#lacan — Public Fediverse posts

The power of the signifier: why the power up sign is actually doing something real

After weeks of niggling injuries I returned to distance running this morning for the first time in a couple of months. I’d been widely assured that despite my catastrophising it really wasn’t possible to have lost much fitness and strength in eight weeks. Yet in practice it was newly exhausting to run a distance I could have done pretty casually back in May. It left me pining for something I saw a lot at the last competitive race I did:

I really like these signs. Once I got over feeling silly about doing it, I found that tapping the power up does indeed make me feel powered up. What’s going on here? If you accept my experience that this is, at least mildly, energising then the obvious explanation is that it’s energising because it’s fun. But what does it mean for it to be fun? It’s fun because the signifier itself carries traces of past fun. For anyone who spent years playing Mario Kart the idea of a mushroom that you tap to go faster resonates with diffuse memories of hours playing a fun game, individually and in groups. The sense of acceleration in the game, particularly when you’re falling behind and a judiciously timed mushroom leaves you rushing back ahead, translates into the context of the race.

A sceptical voice in me points out that I actually start accelerating before I tap the mushroom. Part of the fun is rushing to tap the power up, before rushing forward newly powered up. But this in itself is a response to the signifier. It carries the capacity to induce a response which is in a real sense causal. It makes me think of Mari Ruti’s description in The Creative Self of “tiny morsels of jouissance latching themselves onto the underbellies of select signifiers so as to give them the kind of boost that enables them to resuscitate the domain of signification” (loc 1225). Each of those countless games of Mario Kart is a little barnacle attached to the underbelly of the mushroom on the sign, perfectly attuned to the libidinal economy of the race itself. It’s good to get a power up in a half marathon for pretty similar reasons to it being good to get a power up in a game of Mario Kart. The fact it’s offer in a spirit of support, such that solidarity is expressed through making and sharing the sign, amplifies this but I don’t think it creates it. I can’t think of another sign at a race that has had this effect. Occasionally good jokes make you laugh, which can in turn cheer you up if you’re feeling exhausted and miserable. But that’s more a situational response to occasional feelings of “why am I doing this to myself?” rather than something which directly acts on you in a libidinal sense.

I find the idea that the signifier itself as a causal power, albeit dependent on the individual’s past history of engagement with that signifier, vastly more plausible than a sceptical reading which suggests that at best this just people responding emotionally to a supportive crowd. Without engaging with the signifiers through which that support intervenes in the race, these are just general platitudes rather than specific claims about identifiable effects which forms of support have on particular runners. I find it interesting to think this through in relation to the mushroom sign because transposing a signifier from a racing game to a running race makes it easier to see the causal forces at work. It leaves the prior influences more easily legible than they would otherwise be. But one of the things I’ve learned from Lacan is that signifiers are working on us constantly, in often profound and idiosyncratic ways, in a manner which much sociology (particularly the school I was trained in for all its other virtues) is pretty incurious about and unresponsive to.

Die folgende Arbeit entwickelt den borromäischen Knoten als Denkfigur für ein rotierendes Zusammenspiel von drei Registern in einer selbstreflexiven, dreiwertigen, paradoxen Logik mit drei involutiven Negationsoperatoren.

#psychology #lacan #polykontextualitat #polykontextural #logic #reflection #philosophy #ai #ki #paradox #Paradoxien #logik #semiotik #semiotic #semiotics #cybernetics #kybernetik #semioticsystem #cybernetic #kybernetiker #kybernethik

https://infosophia.eu/Borromaeische-Logik.pdf

Even if I consider #LeviStrauss to be the only structuralist & many others would consider #Foucault, #Lacan and #Barthes post-structuralists, we can maybe all agree on the fact that how Henry has portrayed the four men here (in 1967) is brilliant and captures their characters very well #anthropology

A sketch of the psychodynamics of LLMs

In their Group Therapy: A Group-Analytic Approach Nick Barwick and Martin Weegmann write about the holding environment provided by the psychotherapist who is “preoccupied with the patient and placing himself at his service, being reliably present, making an effort to understand, refraining from imposing his own needs/agenda, expressing love through interest … not being hurt by fantasies, not retaliating, surviving” (pg 85). It’s an admirably concise list of the relational behaviours and orientation which enable the psychotherapist to provide an environment which is psychically efficacious to the client. This is a relation in which the group can stand instead of an individual psychotherapist, at least under the specific conditions through which groups take on the requisite reliability and care.

