Lummerding,
Susanne:
agency@?
Cyber-Diskurse, Subjektkonstituierung und Handlungsfähigkeit
im Feld des Politischen, Wien/Köln/Weimar:
Böhlau 2005
Summary
Lummerding,
Susanne:
agency@? (Discourses
of Cyberspace, the Constitution of Subjects, and Agency in the Field of
the Political)
To
define ‚Cyberspace’ as a field for cultural and socio-political agency
means to reintroduce the political in media studies. The author offers
new ways of connecting structural psychoanalysis to a theory of the
political explicitly focusing the analysis of visual culture
within the context of digital media. Offering fundamental critique of
technicist and techno-deterministic rhetorics the analysis takes as its
starting point the question of why abundant promises and euphoric
expectations still dominate discourses on
new developments in media and technology. The argumentation
leads
to defining a new theoretical approach to the notion of agency not only
within the context of contemporary media and technologies. This
critical analysis is based on the radical refedinition of supposedly
stable categories like sexual difference in order to develop a
theoretically and politically crucial
definition of a subject of agency.
Reviews >>>
Comments While
examining the cyber-hype of the 90s, both
its naive euphoria and its apocalyptic phobia-mongering, Susanne
Lummerding opens a brand new window on cyberspace and the discourses
that surround it. Exposing and resisting the technological determinism
that fuels the hype, she develops a much more complex, and politically
viable, account of what is novel about new technologies. This exciting
book gives us one of our first twenty-first century looks at
cyberspace. For this reason alone, it is sure to become a standard text
on the subject, but one finds in many other treasures besides. To my
mind one of the most valuable is its fascinating rethinking of the
subject and sexual difference in light of the challenge cyberspace
poses for psychoanalysis in general. Here we are treated to a radical
redeployment of Freudian and Lacanian categories.
Joan
Copjec, Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Media Study
and Director of the Center for the study of Psychoanalysis and Culture
at the University at Buffalo
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