Postalgorithms; or, The Perverse Logic of Flisfeder’s Desire

Abstract

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.