Interview with Matthew Flisfeder on Algorithmic Desire
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- Опубликовано: 26 июн 2024
- Todd McGowan and Matthew Flisfeder get together to talk about his book Algorithmic Desire. They discuss the way that social media relates to the structure of desire and explore the implications of the emergence of social media for our political situation.
![Remble - Colors (ft. Mozzy & Stoneda5th) [Official Music Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/KF-3AU9g9xg/mqdefault.jpg)
Mr. McGowan, thank you for the quality content here and in Why Theory. I have really learned about Hegel and Lacan through you. My best wishes for you. Cheers from Colombia.
Thanks!!!
Contemporaneous and a highly valued dialogue. Thank you gentlemen, both.
The Encoding/decoding model of communication was first developed by cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall in 1973. Titled 'Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse', Hall's essay offers a theoretical approach of how media messages are produced, disseminated, and interpreted. Hall proposed that audience members can play an active role in decoding messages as they rely on their own social contexts, and might be capable of changing messages themselves through collective action.
Yes, good description of Hall's project. Matt has an interesting discussion of it in his book, I think.
Todd--your comments on transcendance versus transgression are really good.
For me, this is precisely the enjoyment of great artworks--they appear as "miracles", that somehow manage to do the impossible (I believe Adorno says something similar in Aesthetic Theory).
In the realm of music, this is actually a crucial distinction, and it's one that is usually missed by accounts of musical "progress" or historical evolution of style. One account of musical progress, views it as a series of transgressions of musical laws, until we finally reached the point where we have total freedom from any norms. (If memory serves me correctly, Attali's "Noise: The Political Economy of Music", which is in reality a manifesto of neoliberalism, makes arguments along those lines.)
But what is interesting in Beethoven or Debussy is absolutely NOT the fact that they broke some rules in order to achieve something new. What is interesting is that they created sonic miracles that had never been heard before, impossible sounds that could not be imagined within the frame of the old rules. And those miracles were achieved, not by transgression of musical laws, but by the creation of new, self-imposed rules that allowed the construction of new sounds, planes of sonic consistency, and forms.
Similarly, in jazz improvisation, the axiom "there are no wrong notes" has often been misinterpreted. Such a statement does not mean there are no rules or structures, not does it mean that a collection of random notes can qualify as a jazz solo. What it actually means is that in the contingency of live performance, unexpected notes emerge which were not anticipated and intended ahead of time by the soloist. On its own, such a wrong note constitutes a transgression, and an error; but at the moment the note sounds, in the midst of a musical statement, its meaning is incomplete: only when the musical statement is completed will the full contextual meaning of the note be revealed.
This means that the wrong note presents an opportunity to the improviser, to complete the musical statement according to a new law or rule, that will transform the meaning of the "mistake" so that it is no longer a mistake, but instead becomes an essential part of the overall musical statement that unfolds. There is no question, for me, that the jouissance generated by such a transformation far exceeds the jouissance produced by transgression, although I'm not sure if I would use the term "transcendence" to describe it.
Great stuff!
Thanks for this. I totally agree with this analysis of the miracle in music. It raises an important distinction between the criminal and the political radical. Maybe transcendence is the wrong word, I agree. But I don't know what the word is for occupying the point of the contradiction. It's certainly not transgression, which is how Lacan theorizes jouissance in Seminar VII.
As a musician I cherish this idea you have shared, thanks you for putting that into words
@Chaim Mendel Yes, that's exactly it. Transgression has its own enjoyment that actually supports that against which it transgresses. Obviously, there are times when emancipation requires transgression, but the point concerns transgression for the sake of transgression.
@Chaim Mendel Sorry, I don't know of one, although I'm sure that one exists.
As a philosophy and psychology graduate who is now studying data science for a career in the field this is really interesting content, thank you.