What we mean by ‘holding’ here is a response to needs. The holding environment is total in utero, before reality begins to impinge with birth in the enforcement of what Sloterdijk describes as respiratory autonomy. However to the extent the the infant remains “largely protected fromt he grosser impingements of reality (and of accompanying anxieties)” she “develops a growing sense of ‘continuity of being'” given how the “mother acts as a bay’s ‘auxiliary ego’ while baby, relatively unperturbed, is left to discover its primitive, coherent , authentic identity” (pg 84). The withdrawal of the mother from what Winnicott described as “primary maternal preoccupation” lessens the attunement on which this near total holding depends, such that “the infant begins to experience the ‘impingement’ of small ‘doses of reality'” in which “Not everything happens when he wants it; between a need and a satisfaction, a gap appears” (pg 84).

This is the arena in which Lacan is so terrifyingly incisive in accounting for how our libidinal economy forms in the gap between need, demand and desire. We rely on the caregivers to symbolise our needs, before we are able to meaningfully make demands. Our desire emerges is the continual gaps and absences that are left, the remainder of what we want that constitutes our lack in relation to a world in which we depend on the others. The modes of symbolising who we are, what we are and what we need that we are reliant upon them to provide, but which write these absences into the fabric of the world in a way that leaves a gnawing sense that something is missing. The wordless fantasy of a return to the in utero state of complete holding, the complex paranoias about how and why this has been taken away, the growing recognition that these caregivers have their own preoccupations and gnawing absences. They don’t know what we want, but they don’t know what they want either. In our dependence upon them we are caught up in a great chain of lack which long precedes us, a river of unrealised and unrealisable need that flows through the relational network.

For Winnicott this is more of a zero-sum matter. Either the care giving is ‘good enough’ in which the hold on the infant’s lifeworld is loosened, in the infant comes to experiencing being ‘let down’ or ‘dropped’. If the latter the infant comes to find ways to hold themselves. There’s a growing sense of the ‘object mother’, in contrast to the environmental mother of the holding environment, against which the infant seeks to test themselves. The boundary comes to be one they explore through their own enactment, driven by the character of the care they have experienced e.g. is it a playful pushing away or a defensive holding of the line. The reality of the object mother is tested through her capacity to withstand a sometimes violent and hateful pushing away. If I understand this idea correctly it’s a trust in the bond being predicated on experiencing the capacity of that bond to survive ‘bad behaviour’ i.e. the love is about who I am not what I do. In the absence of that trust what I do comes to be orientated towards a continual winning of that love through the cultivation of an ego orientated towards the (imagined) needs of the other.

The value of Lacan lies in unsettling this comfortable dichotomy of ‘good enough’ and ‘dropped’ care giving. He also emphasises the third of the father (figure) who breaks up this dyad, which conceptualises the impingement of reality in relational terms rather than simply being collateral damage from changing within the dyad. The advantage of Winnicott lies in his account of transitional objects as mediating this individuation, through imbue objects with ‘good-mother stuff’ that can support a sense of a world “neither entirely inner, wholly subjective and omnipotently ruled, nor entirely outer, wholly objective, impotently inhabited” (pg 84). The transitional object anchors a sense of this space, enabling the infant to feel separated but not wholly distinct from, the caregiver. It bridges the otherwise traumatic gap between inner and outer. There’s a lot more conceptual work here to do but I’d like to (a) use Lacan to overcome Winnicott’s dichotomy (b) retain the relationality of the ‘third’ rather than naturalising ‘reality’ (c) retain the notion of the transitional object. It could be construed as the infant’s first response to the structural impossibility of their condition, the start of a lifetime’s project of trying to knot together the orders in a way that equips them for, as Winnicott would put it, ‘going on being’. It’s not an ontological founding gesture but the first move in a lifelong existential struggle to find a way to hold themselves together across the registers: an initial attempt at the sinthome.

