THE LACANIAN DESIRE
Left-wing critics of dating apps have often described the process of the commodification of love or sexual relationships by drawing attention to the profit-incentive of apps like Tinder to design algorithms that would keep you in using the app, to get you addicted, etc. in order to generate a profit. However, while these critiques are true, they miss out on the larger underlying process of the commodification of desire itself.
What is desire and why do we want what we want? For the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, desire is not the same thing as need or demand. A need is biological (hunger, thirst, comfort, etc.). Demand is need translated into language (“I want water”). Desire is what remains unsatisfied even when the demand is met: the surplus longing for something else, often unnamable. Desire is not about the temporary object of desire that acts as a ‘stand in’ for the real lack in the subject. Desire, instead, is about the gap in the subject that objects temporarily mask. The “real” object of desire is lost from the start (Lacan’s ‘objet petit a’), so absolute fulfillment is structurally impossible.
Lacan famously said that “desire is the desire of the Other”. This can be interpreted in two ways. Firstly, we desire what the Other desires (other people, as well as society in general or an ingroup we appreciate). Sociologists such as Rene Girard argued something similar, that most desires are mimetic. This means that we learn to want by imitating what others want. You don’t just “spontaneously” want a Rolex or an iPhone because of evolutionary needs, instead you want it because people you admire or compete with want it, turning the object into a sign of status or belonging.
Secondly, we desire to be desired by the Other. Lacan took this idea from Alexandre Kojeve’s interpretation of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. For Hegel, consciousness can only transcend its state and develop into self-consciousness (being conscious of the fact that you are conscious) through the recognition of another conscious being. Kojeve, later, argued that the desire for recognition is at the heart of all human desires. For Lacan (and more generally, psychoanalysis), desire is a lack, so to desire to be desired by the Other means to try to fill in your own lack with another’s lack.
What all of these theories imply is that desire, at the heart of it, is a relationship between speaking subjects. Desire is not the relationship between one person and an object that they want for whatever reason, it is a relationship to other people, who are also desiring, and to society and culture at large. This makes desire a fundamentally philosophical, economical and political problem at the same time, which is why modern mainstream psychology has shied away from studying it.
Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy operates on observable, measurable, and modifiable cognitive-behavioral loops, so it chooses to focus on studying easily measurable and quantifiable phenomena like behaviors, thoughts and emotions.
Neuroscience can map the dopaminergic circuits that make you want and show how reward prediction errors drive pursuit and link emotional salience to amygdala/ventral striatum activation. But it can’t engage with the cultural unconscious: how desire is shaped by ideology, fantasy, and social narratives. What it tracks is the content of desire, but not the underlying form and structure.
Evolutionary psychology says desires are adaptive strategies: we want sugar/fat because high-calorie food was scarce, we want attractive mates because they signal reproductive fitness, etc. But psychoanalysis points out that many desires are maladaptive in evolutionary terms (desire for celibacy, for risky thrill-seeking, for objects with no survival value) and that cultural signifiers can hijack desire to make us want things evolution couldn’t possibly have predicted (NFTs, niche political affiliations, musical subcultures).
More importantly, mainstream psychology has shied away from studying desire because it implicates ideology: if desire is socially produced, you can’t separate psychology from politics, culture, and economics, and most mental health systems want to stay neutral on those.
THE DATING APP INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
While modern psychology is ignoring desire, multi-billionaire profit-seeking industries are learning not only how to predict it, but also how to shape it. Acxiom is one of the largest companies that collects data about each individual they study and creates a profile of the person in order to sell that data for targeted advertising campaigns. But what about dating apps? Almost all mainstream dating apps are owned by the same giant corporation (Match Group Inc.) whose CEO is Bernard Kim — a guy they hired because he used to work in developing addictive mobile games like Candy Crush before.
