Why Thought is Indirect Towards Itself - On Artificial Intelligence and Low-Context Cultures

 

            What is indirectness? The Oxford Learner’s Dictionary defines it as “a method of avoiding talking or writing about somebody/something in a clear and obvious way”¹. Vocabulary.com defines it as “having the characteristic of lacking a true course toward a goal”². Indirect communication is often associated with the need for the interpretation of the “hidden meaning” behind the code, and is associated with hints, euphemisms, encrypted speech, allusion, censorship and contextual cues. This is contrasted with direct communication, associated with speed, clarity, understanding, etc.

            A first question arises here, whether the quality of a message being direct or indirect is an objective and absolute state of affairs, or something relative, and if it’s the latter, relative to what?

            One possibility is that whether a message falls into the category of direct communication or indirect communication is relative to our perspective. This is a radical statement since it implies that a simple change of perspective can turn a message into a direct or an indirect statement, thus the very dichotomy of directness/indirectness being an illusion in our minds, a filter through which we perceive reality. Yet, one can easily argue in favor of this argument if we use the latter definition from vocabulary.com – if an indirect approach towards a goal does not go “straight from A to B”, but instead, uses detours, then the quality of a method being direct or indirect is relative to the goal. Hence this leads to the further teleological question – who decides the goal? Is the goal-post fixed from the very start, that is, does each message necessarily include a goal, is it automatically implied, or can we switch the goalpost in our own minds?

            I would argue rather for the relativism of the latter approach. Consider a limit scenario: I want to ask for a favor from my friend, but I consider that it’s very likely for him to reject it, but since it’s very important for me, I spend a few days catching up to him, asking him about his day, etc. Then, one day in the morning, I strike up a new conversation with him and immediately in the beginning of the conversation I ask for my favor instead of beating around the bush. He will likely praise me for being so “direct” or “upfront” about what I wanted, yet, little does he know that I wanted that thing for almost a week already, in my mind, me thinking of what I am doing in quite the opposite terms – an indirect approach.

            This leads us to believe that this division is a matter of perspective, what we call a ‘direct’ approach is simply an indirect approach where we redefined the start and or the end of that approach such as to make it seem shorter. If we add in the dimension of the unconscious, we might even say that a person who is direct is simply a person who is indirect without realizing. This is why I argued in a chapter of my previous book, that “The first move is a myth”³ – objectively it is easier to speak of causality than intentionality: a myriad of different actions have a causal effect upon the end-state of affairs, and it is a convention to decide which one of the “moves” was the first, ‘officially’, recognized by the big Other. All the actions before the “first” move in a courtship ritual may as well have an ignored causal effect towards the relationship, so we might as well talk about the zero-th move, the -1, the -2, the -3…

            But if we take the psychoanalytic route, assuming that people have an unconscious, then what stops us from pushing this point even further and say that the mind itself is not fully transparent to itself, that our own spirit is indirect towards itself? In his (in)famous essay “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious”, Jacques Lacan inverts Rene Decartes’ famous formula “I think therefore I am” into “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think”. Lacan writes: “Of course, this limits me to being there in my being only in so far as I think that I am in my thought; just how far I actually think this concerns only myself and if I say it, interests no one. (...) It is not a question of knowing whether I speak of myself in a way that conforms to what I am, but rather of knowing whether I am the same as that of which I speak. (...) What one ought to say is: I am not wherever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think.”⁴.

            That is to say, Decartes’ more or less circular reasoning does not account for a proper transcendental philosophy, the question of where the thoughts come in the first place. If I exist only by virtue of having thoughts, then who is putting those thoughts in my head? There are two possibilities here: in the first possibility, I am the one controlling my thoughts, the word “I” here reflects whoever is the central-controlling agency deciding what thoughts appear in my head and what thoughts don’t. In this case, I clearly am not simply by virtue of thinking, since I am not identified with the thoughts themselves, but with their source. In the second possibility, the essence of the “I” is identified with the locus of those thoughts themselves, in which case, I am fully determined by that source of the thoughts themselves. This is the split between conscious and unconscious here. The ego is not the master in its own house – I do not “am” because I think, because it is not me who is doing the thinking, I am merely the receiver of my unconscious, automatic thoughts. I can definitely control the fate of thoughts through reason, yet this intentionality over my own mind fails to place the subject at the proper place of the agency, since we have still not discovered those active forces which determined me to control my thoughts in that particular way out of all, hence leading to the infinite regress first discovered by Kant and then later developed by all post-Kantian philosophy.

