The Metamorphoses of the Brain – Neurologisation and its Discontents

‘ASMR’ autobiographies and the (life-)writing of digital subjectivity

“…?’ (p. 29). Psychoanalytic critics, in particular, have objected that by attributing the lion’s share of human behaviour to preconscious faculties that do not lend themselves to interpretation or narration, ‘neurologisation’ reduces us to our grey matter, ‘invalidat[ing] us as interlocutors’ (De Vos, 2016: 2) and foreclosing ‘the dimension of translation that permits an opening of the body through language’ (Angerer, 2015: 107).…”

“…It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that outsiders remain sceptical. Casting psychoanalysis in the all too familiar role of recovering the repressed sexual core of putatively chaste behaviours, De Vos (2016) reads ASMR culture as a means of ‘eroticis[ing]’ the brain itself (135). Waldron (2017) and Andersen (2015) take a different tack, seeing ASMRtists’ desire to align trigger videos with therapy and medicine rather than pornography or cybersex in the context of heteronormative culture’s unduly narrow conception of sexuality and its stigmatization of minority sexual practices.…”

“…In many cases, though, it has been scholars from the humanities who have been drawn to ASMR culture. ASMR videos have been read as products of gendered affective labour (Sadowski, 2016), as ‘symptomatic of…the poverty of care within the late digital capitalist contemporary moment’ (Bjelić, 2016: 103), as exemplifying the cultural agency of algorithms (Gallagher, 2016) and as pioneering new forms of intimacy and post-human eroticism (Andersen, 2015; Waldron, 2017); work from sound studies has considered them as a means of cultivating ‘sonic intimacy’ (Pettman, 2017: 20–21) or manifesting a ‘sonic agency of the weak’ (Labelle, 2018: 129); psychoanalytic critics have interpreted them as a sign of our ‘eroticis[ation]’ of the brain (De Vos, 2016: 135) or a means of negotiating the anxiety-inducing ‘lacklessness’ of digital culture (Manon, 2018: 242).…”

“…While popular pundits have repeatedly proposed that trigger videos might be seen as a form of ‘soft-soft-core porn’ (Roy, 2014) or ‘female porn’ (Brand, 2015), the ASMR community has, for the most part, vehemently resisted such readings – despite having initially used terms like ‘braingasm’ to describe the sensation. The question of sexuality has also divided academic critics of ASMR culture (see Andersen, 2015; De Vos, 2016: 133–135; Manon, 2018: 240; Waldron, 2017). Here I draw on the work of Angerer (2015) to argue that ASMR’s vexed relationship with sex must be understood in the context of ‘the replacement of the dispositif of sex by that of affect’ (pp.…”

Marxism, psychoanalysis, and the critique of psychological dualism: From dualist repression to the return of the repressed in hysteria and class consciousness

“…Before examining these returns of monism, it is important to note that they are still common, though not necessarily subversive. A well-known example (and as promising as it is disappointing) is the neurologization that both presupposes and neutralizes psychologization by dissolving the psyche into a soma represented in the same way as the object of psychology (De Vos, 2016).…”