Like Marx taught us, often times the economic base is supplemented by an ideological superstructure that seeks to justify it. The economic base of dating apps requires a transactional approach to needs, wants and demands. It presupposes a liberal, individualist model of the self: a transparent, autonomous agent with stable preferences, entering into a voluntary exchange with another such agent. Users are encouraged to list in their bio all their preferences and what they are looking for in a partner or what kind of relationship they are looking for in order to assess ‘compatibility’ (only date people who want the same things you want). This mediates the reality of desire from a relation to the Other into a relation to the object of the Other.
The ideological superstructure supporting this economic base is the modern dating advice culture that presupposes a transparent subject who communicates their desires to their partner or potential partners in order to avoid miscommunication. The mainstream advice says that clear communication of wants and needs is essential in relationships and that if you don’t express what you want, your partner may not be able to meet your needs. Desire, according to this modern advice, is not a creative force or an animating drive that pushes us to do things, nor is it a relation between two people. Instead, it is a list of demands. Our wants are thought of as lists of things we are looking for in a partner, or a list of things we want them to do, with the goal of finding someone who can satisfy those demands, expecting that we also satisfy theirs. Capitalism has reduced desire to a shopping list. In this case, Byung-Chul Han was absolutely right (in his book “The Agony of Eros”) to critique Eva Illouz for suggesting that our desire has too many options today. Quite the opposite: this permissive liberal openness kills desire completely and leaves space only for demand.
The nature of desire is such that it cannot be controlled: the only thing Tinder can control is demand, not desire. Desire is unconscious. Much of what we say we want is already an interpretation, not the raw desire. Sometimes what you consciously declare (I want more space) masks its opposite (I want you to notice I’m pulling away and stop me). Moreover, once you put desire into words, it’s mediated by the symbolic order. This is why in some relationships, the moment you finally say exactly what you want, it stops feeling urgent, as the fantasy was more powerful than the reality. Or, think of how in the earlier stages of a relationship, if you over-clarify everything, you leave no space for the enigmatic otherness of the partner. Desire often thrives in ambiguity, in the gap between what’s shown and what’s hidden.
Process philosophy is also a victim of this trap. The idea that you can communicate your “wants” like uploading a list to your partner assumes they won’t mutate in response to new experiences, moods, or unconscious shifts. In reality, you might not even want your partner to fulfill certain desires, you might want them to keep desiring you.
FROM COMMODITY FETISH TO THE DESIRE-FORM: WHAT MARX CAN TEACH US ABOUT OUR RELATION TO DESIRE
Our commodified relation to desire can be analogously mapped onto Marxian theory. In Marx’s theory, the use-value of a commodity is the inherent usefulness of it (a chair is valuable because you can sit on it) without putting it in a quantifiable relation to other commodities. Exchange-value is its value in being able to be exchanged with other commodities (a chair is valuable because I can trade it in the market for 20 yards of linen or one coat). Commodity fetishism is the illusion that the value is intrinsic to the thing, rather than produced by a social relation. In the first chapter of the first volume of Capital, Marx argued that the value of a commodity is the average socially necessary labor-time required to produce that commodity. However, labor itself can also be split into a qualitative and a quantitative version: concrete labor (the work itself required to produce a commodity and its qualitative aspects) and abstract labor (the number of hours worked, its quantitative aspect which can make it be compared to other forms of labor). In other words, whereas use value is incomparable between commodities, exchange-value puts a number on it and makes it be comparable to other commodities so you can trade them on the free market. Similarly, concrete labor is unquantifiable whereas abstract labor puts a number on it so that you can compare it with other forms of work. Commodity fetishism is the “real illusion” that the relations of production between real human beings, cemented in the very structure of how we organize our economy, are in fact a relation between commodities. When I trade 20 yards of linen for one coat, it seems like I am exchanging two goods, but what I am really exchanging is two amounts of labor that were required to produce those commodities, and by extension, the social relations between those two producers.
Now, in our dating analogy:
Desire = this is the equivalent of use-value and concrete labor and represents the embodied relation between two subjects.
