Better Living
Through Facebook

Nancy Barton

 

If it sometimes appears that Deleuze and Guattari dreamed the internet's rhizomic structure into existence, the social dimension of networking technologies such as Facebook appear to have emerged as an almost-physical embodiment of Jacques Lacan's meditations on the subject's rambles through the thickets of desire. The almost-physical is increasingly a way that bodies work in our era of ever newer technologies, but it is based on an archaic model: the infantile body, both connected and alone. User-friendly yet increasingly demanding screens of I-phones, pads, books, pods, and macs suspend us in their amniotic sac of electronic signals, erasing the distinction between self and environment, and reconstituting the grandiosity and helplessness of infancy. The chimera of time stretches, twists, disappears, and the visceral frustration felt while waiting for a message to download resembles nothing more closely than the panic of a child struggling to conjure the milk it cannot ask for. When, half a century ago, Lacan began to talk in his seminars about partial drives, alienation, and aphanasis, he may have known that he was also describing technologies, which, in their nascent forms, were already increasing the distances, speed, and efficiency with which these gaps in the subject's experience of desire would be electronically deployed. [...]

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