The logic of desire may be parsed as the ideology of
power/knowledge. Top of Form Bottom of Form
I created this sentence using an algorithm from the University of Chicago’s
“Write Your Own Academic Sentence” (http://writing-program.uchicago.edu/toys/randomsentence/write-sentence.htm).
While this exercise is obviously humorous, it raises what I see as an important
issue in academia itself: the highly structured confines of our disciplines.
One of the benefits of this workshop is that it forces us outside of our
seemingly formulaic vocabularies, methodologies, and theoretical frameworks.
For instance, the focus on happiness diverts our attention from explanations of
human suffering to thinking about its alternatives: satisfaction, pleasure,
desire, and joy. Here, we see the dangerous confines of the algorithm.
But, as Ng and Goldberg suggest, algorithms are also increasingly used to
actually produce happiness in the contemporary world. While limiting choice
might stifle possibility and creativity, do algorithms have the potential to decrease
unhappiness? My own work looks at intergenerational conversations and
narratives of democracy and Apartheid. One of the things that is most striking
about these discourses is the negative connotations attached to certain types
of “freedom” and the longing for a perceived past of structure and limitations.
Many rural, black South Africans express nostalgia for a time when life was, at
least in hindsight, “secure,” “stable,” “known.” I kept thinking about this
during the presentation today, wondering if perhaps the ubiquity of algorithms
in the world today reflects some kind of common human desire to have limited agency?
This is most certainly not to say that such nostalgia actually reflects a
preference for oppressive regimes or any kind of factual accounting of history;
rather, it critiques the present dissatisfactions with democracy. Apartheid
only becomes desirable when viewed through the lens of the present unhappiness
with a system of widespread corruption and poverty. But beyond these structural
inequalities, many people frame liberal democracy as “too free.” That which
offers equality to all, at least in rhetoric, appears to have no moral compass
and no guiding sense of right and wrong. In other words, when all beliefs and
practices are given equal weight, the “algorithm” of leading a moral, good life
dissolves. How might we use the metaphor of algorithms to further interrogate
notions of freedom, structure, and agency in the world?
On a last note, I’m not entirely convinced that the ideology of power/knowledge
might NOT actually be at the root of the logic of desire.
Amber R.
Reed, University of Pennsylvania