Abstracted want-list or things you’re looking for in a partner to put in your Tinder bio = the “exchange-value” of desire, a codified set of traits and preferences that can be compared, matched, and “traded” in the dating marketplace.
Fetishism of compatibility = the illusion that “compatibility” is intrinsic to the partner-object, rather than produced through the ongoing relational dynamic between subjects.
When the social form of dating is mediated through object-preference checklists, bios, and algorithmic filtering, desire really does get reconstituted as a relation between objects (two sets of wants) rather than between subjects themselves. But Slavoj Zizek often argued (in chapter 1 of The Sublime Object of Ideology) that ideology is not an epistemological deadlock, but an ontological one: commodity fetishism is a ‘real’ illusion, it’s not a gap in our knowledge but it’s part of reality itself. His theory applies perfectly here: you may know that chemistry, attraction, and relationships can’t be reduced to checklists, but the structure of the dating market compels you to act as if they can. The form itself disciplines desire: you start thinking about your “type” in terms of ‘shopping list-like’ traits because the system requires you to present them.
Algorithmic matching treats your wants as stable, quantifiable variables, which can then be compared with the Other’s variables. The platform removes the risk of opaque encounters (where your desires might shift unexpectedly), replacing them with curated ‘compatibility’. The unpredictable subject-to-subject encounter, the space where desire as lack actually breathes, is engineered out of existence and replaced with a lifeless list of demands. What’s left is a market where two rational agents meet to exchange “feature lists” and hope the trade is profitable.
The liberal-individualist ideology says: “be transparent, state what you want, don’t play games and find someone who matches”. But desire is constitutively non-transparent and dynamic, so you end up either performing a fake transparency (inventing stable wants just to have something to list) or being punished by the system for saying “I don’t exactly know what I want” (which is actually the most honest statement of desire, because it is impossible to know what one wants as that is created or produced through the interaction itself).
In pre-capitalist exchange, a commodity’s use-value is its immediate, concrete utility. Similarly, in a non-mediated encounter, desire is a lived, embodied relation between two subjects. It’s not yet abstracted into demands, it exists as chemistry, attraction, curiosity, the jouissance of the Other’s opacity, like when you meet someone at a party and you feel attracted to them for reason’s you can’t properly articulate.
Under capitalism, labor becomes measurable as abstract labor: commensurable across different types of work. Under dating-market conditions, lived desire gets converted into wants: discrete, listable preferences (likes hiking, is child-free, has a stable job). These “wants” (demands) are abstracted because they strip away the singularity of the encounter, they make different partners commensurable (you can compare one profile to another) and they imply your desire is stable and transferable.
For Marx, commodity fetishism makes it seem like value comes from the object itself, not from the social relations of production. In the modern dating market, “compatibility” is an inherent property of the partner-object, measurable through shared wants, rather than something produced in the unfolding relationship.
In capitalism, workers are alienated from their labor because it’s commodified and sold. But just like in capitalism, the list of demands that are being exchanged in the dating market are already alienated from their living source. Subjects are alienated from their own desire because they must translate it into marketable wants for the dating platform and because they begin to see themselves and others primarily through these abstract categories. They lose contact with the unpredictable, non-commodifiable aspects of desire that emerge only in the immediacy of encounter.
In capitalism, money functions as the “general equivalent”: the universal measure that allows all commodities to be compared. Now, the dating platform (Tinder, Bumble, Hinge) functions as the general equivalent for desire: it standardizes profiles into comparable units, it assigns algorithmic “match percentages” or ranks based on engagement data and it enforces the form in which desire must appear to circulate.
In the dating app industrial complex, desire stops being an open, relational process and becomes an exchange problem. The living, human relationship between subjects has been abstracted away into a relation between things: a relation between a shopping list of demands. The erotic uncertainty of the Other is replaced by probabilistic certainty (“90% match”). The result is a feedback loop where people learn to desire through compatibility metrics rather than through lived, transformative encounters.
Dating apps aren’t just ‘commodifying love’ — they are restructuring the ontology of desire to fit the logic of the market.