Wide-ranging essays and experimental prose forcefully demonstrate how digital media and computational technologies have redefined what it is to be human

Over the past decade, digital media has expanded exponentially, becoming an essential part of daily life. The stimulating essays and experimental compositions in The User Unconscious delve into the ways digital media and computational technologies fundamentally affect our sense of self and the world we live in, from both human and other-than-human perspectives.

Critical theorist Patricia Ticineto Clough’s provocative essays center around the motif of the “user unconscious” to advance the challenging thesis that that we are both human and other-than-human: we now live, think, and dream within multiple layers of computational networks that are constantly present, radically transforming subjectivity, sociality, and unconscious processes.

Drawing together rising strains of philosophy, critical theory, and media studies, as well as the political, social, and economic transformations that are shaping the twenty-first-century world, The User Unconscious points toward emergent crises and potentialities in both human subjectivity and sociality. Moving from affect to data, Clough forces us to see that digital media and computational technologies are not merely controlling us—they have already altered what it means to be human.

Patricia Ticineto Clough is professor of sociology and women’s 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.

"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