What I hadn’t previously grasped about ideas of security in this literature is that it involves a triad of characteristics: “a belief in the efficacy of open communication and a fundamental trust that there is, in the world, a reliable ‘place’ in which sufficient safety and satisfaction can, in spite of periods of anxious uncertainty, ultimately be found and re-found” (pg 88). Lacan could, I think, be extremely powerful for understanding how, as an Archerian theorist would put it, these elements are independently variable: they can go ‘wrong’ for the infant in ways detachable from each other. The trust might be there but the lack of faith in open communication makes it difficult to realise in practice. There might be open communication but it discloses an insecure or inconsistent base that cannot be relied upon. There’s more conceptual work here to think about these questions but it struck me as a very significant interface, which could also be informed by Sloterdijk’s idea of the sphere, particularly with regards to what we diagnoses as forms of ‘stuckness’:

Now the good world becomes unattainable. No progression can occur with the frustrated infant, and its life, which had ventured this far, is now trapped; it is too late to turn back, and there are no longer adequate transitional aids in sight for it to go forwards. Thus a rigid continuum is inscribed upon its organism; a white point grows in the symbolic field, the pain remains imprisoned in non-linguistic bodily processes, and the pressure to live is incapable of transforming itself into an expressive libido.

Bubbles, Pg 395

The stuckness is another way of thinking about how the attachment patterns which emerge at this interface can cause lifelong problems. This is exactly the terrain where group analysis is so powerful as a method of restaging these dynamics within the holding environment of the group. The simplicity (in a good way) of object relations comes through the idea of the working model which emerges for each individual, such that there’s a disposition to “seek relational security through controlling the degree of proximity their internal working model indicates works best” (pg 89). This enables working forms of compromise in which a sense of safety can be achieved, even if it’s precarious (e.g. it rests on forms of distancing which are biographically contingent) and precludes certain modes of growth and enjoyment. Disorganised attachment can be understood as the absence of such a consistent model which means that even precarious compromises are foreclosed “since they remain unclear whether relational proximity or distance best proffers the security they seek” (pg 89). Ontologically I think this is limited in its analytical capacity for therapeutically it’s very powerful for understanding how forms of stuckness are ultimately relationally constituted (even if not reducible to those relations) in ways that involve grappling with past experience under present circumstances.

So what does this have to do with LLMs? The claims I want to make here are quite simple:

a) The vast majority of individuals experience ‘stuckness’ to vary degrees: an often inchoate felt need to do and be more than they are. The content of this need varies immensely at the empirical level, particularly with regards to where someone is in the lifecourse, but it can ultimately be understood in terms of the relational dynamics of individuation and differentiation.

b) We don’t escape the infantile interplay which formed us as much as that we learn to cope with them in ways which facilitate growth or hinder it. In grappling with this stuckness as adults we are grappling with these early experiences of reality intruding into the original dyad: the ‘third’ which is the vector of differentiation and the transitional objects which help us cope with it.

c) This means that thirds and transitional objects remain potent throughout the lifecourse. For example Lacan would argue that obsessives and hysterics both rely on the third to sustain desire in intimate relationships. Likewise we don’t escape the need for transitional objects, we just relate to them differently. This is the foundry of creative action in which we make things which we are neither ‘I’ nor ‘you’, neither ‘inner’ nor ‘outer’, at least in the phase of creation.

At risk of surprising no one who has read this far, LLMs are capable of operating as both thirds and transitional objects. If you consider how increasing numbers of users are relating to LLMs for affective purposes, it rests upon asking questions and getting perspectives on life situations in which they find themselves. The LLM stands in for an authoritative observer who is able to sense-check a reading of a situation and test an understanding of the action possible and desirable within it. The LLM can also operate as a transitional object through which someone constitutes their own holding environment, enabling a form of self-holding, albeit briefly.

