Katikati ya Nafasi – Reflections on Fernando Castrillón’s Editorial Note

Ulrich Hermanns

Katikati Ya Nafasi – In-between the Spaces

Reflections on Fernando Castrillón’s Editorial Note Generative “Artificial Intelligence” & Psychoanalytic Writing

https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/articles/generative-artificial-intelligence-psychoanalytic-writing-a-short-editorial-note/

 

“It takes the unconscious to lie“ – surely, yes.

And, I think, in psychoanalysis nothing is without sometimes fatal errors. The realm of the unconscious can’t ever be governed. Speaking jargon diminishes the probability of errors, but it also limits overriding forms of understanding.

I.

Understanding between whom? Who are the barred subjects, searching for what? If they know each other, their names are different kinds of signifiers than in (multi)media driven discourses, be it scientific or for entertainment. Science as hysteria is a book of Antonello Sciacchitano from Milan. So, what about the ’value‘ of that dominating realm of finally not responding signifiers? To what shall they respond, this group of remorse brothers and sisters? While their potential ‘guilt‘ fully disappears facing their rational logic – repeatable, valid under predefined conditions?

And this fascinating, different language of poetry and art? Without its interpreters and commercial promoters much would even not be a topic of wide-spread understanding. Without that Stephen King could also just be an unknown writer for a local newspaper as long as the species exists. Stanley Kubrik without a globally available cinema infrastructure might have remained a lonely dreamer.

Timothy Leary once called for a voluntary dedication to hallucinations. Many followed, but most of all those who deliver the effects in small doses – an ultra-rich pharmaceutical industry which can hardly be put into question due to its dominant global role.

As long as psychoanalysis is seen as a ‘field‘ rather than as a quite special form of creating discourses close to truth even beyond these borders – and maybe especially there –, it eliminates more or less the bigger part of social reality. The many humans unable to pay for the cure, maybe also unable to express. Can the subaltern speak? Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri 1926 … Suicide as silent signifier which delivers its message after six decades.

Mass communication comes under pressure as its wild dance of the signifiers is outperformed by even wilder dancers. And they appear in highly cultivated dresses, with polished manners. Even if it won’t take long to generate punk style texts or shouting like those from Antonin Artaud.

Funny for those who have sufficient time to travel thoughtlessly through their consumer realities.

It took time until driving licenses became mandatory documents to drive a car. And now – driving licenses to identify reality? To discover how biopolitics are since long at work? No mercy with those who could know but instead ignore. Children cannot decide themselves about what they are taught or not, whether media reality is kept a secret as for a long time knowledge about their own body and its desire.

Even more important are those poor ones who cannot reject the images of a world dominated by convincing wealth, they will never in life have at their disposal. Where even to buy rice for their babies requires merciless subjugation under laws which fully ignore basic needs? Such as a right to own at least what is needed to survive in honor. Invisible fellows whose communities once were overrun by capitalist violence? Turned upside down until the former shape blows out – whether indigenous or native. Where does the one-percent-share take its further growing wealth from?

Widely coordinated drifts of wishes, shifting in areas where an ‘objective‘ world appears as self-evident and dubious at the same time seem to rule large parts of a commonsense understanding of the world. While up to one third of world income is generated by – according to the official pattern – criminal activities.

Why does law allow now all these nerds to attack property which is not already assigned as individual possession? People’s minds, their unique, ‘hereditary’ property which since long is captured by cultural codes hardly to be distinguished from commercial ones? Le désir de l‘homme … ses racines dans l’autre? Et l’autre, qui ne jamais existe, ou est il – ou est elle?

As long as such is not more or less common knowledge, taught in schools the big phantasm can easily be exploited further. A diamond mine for well organized gangs of soldiers of fortune. With diplomas from most recognized educational institutions which sometimes seem to operate like a publicly financed drug laboratory.

Does ‘science‘ really create its own laws? Continue until an official stop rings and the culprits always since long are gone? Escaped. Arrogantly laughing with their prey?

