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Notes
Since publishing the book, Flisfeder (2022) has elaborated upon this contention with regard to the ‘Internet troll’. Here, the relation to the other is reflected in ‘the character of the troll … since their practice of reputation management is premised on the idea of tarnishing the reputation of others, an act for which trolls aim to satisfy the desire of their own friends and followers. Such examples show that the desire users engage to satisfy on social media is the desire of the big Other in the form of the social network, or the social surveillance of other users.’ (Flisfeder 2022: 421)
Desire always occurs through an interpretation of the Other's desire, or, in other words, from an interpretation of what an authority desires. There is no authority, however, who fully knows their desire, thus, the failure of interpterion is constitutive of desire. It is in how we relate to this interpretation that a sense of one’s desire is made (Ruti 2018).
This line of thinking has subsequently been applied to analyses of algorithmic AI and ChatGPT. Johanssen notes: ‘ChatGPT is another, even stronger symptom for the desire for the existence of the big Other’ (2023).
With regard to the Name-of-the-Father, Vanheule (2011: 61) explains: ‘[w]ithin this logic of the paternal metaphor the father is not a real or an imaginary person, as is the case in the Oedipal myth, but a symbolic function to which all group members—mother, father and child—are subjected. It provides the human being with an internalized compass of culturally and socially viable principles, and facilitates understanding of the (m)other as well as the behaviour of significant others’ (italics in original).
As Žižek (2012: 68) asserts, ‘[t]he first task in the analysis of a psychotic is thus arguably the most difficult, but also the most crucial: that of “hystericizing” the psychotic subject, that is, transforming the void of his “depersonalization” into a hysterical dissatisfaction’.
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Black, J. Review of Matthew Flisfeder (2021). Algorithmic Desire: Towards a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media. Postdigit Sci Educ (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-023-00428-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-023-00428-2