The Uncanny and the Curious: Publicity and the Mulitutde

When reading Dean, I asked myself throughout how this related to most of what we’ve read thus far in class, particularly the autonomist Marxists and their disciples. Lacan and Žižek seem like distant memories (one can only hope they will stay that way). I tried to make connections between Virno and Dean, but perhaps I'm just grasping at straws.

Unheimlich. Dean’s description of the paranoid, conspiring, knowing subject interpellated by the ideology of publicity materialized in technoculture seemed at times very reminiscent of uncanny condition of the multitude. Dean explains, “The conspiring subject, then, is like the hysterical subject, always seeking, always uncertain, never satisfied”118). Elsewhere she notes, “Critiques of conspiracy [...] normalize paranoia as a predominant logic of the public sphere” (61).

This idea of an unstable and uncertain subject, in the context of the technoculture where insider and outsider collapse and the gap between the public-supposed-to-believe and public-supposed-to-know falls off, is at times reminiscent of Virno’s multitude: “The concept of multitude instead hinges upon the ending of such a separation...We have a reality that is repeatedly innovated. It is therefore not possible to establish an actual distinction between a stable ‘inside’ and an uncertain telluric ‘outside’” (33). Later, Virno explains, “The multitude is united by the risk which derives from not feeling at home...The many are those who share the feeling of not feeling at home and who place this experience at the center of their own social and political praxis (34-35).

Curiosity. Virno describes curiosity as an attribute of the contemporary multitude. He explains, “the media trains the senses to consider the known as if it were unknown, to distinguish an enormous and sudden margin of freedom even in the most trite and repetitive aspects of daily. At the same time, however, the media trains the senses also for the opposite task: to consider the unknown as if it were known, to become familiar with the unexpected and the surprising, to become accustomed to the lack of established habits” (93).

When Dean speaks of the gaze and reflexive communication, I couldn’t help but think of ‘greed of sight’ especially when Dean says, “Pundits view conspiracy thinking as political pornography” (67). Later, “The materialization of watching in technoculture, then, brings about a twist: viewers don’t believe something just because they see it on television. Practices of watching, clicking, and opining now materialize belief in a politics of encryption and disclosure such that technologies can believe for us even as we are interpellated as suspicious subjects wanting to know” (69). I need to give it some more though, but I was trying to think about whether the curiosity typical of the multitude is at all relatable to the desiring subject interpellated by publicity.

I was trying to think whether the public destabilized by Dean is perhaps synonymous with the multitude and whether the multitude is a problematic concept eliding difference and distracting from political antagonisms. I haven't elaborated on the cynical emotional tonality highlighted by Virno and emphasized by Dean in her discussion of Zizek's notion of ideology and the system of distrust, because Dan has already alluded to these similarities elsewhere.

In other news...

Many-to-many. The panacean solution to the disavowal of difference and the Real that I felt was Rheingold’s strongest argument against his critics seems to be more problematic in Dean’s account. Rheingold says, “The pictures we were able to piece together of what actually might be happening turned out to be considerably more diverse than the one obtainable from the other media available through conventional channels…the Net became a global backchannel for all kinds of information that never made it into the mass media” (Rheingold Chapter Nine – Grassroots). Dean, on the other hand, seems to point to this excess of information as fueling the paranoid, uncertain conspiring subject and the problems associated to an inclusive public: “The dispersion of media makes it hard for us to now what to believe, whom to trust” (Dean 70).

Sovereign publicity – sovereign power. When Dean mentions Habermas’ take on publicity in Chapter 2, I couldn’t help but think of Galloway’s Protocol. “The sovereign’s publicity was an irrational aura of power that was fashioned through practices of display before an audience” (Dean 30). I began to wonder whether this spectacular publicity of the sovereign could be related to sovereign power and whether the changes to publicity given technoculture could be mapped to changes in disciplinary power and finally biopower (a concept I’m afraid still eludes me). Dean's interpellated subject - both knowing and known - reminds me of the subject internalizing the normative panoptic gaze. I am having a bit more trouble thinking about this in the context of societies of control, protocol, and biopower, but I’ll work on it.