Written Work

Here you can download my (embargoed) dissertation, and see my thesis below as a diagram. 

The discourse of network production is a rotation of Lacan's "discourse of the capitalist", an addition to the four discourses he posited over the course of his seminars. These four discourses model logical positions of speech the belie the production of any particular verbal or written content. The discourse of the capitalist marked a substantial shift; Lacan asserted that the disjunctions marking earlier discourses had been removed, creating discoures that "eat their own tails" and that "move too fast". In my estimation, the discourse of network production results from S2 (knowledge per se, as in AI/ML, a perpetual collecting and collating of signifiers) in the locus of agency. At the same time as this agency of knowledge pursues truth ('a', or the cause and object of subjects' desire) it addresses these engimatic reminders of the loss that constitutes subjects to subjects ($, the divided subjects of speech and the unconscious). This has the result or the "product" of creating a massive perfusion of signifiers (S1's) that divided subjects emit, almost like a gas, in online social networks. In my opinion this is a more useful formulation than Psychology's thinly formulated notion of "Internet Addiction" which describes neither the subject (the addict) nor the object (the Internet) that it tries to explain by setting up such a diagnostic construct (addict <--> user).