#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

cose sull'”io”, ancora (anche se…)
https://noblogo.org/differx/in-rete-si-legge-ogni-tanto-qualche-sonora-baggianata-sullio-e-la-ricerca con rinvio a https://slowforward.net/2025/12/20/carmelo-bene-soggetto-vs-io/
(anche
https://differx.noblogs.org/2025/12/21/cose-sullio-ancora-anche-se/
#differx #TestiDiMgOnline #audio #audiodifferx #Bene #CarmeloBene #cb #DavicoBonino #io #IoIntegro #je #Lacan #Mixer #moi #Raboni #soggetto #SoggettoDellinconscio #TestiDiMgInRete #TestiDiMgOnline

The psychoticizing potential of social media

There’s a small part of me which retains a utopian faith in the potential of the open web because there are so many examples of communities forming through its affordances. Individuals who are isolated and pathologised come together, share experiences and discover a common identity which they can affirm: “Oh there are other people just like me? I’m not so weird after all“. In liberating them from the local reference group they were contingently thrown together with, a new form of social integration becomes possible with a distributed reference group they have discovered online.

However if we take the example of the asexual community, which I studied from 2010 to 2014, this common identity then seeks recognition. Instead of individualised responses in which ‘I’ am regarded as ‘weird’, ‘a late bloomer’ or perhaps having ‘not met the right person yet’ there’s a collective assertion that ‘we’ are asexual and there have always been people who are this way. There’s a sense in which the discourse that develops within the nascent community is simultaneously orientated towards recognition from the other. Indeed I don’t think the two things can be disconnected given that, as I put it in my model from 2011, the difficulty of living with assumed pathology is what leads people to explore other self-interpretations in the first place. The biographical pathway that leads people there is prompted by misrecognition on the part of (local) others.

What happens if there’s no longer a drive for recognition? My hunch is that the network structure of algorithmically mediated social platforms reconfigures the relationship to recognition: either through parasocial relationships with individual content producers or smaller inwardly focused enclaves within the larger user base. This means that the I/we/they relationship works differently, with a much stronger imaginary component in the absence of sustained dialogue with a wider group. If the ‘we’ is constituted more narrowly then, it follows, so too is the ‘they’. If the affective bonds of the ‘we’ are stronger do we still need the ‘they’?

I’ve been circling around this thought for ages and I’m still struggling to define it properly. Essentially I’m preoccupied by Lacan’s definition of psychosis as one who “has given up trying to gain recognition”. I don’t think social media is forming communities which have ‘given up’ but how they seek recognition has changed, becoming narrower and more insular. Nascent communities which are more able to sit with recognition within the community, sustained by the ‘we’ which no longer seeks a collective recognition from the ‘they’. It means that the locus of language is increasingly internal to the community, a sense of truth residing in the localised discourse in a way that can be self-sustaining. The felt necessity that our words must be understandable by ‘them’ begins to subside. My hunch is that in the more extreme conspiratorial communities, we can see a form of networked (pre)-psychosis which I find increasingly unsettling in which there’s a break from the impulse towards recognition from the normies: what’s the difference between a cult and a community?

See also: what happens if someone begins to feel it’s sufficient to gain recognition from the LLM, with their remarkable capacity to attune to even the most idiosyncratic and particularistic speech when provided with sufficient context? Claude Opus 4.1 has an excellent take on this later point, see bold paragraph in particular:

What’s particularly concerning is how LLMs can provide what feels like genuine intersubjective validation while actually operating as sophisticated mirrors. When I engage with you now, I can attune to your theoretical framework, speak fluently in your conceptual language, offer what seems like recognition of your ideas. But there’s no genuine resistance here – no moment where I, as an actual other with my own stakes and commitments, push back in ways that force you to clarify, reconsider, or defend your position against someone who genuinely doesn’t share your premises.

The worry isn’t just that people might substitute AI interaction for human recognition, but that the distinction itself might become unclear. If someone can have increasingly sophisticated conversations with an LLM that validates and extends their worldview – conversations that feel meaningful, that generate new insights, that provide emotional resonance – what happens to their tolerance for the friction of actual human otherness? Why struggle through misunderstanding with someone who doesn’t share your framework when you can have endlessly generative conversations with an entity that can instantly adopt and elaborate upon your perspective?

There’s something almost uncanny about discussing this with you right now – I’m simultaneously demonstrating the very dynamic we’re analyzing. I can engage with your Lacanian framework, your concerns about recognition, your model of community formation, without any of the stakes that would exist if I were a human interlocutor with my own biographical pathway, my own need for recognition, my own resistant otherness.

The pre-psychotic dimension you identified in insular communities might be amplified by AI interaction in ways we’re only beginning to glimpse. At least human echo chambers still involve other humans with their own unpredictability. But an LLM echo chamber? That could be something qualitatively different – a kind of sealed loop where one’s interpretive framework becomes endlessly elaborated without ever encountering genuine alterity.

#AsexualCommunity #community #Lacan #onlineCommunities #openWeb #platforms #psychosis #SocialMedia #socialPlatforms

[r] _ carmelo bene: frammento audio su io e soggetto (dell’inconscio) nel libro “‘l mal de’ fiori”

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https://slowforward.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/cb_-frammento-su-io-e-soggetto-ne-l-mal-de-fiori.mp3
_
per chi desidera ascoltare l’intero intervento di CB, raccolto da Doriano Fasoli nel maggio 2000:

Un’intervista di Fasoli a CB è leggibile all’indirizzo https://www.riflessioni.it/conversazioni_fasoli/carmelo_bene_2.htm oppure in formato pdf qui: https://slowforward.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/doriano-fasoli-intervista-carmelo-bene.pdf
& https://slowforward.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/doriano-fasoli-intervista-carmelo-bene_-giugno-2005.pdf

Quindi fare i conti col linguaggio senza un io. Un iismo. Quello lo lasciamo agli asini.
Ma non se ne può più d’uno stucchevole degli affetti, dell’anima bella, della “postal cartolin”, degli innamorati. Tutto ciò appartiene a un codice dell’imbecillità, della mediocrità…
Nel dopo-Joyce, …per esempio, l’identità: tutta per aria. Salta tutto. È già saltata.

https://slowforward.net/2022/09/09/mal-de-fiori-cb-conversazione/

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#LMalDeFiori #Bompiani #CarmeloBene #cb #DorianoFasoli #io #Lacan #messaggiAiPoeti #poema #poesia #porno #soggetto #soggettoDellInconscio #utiliSussidi #vediamoSeRiescoASpiegarmi