Athanasios Anagnostopoulos

Throughout the domains of social theory, philosophy and psychoanalysis, anxiety moves along the margins of knowledge and existential experience, addressing the notion of nothingness; the "fundamental incompleteness" in Beck, the "nothing" in Kierkegaard, the "lost-object" in Freud, the "objet petit a" in Lacan. The question I pose is why should we read neoliberalism through anxiety? To answer that, I discuss why the neoliberal project, as an ideology and a discourse, is inappropriate for overcoming the production of risk in the context of the “risk society”. Neoliberalism, as based on the idea of the market’s renewal from within the economy, and the individual as self-entrepreneur and self-sufficient, constructs the fantasy that sustains a fascination with an “imaginary other”. I suggest, from a psychoanalytic perspective, that anxiety for the subject can open the way to the Other beyond the enjoyment of the narcissistic identification. I argue that the subject in neoliberalism, in order to work-through the vicious cycle of recurring crises, would have to withdraw from the enjoyment of narcissistic self-destruction and aggressiveness. Anxiety, then, is what points to the neoliberal ideology's own failure, meaning that it constitutes a fantasy that allows for misregarding the most fundamental aspect of the subject of modernity, its fundamental and constitutive Lack.

The research focuses on the field of Internet art, net.art, which followed the emergence of the World Wide Web and often manifested as a result of the need to find alternative ways to deal with and circulate works of art other than the established mechanisms of the dominant market. It is here that we come across one of the first attempts to criticize corporate aesthetics and the commercialization of information through the paradigm of net.art’s pioneer, the Serbian artist Vuk Cosic. This will be the motive to trace a particular field of artistic-activist practice, that of Tactical Media, which have been closely associated with Internet art. The theoretical foundation on which Tactical Media was based is situated around the theory of French philosopher Michel de Certeau on the practice of everyday life, which is transformed into a political tactic. Through the examples of Heath Bunting, ®TM ark and Yes Men we will encounter practices which combine net.art with Tactical Media and develop as forms of critique towards neo-liberal hegemony. In the last chapter, the space of the Internet is proposed as another real space, according to Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia. The following dilemma emerges; whether the heterotopia of the Internet will function as an illusory space which enhances the illusion of real space or whether it will manage to become another real public space, through its political constitution, which can also be a result of its contingent artistic treatment. We will follow the thought of theorists such as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Julian Stallabrass, Rosalyn Deutsche and Oliver Marchart, in order to comprehend, through the theory of the political as antagonism and politics as hegemony, that it is not enough for a public space to be physically or institutionally defined as such in order for it to effectively perform its function.