The Contemporary Unconscious is Structured as Screen-Based Media

Written as an original project for the elaboration of a media-clinic of the unconscious, this article conceptualizes the term self-aesthetics. Within screen-based audiovisual productions, media-clinic and self-aesthetics are both epistemological and methodological undertakings of a post-Lacanian contemporary theorization of libidinal investments. Media-clinic and self-aesthetics analyze the short-circuits between the Lacanian categories of the real and the imaginary while elaborating on the entropy of the symbolic. The goal is to research mediatic phenomena in a political middle ground that is neither culture nor nature: but surely both. I name unconscious this political middle ground between culture and nature and localize my discussions in the territorial convergencies and divergencies of psychoanalysis and schizoanalysis, resulting in a frontier approach that bridges the works of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Thomas Lamarre. I propose that the contemporary unconscious is structured as screen-based media by addressing the problems, the state of the art, and the set of references that may coalesce at the investigations about today’s clinic of desire. Several notions are debated in this article, such as diagram, screen-brain apparatus, representation, hallucination, individuation through agency and assemblage, singularity, object a, the autopoietic body, semiotics, and the death-image.