Review: Does the Internet Have an Unconscious? and Algorithmic Desire (original) (raw)
Related papers
Postdigital Science and Education, 2024
It is this very contention that sits at the heart of Matthew Flisfeder’s, Algorithmic Desire: Towards a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media (2021). In spite of the accusation that, today, our social media is in fact hampering democracy and subjecting us to increasing forms of online and offline surveillance, for Flisfeder (2021: 3), ‘[s]ocial media remains the correct concept for reconciling ourselves with the structural contradictions of our media, our culture, and our society’. With almost every aspect of our contemporary lives now mediated through the digital, the significance of the algorithm maintains a pertinent importance in making sense of the social and psychic investments that our interactions on social media, as well as other forms of digital media, rely upon and encourage. The socio-political tensions and contradictions that such interaction prescribes remains a reoccurring theme throughout Algorithmic Desire, with Flisfeder masterfully navigating the problems and pitfalls of a burgeoning digital infrastructure that is redefining our lives as social beings. What becomes apparent from Flisfeder’s account is how debates and discussions regarding the algorithm can be couched in a number of pressing concerns, including the proliferation of online misinformation and the contradictions inherent to our freedom and security. While these debates are drawn together through the prism of the algorithm, it is mostly with regards to the medium of social media that Flisfeder examines how our desire and enjoyment are algorithmically organized. This focus is expertly followed throughout the book’s eight chapters, producing a critically engaging inquiry that continually considers the socio-political tensions and ambiguities that frame and sustain our digital media interactions. Ultimately, it is this contention that lends further support to Flisfeder’s assertion that algorithms play a key role in reading our desire. In the discussion that follows, this reading will be critically considered by tracing and outlining a number of key significances underpinning Flisfeder’s approach. Most notably, this will require a discussion of the Lacanian conception of desire; the effects of disavowal and cynical perversion; the importance of ‘maintaining appearances’; and, finally, the significance of the social media metaphor.
Algorithmic Desire: Toward a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media
2021
In Algorithmic Desire, Matthew Flisfeder shows that social media is a metaphor that reveals the dominant form of contemporary ideology: neoliberal capitalism. The preeminent medium of our time, social media’s digital platform and algorithmic logic shapes our experience of democracy, enjoyment, and desire. Weaving between critical theory and analyses of popular culture, Flisfeder uses examples from The King’s Speech, Black Mirror, Gone Girl, The Circle, and Arrival to argue that social media highlights the antisocial dimensions of twenty‑first century capitalism. He counters leading critical theories of social media—such as new materialism and accelerationism—and thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, proposing instead a new structuralist account of the ideology and metaphor of social media. Emphasizing the structural role of crises, gaps, and negativity as central to our experiences of reality, Flisfeder interprets the social media metaphor through a combination of dialectical, Marxist, and Lacanian frameworks to show that algorithms may indeed read our desire, but capitalism, not social media, truly makes us antisocial. Wholly original in its interdisciplinary approach to social media and ideology, Flisfeder’s conception of “algorithmic desire” is timely, intriguing, and sure to inspire debate.
Whither Symbolic Efficiency? Social Media, New Structuralism, and Algorithmic Desire
Rethinking Marxism, 2022
Responding to the book symposium on his Algorithmic Desire: Toward a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media, Matthew Flisfeder engages with the thoughtful responses made by Clint Burnham, Jamil Khader, and Anna Kornbluh, expressing appreciation for the provocations and productive disagreements being generated. The author highlights previous work regarding the decline of symbolic efficiency, his intended meaning of algorithmic desire, and the implications of subjectivity in a social media age in which the subject is apparently aware of the big Other's nonexistence. He reveals Algorithmic Desire as implicitly correcting for a critical-and cultural-theory landscape that has not fully absorbed the Slovenian school's (Slavoj Žižek, Mladen Dolar, Alenka Zupančič) psychoanalytic interventions into the critique and development of Althusserian theories of ideology and subjectivity. The essay concludes that this methodology reveals the perverse nature of twenty-firstcentury neoliberal logic and reiterates that a truly social media is only possible under conditions of universal emancipation.
Postalgorithms; or, The Perverse Logic of Flisfeder's Desire
Rethinking Marxism, 2022
Algorithmic Desire: Toward a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media offers an account of internet culture that draws as much on the Marxist theories of Fredric Jameson, Mark Fisher, and Maurizio Lazzarato as it does on the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and Slavoj Žižek (the last of whom falls into both camps). This essay emphasizes that through line for readers of Rethinking Marxism who may be skeptical of the book’s psychoanalytic insights. In this reading, the perverse subject of social media, who cynically “knows very well” that they are wasting time on their phone, is also a potential activist, as shown not only by the role that social media has played in Iran, in the Arab Spring, and in Black Lives Matter but also in how we are “subjected” by the algorithms of our desire.
