Algorithmic Desire
Dr. Matthew Flisfeder's attempt to work the contradiction of social media as concept
This month Philosophy Portal hosts Alenka Zupančič in The Portal to present on and discuss her most recent article “Is Sex Passé?” To join us, visit The Portal.
The following is an interview with Dr. Matthew Flisfeder, an associate professor of Rhetoric and Communications at The University of Winnipeg, where he teaches courses on Communications Theory, Popular Culture, Critical Theories of Discourse and Ideology, and Critical Studies of Social Media. He is the author of The Symbolic, The Sublime, and Slavoj Žižek’s Theory of Film (2012), Post-modern Theory and Blade Runner (2017), , as well as his most recent book Algorithmic Desire: Toward a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media (2021) (which we discuss below).
Algorithmic Desire Dr. Flisfeder attempts to show that social media is a metaphor that reveals the dominant form of contemporary ideology: neoliberal capitalism. As the preeminent medium of our time, social media’s digital platform and algorithmic logic shape our experience of democracy, enjoyment, and desire. 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 which emphasises the role of crises, gaps, and negativity as central to our experiences of reality.
Throughout this video we discuss:
Dr. Flisfeder’s on social media as a contradictory but necessary concept
Even though social media is extremely problematic, and even anti-social, structuring feedback loops, bubbles and fake media that disrupt our collective capacity to relate and build real social networks, we should stick with the idea of social media, inclusive of working its contradictions
Focus should shift to the way these platforms drive business interests/capital, become new vehicles for 21st century neoliberal capitalism to overdetermine the way individuals enter into competition with each other (tendency to instrumentalisation), generate culture wars and other ideological struggles (whether reactionary or extremist)
Neo-feudalism as replacing neoliberalism is a less convincing argument than the concerns raised by techno-feudalism, which seems concerned with the very real threats of automation, artificial intelligence and the potential replacement of human wage labour by platform capitalists, creating even greater impotence and lack of capacity to self-organise
Emancipatory possibility in moving from the reproduction of the big Other via social media to the small other (objet petit a), closer relations which move from competitive dynamics to investment in real small others; here social media should be treated as a type of enemy territory
Society and Class Struggle
We need to decide whether or not we are in ideological culture war or class struggle (political); culture wars are the product of social media structuring parallel universes that have their own time line, but they have no necessity to intersect and actively contradict each other (never forced to encounter that moment of contradiction); real debate would overcome the rise of “cancel culture” in ideological culture wars where we move from reifying external oppositions and move towards transforming our own subjective position (logic of the negation of negation)
Spatial metaphor of left/right politics is an illusion that generates endless negation (spurious infinity), both sides focus on negating something that they perceive as authoritative on the level of ideal culture but never question the underlying political structures (e.g. base infrastructures/materialist)
Consequently, there are too few conversations and movements trying to focus on the political center and defend a new system/material infrastructure that we could really put into place, all positions afraid to take power/charge on the level of system/material infrastructure, and would rather subjectify against an oppositional power to purge cultural superstructures (e.g. conservative right against woke culture/progressives-liberals against toxic masculinity or white culture)
Social media helps us realise the lost object of our desire/constitutive lack
Apply the Lacanian motto of “do not abandon the (algorithm) of your desire” as a social media metaphor, we can only be guilty of giving ground relative to our desire as a constant process of negating the object of desire to discover that our desire is structured around a constitutively lost object/lack
Social media opens us to structures of fantasy in a new way, creating the false impression that we can realise all our desires, but perhaps this is the very condition of possibility for our society to recognise that no object will ever satisfy our desire, helping us shift our perspective to the enjoyment of drive
In this sense, realising the concept of social media would bring to the surface the fundamental lack at the core of the social realm, as well as revealing the fetish which conceals the lack which constitutes the symbolic order (why we should stick to the metaphor of social media)
Symbolic efficiency and symbolic materialism
Post-modernism is structured by the demise of symbolic efficacy/breakdown of the signifying chain (with the rise of imaginary tyrannies); in post-modernism we have a tendency to constantly undermine every unifying Master Signifier that holds social space together, driven by an incredulity of meta-narratives or big explanations of everything (we deconstruct paternal metaphors as a threat to our imaginary emancipation)
We need a new kind of symbolic narrative with material implications that open us to the subjective perception of the relation between fantasy and drive; fantasy is only ever in fantasy itself (not the real), a new symbolic orientation to fantasy could help us subjectively come to a moment of reconciliation with political-ethical consequences
Symbolic narratives must aim towards human universality and avoid the temptations of reactionary localist or communalist particularism which reifies external oppositions and differences; the inner contradiction and lack is universal to all particularism/new Master Signifier would be able to articulate what is constitutively lacking in all particular locals imaginary fantasies of unity
New Structuralism = lack/antagonism/gap/contradiction at the heart of all structures, opposed to New Materialism/Materialists which is an effort to escape human social subjectivity and disavow subject positions; New Structuralism centres human construction and anthropomorphic design, the conditions of possibility for New Humanism
For more on the work of Dr. Flisfeder:
Get involved @ Philosophy Portal: