Self-branding’s demand for total presence becomes sadistic control

Evidence

A narcissist’s auto-affection circumscribes the other, in a diminishment intimately connected to sadism (an instinct to master, a gratification in harm). The sadist flattens the other, engineering infliction to proscribe response. Barthes helps articulate the overpresence and overexposure in self-branding with sadism: in “the Sadean world,” he writes, “the function of discourse … is to conceive the inconceivable, that is, to leave nothing outside words and to allow the world no ineffables.” Everything is enjoined to presence; nothing evades. Immediacy’s auto-emanations and perpetual fluidity paradoxically calcify in this way in the stone of sadism, in its inexorable control and invocatory cruelty. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 96

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the surprising claim that fluid immediacy ‘calcifies’ into sadistic rigidity — a key paradox in the immediacy aesthetic.
• QUESTION: Her psychoanalytic framework (imaginary vs symbolic) is heavily Lacanian — is this where her debt to Jameson’s periodizing/postmodernism analysis surfaces or diverges?
• XREF: connects to: Online self-presentation expresses a neoliberal subjectivity applying market principles to identity — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 25; Self-branding demands maintaining an edited yet authentic self before an audience — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 507; Self-branding functions as a neoliberal technology of subjectivity shaping its practitioners. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 427 (+3 more)