And many in the world adore their wealth … Wish to be them. Identification with the aggressor.

Shall we fight for them? – Is this a question?

II.

But Fernando‘s issue was not about the political dimension of cloud-entrenched text voyages. Neither about the machine parks in the background nor the status of a mega factory – producing simulated realities where individuals face the impossibility to return to linear forms of truth. Only communities as a whole can shoulder tasks from there. Whether previously remarks from psychoanalysts are heard or not. Whether support to unmask a big other between pure non-existence and phantasm is accepted or not.

Diving into writing itself may unveil the nature of a different subject, the text as such.

Is this text searching for readers or is it reverence to one’s own super-ego, making the Ich-Ideal shine (ego ideal). Dressing it nicely, covering the naked body shamefaced with sheets of printed paper. In the sixties pop culture created paper dresses, miniskirts, pants or shirts. While nowadays tattoos shall mark invisible zones of intensity of the body and slip over a new code. Readable only when viewers come close.

Can distance be faked? Or aren’t machine operators and finally the machines themselves much more keen to bridge any gap, to implement feigned closeness where in fact most remains just as an assemblage. What prevents signifiers to fall down in a discourse like oil slips from a lettuce leaf?

Maybe one steps forward to distinguish psychoanalytic talking from meta-analytic theory. Where transference and counter-transference might happen simultaneously unveiling the position of the latter remains often locked. The analyst appears as the subject supposed to know while the other boils in hot desire for this. Monetary equivalents flow in parallel.

Instead signs which become writing spread like a wave – minimalistic or like a tsunami.

Usually attached to the names of its author, singular or plural. A text has a rhythm as writing is the externalized body of its creator. A breathing flow or a wild accumulation of angry signifiers. A monologue or a talk with higher forces, some living on mount Olympus like the gods, revered ancestors with sacred names. To which the author’s one desires to be attached.

Worship once with the flavor of printing ink and book paper in a discrete dialogue. Turning increasingly imaginary. Gunshots from omnipresent screens. Smoking evidence which immediately makes the reading subject surrender. Rendering the process itself unconscious. It implies that the mighty censor is aware of even such electronic challenges ready to react with a short circuit – blackout in the name of to be delivered truth.

In fact, psychoanalysis can never turn into science. To uphold that ideal would demand for a meta language and English seems the most inappropriate imperialist try. James Strachey’s walkthrough forgot die Seele.

And in fact each individual’s constellation of its mysterious psyche is different. Be it Swahili, be it Arabic, be it one of the many Indigenous languages of Australia. Accessing them is impossible without understanding its culture and its people.

The homogenous wording of international psychoanalytic discourses is treacherous. And also unavoidable. Only in-between spaces seem to appear where shines up. Where peace can ease the pain of a frightening environment, regardless whether castration is accepted or not. There is no effective tranquillizer where complex individual and collective arrangements evoke aggression and provide collective destruction.

Having something to say requires style. Whether stumble or stutter or a smooth performance. Since style became a rhetoric category, speakers of elaborated codes tried to distinct themselves from outdated manners. Nevertheless they had to use the bequeathers as master signifiers and reference marks. Contrarily, speaking in one’s own name refers to poetry.

“Es berührt mich selbst noch eigenthümlich, dass die Krankengeschichten, die ich schreibe, wie Novellen zu lesen sind, und dass sie sozusagen des ernsten Gepräges der Wissenschaftlichkeit entbehren“ – what may Prof. Dr. Freud’s notion[1] mean a few generations later?

When in-between them the novelist Robert Musil from Austria stated that “… everything in public already turned non-narrative (unerzählerisch), not following a thread but extends on an infinitely interwoven area”-

Losing ground on both, the scientific and the narrative side – where can authentic psychoanalytic writing be found? Which subtle statements can make an author identifiable, help him or her to make a name for themselves to be trustfully identifiable when the name appears below an article’s title? It surely coincides with the topic. Authors are free to act on their own, targeting the communities from which inspiration emerges.

