Whither Symbolic Efficiency? Social Media, New Structuralism, and Algorithmic Desire

Abstract

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-first-century neoliberal logic and reiterates that a truly social media is only possible under conditions of universal emancipation.

Keywords:

• Fredric Jameson
• New Structuralism
• Social Media
• Subjectivity
• Slavoj Žižek

Acknowledgments

The author offers sincerest gratitude to Clint Burnham, Jamil Khader, and Anna Kornbluh for their careful and (I must emphasize) honest readings. The author also wishes to thank Yahya Madra for his helpful comments and feedback on this essay and for organizing this book symposium. The generosity and labor of my comrades is noticed, welcomed, and appreciated.

Notes

1 According to Mark Andrejevic (2013, 150), the operation of the big Other in this way remains implicit in digital spaces. Rather than an externalization of overt decision-making processes, assumptions, biases, and preconceptions about stated ideological commitments, “These remain operative but largely invisible, inscrutable, and perhaps even more incomprehensible: the uncanny persistence of symbolic efficiency” persists “in the wake of its alleged demise.”

2 I believe this error also occurs in the writing of Christian Metz, particularly with his notion of cinema as an “imaginary signifier.”

3 For more on this point, see my discussion of the branching symbol from the anthology TV series Black Mirror, in Flisfeder (2021, chap. 6).

4 Žižek in fact tends to waver back and forth between supporting and critiquing the thesis regarding the demise of symbolic efficiency. For instance, in In Defense of Lost Causes, Žižek (2008, 34) writes, “It may seem that Lacan’s doxa ‘there is no big Other’ has today lost its subversive edge and turned into a globally acknowledged commonplace—everybody seems to know that there is no ‘big Other’ in the sense of a substantial shared set of customs and values, that what Hegel called ‘objective spirit’ (the social substance of mores) is disintegrating into particular ‘worlds’ (or life styles) whose coordination is regulated by purely formal rules … However, the example of cyberspace clearly demonstrates how the big Other is present more than ever: social atomism can only function when it is regulated by some (apparently) neutral mechanism.”

Even earlier, in The Ticklish Subject, he writes, “Today, more than ever, we, as individuals, are interpellated without even being aware of it: our identity is constituted for the big Other by a series of digitalized informational files … files we are mostly not even aware of, so that interpellation functions … without any gesture of recognition on the part of the subject concerned” (Žižek 1999, 259).

5 Samo Tomšič (2015, 151) likewise asserts that, while capitalism itself is not perversion, nevertheless “it demands perversion from its subjects.”