            In the introduction to the third volume of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences (also known as the “Philosophy of Mind”), Hegel says of mind/spirit (‘Geist’) that it “is not an inert entity but is rather what is absolutely restless, pure activity, the negating or the ideality of every fixed determination of the intellect,- not abstractly simple but, in its simplicity, at the same time a distinguishing-of-itself-from-itself”⁵. Hence, we are dealing here in many ways with the opposite of Ficthe’s tautological self-positing “I = I”, if there is a point that Hegel is making is that one is truly oneself by virtue of not fully being oneself, the subjectivity is found in the very failure to completely actualize one’s identity, hence “I =/= I”. That is to say, mind is “the negating of every fixed determination of the intellect”, since it is not a fixed, stable state of affairs, but a constantly changing and evolving state of affairs, hence not determined as one particular thing out of many, but the constant “distinguishing of itself from itself”. Mind is whatever is not fully itself, yet also the very source of this distinguishing, the perpetually self-negating second-order cybernetic system.

            This is why the Hegelian dialectic is about how things hide their own opposites inscribed within them. It is not “thesis-antithesis-synthesis”, as Ficthe described it. There is no synthesis, with each sublation (“aufheben”), the already-existing contradictions become more and more visible: each identity already was a ticking time-bomb existing just to lead to its own inevitable self-destruction. There is also not really an “anti-thesis” in the Platonic sense of an opposite coming from outside, the antithesis, if we can even speak of one, already existed inside the thesis in its very conception, yet not in actuality, only in “virtuality”, to use a Deleuzian term. This is why everyday language does not reflect the binary Aristotelian logic which teaches us that every contradiction is an objectively false statement. In our day-to-day speech, we often use metaphorical phrases like “I am not myself today”. In those precise moments in which “I am not myself”, that is the first negation, only in those moments I can fully understand the reasons why I was whatever I thought I was previously, in those very failures to actualize my full identity. And in the second negation, the negation of this negation, I can be reborn under what I already-was-before when I “was myself” but in a more, “fuller”, actual form.

            This is the fundamental problem with artificial intelligence and cloning. We already have many examples of AI being used to emulate the styles of singers like Drake⁶, Kanye West⁷, etc. The real question is not whether AI can evolve so much such as to imitate a real-life person to the point in which the two are indistinguishable. The real question is whether AI can evolve to imitate someone such as to be “more-than-themselves”, to emulate their spirit, not their letter. Can an AI emulate Drake’s musical style such as to be “more Drake than Drake himself”. Drake, as a human, can still have moments where he can be justified in saying “I am not myself today”, can AI then be ‘more than someone’? Deleuze knew this perfectly well, that each time we repeat an act, it is never the same as the initial – the eternal return is the eternal return of difference. This is the difference between generality and repetition. As Deleuze says himself:

 

“If exchange is the criterion of generality, theft and gift are those of repetition. There is, therefore, an economic difference between the two. To repeat is to behave in a certain manner, but in relation to something unique or singular which has no equal or equivalent. And perhaps this repetition at the level of external conduct echoes, for its own part, a more secret vibration which animates it, a more profound, internal repetition within the singular. This is the apparent paradox of festivals: they repeat an 'unrepeatable'. They do not add a second and a third time to the first, but carry the first time to the 'nth' power.”⁸

 

This is why, in philosophy, we can speak of someone being “more Hegelian than Hegel himself”, or “more Lacanian than Lacan himself”, etc. A true repetition has to abandon the letter of a philosopher’s thought to stay true to his spirit: “one can only truly betray an author by way of repeating him, by way of remaining faithful to the core of his thought”⁹. Hence, in regards to Artificial Intelligence, ethical concerns arise in the true repetition of someone’s spirit – can AI evolve such as to make an “AI Ouija Board” in which I can input into it conversations I had with a dead relative and then have the AI emulate their personality such as to be “more of” what they ever were? More Hegelian than Hegel himself, more grandfather than my actual grandfather, etc.

This is, then, why “indirectness” is a false category – only by virtue of the human spirit having an indirect relationship to its very own self can true subjectivity emerge, by this split between spirit and letter, between virtuality and actuality. Humans, unlike animals, have the privilege of saying “I am not myself today”.