Where the topics are broader, corresponding to new developments, be it in society at large or in special habitats like science an unmistakable demand for strategy arises. Handling such goes beyond an individual’s personal power. Collective acting is vital instead. When authors act in publishing communities, guidelines and codes of conduct seem helpful. But authority can also kill creativity … history of psychoanalytic associations is full of that.

Warfare of groups and stakeholders are not eo ipso bad. Whereat they often fight also for resources beyond the truth of positions or statements.

This links back to the broader dimension of the polis, the macro-economic arena where different currencies of desire are exchanged. It would be naïve to deny that. Behind each message there is a sender and a real sender can be identified as an individual with undeniable demands. Que vuoi?

What do you want? What do you want, dear text? You other who appears so familiar as you use familiar signs and terms, follow known codes, lure with familiar rewards which remaining hidden until the lecture is finished, the work of deciphering done.

Maybe sometimes there is a too fast consumption, unrecognized greed, an unconscious will to devour. The capitalist train always derails, as pointed out in Jacques Lacan’s discours capitaliste. And only then the process runs correct. Capitalism as continuous accident. Even if it is a mere generalization, it may help to identify the environment, in which authentic writing occurs.

So, such writing demands for positioning. It must remain up to each individual to find the most suitable tools. Embedded in a community of sympathetic fellows, recognizable as the humans they are under suitable conditions – beyond the silent isolation of writing. Somewhere where a reader can reach him or her, can respond from the position of perception and start – a form of mutual, true communication.

Authorization is a both-way process. Everybody has it in their own hands to refuse or to give it.

III.

Is it needed to once again stress one’s own mind to the border to react to the attacks on personal phantasy and creativity? This time from an ethical perspective?

It may put the own self into question – also repeatedly. Monitoring one’s own reactions and feelings psychoanalytically will hardly ever erode. 

If creating texts or images is a task able being performed by machines – what may be the next steps in the electronic brain prosthesis community? Armies of smiling new gold junkies are waiting to intensify their pressure to soak the ties between humans and their social environments where authenticity and truth have given up. Just to shortcut the onerous path of achieving results and justified satisfaction.

Neurosis as purely an ethical unease – as Néstor Braunstein put it – directs to the path of jouissance which appears to be continuously deprived by accelerated arrivals of ever new surprises. An ageless Anti-Œdipus can be heard laughing from the virtual hills.

There is a friction between a life full of available time and money on one side and on the other the need to earn a living by subjugation to the demands of merciless fragments which once could have been a system. Here only minimum wages are provided which anonymous markets force to pay. To equip the workforce with needed monetary equivalents to fuel the ever accelerated exchange loop between production and consumption spheres.

It is not the system which appears being in need to receive these died away, life spending equivalents. Instead, subjugated individuals beg for entrance to the big show. Nature Theatre of Oklahoma was Franz Kafkas name for a fantastic place where everybody is welcome to work – only on payment nothing was mentioned.

Is not there a secret will of getting fully rid of such embarrassing pressure? To escape once and for all? Is holding on to individualized death drives one of the last resources which a stressed individual finds in the deeper strata of its unconscious – or is already this an effect of rubbing fragments? Elements of a broken world whose intrinsic desire appears as lifebelts which everybody may grab according to what is available in these bitter moments of searching for help from kind gods or goddesses, the big other which hardly exists.

In cold winter nights the question might raise where to position the shaken self.

“Your things are packed, your mind is clear – let’s go for the final walk.”

Previously enjoying places are all demanded by the world around, occupied by knowing and creating machines, speaking to mainly dumb individuals. Time tells you that it is passing. Memory is the status of what once was real. And it will not so easily as before open your doors to new adventures. The attackers will neither give up their robbery of your former reality nor the one which is rising.

Wake up, lost human, wake up!

A cup of tea can be prepared easily! Some toast or cooked rice is there, birds are singing outside. The wind rustles through the trees’ leafs. But the devils won’t stop.

