Undoubtedly one of the strangest features of the 21st century is the endurance of the explanatory powers of classical Psychoanalytic concepts. With the arrival of the internet, writings in the late 80s and 90s are brimming with a Deleuzian optimism of things yet to come – new possibilities and openings accessible via the rapid dissemination of publicly available information. The promise goes like this: the public, now have unbridled and uncensored access to what is conceivably the largest library ever constructed by humans. An oddly alien form of a library – one in which the books sort and resort themselves, contradict and manifest new categories – something like the sliding staircases in the Harry Potter series. Information, data and scientific progress will now generate its own perpetual motion, an artificial identity that necessitates its own progress.

We may reply to this assessment with the valid question of where in this dynamic mesh do we find the human. The problem has already been solved by Lacan’s inversion of the sign:

qu'un signifiant est ce qui représente un sujet, là, pour un autre signifiant. [1]

The “là” in question being the site of language, the Symbolic order, or what can be in ordinary language described as the entity of language itself; a dynamic agreement of language bounded by laws that structure not only our relationship to language (and therefore Freud’s unconscious), but our own “reality” as it is encountered as such. Lacan routinely stresses that the subject is not the autonomous presence here (or as he puns in Seminar V, we are subject-ed, akin to the English language usage of population and its monarch). This encounter with the Other of language is distinguished from a notion of a scientific “view from nowhere” by insisting that it is both a product of humans and an uncannily ectopic from the individual – Lacan insists that a man alone on a desert island still has an Other - by contrast with the Jungian notion of a “collective unconscious”.

This now gives us a new conceptual focus on how we encounter the internet as individuals: the internet escapes the utopian promise of the 90s whilst still sufficiently meeting the criteria. Yes, we can access unbridled data and information at our fingertips daily, but in this unbridled access we encounter the sensation of being a displaced node in a network, akin to Lacan’s subject in the network of signifiers. To misapprehend the modern subject as an autonomous node not only misses the point but carries ideological weight for notions of the sovereign individual already made redundant in the 19th century by Marx’s economical insights.

To summarise the argument in brief:  we are subjects of the internet, or more appropriately subjected to the internet that is an “Other” that both appears as ectopic and requires us for its existence. Subjectivity has internalised the internet as a structure akin to our fundamental relationship with language. The contemporary displacement of the subject (or in Marxian terms its alienation) misrecognised as utopian progress is instead another encounter with the Other of language, therefore rendering psychoanalytic concepts not only explanatory, but as an analysis that has already taken place. The job of updating these concepts is similar to the mathematical concept of translation in which relations are merely repositioned within the same axis.

[1] Lacan, J. (1973). Le Séminaire. Livre XI: Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, oprac. J.A. Miller, Paris: Éditions du Seuil.