A while ago I was describing an accident that happened to me: A black friend was so entranced by what I just said that he hugged me and exclaimed, “Now you can give me a ‘n…r’ to name!”
One critic recently claimed that those who agree with me here are “crazy”: “The problem is that Žižek’s argument is based on his freedom to use racist language. Žižek uses the N-word as an argument against political correctness, implying that black people who don’t want to be racially abused are politically correct. And therefore unreasonable. And sure, maybe it didn’t bother the man he was talking to at all. But saying the N-word or not as a non-Black person shouldn’t depend on finding a single Black person who ‘allows’ you to do so. The way you use words should be based on how you understand the world. The N-word is a word used to directly justify ownership of one race through ownership of another. That’s what’s on my mind, man.”
imago
To person
Slavoj Zizek was born on March 21, 1949 in Ljubljana, SR Slovenia, Yugoslavia. He is a philosopher, researcher at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana and International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London. He is also Professor of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis at the European Graduate School and Global Distinguished Professor of German Studies at New York University and works on subjects such as continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, political theory, cultural studies, art criticism, film criticism, Marxism, Hegelianism and theology. He is one of the best-known living philosophers in the world and is a columnist for the Berliner Zeitung.
It was an expression of friendship
Let me be absolutely clear: just like a chatbot, my critic ignores the obvious context of my example. I have not used the N-word in any communication (nor do I ever) and the black guy who said to me, “Now you can call me ‘N…r’!” obviously didn’t mean that I really should do it. It was an expression of friendship based on the fact that black people occasionally use the word among themselves in a wryly friendly way.
I’m pretty sure that if I really did address him as ‘n…r’, at best he’d respond angrily, as if I didn’t get the obvious point. His remark obeyed the logic of an “offer to be rejected,” which I have explained at length elsewhere. For example, if I say something like, “What you did for me now was so nice that you could kill me and I wouldn’t mind!” I definitely don’t expect the other person to say “Okay!” and on draws knife.
The stupidities of chatbots are exactly their worth
My guess is that, at least for now, chatbots can’t respond to such offers that are meant to be declined. (Let’s disregard here the rare instances where, in a very specific context, not only can the N-word be used by a non-Black person without hurting a Black person, but, more importantly, in to whom the NOT use of that word, but its subtle allusion through associated expressions, can be almost more hurtful.The same, by the way, also applies to the expression “God help me!” If at that point God appear and truly come into the world for me intervened, I would be totally shocked.)
But still, haven’t I relied too much on the usual academic response to chatbots, mocking and denouncing the imperfections and mistakes ChatGPT makes? Against this prevailing view, shared by Chomsky and his conservative opponents, Mark Murphy, in a dialogue with Duane Rousselle, defends the claim that “artificial intelligence does not work as a substitute for intelligence/sensibility as such”.
Therefore, “the stupid things, gaffes, mistakes, and half-witted short cuts that a chatbot commits — its constant excuses when it gets it wrong — are precisely its value” that enables us (the “real” people interacting with a chatbot) to do so to maintain a false distance from him and claim when the chatbot says something stupid: “That’s not me, that’s the AI machine.”
ChatGPT is an unconscious
Rousselle and Murphy support this claim with a complex line of reasoning, the starting premise of which is that “ChatGPT is an unconscious”. The new digital media externalize our unconscious into AI machines, so that those who interact with AI are no longer shared subjects, i.e. subjects subjected to a symbolic castration that makes their unconscious inaccessible to them. As Jacques-Alain Miller put it, with these new media we have entered a universalized psychosis, since symbolic castration is now excluded.
A horizontally divided subject is thus replaced by a vertical (not even shared) parallelism, a juxtaposition of subjects and the externalized machine/digital unconscious: narcissistic subjects exchange messages via their digital avatars, in a flat digital medium in which simply no There is room for the “opaque monstrosity of the neighbor”.
The digital unconscious is “an unconscious without responsibility”
The Freudian unconscious implies responsibility, signaled by the paradox of intense guilt without us even knowing what we are guilty of. On the contrary, the digital unconscious is “an unconscious with no responsibilities, and that poses a threat to the social bond.” A subject is not existentially involved in its communication, since it is carried out by the AI and not by the subject himself.