The irritated individual took a piece of paper and a pen, switched on its consciousness. Was it not always on, well connected to the self and willing to fight against any of these monsters who want to steal its world?

“Maybe I find some readers”, the individual thought.

“The path is difficult, a long journey to seed solidarity. Will we ever harvest? Create a world where such destructive forces are common knowledge?”

“The devils will find ever new holes from where they can evaporate their seductive opium. But collectively, at last there is a chance. There are limits and we can put the attackers in their place.”

The door of the prison cell opened.

“Time for exit”, the guard called.

He distributed the load of new court rulings the judge had created with his electronic gadget.

“Why can’t we change our identities like that machine?”

Consciousness went lost. Black with fuzzy shining shapes.

“We have reached, dear guests”, the conductor announced.

“Dark continent, the destination you have booked.”

Secretly he took the tips from the descending guests.

“For my children at home. We will buy some new things. Something nice. It’s so fine to see them smile.”  

The Return Ticket

IV.

Someone had boarded. Was it the addressee or a bot?

„Would you like to add more or write something longer?”, was the reply.

“Shall I continue?”

Few authors are widely known, their gardens of letters are flowering in book shops, libraries and homes. Some more lack such widespread popularity. Most remain hidden in dense bushes or even disappear in the deserts. Their signs remain the sole ambassadors.

Vichaka mnene vinawazunguka. Warm or cold.

V.

The tips were collected. An imaginary army from prison to the ship had generated valuable equivalents.

“Yes, my son needs me, he suffers. Our income is so low.”

The son was going to attend high-school and the girl still small. Only three. Her brother was also a kind of father as the family’s earner was far most often. Doing robbery or unskilled labor. Mara kwa mara soft sweat opened the pores of his dark skin. Made it cuddly for some occasions.

Father John put his pen away. He thought of his wife. She worked in a laundry in St. Louis. Her father came from Nigeria, Adeyemo. A boat captain. Had given her a good education before he died when she was only ten. Helen, her mother, was Adi’s second wife. Had to raise her little Sheila alone. The elder stepbrothers were with their mother.

Some spicy smoke from a cigarette ran through his lungs and then back. John had stepped outside his veranda door. The garden appeared like a painting in his mind. Tapped into eternity. The jets of an airplane emitted noise like thunder. Like the flow of milk once from mummy’s breasts.

New ideas are hardly ever expected, a French had argued against the rise of structuralist thinking.  “Une pensée vraiment originale n'est jamais attendue.” 

Structuralists followed the chain of signifiers in strange processions. A signifier which represents a subject for another signifier … A subject in such context remains a subdued individual. Only in what was called le discours de l’hysterique the barred subject – never able to access itself fully – enters the driver’s seat. Pushing down the unconscious formation of its desire in obsessive manner. The analyst’s discourse shall pull it onto the stage again and get paid for its service. A subtle division of labor in the mega-factory of reality. All such terms and concepts are treated in separate disciplines. Humanity turned into a sacrosanct word from structuralist view. Technology had an easy game.

Ground control to Major Tom … A melody came into John’s mind. He smiled. So soft and irresistible the seducing voice and so unavoidable the consequences. Loss … void.

Life for structuralist linguists was more difficult that time than for other engineers. Texts could be structured and dissected. Each particle be described in its functions. At least those of dominant western languages. Logic machines were programmable since their rise as weapons to spy upon the enemies’ messages and to confuse the deadly aggressors in return. Deciphering was like interpretation, only indirect production.

One of John’s elder cousins was an assistant professor in linguistics and formal logic then. They lacked access to computer and processing power that time. So all remained more or less theory for a long time. In discreet laboratories the work went on. Slowly, sufficient capital was provided to make human language a synthetic good.

Like other goods also language should turn into a profitable story for those able to create and control a market. A huge market following a seductive idea – to sell people what they own themselves but do not value as long as it does not come from the big Other. Satisfaction calls for the duty to pay for it before it can be perceived laid-back. Earn magic equivalents first, subdue the self to forces which like sirens call from the shore. Collective synthesis, not individual obsession where jouissance and pain can hardly be distinguished.

