{"title":"Imagined Communities 2.0","authors":"Anna Kornbluh","doi":"10.1080/08935696.2022.2111958","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2022.2111958","url":null,"abstract":"A solicited response for a forum on Matthew Flisfeder’s Algorithmic Desire: Toward a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media, organized by Yahya Madra, this brief essay considers the book’s thesis that social media functions as a new symbolic order for digital society, one that both ideologically interpellates individuals and provides a metaphor for social totality that might galvanize social transformation. The essay concludes that this thesis significantly contributes to media studies but neglects the psychoanalytic account of digital infrastructures as a waning of the symbolic and an elevating of the imaginary. It therefore underestimates some political complexities of digital culture.","PeriodicalId":45610,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking Marxism-A Journal of Economics Culture & Society","volume":"34 1","pages":"406 - 412"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59493144","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Postalgorithms; or, The Perverse Logic of Flisfeder’s Desire","authors":"C. Burnham","doi":"10.1080/08935696.2022.2111956","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2022.2111956","url":null,"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.","PeriodicalId":45610,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking Marxism-A Journal of Economics Culture & Society","volume":"34 1","pages":"387 - 396"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47446270","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Call to Arms: Iran’s Marxist Revolutionaries; Formation and Evolution of the Fada’is, 1964–1976","authors":"A. Davari","doi":"10.1080/08935696.2022.2111961","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2022.2111961","url":null,"abstract":"This review essay interprets Ali Rahnema’s Call to Arms: Iran’s Marxist Revolutionaries: Formation and Evolution of the Fada’is, 1964-1976 through a fragment drawn from Amir Parviz Pouyan’s treatise “The Necessity of Armed Struggle and the Refutation of the Theory of Survival.” The fragment illustrates a peculiar aspect of Marxist guerrilla warfare in 1970s Iran: its emphasis on political education through political violence in lieu of conventional organizing. Rahnema recovers this history in Iran’s most prominent leftist guerrilla group, the Fada’is, of which Pouyan was a founding member. This essay situates Rahnema’s work in opposition to three prominent trends in the historiography of modern Iran and demonstrates the book’s unresolved relationship to a fourth, an approach that privileges gender as an analytic. Precisely where Call to Arms succeeds in correcting the historical record, repudiating judgments directed against Pouyan’s branch of the Fada’is, it overlooks the lifeworld of affect and ethics implied in the Pouyan fragment.","PeriodicalId":45610,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking Marxism-A Journal of Economics Culture & Society","volume":"34 1","pages":"436 - 440"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42401109","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Whither Symbolic Efficiency? Social Media, New Structuralism, and Algorithmic Desire","authors":"Matthew Flisfeder","doi":"10.1080/08935696.2022.2111959","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2022.2111959","url":null,"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.","PeriodicalId":45610,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking Marxism-A Journal of Economics Culture & Society","volume":"34 1","pages":"413 - 432"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42267840","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Welcome to the Metaverse: Social Media, the Phantasmatic Big Other, and the Anxiety of the Prosthetic Gods","authors":"Jamil Khader","doi":"10.1080/08935696.2022.2111957","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2022.2111957","url":null,"abstract":"In Algorithmic Desire: Toward a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media, Matthew Flisfeder develops an alternative structuralist theory of social media. As a Žižekian analysis of social media, this book is an important contribution to the field of Žižekian studies. While Flisfeder theorizes social media in relation to Slavoj Žižek’s idea of the big Other, he nonetheless proposes an unorthodox understanding, importantly choosing not to engage Žižek’s analysis of technology, which develops in the context of his discussion of artificial intelligence and virtual reality in relation to Freud’s “prosthetic God” and Lacan’s lathouses. The present essay suggests that Žižek’s analysis of technology has radical implications for understanding social media, providing an important perspective that shifts the emphasis of theorizing social media from desire to anxiety in a zone “beyond the pleasure principle,” an analysis that Žižek situates in the context of the global COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on the big Other.","PeriodicalId":45610,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking Marxism-A Journal of Economics Culture & Society","volume":"34 1","pages":"397 - 405"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43280799","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The COVID-19 Crisis: A Case of Capitalism’s Dialectic of Failure","authors":"Costas Panayotakis","doi":"10.1080/08935696.2022.2111955","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2022.2111955","url":null,"abstract":"Acknowledging the multiple ways capitalism fails humanity and the planet, regularly triggering anticapitalist resistance, this essay employs the term “dialectic of failure” to examine how capitalist failures often boost profits and facilitate capitalism’s reproduction. This tendency for capitalism’s failures to create