Circulation of drive

Reading Jodi Dean's Blog Theory, though just finished the first chapter. Struck by how she nails the repetition-compulsion facet of social media: the way in the Twitterbook environment, it's actually really difficult, 2011 revolutions notwithstanding, to make visible the crucial connections (between the security state and the University of California, for example) which transform consciousness into radical consciousness:

the circulation of drive is functional for the prevention of [coherent enchainments of meaning] enchainments that might well enable radical political opposition. The contemporary challenge, then, is producing the conditions of possibility for breaking out of or redirecting the loop of drive (31)

I think here of how rapidly the UCD pepper spray incident has faded from public consciousness, a fading that would seem to have something to do with the "memeing" of the incident, the obsessive replication of John Pike's image. Here, a potentially transformational moment dissolved into a repeated image, a too-many times repeated idea that goes nowhere because it goes everywhere.