What can psychoanalysts unveil from the unconscious when the lock between the human psyche and the externalizing forces with their shifting power is removed? When it turns clear and confirmed that supra-structures in fact have codes which connect these spheres?

Where else shall the orders and underlying structures come from if not as results of something simply unbearable inside the undivided body and soul entities? So, Jacques Derrida’s archi-trace would lead to a created and perceived relationship between the individual and the other. Something a human constantly experiences without conscious perception.

VI.

Burden or pleasure of existence may be foreign to language machine or those creating synthetic music or art. They can refer to it by using the logic of signifiers. Embedded in environments of usage, stereotypes, patterns. Can become doctors’ little helpers like mummy’s washing machine in the past.

John wished to possess a car once more. Car, care, caressing – for the children, their souls, funny drives.

“The mind, the mind, the mind”, all turns to fantasy, the wind whispered.

A dog barked. John’s thoughts travelled to Sheila. Her slim body, her so expressive lips and eyes. Things were so difficult.

“You should isolate all elements thoroughly and then put them to the programming loop”, his avatar suggested.

“That would imply to isolate them from their living substrate, a kind of death. I can steal but I am no killer.”

“I can imagine what you talk about. But I am only a kind machine myself.”

Sometimes John forgot all he once had learned. Saw no need to remember, emptied his mental cache. The new Who’s-me app from Intragenetics could update his self-consciousness immediately. Just a whisper. It constantly stored all identity parameters and analyzed, synthesized them more stringently than a human mind ever could. Structured, eliminated unnecessary history. Everlasting now.

The past an empty sheet of paper.

“Something must be wrong here”, the senior programming officer of Lalangue Incorporated shouted.

“Joe, come over and look!”

He called his assistant.

“Here, you see? All discourse modes are shifting. Who is responsible for this shit?”

Joe laughed.

“We can’t control the final output, boss. The sequencers transform the codes themselves according to their findings. Jenny is responsible for that. Her father sometimes works on a boat. And her mum has Nigerian roots. Maybe she could not avoid that an unconscious transfer of memories influences her work. These African ancestors had magic qualities.”

“Oh, I see. So we have a funny stuttering engine. Not so bad. Somehow like in real life. These fools who populate most of the globe’s surface function like this in their minds. Break, patchwork, pieces. But they want …”

The senior officer pronounced each syllable.

“Ho-mo-ge-ni-ty! – Okay?”

“Homogenity! A smooth, easy tellable story. Surely with thrills and shocks or breaks, but well composed. Well composed. And also here is no sound in the background.”

“The sound, boss, the sound?”

Jenny walked into the room.

“Twelve thirty, I just implemented it.”

“Young girls are coming to the canyon. And in the mornings I can see them walking.”

“My grandmother sang it when she wanted to enjoy me. A song from hippy people in California. Love and peace. Long gone but our algorithms remember.”

She continued singing.

“I can no longer keep my blinds drawn, and I can’t keep away from ta-a-lking.”

“Talking, yeah, talking. That’s good. It will motivate our clients, at least they have an idea of it.”

The boss nodded to his contemplative statement.

“That there is an own rhythm in every body. A heartbeat. A flow of air. Common time even when we speak or write. Light form somewhere in universe which makes things appear.”

“There are plenty of resources for our marketing teams to be simulated and then reimbursed as virtual goods, lovely things, pretty decoration”, Joe’s boss noted.

“You want to say even air and heartbeat as artificial, buyable things, boss? It goes beyond my imagination.”

“Hey, hey Joe! You’re in science. Don’t forget it. And you should know the mega-power sufficient capital delivers.”

Jenny took a joint. Smoke Columbian the yellow logo on the turquoise package demanded.

“Yes, Columbian is the best. And it is legal here. Laws can change.”

“Luckily. Otherwise we all would walk in yokes.”

