Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive

by Jodi Dean

Blog Theory offers a critical theory of contemporary media. Furthering her account of communicative capitalism, Jodi Dean explores the ways new media practices like blogging and texting capture their users in intensive networks of enjoyment, production, and surveillance. Her wide-ranging and theoretically rich analysis extends from her personal experiences as a blogger, through media histories, to newly emerging social network platforms and applications.

Set against the background of the economic crisis wrought by neoliberalism, the book engages with recent work in contemporary media theory as well as with thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, Jacques Lacan, and Slavoj ?i?ek. Through these engagements, Dean defends the provocative thesis that reflexivity in complex networks is best understood via the psychoanalytic notion of the drives. She contends, moreover, that reading networks in terms of the drives enables us to grasp their real, human dimension, that is, the feelings and affects that embed us in the system.

In remarkably clear and lucid prose, Dean links seemingly trivial and transitory updates from the new mass culture of the internet to more fundamental changes in subjectivity and politics. Everyday communicative exchangesÑfrom blog posts to text messagesÑhave widespread effects, effects that not only undermine capacities for democracy but also entrap us in circuits of domination.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Technology, Politics, Social Media

140 pages, Paperback

First published August 30, 2010

About the author

Jodi Dean teaches political and media theory in Geneva, New York. She has written or edited eleven books, including The Communist Horizon and Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies.

Reviews

[Malcolm · Rating 3 out of 5]

Four stars for insight and analysis, one star off for writing a book that is so dense and of doubtful comprehensibility that is unlikely to have any impact beyond a very small circle of us in the world of academia when it needs to be making its way into activist circles.

I really like the political case that Jodi Dean is making here: the change in new media from audiences and consumers to users and participants, the danger that whereas “Old media sought to deliver messages. New media just circulate.” (p121), and that politics in communicative capitalism risks being reduced to making statements, clicking the sign-the-petition button here, and so forth. Her attack on the technologistic utopianism of Facebook and Twitter revolutions is timely (I read the book while the rebellious Egyptian people spent their first week occupying Tahrir Square, and in a delightful moment on TV news watched as a mystified reporter asked a woman how they organised once the internet and phone networks had been closed down and didn’t seem to get why she was puzzled when she answered: We go to the square and we talk to each other.), and part of a forceful wider attack on the technologicist fetishisation of Web 2.0. It is refreshing to read discussion of new media forms that is so deeply grounded in materialist politics where ‘being made aware’ or ‘having stated our opinion’ is not enough when there is a need to organise for change and to resist, when we must take a position (the chapter on ’whatever blogging’ is insightful even if it relies on a subtle sense of North American ‘whatever’ idiom).

So amid all this good stuff, what’s the problem: frankly, the Lacanian stuff is obfuscatory and so problematic that it limits the meaningful readership of the book to a tiny proportion of those who should read it, and apply its ideas in their political analysis and struggles. I am well aware that psychoanalysis is a helpful tool for making sense of how and why individuals act – something we’ve not been good at on the Left – but it remains a theory of the individual, and seems at times to set out to prevent understanding; such is the nature of a pathologising discourse.

The Lacanian approach is a helpful frame for making sense of some of the compulsions underpinning communicative capitalism (an idea of Dean’s, drawing on Žižek, that I quite like) – but please let’s have those of who work and write in this world consider audiences beyond the Upper Common Room and occasional graduate student seminar group. So a fine argument, useful politics, potentially significant analysis is wasted because hardly anyone-in-struggle will be able to make use of it.

[Fredrik deBoer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is, obviously, very dated in many core ways - who would write a book about blogs now?, I say as a blogger - but its deeper analysis remains apt and convincing. Dean is interested in how the networks in which blogs are/were embedded pull them into the control of corporate interests, establishment political power, and neoliberal capitalism, no matter what the politics of the blogger. The extension to social media, YouTube, TikTok, and the contemporary internet writ large is obvious. It's one of those books that suffers a bit from how prescient it was; its observations about the internet's fundamental complicity in exploitation became too obvious to ignore as time went on, and so now they seem a little less fresh. But the book was published in 2010.

[Sarah SL · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am left wondering if it is not so much the repetitive structure of drive that is necessarily to be rejected, but merely the way it has intersected with the current technologies of production. After all, circuits of drive are also at work whenever we “edit” as artists or writers, obsessively returning to and revising what we want to say. And this type of drive structure can be genuinely “productive” in another sense, in the sense of improving thought. Indeed part of what makes blogging culture sometimes very difficult or unproductive for discourse is that it does not involve a lot of editing, and that our unedited (unrepeated and returned to and revised) thoughts are not the best version of our understanding, our potential. I wish Dean had built from her extremely important point about drive to distinguish the relationship between existing technologies and structures of capital and the psychological structures that currently underlie them, but which can of course develop in many other potential directions.

[Mak Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly insightful. Loved Aliens in America, and Jodi Dean continues to be one of my favorite academic authors to date. Incredible writing style, breaks down concepts and loops in related authors while always maintaining the connection to a framework of psychoanalysis and historical materialist thought. One of the best at synthesizing the two frameworks in my opinion.
Despite being in 2011 and social media no even reaching the heights of slop it churns out today, this book hits home in so many ways and is maybe even more accurate than before. I think the social media landscape remains the same in so many ways and this proves it. The same discourse on substacks is the same as blogs and the same acephilic drive captures us in pervasive ways.

[Gabriel Schuhl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Super interesting analysis of how blogs today insert us into circuits of drive, where mere participation in the network is more important than any possible content. Dean's asking what the effects are of a world where every internet opinion matters, making information unmanageable and eliminating our sense of desire. A lot of her stuff relies on dense Lacanian pscyhoanalysis, which she explains better in some places than others. The fourth chapter just felt lazy, and it makes me upset when academics sacrifice intelligibility for a shock factor (especially when they've proven they're good at explaining things)

[Gabriel · Rating 5 out of 5]

So good! And only 100 pages (or so)!

[Bookshark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dean is at her best when synthesizing and applying other theorists. As a result, I find her work a bit derivative, but she does have flashes of insight with respect to her object of interest (blogging and other online media).

I found her steadfast technological pessimism a bit refreshing, because the relenting reminder that new media is often a tool of capitalism rather than a subversion of it sounds a much-needed cautionary note to counterbalance the technological optimism of other media theorists. Yet, it seems that she misses or glosses over some of the truly interesting things about online media because of her investment in her Lacanian theory of communicative capitalism. For instance, she misses some of the interesting ways that the internet affects physical space. What about when new media is used to organize in-person meet-ups, like protests or making an IRL date with an online sweetheart or simply friends gathering at each other's homes for parties planned on Facebook? She mentions that online games seem like the height of fantasy, yet affect the real economy. I would love to hear more on this - what does it mean that people buy imaginary WoW objects? How does Bitcoin relate to her theory of capitalism? What about cases where the real world economy and state infringe on the internet and the internet denizens fight back, like battles over Net Neutrality, illegal downloading, the Silk Road, and Anonymous?

As the previous paragraph may demonstrate, the best part of reading this book was that it helped me formulate some interesting research questions about new media. Another positive is that I gained a greater grasp of the media theory literature, because Dean engages with it comprehensively and gives summaries that make the debate easy to follow even if you haven't read the other theorists. On the negative side, she doesn't make much of a theoretical contribution. I also disagreed with her conclusions a fair amount, but that may be because I'm not a Lacanian.

[Ivan Labayne · Rating 3 out of 5]

at the beginning, jonathan lethem: the only conspiracy was a conspiracy of distraction.
feels a bit weirdly refreshing to 'review' zizek's take on psychoanalysis (drive, desire, objet petit a and all those senior year juvenile struggles) via dean. constant reminder, important i guess, in thinking through the digital: the digital is social; the Internet is not a world in itself (quite obvious; the real questions is How). At the end: "as long as politics is reduced to communication, it will remain captured."

2019 update: i found this useful for a blog post:
https://ivanemilabayne.wordpress.com/...

"To paint more clearly the exhilaration in being directly approached, directly receiving feedback after you’ve presented a paper, read poetry in an eskinita, drank beer in public, sang The General Strike in a southern city, I turn to some bleak words in blogging. Jodi Dean quotes Guy Rundle, “blogging is the illusion of connection, publishing into a void and thus doubly isolating.” Nine pages later, in Blog Theory, Dean resorted to Lacanian vocabulary: The “gaze” that we posit, or unconsciously rely on as we post online (when I post something, it must/can be seen by others; this post must have an audience to acknowledge its existence) “remains an object in a strict Lacanian sense, not a symbolic feature. In a setting of multiply interlinked media, we are never quite certain to what we have made ourselves visible. We don’t know who is looking at us or how they are looking.… What databases are we in? Who has googled us and why?”

And yet another update:

https://thebaguiochronicle.com/opinio...

" If Jodi Dean’s quotation of Lethem at the beginning of Blog Theory is to be believed, then we can repeat what she cited, that for Lethem, “the only conspiracy was a conspiracy of distraction. The conspirers, ourselves. If I didn’t grasp this law of complicity, I should go back to beginning and start again.” The italics was here; I didn’t quite grasp this complicity, so let me begin again:"

[Tonia · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of those books for my thesis that I will have to read again because I have the gist of it, but I need to re-read it so that I can understand the underlying ideas that further define the books thesis. In essence the author states that blogs are a contemporary medium that is a "strange convergence of democracy and capitalism in networked communications and entertainment media" p. 4. Some people say that blogging is dead but Dean suggests that there is still a great deal of activity in the sphere, and an increase of the private and large corporate influence in blogging as it is now part of a capitalist agenda. She also states that being part of the blogipelago is "parasitic, narcissistic and pointless" p. 37. While I agree that there are elements of each of these characteristics, I would argue (as does Dean) that the sense of community that can be created that we have lost in our neighbourhoods and actual communities is being replaced with such parasitic and narcissistic behaviours, which in itself does have merit and is point-ful. Dean also speaks to Jaques Lacan's Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis wherein we learn that symbolic efficiency is defined as knowing who you are and how you fit in socially in the world. Once again, blogging is defining this space for many people, just in an alternate format. Lastly, Dean suggests that as more non-professionals participate in the creation of the blogipelago, as a culture, we have to decide whose voice and opinion has more merit, the trained professional or the individual with less training. Good read. Excited to use it in my thesis!