Neoliberalism Against Society? Spontaneous Order and Governance of Desire in Digital Societies (original) (raw)
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This review reads two recent books that approach the Internet through Marxist and psychoanalytic theory, Matthew Flisfeder's Algorithmic Desire: Toward a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media and Clint Burnham's Does the Internet Have an Unconscious? Slavoj Zˇizˇek and Digital Culture. The latter allows us to grasp the structured discourse of the Internet that produces the subject, while the former allows us to grasp the subject's excess that signals the lack in the Internet as social structure. One of the central arguments of Matthew Flisfeder's Algorithmic Desire: Toward a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media involves how ''structure and subject have always been interdependent'' (p. 49). This review positions Flisfeder's book and Clint Burnham's Does the Internet Have an Unconscious? Slavoj Zˇizˇek and Digital Culture as similarly interdependent, with the former grasping the subject of social media through structure, and the latter grasping the structure of social media through the subject. It is only in reading these two books together and against each other that we can shift from being analysands of the Internet to analysts capable of ''affect[ing] the Real of the symptom'' (Ž ižek quoted in Flisfeder, p. 11) that is our usage of social media. Flisfeder's book advances a new structuralism that moves against the ''ethics of structure smashing'' (p. 49) that dominates critical discourse today, in which oppressive structures are illuminated, critiqued, and ideally dismantled. Flisfeder still wants to smash neoliberal capitalism, but he is more preoccupied with structure raising, asking ''what structure… is adequate to the task of Symbolically mediating the position of the subject who emerges at the limit points of the existing structure''