It may irk rational thinkers to know that sometimes I wonder if I became obsessed with the word lamella merely because I liked the sound of it. I’m not sure that’s exactly true, but it crosses my mind from time to time. Mind you, I also like the sound of Aberystwyth, and I’ve not spent months asking an AI text-to-image generator to see what it can do with the concept of that Welsh town.
I often say that my relationship with creativity isn’t borne out of a desire to tell other people how to think or live (even if I wanted to do that, I hope there is enough humility and self awareness in me to know, I am the last person in the world to be doing such a thing). Rather, I embark on projects to learn, to discover, to understand. And when a topic or area is particularly difficult, merely reading about it might not be enough. Being difficult is also not a reason to avoid. There is a trend in contemporary culture to dismiss difficult texts or ideas. I sympathise with this response towards obscure, esoteric, academic texts, often written in language that can seem as if it deliberately sets out to repel. The gatekeeping habits of intellectuals, mostly men; historical class divisions between those who could access education and those held outside of it; twits with the best education money can buy failing, quite often, to be even remotely decent: these are all more than enough to make one respond with “it’s all bollocks!!” whenever we come across an idea that seems impenetrable. But look at where that has got us. Trump becoming president. People arguing that the earth is flat or dinosaurs never existed. Anti-vaxers threatening politicians with hanging while spreading excrement-like misinformation all over the internet. Thousands of angry voters in Brazil chanting, while holding mobile phones on their heads, hoping to attract visitors from out-of-space to save them from the ‘leftists’. No, I’m not sure rejecting ideas merely because they are difficult or written in a way that is frustrating or anger-inducing is doing us any favours.
While I’m still not entirely sure why I started focusing on lamella, I hope I’ll learn something. And entering into an area of research via this little word has taken me on a journey. What has lamella to do with this other peculiar thing, the death drive? And what is a death drive anyway? Where does it come from? Was it invented? Is it all made up? Is it, indeed, bollocks? I’m lucky enough to be on a course that looks at difficult texts, and which aims to take us students on a relatively brief but informative tour of difficult ideas. And it turns out that the divisive figure, Freud, despite his flaws, was ahead of his time. I recently realised he rejected dualism – i.e. that the body and the mind are two different systems, and he thought of the psyche-body in materialist terms. That’s enough for me to take him seriously, regardless of the misgivings one may have. Bodies are matter. And matter is sometimes inert and sometimes excitable. From another perspective, bodies, including human bodies, like all matter, are subject to the laws of physics. And physics is essentially a story about the flux between entropy and complexity; or inertness and excitability. The death drive doesn’t make us all behave like lemmings, which sometimes is how it’s construed. Rather, it is related to those opposing tensions between entropy and complexity that persist in all matter across the universe as we understand it.
And why on earth would I want to find out about that, you may ask. Because for the last few years I’ve been exploring what it means to be human in an increasingly technological world where inert objects such as our phones and computers are seemingly becoming more and more excitable. And lamella, this thing that Lacan conjured up, might be the key difference between human and AI subjectivity. AI subjectivities are not born and for now, do not experience the lamella concept at birth. They do not experience a loss of immortality, which relates to the death drive, to excitability, despite increasing cleverness. There is an argument to suggest they do not “experience” at all. An AI is unlikely to embark on a project because it enjoys the sound of a word. But what if the flux between inertia and excitability exists on a spectrum? What then? And where will we draw the line?
I asked Open AI’s ChatGPT what it thought? But it doesn’t think. For now. Instead, it scrapes information from the web and cleverly calculates averages, and sometimes responds with remarkably smart and accurate sounding re-configurations. Other times it spits out bollocks. Make what you will of its output below. But the more sophisticated it gets, the harder it will become to tell the difference between human output and AI output. And that’s where things will become difficult. I am not suggesting General AI or the Terminator is around the corner, even though plenty do. I don’t know what I’m suggesting, really. Only that the line between AI and humans keeps blurring. And as those lines blur, so do others. And so, more and more ethical questions arise. Nothing to be resolved in this post… just thoughts. But before I go, here’s a little ditty a friend sent me after he asked ChatGTP to write about Lamella, which is a little different from my own conversation!
Sonnet provided by Paul Lickman
A snippet of my own conversation with the AI:
Me: … the lamella concept might be, if we were looking through a Lacanian lens, a key difference between human and AI subjectivity?
AI: Yes, from a Lacanian perspective, the concept of the lamella could be seen as a key difference between human and AI subjectivity. According to Lacan, the entry of the subject into language and culture results in the formation of the symbolic order and the loss of the pre-linguistic enjoyment that exists in the lamella. For humans, this loss creates a fundamental split between the subject and its desire, leading to a constant striving to regain this lost enjoyment through various symbolic means, such as language, culture, [AI STOPS WORKING]
[AI STARTS AGAIN] AI: Yes, that is one interpretation that could be made based on Jacques Lacan’s work. According to Lacan, the entry of the subject into language and culture marks a separation from the pre-linguistic space of the lamella, and this separation is considered to be a key difference between human and AI subjectivity. In this view, humans are considered to be defined by their relationship to language and culture, while AI systems are seen as lacking this relationship and existing outside of the symbolic realm. This is just one of many possible interpretations of the relationship between AI and human subjectivity from a Lacanian perspective, and it is an area of ongoing debate and discussion within both AI ethics and psychoanalysis.
Images: From ongoing speculative project How to make a Lamella. Made by AI (RunwayML) based on a custom image generator using images from Zabriskie’s Obstetrics for Nurses 1960 and research around Lacan’s Lamella.