![]() 39), both through a material reorganisation of the Internet into more controlled encounters between users, as well as through serving as master signifier, an interpretive matrix, with everyone having an opinion on its meaning. Social media brings “structure to the seemingly unstructured space of the internet” (p. 48), thereby dissolving our symptomatic (digital) solutions to these contradictions. The first step to establishing a different structure involves registering the present “structural contradictions of reality, society, and history” (p. 47), a particularly necessary project in light of the loss of structure that defined Covid-19 social distancing. ![]() Rather than abandon this field to the Right and figures like Jordan Peterson who are marketing their own new structuralism (which props up rather than challenges the existing structure), Flisfeder-along with Leftist scholars like Anna Kornbluh-wants to “give structure to our knowledge in a way that benefits us as subjects” (p. Flisfeder still wants to smash neoliberal capitalism, but he is more preoccupied with structure raising, asking “what structure… is adequate to the task of Symbolically mediating the position of the subject who emerges at the limit points of the existing structure” (p. 49) that dominates critical discourse today, in which oppressive structures are illuminated, critiqued, and ideally dismantled. 11) that is our usage of social media.įlisfeder’s book advances a new structuralism that moves against the “ethics of structure smashing” (p. ![]() It is only in reading these two books together and against each other that we can shift from being analysands of the Internet to analysts capable of “affect the Real of the symptom” (Žižek quoted in Flisfeder, p. This review positions Flisfeder’s book and Clint Burnham’s Does the Internet Have an Unconscious? Slavoj Žižek and Digital Culture as similarly interdependent, with the former grasping the subject of social media through structure, and the latter grasping the structure of social media through the subject. One of the central arguments of Matthew Flisfeder’s Algorithmic Desire: Toward a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media involves how “structure and subject have always been interdependent” (p. ![]()
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