"Hegel in a wired brain" - what if we could read minds? | Seduction, jokes, pokes, sarcasm, lyrics and other quirks of language

 

 

            I recently finished reading Zizek’s 2020 book “Hegel in a wired brain” and I decided to write my thoughts about the subject manner in this post.

            The premise of the book is pretty simple: Elon musk and his friends are working on a project called “Neuralink” which would directly connect your brain to a machine that would allow for the immediate transfer of thoughts and subjective experiences to another human consciousness without the mediation of language. This means that we could both connect our brains to the Neuralink and we could both read our thoughts. Another implication is that I could directly share experiences with another person – the other person could potentially have access not only to “my thoughts” per se but to my entire experience of consciousness: I could experience something like a rollercoaster ride, a bungee-jump or a sexual encounter and another human consciousness could “live it” with me.

            In the book, Slavoj Zizek explores all the potential philosophical and psychological implications of the existence of such a device: what does this change about the way we view language, communication, sexuality, subjectivity, identity, consciousness and the unconscious?

            The main idea that caught my attention are the implications regarding the philosophy of language and communication (semiotics). The general formula is this: language is not only a medium of communicating idea, like the naïve everyday attitude would guide us to believe. In this naïve paradigm, “understanding” is the goal of communication and thus each signifier should be defined as clearly as possible because the only purpose of language is for it to act as a tool to transmit ideas from human to human. Under this understanding, I have an idea/image in my mind, and I am using language only to create an idea or image in your mind that is as similar as possible to mine. If you start from such assumptions, then Musk’s Neuralink is a net positive gain, since it avoids all the hurdles of miscommunication and eliminates the “language barrier”.

            However, things are not that simple. Language is not just a tool to “transfer ideas clearly”. There are certain peculiarities of language in which meaning is not found in the signified behind the signifier, but inside the signifying chain itself, for example, in wordplay. In those situations, the purpose of language is not “clear communication and understanding”, but more of an aesthetic goal – to produce an emotional effect through the relationships between the signifiers themselves. I have identified so far five situations in which this is the case:

1.     Flirting/seductive language

2.     Jokes

3.     “Poking”, i.e., “making fun of people”, trying to say stuff that sounds “cool” in a competition of insults, coming up with clever comebacks that would “burn” or “roast” the other person

4.     Sarcasm

5.     Lyrics (in either poetry or music)

What do all five of these modes of communication have in common? First off, they are self-censoring – they create an emotional response in the other person through the logic of implication or allusion, there is always something left unsaid, and the other person has to “get it”, and if you later explain the meaning behind your speech, it “loses its magic”. Second off, the emotional response is not to an idea that is express through words, but inside the relationships between the words/signifiers themselves. This is why I say that those five scenarios are, paradoxically, five types of “successful failures” of language – the failure to communicate a signified/image/idea itself becomes “not a bug, but a feature”. For example, take the simple example of a joke. Here is a joke from Chapter 3 of Alenka Zupancic’s book “What is sex?”:

 

A man comes home from an exhausting day at work, plops down on the couch in front of the television, and tells his wife: “Get me a beer before it starts.” The wife sighs and gets him a beer.

Fifteen minutes later, he says: “Get me another beer before it starts.” She looks cross, but fetches another beer and slams it down next to him. He finishes that beer and a few minutes later says: “Quick, get me another beer, it’s going to start any minute.” The wife is furious.

She yells at him: “Is that all you’re going to do tonight? Drink beer and sit in front of that TV? You’re nothing but a lazy, drunken, fat slob, and furthermore …”

The man sighs, and says: “It’s started …”

 

The emotional response of laugher is found not in an image or idea that is expressed through words, it is instead found in the very wordplay (in this case, double-meaning) inside language itself. The double-meaning of the signifier “It’s started…” is not a “thing-representation”, to use Freud’s language, but a collection of “word-representations”. Thus, the very thing that seems, on the surface level, to thwart “clear communication of ideas and mutual understanding” (double-meanings, ambiguous language, vaguely defined signifiers) is now the goal, not the obstacle. Hence why I call them “successful failures” of language.

