Sunday, November 11, 2012

Twitter Tweets and Žižek and Minitel

One waits for the stimulus:

you’ve got mail

Today, with or without AOL, one’s phone signals a tweet “connection”  or notification.
One looks for — one checks, as one says — one’s email, Facebook account, blog, etc. 

 
The point, and this is how social networking works as social marketing, this is how people fall in love with a brand, despite the shortfalls of the brand, is that anticipation and satisfaction are the same. There is a willing, all-too-willing suspension of judgment. Nothing need ever be evaluated.

  

 Thus it is the checking activity itself that reinforces the activity because this mini-event, this little tone or buzz is all the rewardwe get and, so advertisers have learned to their profit, as Twitter also knows this: this is all we actually need. 

See Jaron Lanier for his reminiscence of the “Well” experience that he himself co-founded, and thus for a kind of virtual media archaeology in the mode of nostalgia in Lanier, You are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (New York: Vintage, 2011) — and it is worth adding that this nostalgia has been a while brooding as he began this reminiscence in a online version “One Half of a Manifesto” in 2000. And see too Lee Siegel’s Against the Machine: How the Web Is Reshaping Culture and Commerce – and Why It Matters (New York: Spiegel und Grau, 1996) as well as, if in general, Patrice Flichy, The Internet Imaginaire (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), especially pp. 101f.

 
Slavoj Žižek invokes this phenomenon in Lacanian terms, giving the example of the French minitel.

Now, the minitel, for those who do not know, was (it is one among myriad, often instantly forgotten legions of extinct technologies) a physically dedicated, chunkily, at the time futuro- but nowadays retro-techno little screen-plus-keyboard version of what would come to be translated into the intensified virtual encounters of AOL’s and other online chatrooms.

Indeed, as a student in Paris in the mid-1980s, I remember using the minitel, both in terms of its frisson and the plastic insignificance or flatness of the same. 



And as Žižek writes in his Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out, “enjoyment is primarily enjoyment in the signifier.”




Žižek’s point recollects or sharpens Jacques Lacan’s discussion of jouissance, that is to say: enjoyment as enjoyment, most especially erotic enjoyment. 
By its nature, desire is elusive, which is also why it is able to serve an ethical function, qua imperative, for Lacan. 
In his own reminiscence, Žižek’s analysis takes this apart in more rather than less fundamentally Hegelian terms (depending, to be sure on just how high-church Hegelian or indeed Lacanian you are):
…the idea of minitel is “sex is an Other.” You type in your password but you do not communicate with a paid prostitute, you communicate with hundreds of people doing the same thing you are doing.
 So you pick up one of the messages and you do it: you send in your own message to him or to her — you don’t know to whom, that is the charm. You only have the family name: it may be a man or a woman. You send your message to someone you don’t know, you exchange dirty messages: I will do this to you, you will do that to me. The point is that people became obsessed by this. Lacan says — he even uses vulgar terms — that if I’m speaking now about fucking it’s the same as if I’m fucking. This is literally realized now in France; sex can be purely the matter of a signifier of exchanging dirt.
 
  
See Žižek's 1992 Flash Art interview with Josefina Ayerza.   For a political theoretic discussion of the French Minitel qua telephone based electronic information technology, distinct from the internet, see Heather L. Moulaison (@libacat), “The Minitel and France’s Legacy of Democratic Information Access,” Government Information Quarterly, 21 (2004): 99-107.