Decoding a "hidden meaning" behind a message is a form of surplus-enjoyment | The recent culture of "post-autism"

 

 

            In a recent article¹, I discussed five forms of communication that denote “successful failures” of language, in which miscommunication is not an obstacle but the goal, in the sense of a “clever”, specific type of miscommunication (ex: wordplay) – those five forms were flirting, poking (making fun of people, “roasting” them), jokes, lyrics, sarcasm. What all five of them have in common is self-censorship, something is left unsaid, alluded to, and the other person has to “get it”, and if you explain the meaning behind it, it (partially) “loses its magic”. The mode of communication in these cases is not your “classical semiotics” view of the signifier-signified relationship (idea in my head -> language -> idea in your head) but a self-referentiality of language itself (language -> language -> language).

In other words, the emotional response in the receiver of the message is not a response to an idea/image (“signified”) in the sender’s mind that is communicated through words, but is a response to the very relationship between the signifiers. The simplest example here is wordplay: the punchline of a joke has a double-meaning, a “pun” in an Eminem rap song has a clever double-meaning, etc. References are another example: “anti-jokes” are funny because of their relationship to other jokes, not to an image; a rap song can reference an old movie in a clever way; a flirting remark can create a sort-of “inside joke” between the two people, etc.

To put it more simply: all five of those modes of communication would be impossible if the sender and receiver could read each other’s thoughts, since language itself would disappear, and they would only have access to the signifieds without signifiers. But the “catch” in those successful failures of language is that the content is not “behind” but inside the form, the essence is not “under” or “behind” but inside the appearance. We are not dealing here with the classical paradigm of repression in Freudian psychoanalysis, in which there is a manifest content (what is being said on the surface) and a latent content (what it “actually means”), like we would deal in the case of a euphemism (ex: “Netflix and chill” being code for sex; “Grass” being code for marijuana, etc.), where the relationship between manifest and latent content is clear. In the five examples enumerated above, the latent content is inside the manifest content.

There is a cultural shift in the attitude towards interpretation and coded language in the past 8-12 years. In various areas of psychology, pop culture and politics, what was usually before-regarded as “autistic” (not understanding contextual cues, social unawareness, interpreting every social situation literally – in other words, not being able to decode a coded message) is now idealized as the “healthy” or “proper” form of social interaction; and the opposite (indirect communication, speaking in code) is regarded as unhealthy in various ways (Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy books having “mind-reading” as a cognitive distortion, for example). I have approached the problem of the normalization of autism in society in various past articles^{2, 3}, but in this article, I want to address the relationship between decoding and the psychoanalytic concept of “surplus-enjoyment”. I argue that the concept of explicitly explaining what a coded message means to the sender is never “just that”, it always comes with a surplus enjoyment in the very act of decoding itself. In other words, I speak to you indirectly, with implications, and then right after that, I explain to you what the implications of my speech were – the explanation itself has implications. Let us look at three examples:

 

I: SARCASM

 

Sarcasm is a form of indirect communication or “encrypted speech” because we do not directly say what we mean (we actually say the opposite) and the other person has to “get it”. There is a trend in internet culture to be sarcastic and then right after that explain that you were sarcastic with the use of a “tone indicator”⁴, in this case the infamous “/s”. If I add “/s” at the end of the sentence, it indicates that the previous sentence was sarcastic. In other words, I speak to you in code, and right after that I explain to you what the code means. On the surface-level, this may seem retroactively useless, if I’m just going to explain to you what my code means right after I use it, why bother speaking in code in the first place?

There is something deeper going on at play here. The explanation of the implications behind my speech itself has implications. If I am in real life, I am being sarcastic, and then right after that I explain to you the fact that I am sarcastic, this itself can be an indirect way of telling you “Oh, you’re the kind of person who doesn’t understand sarcasm, so you’re an idiot, it has to be explained to you…”, for instance. This is especially true the more obvious it is that I already was sarcastic, if I was so obviously sarcastic that everyone who is not an idiot could get it, and I still choose to explain the fact that I was sarcastic, I just called you an idiot.