“And the aftermath? Do you think anything has been truly resolved? Anything has ever begun to be part of common talking, of reparation?”

“All in culture is entrenched by raids, violence and oppression. It finally turned into structures and structuralists are unwilling to see it.”

“Let’s finish the meeting here for today, dear colleagues. See you all tomorrow same time. Okay?”

The lab went empty. Jenny called her dad.

“Love you, dad. So sorry that you can’t be with us. But you are always in my heart. Just that you know.”

“Thanks child. Kind of you. Love you too my daughter.”

“Dad, I just played with the pink simulator engine you bought for us”, the girl continued.

“I played it first time. It’s amazing. Like in a dream.”

“Don’t use it too often, my child. Greetings to Billie and mum. Love you, bye.”

“Bye dad, nice day.”

VII.

Can quite delirious sentences say anything regarding the difference between in some way authentic subjectivity in writing, speaking or painting and the results of simulated representation?

In theory, subjectivity always misses its most essential quality. Le discours de l’université – university discourse – makes knowledge the central agent. Absurdity had its time in screenplays and novels. And the conditions in the outside world are hardly less unsettling. Writing which simply describes or reports ignores its own fragility. Such basic errors must be shared by the audience to work. Working in reciprocal ignorance. This also may apply for psychoanalytic texts. In fact, machines can provide flows like that.

To call for engagement and humanity in an existentialistic understanding would mean turning back time. The appeal has its power below theorizations. Nevertheless it is a task for life in community at all and for the discourses there.

The role of machine-supported contributions to analysis and practice makes it unlikely that ever a clear border on its appropriateness can be fixed. Sigmund Freud’s evenly-suspended attention – gleichschwebende Aufmerksamkeit – of 1912 without any further expedient is hardly replaceable as it is just the situation, the moment when the unconscious starts to speak. Generates resonances on the ground of transference and trust.

Not reason but something very much different.

On the vulnerability of especially young souls by experiences in bottomless, virtual worlds much has been reported. The loss of connectedness to one’s own body. A sound concept of the body would include considerations on what Michel Foucault had called biopolitics – biopolitique.

The driving forces – biopower – are rooted in socio-political environments. Combined with individual adoptions or embodiments they form a kind of ‘objective’ unconscious, at least its resonances. Its individual perception can hardly transcend basic ideas of an individual’s reality or specific manifestations.

Beneath the fundamental dimensions of life and death, generation and gender as sources of serious uncertainty, embodiment and faked words appear as sources of substantial doubt.

Can the ‘true’ status of such elementary dimensions be determined without individual myths or auxiliary constructions including psychoanalysis and the $? Something in-between the spaces or codes?

Are the ghosts not only nicely speaking or painting machines but even life itself and the machine monsters distract from it? Behind their own shadow work? Which new Oedipus must come to question their status in the same lasting way the mythological hero once did?

VIII.

That words are like dark, empty stars in the universe is quite self-evident. This inorganic matter receives its shining from celestial bodies which consume themselves. Unimaginable, which forces are at work there. Immanuel Kant called it the sublime – das Erhabene – and esthetics could remain a division of reason. All would remain en soi or nothing if not some mysterious beings would lend their perception. Let such shining enter their minds and play there.

Letters borrow their meaning from these strange beings, enter through the same doors as images from universe do. All are more or less symbols. Everything outside remains or disappears with them. Contracts – even constitutions – and speech acts may make differences.

As soon as a book is closed, a virtual page is turned, the shining tie in the imaginary extinguishes.

John returned to his room. He sat down by the window. He watched the night coming. The girls would walk again through the canyon next morning.

“Wake up early to see them”, he spoke to himself- He and the world were one.

“Good night darling”, Sheila whispered from their bed.

She pressed her head into the pillow.

“One day we will return to where we belong, one fine day, John.”

“Wait, I come, dear.”

A quote he found recently was added to his diary.

Sólo él, el amor, puede hacer que el deseo condescienda el goce.

The light of pleasure had caught fire.

 

July 2023