Sandy Baldwin’s The Internet Unconscious and Theories of the Unconscious in Electronic Writing

Abstract

The article discusses Sandy Baldwin’s book The Internet Unconscious. On the Subject of Electronic Literature. The author takes note of the numerous deconstructionist threads in Baldwin’s work on the subject of electronic literature, and at the same time points to the absence of scrupulous discussion of previously developed concepts of the unconscious of the subject of online writing. One example of such a work is Slavoj Žižek’s The Plague of Fantasies, which the author uses to show some of Baldwin’s theoretical oversights and finally present the thesis that The Internet Unconscious is hindered by an anachronistic conceptual framework.