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the data flows; the ‹wonderful› emergence of the others, who however are completely distant in their concrete physicality; the child-like joy over the simultaneity of being at different geographic poles; a directly experienced intimacy; the feeling of an omnipotent and ubiquitous access and response: all of this makes experiences in the Net so seductive and provokes the fantasies mentioned here.
Besides the representatives of psychoanalysis, in particular Jacques Lacan and his situating desire in the symbolic order, it is above all Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari who have conferred great meaning to desire. In their case one can even speak of a kind of ‹ontological constant.› Because while psychoanalysis starts out from a ‹transgression of being,› through which desire is installed into human existence as a fundamental constant, in Deleuze and Guattari's ‹Philosophy of Becoming› it has its basis in the overabundance of being itself. Desire is one of the abundance (of being) and not of the deficiency (of the subject or language). But both theoretical versions of
the subject omit its actual place: In Lacan's psychoanalytical theory the subject «shows» itself between the signifiers and is defined as an effect of the signification process. In the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari it is the preliminary result of different power relations, which permanently distort and deform it. They call these two different states «molar» and «molecular»: «molar» means rigid, fixed and sealed off sedimentations, whereas «molecular» refers to flexibility and being fluid, agile and open. The individual however is always somewhere in between: between being and becoming different or something else. «Molar» describes the state in which humans became simulacra, «derived from a social aggregate […] Since no particular body can entirely coincide with the code enveloped in its assigned category and in the various images recapitulating it, a molar person is always a bad copy of its model.» [30] Both states are produced by two different modalities of subjection: «subjectivation» and «subjectification.» While «subjectification» means that one is a subject only with respect to something, «either the State or Capitalism, and its aim is to produce more surplus value,» the other modality,