Beyond the Snare of Reflection: Blog Theory and Hyperstition

Stefan Goncharov, PhD student
Sofia University

https://doi.org/10.53656/phil2023-01-05

Abstract. The paper enters into a polemical dialogue with the american theorist Jodi Dean and her attempts to critically examine the blogosphere through the prism of psychoanalysis. To this end, the text analyses whether user-generated content on the internet can produce meaningful and epistemologically sustainable “social enclaves”, informal communities and institutions, or whether it operates more as a series of recursive and increasingly meaningless quasi-messages. While attempting to consider blogging as both a constructive practice and a pathology, the text develops the hypothesis that in special cases one can conceptually speak of “epistemic inflation”, a phenomenon that can manifest itself at the personal as well as the social, economic and/or political level. Furthermore, the paper briefly introduces the ideas, history and one of the key concepts of the influential british theory-fiction collective, CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit).
Keywords: epistemology; reflexivity; blog theory; hyperstition; psychoanalysis

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