Dreaming in the Digital Age
Thoughts on the Technological Pharmakon
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35469/poligrafi.2023.404Keywords:
Digital Age, dreaming, Bion, Stiegler, pharmakon, philosophy, psychoanalysisAbstract
This article explores one way of understanding how digital media are affecting our ability to distinguish reality from fantasy, by reading Bernard Stiegler’s diagnosis of our current cultural crisis, alongside Wilfred Bion’s dream theory. The central claim of the paper is that we can understand the technological pharmakon, its both poisonous and therapeutic nature, in terms of Bion’s definition of dreaming, as the commerce between consciousness and the unconscious negotiated by the “alpha function”. Understanding how the digital impacts our capacity to dream provides us with a tool to counteract its toxicity and to combat the thanatic impulse triggered by technological power.
From a binocular point of view – both from Stiegler’s perspective of our technical or “organological” evolution and from Bion’s perspective on the constitution of reality in dreaming – we can begin to see more clearly how to modulate our technological drive, in order to prevent the pharmakon from short-circuiting the very psychic function necessary to distinguish between reality and illusion. The paper ends with a discussion of the algorithmic effects on the living imagination in support of this contention.
References
Asma, Stephen. The Evolution of Imagination. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2017.
Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press, 2007. Kindle.
Benjamin, Walter. One Way Street and other Writings. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1979.
Bion, Wilfred. Learning from Experience. London: Karnac Books, 1984.
Bion, Wilfred. Cogitations. London: Karnac Books, 1992.
Frankel, Richard, and Victor J. Krebs. Human Virtuality and Digital Life. Philosophical and Psychoanalytic Investigations. London & New York: Routledge, 2022.
Grotstein, James S. “‘We Are Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On’– Annotations on Dreams and Dreaming in Bion’s Works”, in: Dreams in Group Psychotherapy. Theory and Technique, edited by Claudio Neri, Malcolm Pines and Robi Friedman, 110–146. London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2002.
Grotstein, James. “Dreaming as a ‘curtain of illusion’: Revisiting the ‘royal road’ with Bion as our guide.” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 90, no. 4 (2009): 733–752. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-8315.2009.00155.x.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Norman Kemp Smith. New York: MacMillan, 1965.
Ogden, Thomas. “This art of Psychoanalysis. Dreaming Undreamt Dreams and Interrupted Cries.” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 85, no. 4 (2004): 857–877. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203970010.
Olma, Sebastian. In Defence of Serendipity. For a Radical Politics of Innovation. New York: Random House, 2016.
Roberts, Ben. “Cinema as mnemotechnics: Bernard Stiegler and the industrialisation of memory.” Angelaki 11, no. 1 (2006): 55–63, https://doi.org/10.1080/09697250600797864.
Ross, Daniel. “Politics, Terror and Traumatypical Imagery”, In Trauma, History, Philosophy, edited by Matthew Sharpe, Murray Noonan, and Jason Freddi, 230–46. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007.
Ross, Daniel. “For a Neganthropology of the Cinematic.” Academia. August 19, 2015. https://www.academia.edu/15142703/For_a_Neganthropology_of_the_Cinematic_2015/.
Ross, Daniel. “A Summary of Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus.” Academia. August 23, 2019. https://www.academia.edu/20136235/A_Summary_of_Bernard_Stiegler_Technics_and_Time_1.
Ross, Daniel. Psychopolitical Anaphylaxis: Steps towards a Metacosmos. London: Open Humanities Press, 2021.
Sandler, Paulo. The Language of Bion: A Dictionary of Concepts. New York and London: Routledge, 2010.
Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Translated by Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, 3. Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011.
Stiegler, Bernard. What Makes Life Worth Living. On Pharmacology. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013.
Stiegler, Bernard. Automatic Society, Volume 1. The Future of Work. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016. Kindle.
Stiegler, Bernard. The Neganthropocene. London: Open Humanities Press, 2018.
Stiegler, Bernard. The Age of Disruption. Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism. Cambridge, Polity Press, 2019.
Stiegler, Bernard “Anamnesis and Hypomnesis.” Ars Industrialis. Accessed October 16, 2023. https://arsindustrialis.org/anamnesis-and-hypomnesis.
Venn, Couze, Roy Boyne, John W.P. Phillips, and Ryan Bishop, “Technics, Media, Teleology: Interview with Bernard Stiegler,” Theory, Culture & Society 24, no. 7–8 (2007): 335. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276407086403.