This view of indirectness as a matter of perspective is more evident in ambiguous social situations. An ambiguous message can be interpreted in at least two ways, and whether one choice is more “objectively correct” than the other is a matter of great debate. That is, we are dealing here with at least two possibilities:

1.     An ambiguous signifier of a non-ambiguous signified: I have a clear image in my head of what I want to say but I say it in a very vague, unclear manner

2.     A non-ambiguous signifier of an ambiguous signified: I don’t even know myself exactly what I am talking about, hence expressing this very indirectness of my own thought towards itself in a direct and “transparent” way

Consider a typical game of seduction: when I communicate ‘indirectly’, and I say something ambiguous that may or may not be interpreted by the other as a sign of romantic interest, the indeterminacy of my own intent may be more real than the “hidden message” behind my words themselves. That is, there is nothing behind the mask, maybe I don’t even know myself whether I like them or not, and by being vague about what I mean, I am paradoxically direct about my state of uncertainty about my own feelings. There is the letter of what I say (the signifier), and the spirit of what I say (what I “mean”), and the very difference/gap between the two is part of the spirit: spirit is only spirit by virtue of not fully being itself.

This is also why Zizek insists that the gap that separates us from God, in Christianity, is part of that very same God¹⁰: when Christ died on the cross, he temporarily became an atheist (“God why have you forsaken me?”), hence the true question of theology is not whether God exists or not, but whether God knows that he exists. Atheism, quite paradoxically, is part of Christianity itself: this very impossibility to know God’s true nature is God itself.

            In an interview with Jacques Lacan from 1957, Lacan says: “I don’t ask myself “who speaks?”; I try to pose the question in a different way, in a more precisely formulated way. I ask “From where does it speak?””¹¹. In the psychoanalytic setting, when the patient lies on the couch and free associates, they are attempting to be fully ‘transparent’, saying whatever comes to mind without any filter or censorship. We could say that, under the colloquial view, they are being “direct”: there is no filter, we can finally see who the person truly is ‘behind the mask’. They are “psychologically naked”, so to speak. The irony is that even when they are fully psychologically naked, there is still decoding to be done, there is still something to interpret. This is where true interpretation begins, actually. The real question here, as Lacan says, is not where we place this “I” of subjectivity (“Who speaks?”), but what are the determining forces that transcend the cognitive experience of the subject itself (“From where does it speak?”): what unconscious force determined me to say whatever I accidentally said (like in a Freudian slip, for example)? The paradox of directness (or ‘transparency’) is that by free associating on my analyst’s couch, I talk without thinking and, thus, I lose all intentionality. To intentionally say one thing or another, to speak with free will, I must censor myself, since the “I” that chooses my actions is that very self-restricting force that chooses between multiple answers (“self-control”). In a situation where I am fully direct, I also lose subjectivity, since I have no self-control, I let loose and thus, I let go of intentionality. When someone is being “indirect” in language, we often start to worry about what their true intentions are, but when we truly see them ‘naked’, peeking at what is behind the mask, we lose intention itself. Slavoj Zizek explains this perfectly well here:

 

“The key formula of semblance was proposed by J‐A. Miller: semblance is a mask (veil) of nothing. This brings us back to the anecdote, repeatedly evoked by Lacan and mentioned above, about Zeuxis and Parrhasius, two painters from Ancient Greece, who compete to determine who can paint the more convincing illusion. Zeuxis produced such a realistic picture of grapes that birds tried to eat them. But Parrhasius won by painting a curtain on the wall of his room so realistic that Zeuxis asked him to draw it back so that he could see the painting behind it. In Zeuxis’s painting, the illusion was so convincing that the image was mistaken for the real thing; in Parrhasius’s painting, the illusion resided in the very notion that what the viewer saw in front of him was just a veil covering up the hidden truth.

This is also how, for Lacan, feminine masquerade works: the woman wears a mask in order to make us react like Zeuxis in front of Parrhasius’s painting—OK, now take off the mask and show us what you really are!”¹²

 

            If spirit is whatever escapes all static determination, constantly “distinguishing-itself-from-itself”, like Hegel says, if our very mind is indirect towards itself, then we can return back to the topic of artificial intelligence. Byung-Chul Han makes a distinction between calculation and thinking. Calculation is direct, it goes straight from A to B, and it can be reproduced by a computer. True human thinking is about detours, waiting, contrast, difference and abrupt, unpredictable interruptions:

 

“There is no such thing as data-driven thinking. Only calculation is data driven. The negativity of the incalculable is inscribed in thinking. As such, it is prior and superordinate to “data,” which means “things given.” Indeed, for thought, negativity is preexisting and prescribed. It transcends the positivity of given facts and makes them suddenly appear in a new light.