opportunities as well as risks for itself is analyzed with respect to the COVID-19 pandemic. After first analyzing the pandemic as a capitalist failure, and while acknowledging the social-justice and anticapitalist struggles the pandemic has given rise to, the essay examines how the pandemic may also be facilitating capital accumulation and the reproduction of the prevailing socioeconomic order.","PeriodicalId":45610,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking Marxism-A Journal of Economics Culture & Society","volume":"34 1","pages":"361 - 386"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45961964","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Rise and Demise of Neoliberal Populism as a Hegemonic Project: Brazil, Thailand, and Turkey","authors":"Ahmet Bekmen, Barış Alp Özden","doi":"10.1080/08935696.2022.2069459","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2022.2069459","url":null,"abstract":"Three countries—Turkey, Thailand, and Brazil—exemplify the rise of neoliberal populism as a response to the crisis created in peripheral social formations by their integration into global capitalism. This essay thus begins by examining the social dimensions of neoliberal populism: namely, the formation of its social base, its policies of economic inclusion, and its organic relations with revisionist capitalist groups. Since these countries have undergone political crises resulting in regime changes with different authoritarian patterns, the essay then deals with three domains of struggle in which the specific dynamics of each country and the strategies and capacities of neoliberal populist parties can be decisive: political struggles with and among intrastate actors, the strategies followed by segments of capital and neoliberal populist parties, and the capacity of such parties to hold broad class coalitions together.","PeriodicalId":45610,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking Marxism-A Journal of Economics Culture & Society","volume":"34 1","pages":"338 - 360"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-05-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42403265","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Labor, Humanism, and the Play of Mediation: A Rejoinder","authors":"A. Dinerstein, F. H. Pitts","doi":"10.1080/08935696.2022.2051373","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2022.2051373","url":null,"abstract":"This rejoinder focuses on two issues discussed in Samuel Mercer’s review of Ana C. Dinerstein and Frederick Harry Pitts’s book A World beyond Work? Labour, Money and the Capitalist State between Crisis and Utopia. The first concerns the authors’ alleged defense of concrete labor against abstract labor; the second concerns the accusation of humanism. First, the rejoinder clarifies the authors’ understanding of concrete and abstract labor as dialectically intertwined, and also the implications of this for class struggle in and against the “play of mediation” between the two. Second, the rejoinder pleads guilty to the charge of humanism in how the authors approach work and alienation. The authors argue that the related criticism is based in the idea of an “epistemological break” in Marx’s work, but they situate their work in a countervailing reading of Marx that sees a humanist core and continuity characterizing both Marx’s “early” conceptualization of alienation and estrangement and his later conceptualization of real abstraction in the critique of political economy.","PeriodicalId":45610,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking Marxism-A Journal of Economics Culture & Society","volume":"34 1","pages":"282 - 284"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48761214","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Utopia against Abstraction: Raymond Williams, Communication, and the Desire of the Common","authors":"Roberto del Valle Alcalá","doi":"10.1080/08935696.2022.2051379","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2022.2051379","url":null,"abstract":"This essay aims to offer a clarification of the political significance of Raymond Williams’s early work, situating it in the context of utopian thought. Through a detailed reading of Culture and Society’s landmark concluding chapter, as well as his breakthrough novel Border Country, the essay argues that the core of Williams’s early project turns on a sustained critique of capitalist-driven forms of abstraction. The radical political program Williams weaves out of this critique is to be understood, first and foremost, as a utopia of communication and community premised on the measuring and overcoming of division.","PeriodicalId":45610,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking Marxism-A Journal of Economics Culture & Society","volume":"34 1","pages":"225 - 239"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45690212","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Punishment Monopoly: Tales of My Ancestors, Dispossession, and the Building of the United States","authors":"Boone W. Shear, V. Lyon-Callo","doi":"10.1080/08935696.2022.2051369","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2022.2051369","url":null,"abstract":"This review engages with Pem Davidson Buck’s The Punishment Monopoly: Tales of My Ancestors, Dispossession, and the Building of the United States. We position the book in relation to the political-cultural context of the United States, and outline and describe the general arguments and contours of the text. We then think with and in relation to Buck’s arguments in order to suggest the need for a politics of possibility—of exposing, defending, and advancing a pluriverse of worlds—to join with a politics of oppositional, power-building solidarity.","PeriodicalId":45610,"journal":{"name":"Rethinking Marxism-A Journal of Economics Culture & Society","volume":"34 1","pages":"262 - 268"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44363849","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}