This is how we must understand the “/s” in writing. The explanation of the fact that I’m sarcastic is never just that, it always comes with something “more”, what Lacan called surplus-enjoyment (“plus-de-jouir”⁵). The “/s” often actually adds an extra layer of sarcasm to my message. It is always a stylistic or aesthetic choice, its purpose is never to “just” explain whether your previous sentence was sarcastic or not, it adds an extra-layer of code, implications and indirectness. There is a difference between a sarcastic message which the receiver understands that it's sarcastic and a sarcastic message with “/s” at the end which the receiver also understands that it’s sarcastic. If the effect of the “/s” was just to explain or “decode” the sarcasm, then, in theory, it should have no effect in the cases where the receiver of the message would have understood anyway the sarcastic implications even if there was no “/s”. Yet, we see that even in the cases where the sarcasm is obvious, you add the “/s” and it changes the effect of the message (how it changes exactly depends on context).

Hence, what is presented as “subtracting” or “decreasing” from the “encryption” and “indirectness” of a message actually increases its level of encryption: we are in a cultural era of meta-irony, layers and layers of inside jokes and memes, and all sorts of weird and ‘twisted’ ways of being direct through being indirect, alluding or hinting towards something through being explicit, etc. Let us now look at two more examples of this:

 

II: LYRICS

 

Lyrics are yet another example of encrypted speech: rappers, poets and other writers intentionally obfuscate the meaning of their lyrics through various metaphors, metonymies, double-entendres, inside jokes and references to older pieces of art and other forms of wordplay. The purpose of the literary critic is often thought to be as a “decoder” of the “hidden meaning” behind the lyrics – and literary criticism has went through multiple phases regarding the stance that the critic should go through. Roland Barthes revolutionized literary criticism with his 1967 essay “Death of the author” in which he argued that what the author behind the lyrics intended to say is not relevant, that there could be implications and hidden meanings behind those words that even the author themselves is not aware of, etc.

In the past decade, we are going through another weird cultural shift in regards to the meaning behind song lyrics in which the death of the author takes a different form. On the superficial, manifest “surface-level”, it seems that we have ignored Barthes and we are going back to trying to figure what the author “tried to say”, but if you decipher what is “really going on” here, the death of the author is still here – with the author alive. What I am trying to say is that the cultural shift that is going on here is more akin to “the suicide of the author” – the author of the lyrics themselves is invited to explain the meaning behind their lyrics. Let me show you two examples:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tk_QSe1gnDQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBRSbnUlGIk

There is a catch here. Just like the explanation of the fact that you’re sarcastic is never “just that”, in that same way the explanation behind the lyrics is never “just” the explanation. The song itself is a form of artistic expression, but what we notice in videos like above is that the explanation behind the artistic expression is itself a form of artistic expression. The author speaks indirectly, in “code” when they write the song, and when they “decode” the meaning behind their own speech, they add another layer of code, such that it is now necessary to try to decipher or “decode” the videos in which they explain the meaning behind the lyrics. This is due to the fact that they always do more than “just explain” what the lyrics mean in a logical, cold or rational way: they always add stuff related to the context in which they wrote the song, the life-situation, their personal problems, how they came up with the lyrics, etc.

The algorithm goes like this:

1.     In the first stage, the author builds an imaginary persona by writing their song/poem. The lyrics are sung by a character (the rapper or lead singer of the band), that character is not exactly the same as the real person.

2.     In the second stage, the singer goes on Genius and “decodes” or “deconstructs” the persona they created in the song, explaining the “hidden meaning” behind the lyrics, what lies “behind the mask”.

3.     The end-result is that the very act of deconstructing the persona creates a new persona. By “killing” (decoding) their stage persona, the author invents a new persona.

In Roland Barthe’s terms, we could say that the death of the author is still there, but it has evolved to a stage in which we would be better off calling in the suicide of the author – the author “kills themselves”, and through this very act of metaphorical suicide, a new character is born. What would be the most ironical, “meta” or “post-post-modern” shift in our culture right now would be if there would appear a discipline of literary criticism which would try to “decode” or “decipher” those genius videos in which authors explain their lyrics… For example, what if someone made a website called “Genius 2” in which people try to analyze the hidden meaning behind the videos in which rappers explain the hidden meaning behind their songs?

 

III: CONSENT AND POLITICALLY CORRECT SEX

 

The cliché scenario of a man not being able to understand the “code” in which a woman speaks in is so cliché that we may as well call it “archetypal” right now, archetypal in the Jungian “collective unconscious” sense even. The “algorithm” of a sexual invitation or expression of romantic interest being expressed in “code” (hints, euphemisms, allusions, etc.) itself goes through various twisted deconstructions in the cultural shift in the past decade.