ResearchSpace@Auckland, 2018
Within the contemporary articulation of the Society of Control, online-platforms such as Facebook have vastly extended the breadth of surveillance and depth of control exerted by capital, used to guide our subjectivation within circuits amenable to the accumulation of surplus-value. As digital-networks facilitate the proliferation of information, the symbolic order becomes increasingly fractured and the capacity for previously authoritative sources such as news media to secure common meaning declines (Andrejevic, 2013). Through examining the development of control societies into Platform Capitalism, as well as the Cambridge Analytica and “Fake News” scandals emerging within the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election, this thesis seeks to examine two converging strategies through which capitalism attempts to maintain its domination. The first is the control exerted over our subjectivation as statistical technologies facilitate the production of fine-grained inferences from unstructured data, such as our seemingly arbitrary Facebook likes being used to infer sexual orientation, ethnicity and political views (Kosinski, Stillwell, & Graepel, 2013). The second is the exploitation of a decline in symbolic efficiency, which the emergence of a ‘post-truth’ politics is symptomatic of. A problem which results in the subject turning towards affect as a means to resolve meaning (with affect measurable and exploited through data-analytics), and a culture of conspiratorial-cynicism which makes disinformation such as “fake news” effective. This thesis further examines the centralization of the internet through monopoly platforms as an expansion of imperialism, seeking to examine their role in contesting the sovereignty of the nation-state and shaping the terrain of political struggle.
Neoliberalism Against Society? Spontaneous Order and Governance of Desire in Digital Societies
Critical Sociology, 2024
Critical scholarship often argues that neoliberalism has caused the 'crisis' or 'destruction' of society. Drawing on Foucault's concept of power as 'productive' and focusing on digital societies, we argue that neoliberalism seeks not to dismantle society but to create societies that govern desires through market freedom. We explore Friedrich Hayek's idea that a free society is not based on social well-being or equality, but on spontaneous norms arising from the market order. Digital societies, we contend, are neoliberal but not spontaneous; they emerge from the market order yet are shaped by algorithmic codes that intercept, manipulate, amplify, and promote the voluntary self-exploitation of individual desires. The article combines the latest critical scholarship on neoliberalism with a fresh interpretation of Hayek's thought and recent work on digital societies and algorithmic governance, highlighting the often-overlooked role of desire in the neoliberal governance of the digital age.
Everybody Wants to be a Fascist Online: Psychoanalysis and the Digital Architecture of Fascism
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 2022
Félix Guattari and Franco Berardi have both argued that media ecologies and psychic ecologies are intimately intertwined and as such, any exploration of the collective unconscious must engage with how the mind is formed with and through media. This understanding of networks of interdependence necessitates an exploration of how platformization has impacted users” collective psyche. Drawing from psychosocial theory, psychoanalysis and the work of Félix Guattari, this article analizes the micropolitics of desire of digital platforms, with an explicit focus on how algorithmic structures amplify extreme Right content, allowing fascisms to metastasis throughout digital spaces. It will first examine the algorithmic architecture of social media platforms, demonstrating how these digital spaces lock in and over-code desire through recursive feedback loops that amplify extremism. Following this will be an exploration of the excess of desire that is cut off and left as a remainder partial object, termed the “fascist abject,” and what role this process plays in the production of subjectivity.
Criticism , 1991
The excitement and difficulties that Mark Poster's latest study generates arise from his bold attempt to define "a theory able to decode the linguistic dimension of the new forms of social interaction" occasioned by electronic communication, i.e. the "mode of information" (5), at the core of which he sees the representative capabilities of language, transformed by diverse realms of communication (the media, data bases, state and corporate surveillance, scientific discourses). Organizing his study around the transformative impact of and on language within these four regions, Poster follows what he calls the "double imperative" (18) of shuttling between, on one hand, particular poststructuralist positions that reveal "the self-referential linguistic mechanisms" at work in the four aforementioned "sectors of electronically mediated communication" and, on the other, these sectors themselves and their subversion of the "authority effects of the poststructuralist position" (18). By linking "sectors" to theoretical positions —TV ads to Baudrillard (chapter 2), databases to Foucault (chapter 3), electronic writing to Derrida (chapter 4), scientific discourse to Lyotard (chapter 5) —, Poster hopes to call attention to the new features of "the contemporary social space," to modes of analyzing it, and to the disruptive potential of the theoretical concepts that his study foregrounds.