This was great ✨
i love you todd you give me life
Lots of good questions
~ Machinic Desire ~
I am wondering when if/when you will be doing one of your nice concise treatments of sinthome/symptom (with relation to death drive & jouissance possibly?). I'm quite excited lately to find this 'missing piece' which makes so much sense... and yet. Don't know how it has been sitting under my nose all this time without the faintest whiff. Or when-iffing the wonder ring, one might say.
I'll try to do this sometime soon. Thanks for the thought.
Awesome! You rock! Either way.
@Todd McGowan have you ever read God is Unconscious? I just started into it and I'd be curious to hear your own thoughts on it.
I think Tad is smart and like that book.
Good book
@@toddmcgowan8233 thanks, he seems like a very interesting thinker and I like his writing style.
@@nightoftheworld glad to see another endorsement. Thanks
14:29 “I think you’re right to see the way in which relation works both ways-so that every structure occasions a dialectical movement because of the space of subjectivity that it can’t include. And then every dialectical movement itself creates another structural totality right that then has its own point of contradiction that then creates something else-that seems to me really good […] and you don’t really talk about this in the book but I wonder to the extent to which the algorithm is an attempt to avoid that totality. […] Is the algorithm part of this inability to see the whole and is seeing the whole what it means to be sociable?”
Your two examples (pairing concepts of structure with dialectic, and desire with drive) show how much superior DeleuzoGuattarian concept of machine is (structure is static and can not account for historical movements; dialectic is unnatural, false movement in reverse; and desire as lack is also static and thus in need of a drive), since notions of movement and production are inherent to it. Guattari's essay _Machine and Structure_ can be dated as the beginning of post-structuralism and of D&G's collaboration, where desiring machines and becomings stand for new and revolutionary ways of conceptualizing our world (ergo doing philosophy).
I know that this will mean nothing to Todd who enjoys his permanent intoxication of the Hegelian narcosis, but there is still some hope for the other guy...
How can dialectic be simultaneously unnatural(a ceaseless movement from nature) and static?
@@jeanlamontfilms5586 Structure is static, then "they" add a concept that, inherently, contains movement, namely dialectic, so that "they" can justify structure's historicity (changing of the structure in time), but dialectical movement has in itself a phase of it's process that goes in reverse, against the vector of Time or Duration, hence, in terms of the general anti-Hegelianism, dialectic is called an unnatural or _false movement._
@@exlauslegale8534 Doesn’t every concept inherently contain movement? Even stasis is a literal containment of movement.
@@exlauslegale8534 Have you ever seen a spiral structure in the shape of a Helix (a coil spring, a corkscrew, a spiral staircase, etc)? If you haven't, try to find one and start watching... Looking at it from directly the top vertical viewing point, someone might think a spiral structure of symmetrical circles might be 'static' - it kind of looks like only one circle, which of course it is not. Moreover, someone with your rationale would think it could still be perceived as a circular movement which is kind of "unnatural": first it goes in one direction and then "in reverse" as you called it. But would it be naive, if one was to follow your rationale and assume that the spiral structure's circular movement '"is not" a movement - or that is "static" - or as you poignantly called it a "false movement"?... Not only the spiral structure does not go "against the vector of Time" -as you believe - since its movement repeats in time; but also, It never passes from the same point.
In your schematic thought above, I have the feeling, that you fail to see the spiral structure in a way that does not reduce it into a mere 2-dimensional fixed movement which then you could name it 'static', and then even try to normatively conceptualise it as 'unnatural' and 'false'. Unfortunately you chose to observe it, too conveniently perhaps, from the top viewing point and so you missed so many things. If only you could move your subjective view a bit... But this, now, the reference to your subjectivity introduces us to another interesting point - against the flat ontology of assemblages and productive machines... But I think enough said already.
@@jeanlamontfilms5586 Imagine a 100 meter race between a structure (represented for example by a small pyramid 3x3 meters in base) and a machine (lets say a tractor). My bet would be a tractor's win since it has a motor that will pull it across the finish line, but then a dialectical decision can be made and a pyramid's win can be proclaimed... So I guess you're right, every concept has it's movement, it only depends how functional it is.