Willse
War by Other Means: What Difference Do(es) the Graphic(s) Make?
Praying and Playing to the Beat of a Child’s Metronome
Gendered Security/National Security: Political Branding and Population Racism
Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse
My Mother’s Scream
Feminist Theory: Bodies, Science, and Technology
A Dream of Falling: Philosophy and Family Violence
The Datalogical Turn
Patricia Ticineto Clough, Karen Gregory, Benjamin Haber, R. Joshua Scannell
The Object’s Affects: The Rosary
Rethinking Race, Calculation, Quantification and Measure
And They Were Dancing
Ecstatic Corona: From Ethnography to Performance
Acknowledgments
Notes
Previous Publications
Index
