lacan – Absalom, Absalom!

Eschatological Conspiratorialism

What is crucial is less why someone believes than what that belief allows them to do

Matthias Gerung (1500–1570), Ottheinrich-Bibel, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, The Fifth and Sixth Trumpets, Revelation 9:1-12 (pg. 292)

Ask a nonbeliever to describe the QAnon conspiracy theory, and they almost immediately reach for metaphors of madness: batshit insane, fucking crazy, bonkers, etc. Bracketing the real question of stigma attached to these metaphors, the point the speakers are making is the great gap in perception between those who believe in the conspiracy and those who don’t. That which is hard to imagine, outside the bounds of normal mental contexts, is insane.

Put simply, extreme beliefs allow for the breaking of social norms.

For instance, it makes no sense that this very American conspiracy theory is going global:

The resilience of QAnon narratives after the election shows just how far and deep this made-in-America conspiracy has spread — and hints at its staying power around the globe.

Google Is Alive, It Has Eyes, and This Is What It Sees

Beautiful art by Samuel J Bland, digital collages composed from google image searches. Lacking intuition, the algorithm finds surreal patterns in mundane images. Mechanism in the articulation of a stuffed woodcock, the echo of a tiger from a fuzzy orange object in a plastic bag, these images percolate up through the digital froth of images and haunt these other, everyday objects, visual ghosts.

As I wrote before, when we imagine alternative/artificial intelligences, we tend to fixate on symbolic consciousness (i.e., the Turing Test) at the expense of what Lacan calls the imaginary, that layer of consciousness closer to animal ethology and the machinic. Consciousness emerges not just out of language, but out of a constant processing of images and environmental stimuli. Give the AI sense, then engage in a constant and distributed Turin reality-testing (Turin avec Freud), and see what emerges.

Source: Wired

Kevin Curtis’ Ripoff Report

Similar to the other piece of stereotaxis I published a few days ago, another scrap of speech:

About 4 hour into the job after I laid down the first coat of sealer, I became very thirsty. I was unable to exit the morgue due to floor finish not drying as fast as I had anticipated with the humidity level, so I opened the dor to a small refrigerator located to the right of the autopsy table. I assumed I might find some water or anything to drink as I was dehydrated.

What I discovered, changed my life forever! There were dismembered body parts & organs wrapped in plastic. A leg, an arm, a hand, a foot, hearts, lungs, tissue, eyes and even a severed human head! I guess I was in a state of shock when I rushed out of the morgue because a physician asked me “What’s wrong”?

I told him exactly what I had seen & asked him what they did with so many body parts? He looked very strange & did not answer me. Instead, wrote something down on a piece of paper. I suddenly became a prime “person of interest” where my every move was watched & video-taped.

I escorted a young radiology technician to the morgue as she did not believe me. When she saw the body parts and severed head, she could not believe it either. We told every single person in Radiology what was in the old upright refrigerator.

I immediately noticed a change in the atmosphere. Security guards were all of a sudden around me…walking behind me and I could hear video camera’s zooming in on me as I walked down the hallways that night. Security followed me to the time card machine that night for the first time in 14 months.

Here, the individual is confronted with a “fantasmatic anatomical fragmentation,” something shocking to him, the fragility and dissocited body, a moment where he “all of a sudden, mysteriously, God only knows why, becomes decompensated,” decomposed into a world that no longer makes sense (#, #).

And it cannot be just the body parts: we are in a morgue, after all, where the job is to dismember the occasional body. There is an immediate change, a paranoia that bears on everyone and everything, where the imperceptible (the noise of cameras zooming, security guards) begins to impinge upon and dissociate reality.

Though, unlike a law suit against a basketball player, one with a political direction, a man who sends ricin, a biological weapon, to senators and the president, with notes bearing witness to this fundamental experience: “No one wanted to listen to me before. There are still ‘Missing Pieces’" (#).

EDIT: Or, potentially, a sociopath mimicking such an enunciation (#), which only makes the circulation of these signifiers more intriguing, not less …

Kevin Curtis’ Ripoff Report

Saginaw man asks for FBI wiretap on NBA player, wills ‘laser proof cars’ to father

I collect scraps of speech like this, though I used to do it at my other tumblr, stereotaxis …

“I leave 25% for family apartments, houses, small mansions in the middle of the land in country with mountain ranges and cultured lands, home grown fruits, vegetables, fish (shrimps), meat, cigarettes, weed, cocaine, beer, liquor and wine, bullet and laser proof cars, trucks, buses, limousines, boats, yachts that goes on and in water, air plain (sic) with inside and outside parachutes and dance and gambling places as (sic) Atlanta all with laser security and security officers (2 woman to 1 man). I leave 10% for hospitals and chemistry labs to work on molecule, atoms, chromosomes, cell death acids, and oxygen on regeneration then I like to be laid to rest in a water chambers (sic) with flowers, TV, and radio.”

In his third Seminar, Lacan speaks of “the sense of the twilight of reality” that characterizes the speech of individuals in the midst of a particularly extreme psychic disturbance (#).

Often, we hear of these as they come to light in legal filings, appeals to the law for restitution of the social order against some corruption, and, often, fixated on a particular celebrity, a figure that looms larger that life in one’s mind.

He writes – sues for justice – as if he is already dead, and what we need is research into the infinite decomposition of the world: molecule, atoms, chromosomes, cell death acids, and oxygen.

Saginaw man asks for FBI wiretap on NBA player, wills ‘laser proof cars’ to father

“We Just Don’t Have That Many Substances”

Lydia Kerr, a friend and colleague of mine from the University at Buffalo, has an interesting article responding to Eliza Slavet’s essay on Freud and Jewishness at the Religion & Culture Web Forum of the University of Chicago’s Marty Center. Lydia has put a lot of thought into the question of race and psychoanalysis, and this brief response is a good illustration of her ability to concisely demonstrate the usefulness of psychoanalysis—particularly, Lacanian—for thinking race. She argues that in addition to extended substance (materiality, genetics, the body) and thinking substance (the immaterial* realm of ideas and social construction), we also need to add what Lacan called a third category—la substance jouissante—enjoying substance, or jouissance. Take a look.

*I am increasingly of the opinion that the category of the ‘immaterial’ is of diminishing utility, and that Lacanian psychoanalysis seems to be a fruitful point of departure.

Ian Hacking’s critique of the Theory-of-Mind-deficit theory of autism « What Sorts of People

Apropos fiatluxemburg on reverse gestalt psychology. Made me think…

Our culture almost always envisions AI emerging from an enunciative function, of learning to become self-aware (think, I, Robot or, inversely, Babel-17).

But, what if AI is much more likely to first become … complex, let us say … not based on the level of the symbolic (abstract and abstracted self-conception, language), but on the level of the imaginary (like birds reacting to breast plumage, or dogs reacting to smells or facial recognition), i.e., something automatic and environmental.

Avatars who can recognize anger and run, or happiness and approach. Then, for some crazy reason, like broken machines being used for something, by something, not in their programming, they learn to say “I” …

Ian Hacking’s critique of the Theory-of-Mind-deficit theory of autism « What Sorts of People