“Just as we create an online avatar to connect with others and join online groups, couldn’t we similarly use AI personalities to take on risky functions when we get tired? Like bots being used to cheat in competitive online video games, or a driverless car navigating the critical journey to our destination? We just sit back and fire up our digital AI until it says something that is totally unacceptable. Then we tune in and say, ‘That wasn’t me! It was my AI.’”
For Freud, the dream is the royal road to the unconscious
Therefore, the AI ”offers no solution to the segregation and the basic isolation and antagonism that we still suffer from, because without responsibility there can be no post-givenness”. Rousselle introduced the term “post-givenness” to denote “the realm of ambiguity and linguistic uncertainty that allows an approach to the other in the realm of so-called non-reference. So it goes directly to the question of the impossibility of how we relate to the other. It is about dealing with the opaque monstrosity of our neighbor that can never be erased, even if we offer them the best conditions”.
This “neighbour’s opaque monstrosity” also affects us, for our unconscious is an opaque other at the heart of the subject, a jumble of filthy pleasures and obscenities. For Freud, the dream is the royal road to the unconscious, so the inability to consider the opaque monstrosity of the subject logically means the inability to dream.
The clownish characteristic of père-verse-ity (turning towards the father)
“We dream outside of ourselves today, and that’s why systems like ChatGPT and the Metaverse work by offering themselves the space that we lost because the old castrative models fell by the wayside.” With the digitized unconscious, we get a direct in(ter)vention of the unconscious – but then why are we not drawn from the unbearable closeness of the enjoyment (Enjoy) overwhelmed, as happens in psychotics?
Here I am tempted to disagree with Murphy and Rousselle when they focus on how with AI machines, “enjoyment can be deferred and denied: how we can create something utterly and horribly obscene and not take responsibility for it. The genius is in imitating the split subject in such a way that we can still say openly, ‘This isn’t mine’. The fun comes from being in denial of agency at this point: pointing at the AI and saying, ‘Look how idiotic it is’. The clownesque père-verse-ity (turning to father) feature of much online conservatism is precisely the need to resurrect the father. From Trump to various triumphalist, self-help lifestyle gurus, we see them functioning as prosthetic father figures. In these events we see attempts at a reactionary resurgence of the prosthetic phallic logic of ‘everything’ and an era of invention to sustain that logic. (…) By failing to manifest a castrating figure, there is now a direct invention of the unconscious without the paternal structuring point.”
The perverted return of the obscene father
So it is perversion (or père-version, “version of the father”, as Lacan puts it) and not psychotic isolation that characterizes the AI. The unconscious is not primarily the real of “jouissance” repressed by a castrating paternal figure, but symbolic castration itself in its most radical form, implying the castration of the paternal figure itself, the embodiment of the great Other – castration meaning that the Father as a person is never at the level of his symbolic function.
The perverse return of the obscene father (Trump in politics) is not the same as that of the psychotic paranoiac. Why actually? In the case of chatbots and other AI phenomena, we are dealing with a reverse rejection: it is not (to reiterate Lacan’s classic formula) that the excluded symbolic function (name-of-the-father) returns in the real (as the agent of the paranoid Hallucination); on the contrary, it is the real of the opaque monstrosity of the neighbor, the impossibility of reaching an impenetrable other, which returns in the symbolic, in the shape of the “free”, smoothly functioning space of digital exchange.
The unconscious is suppressed
Such reverse compartmentalization characterizes not psychosis but perversion — meaning that when a chatbot produces obscene stupidity, it’s not just that I can enjoy it responsibly because “it was the AI that did it.” , not me”. Rather, what happens is a form of perverse denial: knowing full well that the machine, not me, is doing the work, I can enjoy it as my own.
The most important feature to note here is that the perversion is far from an open display of the (hitherto repressed) unconscious: as Freud put it, the unconscious is nowhere so repressed, so inaccessible, as in a Perversion. Chatbots are machines of perversion, and they obfuscate the unconscious more than anything else: precisely because they allow us to spit out all our dirty fantasies and obscenities, they are more repressive than even the strictest forms of symbolic censorship.
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