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

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.