As I tried to show in “The Unconscious of the Unconscious," the onslaught of the visual and the penetration of the life world by visual technologies can be thought of as the unconscious of the unconscious itself—the repressed media history that provided the template for the new insights into human nature that emerged out of both psychoanalysis and studies of sign function. Likewise semiotics, with its attention to visual texts as well as its meditations on the meaning of meaning that in one branch of its endeavors culminated in the analysis of the structure of myth as a second-order signifying system (Barthes), showed the ways in which signs could be deployed (and therefore denatured) by what we might today recognize asa program. Poststructuralism and deconstruction, despite the latter's intensive emphasis on textuality, amounted to an elaboration of Lacanian aphanasis (the fading of the subject) by placing presence and being itself under erasure. Both the subject and existence could no longer be guaranteed by writing or speech, which, in being understood as moments of a specific technological formation, had become one and the same. One could say that in a visual-becominginfomatic digital culture, the traditional forms of writing and its subjects were driven to the brink of extinction. Linear time, grand narratives, history, presence, and being itself, all of the once-essential elements of not only human nature but purportedly of nature proper, were shown to be at once discursive formations and formations that were crumbling. One could find the visible, photographic, and electronic light of images pouring through the cracks of the old forms. The subjects who once presided over their objects melted into them, and, as I put it somewhere else, all that is solid melts into film. What's more, this light, once seemingly external but now internal to language and subjectivity itself, was powered by the masses.
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The Violence of Participation