I would trace its historical development like this (albeit, what follows is an oversimplification for the sake of brevity): first, it was commonly accepted that interpretation was a “healthy” skill and if you weren’t able to understand hints, unwritten rules of politeness, contextual cues, and you interpreted everything literally then it was “pathological” (in the extreme cases, you were diagnosed with an autism-spectrum disorder; but other disorders also had symptoms related to breaking social norms and unwritten rules of interaction, like schizophrenia). This ultimately lead to a deadlock, because if we accept interpretation, then anyone can come up with their own shitty interpretation. This was the rise of what we usually call “rape culture”⁶ which entered the mainstream around, say, 2012: if men are supposed to decipher the code of women, then what prevents men from coming up with a shitty interpretation? This led to ways of thinking such as “if a woman dresses revealingly, she’s asking to be raped”, “if she says no, that is code for yes”, etc.

A few years later, political correctness came as a reaction against rape culture. The idea behind political correctness is that interpretation can be abused in certain cases so we shall get rid of interpretation altogether. Political correctness is inherently “post-autistic” in the sense of taking unwritten rules of social interaction and making them “explicit”³ – political correctness does not get rid of “coding and decoding”, instead it provides a new set of code (ex: euphemistic language⁷) but also provides everyone else with the key to deciphering that code.

Such is the case, for example, in the discussion regarding consent and sexual harassment, #MeToo, etc. Various models of consent have been proposed and discarded over the years: “no means no” turned into “yes means yes”, etc. From the standpoint of semiotics and psychoanalysis we shall look beyond the surface-level interpretation of communication as a simple 1-to-1 transfer of ideas between people and ask ourselves, again, what is the surplus-enjoyment hidden in the act of coding and decoding a message (just like with sarcasm and tone indicators).

Here, we shall bring the dimension of desire into play. I argue that the “sex positive” American liberal attitude (“woke”, or whatever you want to call it) is fine with sex as long as you remove desire from it. By desire I mean desire in this strict psychoanalytic sense, the chaotic inner kernel of human being that alienates it from himself: the desire for desire, the desire to be desired, the masochistic desire for the very prohibition of what is desired, the desire of transgression (you want to do something only if it’s not allowed), etc. Desire is by nature chaotic and impossible to “pin down” or “tame”⁸ – what “woke” social progressives are bothered by usually is the “desire” part of “sexual desire”: that impulsive, spontaneous, unpredictable and uncertain kernel of sexuality.

Hence, just like with sarcasm and other forms of communication previously discussed in other articles of mine, sexuality itself is taking a “post-autistic” form: the more ‘woke’ a person is politically, the more likely they are to idealize a form of what we usually tended to call “autistic speech” (interpreting a social situation literally, saying everything explicitly, etc.). For the more moderate types, sex shall be “planned out in advance”, they call this “setting healthy boundaries” (before the sexual act, the two partners should discuss in advance what they shall do, this is for the sake of “explicit, informed consent”). The more radical types would even suggest writing it down and signing it (the infamous “consent form” that has been the subject of public ridicule throughout the years). This is sex without spontaneity and unpredictability, in other words, sexual desire without desire. Sex turns into a “tamed down”, tightly-controlled, mechanistic or ‘robotic’ act. The only morality is the morality of the contract (as is the case of the morality of “economic libertarianism” which fetishizes consent and contracts between employer and employee, so did this so-called “social libertarianism” turn into a fetishization of verbal or written contracts in the social world).

The more “centrist” or conservative types have criticized this view of sex as mechanistic and robotic (rightly-so), but one can’t help but notice that if you go into the other extreme of Christian conservatism, one sees the same tendency: rigidly planned-out in advance sex without desire (sex is only for marriage, only in the missionary position, at certain hours with the lights off, etc.). The only difference is that hardcore religious conservatives replace the “social contract” of explicit consent with what in Lacanese we may call the “law of the big Other” (ex: God).

So, what is the surplus-enjoyment here? One can’t help but be reminded of how Jacques Lacan explained satisfaction in his eleventh seminar: “For the moment, I am not fucking, I am talking to you. Well! I can have exactly the same satisfaction as if I were fucking”⁹. Speech and sexuality intersect more than it is apparent. We shall not make the binary distinction between “sex” and “talking about sex” as if the two can have any chance of remaining separate. Just as the very act of communication about sex can itself be “sexualized”, so can the very act of having sex be a form of communication (“communicatized”, to invent a word). In other words: talking about sex brings more sexual enjoyment than the very act of having sex, and the very act of having sex communicates more than a thousand words.

