Death Drive on Social Media

 

 

 

Is anyone else staggered by the amount of political sharing on social media these days? Yesterday I scrolled though about 50 posts on Facebookand the only article that wasn’t political was one by the NY Times on whether reading could make you happier? Well reading these posts aren’t making me happier but I must be getting some satisfaction from reading them.

The truth is that I have developed an obsession for reading about politics and let’s face it, the political discourse is perfect fodder for a neurotic with it’s inherent failure and incompleteness – the failure of Labour to achieve government and the prime ministers failure to obtain her mandate for Brexit, the failure of any party to gain a ruling majority, feeds our drive for un unobtainable satisfaction.

Our totemic identification with leaders like May still strong and stable despite sailing virtually submerged Corbyn still upheld as honest and kind despite sacking his colleagues and being covert about running his parochial, socialist petty project under the guis of bridges not walls.

The lying and the fake news creating a desire for a utopian truth which must be out there somewhere… but truth just seems to generate untruth and satisfaction dissatisfaction with endless scrolling …

People assume that Freud came up with the name Death Drive (Todestrieb) because we unconsciously seek death as the only way of escaping this endless scrolling of un-satisfaction and failure but it’s something much worse. It’s actually a desire to be undead. Like a Zombie who is endlessly suspended between life and death, stuck in endless cycles of unsatisfiable anxiety, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling …

Is anyone else staggered by the amount of political sharing on Facebook these days? Yesterday I scrolled though about 50 posts and the only article that wasn’t political was one by the NY Times on whether reading could make you happier? Well reading these posts aren’t making me happier but I must be getting some satisfaction from reading them.

The truth is that I have developed an obsession for reading about politics and let’s face it, the political discourse is perfect fodder for a neurotic with it’s inherent failure and incompleteness – the failure of Labour to achieve government and the prime ministers failure to obtain her mandate for Brexit, the failure of any party to gain a ruling majority, feeds our drive for un unobtainable satisfaction.

Our totemic identification with leaders like May still strong and stable despite sailing virtually submerged Corbyn still upheld as honest and kind despite sacking his colleagues and being covert about running his parochial, socialist petty project under the guis of bridges not walls.

The lying and the fake news creating a desire for a utopian truth which must be out there somewhere… but truth just seems to generate untruth and satisfaction dissatisfaction with endless scrolling …

People assume that Freud came up with the name Death Drive (Todestrieb) because we unconsciously seek death as the only way of escaping this endless scrolling of un-satisfaction and failure but it’s something much worse. It’s actually a desire to be undead. Like a Zombie who is endlessly suspended between life and death, stuck in endless cycles of unsatisfiable anxiety, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling …

Jouissance and Lisa Yuskavage

What I find interesting about the art of Lisa Yuskavage in her current show at the David Zwirmer gallery 24 Grafton St (on until 28 July) is the way she portrays jouissance – a psychoanalytic hypothesis that defines both pleasure and anxiety and has to do with the body. There is an excess that distorts the subject’s psychic world and there is also something absurd and ridiculous about it. Here you can see how the artist caricatures form and exaggerates colour to evoke this idea of jouissance.

In this particular painting you could interpret her intention to contrast the two neurotic structures of the obsessional (typically male but could be female) with the hysteric (typical female but could be male) with the obsessional, in this painting depicted as kind of 70’s hippy fauns, leaning towards the question of death ‘am I dead or alive’ with the muted tones showing the life drained out by their continual looping. In contrast to this voluptuous hysteric bulging with jouissance – a kind of narcissistic pleasure from being loved; to be the love object, holding at bay the need for satisfaction