Read without ads and support Scribd by becoming a Scribd Premium Reader.
See Premium Plans
 
 New Zealand Sociology Volume 26 Issue 1 2011
Reading Facebook Through Lacan
Oliver Mannion
Abstract
Facebook is the predominant social networking technology in usetoday. Here it is examined through the Lacanian concepts of themirror stage, the Big Other, the unconscious, jouissance and desire.Using Lacan’s theories of subjectivity, Facebook user identifications,interpersonal interactions, and personal attachment to the site areelucidated. Just as Lacan can provide an understanding of Facebook,Facebook itself can help understand Lacan’s work.Facebook is a juggernaut. The online social network site currently boasts morethan 500 million users, 200 million of whom log in daily, with 700,000 newusers joining every day (Facebook 2011; Pingdom 2010). Few socialphenomena in contemporary Western society can match the scale, reach andhegemony of Facebook. Like mobile phone use, it has often got to the pointwhere non-users have to justify their non-use, which is usually framed as somesort of resistance where non-users talk about “holding out”.To see the Facebook phenomenon as superficial is to miss the point. Tosee it as a site of self-interested rational actors is simply wrong. Given theenormity of the Facebook phenomenon, and the vastness of social theory’shorizon, something of its dimensions ought to be a target of critical theory.Others have examined social networking sites as implicated in thecommodification of community and the extraction of surplus value fromrelationships (Kreps and Pearson 2009; Hodgkinson 2008). Another startingpoint might be Foucault, with his notions of technologies of the self. But insteadof taking this, or the Big Brother and surveillance angle, I will approach thetopic via Lacan’s concepts of the big Other, the mirror stage, the unconscious, jouissance and desire.Using these Lacanian concepts enables an understanding of Facebooksubjectivity that goes beyond more surface level `looking-glass self’ notions of how we might construct our identities and interact with others on the site(Cooley, 1964). Our Facebook selves operate according to Lacanian logic, asubjectivity that places us into relationships with others and structures ourdesire and enjoyment. Just as Lacan can help us understand Facebook,
143
 
 
 Mannion
Facebook itself can provide an understanding of Lacan’s theories of subjectivity. Furthermore, Facebook reveals an understanding of our offlineselves in a similar way to Lacan, and illuminates that something more in us thanourselves.Facebook is promoted as an online “social network” which allows you to“connect and share with the people in your life”. But you can connect and sharewith email, so why use Facebook? In order to connect and share, Facebookenables profoundly narcissistic elements of identification via user profiles andin the articulation of one’s social network. Narcissim is fundamental for aLacanian understanding of subjectivity. (Elliott, 1992, p.123). The Facebooksite is double sided that, like the Foucauldian panopticon, compels subjects toself-monitoring and internalization of the surveillance gaze, as well as itscomplete opposite; an externalization of identification and recognition-seekingprojected onto a social network (Grassman & Case, 2009, p.183).In the Facebook profile we are provided with the mirror in which to makeour own image. We are captured by this image, and enjoy the pleasure of staging a unity in the face of our offline disunity. Just as we supplement ourphysical inadequacies with stints, pacemakers, glasses, plastic surgery andmobility scooters, we supplement our inadequate and vulnerable identity with aFacebook profile. Lacan talks of anxiety as emerging at the point when theego’s imaginary frame breaks down, and what he calls the Real, in itsdimension as an object of anxiety par excellence (Lacan & Miller, 1988, p.164),erupts. Anxiety is an experience of the fragmented body, in its pieces, before themirror stage and the crafting of a self (Jagodzinski, 2004, p.54). Indeed Orr et.al find that shyness, as that cluster of anxiety reactions and inhibitions in thepresence of others, is positively related to increased Facebook use (2009). Is itany wonder that Facebook’s birth and rapid growth occurred primarily amongstcollege graduates and teens who are in that stage of life that is full of strugglesfor identify and finding oneself and their place in the world?Facebook’s success in performing its narcissistic function relies onbringing the user into virtual contact with these others, where the user is able tobe recognised and reified. Here Facebook clearly reveals the inexorable potencyof Kojève’s reading of Hegel. Kojève sees dialectical recognition as the basisfor establishing the identities of Master and Slave (1980, p.8). Lacan, followingKojève, would agree that not only do we look for recognition as a confirmationof our existence in an other, but we also gauge the worthiness of our existence
144
 
 
 New Zealand Sociology Volume 26 Issue 1 2011
in that other person. This is what happens in Facebook. Very rarely do userscreate a profile and not add any friends. The purpose of our existence on the siteis to exist for these others. In Facebook this intersubjectivity is staged from thevery beginning via the mutually recognising pact of inviting/accepting a friendrequest. Becoming a friend always requires the mutual recognition of eachother, by another. This begins the process wherein our Facebook profile, or ego,can be further recognised through profile details, photos and the shared area of the profile called “The Wall”.For dialectical recognition, the existential question at the heart of subjectivity is not “Who am I?” but “Who am I to others? What do yousee/want in me?” or “Che vuoi?” (Žižek, 1989, p.95). This is very much thequestion of the decentred subject; that what constitutes my being is locatedoutside of me. By bringing the self into contact with the other, Facebook isembodying this fundamental psychoanalytical insight introduced by Freud andmuch elaborated since. This is not a self that is a closed system, but a self thatincorporates elements of the world, including others, in its internalrepresentations of itself. This is highly visible in a literal way in Facebook,where the other can interject elements directly into your profile by, for example,posting photos and tagging (identifying) you in them, and writing on your Wall.More subtly it is present in the way in which Facebook profiles are orientatedtowards the gaze of others, in ways that seek to capture the recognition anddesire of the other. Imaginary identification, as Žižek says, is alwaysidentification on behalf of a certain gaze of the other (1989, p.117).An examination of Zhao et. al’s (2008) empirical study of the content of 63 Facebook accounts that follows reveals how profiles on the Facebook sitefail to represent conscious and unconscious subjects in all their complexity but,like the ego ideal, are objects from and outside of ourselves. These ego idealsare who, and what, users identify with. Zhao et al talk in the socialconstructivist vernacular about these ego ideals as socially desirable “hoped-forpossible” selves and identify three broadly used Facebook profile types (2008,p.1821).The first Facebook ego ideal is the “popular with friends” profile whichexplicitly reveals its recognition by the other through the display of photos,particularly the predominant profile picture, which show the self together withothers (Zhao, Grasmuck, & Martin, 2008, p.1827). Generally these photos willshow how the user is having fun, as if the superego is commanding them with
145
 
Search
Search History:
Searching...
Result 00 of 00
00 results for result for
  • p.
    • Notes
    Load more