The User Unconscious: On Affect, Media, and Measure

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These stimulating essays and experimental compositions demonstrate how digital media and computational technologies fundamentally affect our sense of self and the world we live in, from human and other-than-human perspectives. Moving from affect to data, Patricia Ticineto Clough reveals how digital media and computational technologies are not merely controlling usthey have already altered what it means to be human

Reviews

"The essays collected in The User Unconscious, each in its own way and together, are groundbreaking in that they brilliantly pose problems of affect, media, and measure as questions of memory, embodiment, and subjectivation in the datalogical era. Drawing on the best in critical theory, philosophy, and media studies, Patricia Ticineto Clough shows us how to intervene more effectively in the present configuration of digital media and computational technologies in the afterward of neoliberalism and biopolitics."Amit S. Rai, Queen Mary, University of London

"Weaving together the analytical and the lyrical threads of her collective work, Patricia Ticineto Clough takes us to the originary technicity of an unconscious that starts experimenting with the nonhuman modalities of affect, media, and datalogics. These critical and poetic writings about the auto-affective reconfigurations of information governance are a compelling excursus into the political sensibilities for thinking technology today."Luciana Parisi, Goldsmiths University of London

"This is a gorgeous collection of essays and poems from one of our finest thinkers of technology, affect, and biopolitics. Patricia Ticineto Clough pushes thought to new edges, always coercing the bounds between what can be known, not-known, and un-known."Jasbir Puar, author of The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability

"If the most important part of a text on affect is the capacities it opens up for humans, then Clough is more than successful. By integrating personal narrative and poetry, she made this book more digestible and more human, which is ultimately the point."Hyperrhiz

"The User Unconscious is extremely efficient in making syntheses, tweaks, and combinations of theories in the field."Afterimage

Author Bio

Patricia Ticineto Clough is professor of sociology and womens studies at the Graduate Center and Queens College, City University of New York. She is the author of Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology (Minnesota, 2000), Feminist Thought: Desire, Power, and Academic Discourse, and The End(s) of Ethnography: From Realism to Social Criticism. She is the editor of The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social with Craig Willse, editor of Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Death, and, with Alan Frank and Steven Seidman, editor of Intimacies: A New World of Relational Life. Clough is also a psychoanalyst practicing in New York City.