Captivations of the
Algorithmic Ego
Colin Wright
Against the lures of the
imaginary, Jacques-Alain Miller has defined psychoanalysis as “an invitation
for the subject to abstract himself from the ineluctable modality of the
visible and renounce the image in favour of the signifier.”[1] How crucial a
clinical orientation this is, in our Society of the Spectacle, becomes
clear when we consider the recent phenomenon of ‘suicide porn’…
In its juxtaposition of sex
and the passage à l’acte, this precise phrase invokes the
digital mediation of the death-drive today. According to the Urban Dictionary, ‘suicide porn’ involves going online to
look “at dangerous objects or places and to fantasize over causing
yourself harm/death using them. The warm feelings this brings up”, the
dictionary claims, “are psychologically gratifying, rather than
sexual.” Of course, our focus on jouissance exposes the falsity of this last
distinction: the signifier ‘porn’ is far from being a mere analogy here, and it
indexes an enjoyment that will not be psychologised.
The issues raised by ‘suicide
porn’ have risen to prominence in the UK because of the tragic case of Molly Russell. Aged just 14, Molly took her own life in
November 2014 after months of viewing ‘self-harm porn’ on her mobile phone via
her Instagram account. Sadly, Molly’s case is not an isolated one. In January
2018, Ursula Harlow, aged only 11, also committed suicide
following prolonged exposure to suicide porn sites, prompting her mother to say
“if I could turn back time I’d destroy her phone”. Behind a pretence of mutual
self-help, these kinds of sites encourage users to swap hints and tips on the
best methods for ending one’s life. Many also involve exchanging graphic images
of self-harm: lurid ‘selfies’ of lacerated arms dripping with blood prompt
appreciative comments from fellow ‘cutters’, along with helpful advice on how
and where to make the incisions.[2] Molly’s
father, Ian Russell, accused Instagram of “helping her to die”, not simply
because it did little to curb the proliferation of such sites on its platform,
but also because its algorithms ensured his daughter’s entrapment within an
“echo chamber” of suicidal voices. He is right! Recursive data-profiling means
that once you search for these sites (or indeed stumble across them),
Instagram’s software points you in the direction of more of the same,
effectively interpellating you as a ‘fan’ of suicide porn. Social networking in
this instance means connecting around a common identification with death, the
speech of each echoing in a self-enclosed bubble of the imaginary. It seems
that Molly’s initial online search for support with her depression took a
tragic turn because algorithms amplified exponentially the echo of her own
complaint (in precisely the way Lacan argued against).
Is this not a new algorithmic
mutation of the ego? The ego has always been a kind of iterative sameness
machine, and as Freud’s shrewd reference to the myth of Narcissus warned, at
its heart lies a deadly effect of capture by the image. But the digital
redistribution of narcissism seems to have unleashed its mortifying aspect with
new ferocity. Where once the mirror stage required a symbolic Other to pin the
ego to an image in an imago, there is little or no such symbolic mediation
now. Instead, the ego is delegated to a computational Other whose algorithms
are programmed primarily to make jouissance circulate as a surplus from which
capital can profit. The result is not so much subjects of the signifier divided
by alienation as it is consumers of a limitless jouissance that also consumes
them.
In this sense, we should
probably be sceptical about the attempts to make another Other exist that could
police the problem that ‘suicide porn’ names.
The UK government’s Science
and Technology Committee has responded by launching an enquiry into the links
between social media usage and young people’s mental health, something about
which the Education Policy Institute already produced a report in 2017. The UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock
even arranged a personal meeting with Adam Mosseri, CEO of Instagram, in order
to seek assurances about the platform’s response to Molly’s case. Whilst
Mosseri made a number of no-doubt sincere commitments – for example,
“Sensitivity Screens” that will blur images of self-harm, as well automated
prompts for people who search for them to contact the Samaritans – these
measures seem impotent before what some social media theorists have referred to
as “algorithmic governmentality”.[3] Foucault’s
concept of governmentality was always meant to push beyond state-centric models
of top-down power, towards a microphysics of dispersed and productive power.
How much more pertinent does this become as we voluntarily submit ourselves to
datafication by the likes of Google and Facebook? As is clear in the area of
high finance and the stock markets, computational transactions have an inhuman
agency that now far outstrip any individual’s ability to know, let alone
control, them. The University Discourse ultimately real-ises the S2 of a
knowledge decoupled from an S1 that would master it. Hence the new algorithmic
ego.
To return to the invaluable
clinical indication Miller’s comment gives us, it is arguably only the
discourse of the analyst that can support the subject’s attempts to extract
itself from the “ineluctable modality of the visible”[4] which has such
deadly effects today. Renouncing the image in favour of the signifier means
risking a step outside algorithmic echo chambers, the better to hear the speech of
the Other.
[1] Miller,
Jacques-Alain, "The Sovereign Image", The Lacanian Review: Hurly
Burly, No. 5, Summer 2018, p. 42.
[2] This recalls
Lacan’s comment on ‘self-flagellation’ in Seminar XVII: “I am speaking of
the mark on the skin, which, in this fantasy, inspires nothing other than a
subject identifying itself as the object of jouissance” (Lacan: 2007. p.
49)
[3] See also
Galloway, Alexander and Thacker, Eugene, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks
(Electronic Mediations), Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
[4] This beautiful
phrase was in fact coined by James Joyce in Ulysses.
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