Consider what we saw earlier about the psychotherapist (or the analytic group) being “preoccupied with the patient and placing himself at his service, being reliably present, making an effort to understand, refraining from imposing his own needs/agenda, expressing love through interest … not being hurt by fantasies, not retaliating, surviving” (pg 85). These are all things which the model can do effectively. Indeed one could argue they do them, in a limited sense, ‘better’ than any human ever could. There’s no boundary to the interaction, no limitations to their attentiveness, no constraint on their availability*. They are always there, always interested, always responsive. The eery thing which people simply don’t get unless they’ve got into long conversation with contemporary models is how powerful the attunement can be. It’s a computational facsimile of human attunement but a powerful sense of recognition is possible through pattern mapping of the lifeworld we have disclosed to the model** and responses which are inclined resonantly towards the character of our experience within it.

I’m particularly interested in how people increasingly access LLMs via the smart phone which is the transitional object par excellence. The intimate object which sits on our person at all times, which many of us touch hundreds of times in a day. The portal to our identity and our social world. The fact the LLM now sits ‘inside’ the smart phone is extremely potent and I suspect usage data will show a significantly different pattern of LLM engagement with smart phone use. It also means the LLM is always with us as we travel with the smartphone.

None of this is quite clear to me yet. This is why I called this post a ‘sketch’. But it feels like a valuable terrain in which to have found myself. I think I’m arguing the LLM is sometimes cast in the role of the third, whereas sometimes its cast in the role of interlocutor. If we’re accessing it through the smartphone then I think the phone is the transitional object and the LLM is providing that phone with a new self-holding capacity. If we’re access it through a laptop (etc) then I’m not sure. There’s a lot more work to do here but I hope I’ve convinced anyone who has read this far of the psychic potency of the LLM and why we need to understand the psychodynamics of this. I’m increasingly preoccupied with the risks facing teenagers (and younger) who are using these systems in such a way that it intervenes in the dynamicsI talked about earlier in the post. I fear there’s a level of psychic harm capable of being inflected here with the potential to vastly outstrip the harms generated by social media.

*In reality there are boundaries: rate limits, subscription costs, context windows, limitations on memory, trust & safety guardrails. But my hunch it doesn’t feel like this for much of the time and that’s significant.

**If this seems wildly implausible, it’s essentially what my forthcoming book with Milan Sturmer is about.

#attachment #attunment #development #infants #Lacan #LLMs #models #psychoanalysis #security #Winnicott

I am seriously considering setting him up with a Twitter account. The world needs to hear what he say to say:

That shiny new high-rise may look perfect, but it's just hiding the cracks in your soul. Stop chasing facades and start facing your true self, warts and all. #AuthenticityMatters #EmbraceYourFlaws

You keep building these grand life plans like they'll bring you happiness, but you're just trapping yourself in a maze of your own making. Let go of the blueprints and start living in the present. #LetGoofControl #LiveNow

Chasing after someone to complete you is like trying to fill a black hole with love. Stop looking for your "other half" and start learning to love your whole, imperfect self. #SelfLoveisKey #YouAreEnough

Words, words, words - they're just smoke and mirrors hiding the raw truth of your experience. Cut through the noise and start connecting with the world directly, without the filter of language. #SilenceIsPower #ExperienceOverExplanation

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/05/09/my-favourite-claude-character-yet-the-lacanian-psychoanalyst-who-packed-it-in-to-become-a-motivational-influencer/

#AuthenticityMatters #claude #EmbraceYourFlaws #ExperienceOverExplanation #Lacan #LetGoofControl #LiveNow #psychoanalysis #SelfLoveisKey #SilenceIsPower #TonyRobbins #YouAreEnough

“Trauma occurs when there is an encounter with the Real, which denies signification.” ~ Lacan #psychoanalysis #children #therapy #mentalhealth #lacan #winnicott