Out of those five examples I listed, Zizek only talks in the book about the first one. He writes:

 

"What we find in human sexuality is the obverse of simplification which gives birth to a surplus: an unnecessary complication which prevents the direct access to a goal. Human sexuality comes in a variety of perverted forms and procedures which not only cannot be reduced to different ways to reach the same goal of procreation but often run directly against this goal. However, one should always bear in mind that this excessive diversity is set in motion by an underlying impossibility or antagonism. This is why, from the psychoanalytic standpoint, one thing is sure: what the shift to the post-human amounts to at its most fundamental is the overcoming (leaving behind) of the sexual in its most radical ontological dimension – not just “sexuality” as a specific sphere of human existence but the sexual as an antagonism, the bar of an impossibility, constitutive of being-human in its finitude."

 

In another part of the book, he writes this, confirming seduction to be what I call one of the “successful failures” of communication:

 

"Sexuality also provides the basic matrix of the dialectical reversal of failure into success. Since France is the land of love and seduction, no wonder French cuisine, the paradigm of high cuisine, works in this way: is the origin of many of its famous dishes or drinks not that, when they wanted to produce a standard piece of food or drink, something went wrong, but then they realized that this failure can be re-sold as success? They were making cheese in the usual way, but then the cheese got rotten and infected, smelling bad, and they found this monstrosity (measured by the usual standards) charming in its own way; they were making wine in the usual way when something went wrong with the fermentation, and so they began to produce champagne …

And is this not exactly how our (human) sexuality works? Something goes terribly wrong (measured by the standards of simple instinctual mating), but this failure is then endorsed and cultivated as the resource of new sexual pleasures. Can we imagine anything more stupid (from the standpoint of successful reproduction) than the tradition of courtly love in which the completion of the sexual act is endlessly postponed? So how could courtly love become the model of high eroticism? And what about our perverted games in which a particular object or gesture which should be constrained to a subordinated moment of erotic foreplay becomes the central feature, the focus of libidinal intensity which eclipses the big procreative Act? Is this dimension of erotic mediation not threatened by a direct brain-to-brain link?"

 

In another part of the book, he writes:

 

"Imagine a seduction scene between two subjects whose brains are wired so that the other’s train of thoughts is accessible to me: if my prospective partner can directly experience my intention, what remains of the intricacies of seduction games? Will the other not react with something like: “OK, I know you desperately want to fuck me, so why are you asking me all those stupid things about the movies I like and what I would like to have for dinner? Can’t you feel that I would never have sex with you?”"

 

It is clear that mind-reading would ruin flirting and that it would be impossible in the singularity of Elon Musk’s “Neuralink”. But I want to extend Zizek’s point and argue that there are many more things that would be impossible if we could read minds. Jokes would be impossible, and stand-up comedy would be impossible if the audience could read the comedian’s mind, since they function by the same principle – what makes a flirting remark “smooth” or what makes a joke “funny” is not an idea communicated through words, but the very “successful failure” of communication, the “clever” puns created through the precise (dis)placement of words and meaning. Sarcasm works in precisely the same way, in sarcasm not only do we communicate “indirectly”, through various hints and allusions towards a specific “pun” or wordplay, but we in fact even say the opposite of what we think. In all three of these scenarios, miscommunication is a goal, not the obstacle, but a very specific “clever” type of miscommunication.

It is the same for lyrics. If the sole purpose of language was understanding and clear communication, then this does not explain in any way why poetry and music exist in the first place, in which the author intentionally tries to obscure the meaning of their words for stylistic effect. In poetry, poets never directly say what they mean, and nor do rappers who intentionally focus on clever word play, “double-entendres”, various “hidden references” to movies and pop culture, etc.