Sex itself, in the physical sense of rubbing two bodies together, communicates more than every word – sex is not just a signified, but also a signifier since it points to something else. For example: if I have sex, then this can “signify” certain things in my mind – I am “alpha”, I am high-status, I managed to convince the coolest girl in school to have sex with me so I am an important person, a “chad”, my self-esteem increases, etc. Just like that, the very act of being sexually assaulted or raped is never just the physical pain of the act, but always signifies a higher meaning, resulting in another “surplus” form of suffering (“My boundaries are broken, I am worth nothing, I am just an object with no agency”, etc.). Just like that, so is the very act of talking about sex itself a form of sexual enjoyment for the very same reasons.

Now, from this perspective, let us now take a look at the politically correct “post-autistic” form of sex: after the foreplay but before taking our clothes off, I “pause” everything and I tell the other person to bring in a pen and a piece of paper because we will write down everything that we will do before-hand. Here she writes down everything that she will do to me in great detail, and we both sign the paper. The conservative critics who say that this “ruins the mood” are only partially right – the very act of ruining (“deconstructing”, “decoding”) the sexual game is itself a creation of a new game (just like rappers and singers deconstructing their artistic persona itself creates a new persona). In other words, the “consent form” (or even in the case of a purely “verbal” contract, “healthy boundaries” or whatever they call them now) is part of the game/foreplay itself.

In the moment where I manage to convince a person that I desire and value and regard as high-status to do all of those sexual things to me, my self-esteem increases, I think of myself as high-status, “alpha”, whatever. That is the real form of enjoyment: not just the physical rubbing of two people together, but the abstract concepts that the sexual act itself signifies. The moment where the other person signs a paper promising to do all those sexual things to me, it means I am desired, I am loved, I already mentally “got off” on them even if I didn’t “get off” physically yet. That is 90% of the enjoyment already gone from the very first moment. After signing the paper, actually doing it is just a chore, more of a thing of maintenance, something done only to retroactively make sense of the consent form. So, after we sign the paper, I might as well go home: the sexual act is done through the very act of convincing another person to have sex with me, I psychologically got off on them, why waste time actually doing it?

 

IV: CONCLUSIONS

 

Notice that I prefer to call the recent cultural shifts in political correctness, tone indicators, etc. as “post-autistic”. Why “post”? This is because the autistic or “literal” / “explicit” speech is only a masquerade, a façade to hide the fact that the act of communication is more coded than ever before. Think, for example, of how a person with diagnosed autism actually strives in this new environment? This form of “explaining” what a code means (a sarcastic retort, the meaning behind the lyric, a sexual invitation, etc.) right after using the code only adds an extra layer of code and indirectness to it (“surplus-enjoyment”). Hence, an actual autistic person would be fooled that now they can better understand social cues, when in fact, it is the opposite: we have added an extra layer of social contextual cues and indirect speech to everything we say under the mask of removing them. Internet culture, meme culture, politically correct euphemisms and so on require more social skills and social awareness than ever before: there are layers upon layers of irony and meta-irony, years upon years of inside jokes hidden in "memes" and so on. It reached a “post-post-modern” level of meta-irony that the very explanation of the hidden meaning behind a code is itself a code to be deciphered. This is “post-autistic”.

 

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1: "HEGEL IN A WIRED BRAIN" - WHAT IF WE COULD READ MINDS? | SEDUCTION, JOKES, POKES, SARCASM, LYRICS AND OTHER QUIRKS OF LANGUAGE; https://lastreviotheory.blogspot.com/2023/04/hegel-in-wired-brain-what-if-we-could.html

2: THE POLITICIZATION OF SEXUALITY - THE VOICE, THE GAZE, AUTISM AND CONSENT; https://lastreviotheory.blogspot.com/2023/02/the-politicization-of-sexuality-voice.html

3: POLITICAL CORRECTNESS AS "POLITENESS WITHOUT POLITENESS", THE INTERNET AS THE REALITY OF FICTION AND THE ANTI-RESISTANCE ATTITUDE; https://lastreviotheory.blogspot.com/2023/03/political-correctness-as-politeness.html

4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_indicator

5: https://nosubject.com/Jouissance#Plus-de_jouir

6: Loosely associated with 4chan and the rise of the alt-right, see: Angela Neagle’s book “Kill All Normies”

7: See: George Carlin’s legendary stand-up comedy on “soft language” - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o25I2fzFGoY

8: See Lacan’s concept of ‘objet petit a’ or “the object-cause of desire”: https://lastreviotheory.blogspot.com/2023/04/objet-petit-is-concrete-universal.html

9: Jacques Lacan, “Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts Of Psychoanalysis”