Algorithmic Desire: Toward a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media

Diaeresis

by Matthew Flisfeder

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 shape 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.
 

Genres: Theory, Philosophy

248 pages, Hardcover

Published March 15, 2021

About the author

Matthew Flisfeder is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Rhetoric, Writing, and Communications at the University of Winnipeg. He is the author of The Symbolic, The Sublime, and Slavoj Žižek's Theory of Film (2012) and co-editor of Žižek and Media Studies: A Reader (2014).

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

An engagingly written theoretical analysis of social media from the perspective of Marxist psychoanalysis that (predictably) leans rather heavy on Žižekian ideas, but which also incorporates a wide range of critical perspective that are clearly and concisely explained in a way that can be very helpful to advanced grad students familiarizing themselves with these fields.