Finally, miscommunication is also not a bug, but a feature of what I had called “poking” earlier, for lack of a better term. It is the equivalent of flirting but with hate instead of love, so it functions in extremely similar ways (remember Lacan’s statement that love and hate are not two sides of the same coin, but two opposite points on a Mobious strip): when you get in a heated argument with someone, and the discussion turns towards coming up with “clever” insults and comebacks towards the other person (ex: “You are so full of shit, the toilet’s jealous” -> “Yeah? Well too bad you can’t Photoshop your ugly personality!”), again, there is no substantial signified behind the signifiers, instead the emotional response is produced by the clever displacement of meaning inside the relations between the signifiers themselves.

To be clear, in all five of those examples, we are of course dealing with signifieds and words definitely do have meaning, but only individually, when taken out of context. In the examples of pokes above, or in the joke from Zupancic’s book about the angry wife, each word does have a meaning, but when you reach the end of the joke/poke/lyric/flirt/etc., the final meaning is self-referential, referring back to the signifiers used to communicate in the first place.

To describe this more rigorously, let us recall Lacan’s concept of “the quilting point” – the last signifier in a phrase that “holds meaning together”, retroactively changing the meaning of everything that came before. Consider the following two sentences:

 

“In a cold winter night, he was whispering in her ear while gently stroking her soft skin…”

vs.

“In a cold winter night, he was whispering in her ear while gently stroking her soft skin… with the edge of a knife”

 

            The last signifier in the last sentence, “with the edge of a knife”, is the quilting point, retroactively changing the meaning of all the words that came before. However, in both of those two sentences above, the purpose of language is still a clear communication and understanding. There is an actual image that is communicated in both sentences, with no clever wordplay or intentional miscommunication. Therefore, language in those examples still follows the “traditional” model of communication of “idea in my head -> language -> idea in your head”. Hence, the quilting point “fixes” meaning by altering the idea in your head produced by the words.

            What happens when the self-censoring language of allusion and implication is used in jokes, flirting, lyrics, sarcasm, and pokes? In there, the quilting point fixes meaning by referring back to the other signifiers and giving them “a twist”, so to speak. Hence, the model of communication is no longer “idea in my head -> language -> idea in your head” but something more akin to “language -> language -> language”. For instance, in Zupancic’s joke about the angry wife, the last reply “And so it starts…” is the quilting point of the joke (in jokes, all quilting points are called “punchlines”), and it functions just like any other quilting point: it makes us retroactively look back at all the other signifiers, twisting their meaning. However, what is communicated is not an idea or image in the interlocutor’s mind, but an “imperfection” or “gap” inside signification itself.

            To put it more simply: in the "classic" model of communicating ideas and images, there is an appearance/form, and the "meaning" of the message consists in finding the essence behind the appearance/form. Instead, in the "successful failures" of language, the meaning of the message is found in the appearance/form itself - there is no "hidden essence" behind the appearance, instead the essence is inside the appearance, the content is inside the form.

            Another interesting observation to make here is in regards to political correctness. Conservative critics of political correctness label it as a form of authoritarian censorship, but notice the irony: the targets of political correctness are way more often precisely those five scenarios I enumerated above, which are already self-censoring. “Offensive” humor is targeted, lyrics and art are censored, flirting is heavily policed with the fear that any moment it might turn into “verbal sexual harassment”, etc. What most critics miss is that political correctness is not a simple mode of censorship, like the way criticizing an authoritarian regime is censored (thus, blocking communication between two channels, putting an obstacle in the transfer of ideas). No, it is a censorship of the very aspects of communication that were already self-censoring. Hence, it is a censorship of censorship itself, and in a typical Hegelian fashion, we are not dealing here with a simple (“determinate”) negation, but the double-negation (“absolute negation”, for Hegel). Political correctness is, like I said in one of my previous posts, about taking the implicit unwritten rules of allusion and politeness and making them explicit, it’s about censoring the censorship itself, prohibiting the prohibition.

            To sum all this up, I think the conclusion is here: the “superpower ability” to read other people’s minds would be more of a living nightmare than anything else. What makes us human is the ability to be taken by surprise by others.