Title: By the Skin of Our Machines: Psychoanalysis Beyond the Human A Dialogue Between Patricia Clough and Jacob Johanssen
Abstract: are likewise fascinated with and highly attentive to the ways that various technological operations in our digital age must necessarily transform the contemporary workings of psychoanalysis.Patricia's career-long commitment to "originary technicity"-the notion that techné and being occupy the same ontological plane, that there is no rift between the technological and the epistemological, no gap between matter and the psyche, no splitting of extension from thought-indicates how the intertwining of the machinic and the psychoanalytic has always been the case.Now ninety-five years on from Freud's mystic writing pad, computational data-capturings, other-than-human micro-sensibilities, and out-of-body/mind sites for memory storage have certainly stretched -if not often unfastened-any and all skin-topographies of psyche and soma traces and layerings.In this intellectually generous and lively dialogue, Patricia and Jacob present freshly formed methodological challenges to the more typical interpretive practices of psychoanalysis.They also articulate the crucial role of affect in how we come to grips with the continually shifting relationships of bodies, interiorities/exteriorities, digital media/tions and all of those other present day machines that are, as Patricia reminds, "changing the function of the skin."-Greg Seigworth, co-editor-in-chief Dialogue JACOB: To begin with, I would like to say that we seem to have similar interests in relation to digital media, affect, psychoanalysis, critical theory, and how one can think about the embodied, entangled-and at times messy-relationships we have with various media and how those, in turn, are shaped by and give rise to social processes and injustices.I am very inspired by your ideas and I first encountered your work when I read Autoaffection (2000); I was drawn to your treatment of television.I found it particularly insightful how you drew on a range of thinkers while advancing, I think, an argument that was still loyal to psychoanalysis, and Freud in particular, in order to think about the (un)conscious qualities of television as a technology.Perhaps we could begin this conversation by talking about your interest in psychoanalysis (and its critiques and developments by thinkers such as Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, and others) and television as a technology.How did you develop those interests and why did you specifically turn to television in your book?