Data-based, positive science (“Google science”), which amounts to merely balancing out and comparing data, is putting an end to theory of the emphatic sort. It is additive or detective—not narrative or hermeneutic. No narrative tension animates it. As such, it falls apart into mere information. In view of the pullulating mass of information and data, theories are now more necessary than ever. Theories keep things from running together and sprawling. That is, they reduce entropy.

Theory clarifies the world before it elucidates it. Massive information massively heightens the entropy of the world; it raises the level of noise. Thinking demands calm. Thinking is an expedition into quietness. Philosophy is the translation of eros into logos.”¹³

 

            This is why artificial intelligence will never replace psychodynamic and humanist therapists, since therapies like psychoanalysis or person-centered therapy are centered on thinking. Psychoanalysis, for example, is a venture into mystery. It does not go straight from A to B, it is dialectical and has many surprises, sharp contrasts and differences, abrupt and unexpected twists of events. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, or Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy, something radically new is created, not something simply superficially different, but something so new that it could have not even been imagined or comprehended under the previous system of thought. This radical alterity is what Socrates called “atopos”: it is an event that is not only different from everything that came before, but also different from all the ways in which the previous events were different. It is “meta-different”.

            On the other hand, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT), especially the “manualized” kind, rests more on calculation than thinking. It treats the human subject like a robot: if you are in a bad mood, it is caused by an “incorrect” thought, and the therapist knows better than you how to think in an objectively-correct way. Your logical errors and cognitive distortions need to be corrected in order for you to think “properly” again, just like a piece of programming code needs to be debugged for us to find the logical error in the steps of the algorithm. For CBT, the human brain is like a machine that we need to fix, and your train of thought is a computer program. This is why CBT therapists might actually be partially replaced by artificial intelligence. An AI can be trained to identify logical errors and cognitive distortions.

            This is why I say that not only AI is becoming more and more “human-like”, but that humans themselves are becoming more and more “AI-like”. The sphere of dating and relationship advice has subtly turned lately more and more into a view of human subjectivity similar to CBT: the two people in a relationship are like robots, communication is a simple ‘transparent’ transfer of information and the two people must communicate clearly in order to avoid misunderstanding. Only the message is important, not for it to sound aesthetically pleasant. We could say, with a little exaggeration, that the world is becoming less and less erotic and more and more pornographic. Values such as speed, transparency, communication, functionality, clarity, smoothness, identity and presence (i.e.: pornography) are prioritized over values such as absence, ambiguity, silence, waiting, difference, contrast and aesthetics (i.e.: eros). “Therapy-speak” is one caricature of this:

 

“I’m in a place where I’m trying to honor my needs and act in alignment with what feels right within the scope of my life, and I’m afraid our friendship doesn’t seem to fit in that framework,” the friend wrote. “I can no longer hold the emotional space you’ve wanted me to, and think the support you need is beyond the scope of what I can offer.”¹⁴

 

            It should go without saying that this feels generated by Chat-GPT. Robotic, lifeless, soulless, no pulse left in it. The recent trend in “political correctness” is also another example of HR-speak that may as well be AI-generated. By turning the unwritten rules of politeness into the written rules of political correctness, a twist happens – we know very well that decoding the ‘hidden meaning’ behind a message is itself a code. A typical example I always give: sarcasm. Let’s say that I’m sarcastic. But let’s say that right after I say something sarcastic, I explain to you the fact that I was sarcastic. In many contexts, this can be an indirect way of calling you an idiot (“You’re the kind of person that does not understand sarcasm, so it needs to be explained to you…”). The general formula is this: I talk to you with implications, I explain the implications behind my speech, and this very explanation itself has more implications. That’s why the “/s” we add online is never just an explanation of your intent, in many ways it actually adds an extra-layer of sarcasm. Hence why full transparency is impossible¹⁵, and there is no such thing as complete “directness” in communication – there is always subtext, even subtext that the sender of the message themselves is not aware of. Not being able to know what I mean by what I say is not a paradox, since we are actually dealing here with four categories: what I mean by what I say, what you mean by what you say, what I mean by what you say and what you mean by what I say. The latter two are characteristic of Lacanian perversion: “I say something, and you tell me what it means to you / You say something, and I tell you what it means to me” – hence why I have the key to deciphering your message (“I know you better than you know yourself”) and you have the key to deciphering my message (“You know me better than I know myself”).

            This is also why there is no such thing as a “low-context culture”. Edward T. Hall introduced the concept of high context and low context cultures in order to separate human cultures in terms of communication. High-context cultures are marked by indirect communication, non-verbal contextual cues, collectivism and a difficulty to enter them. Low-context cultures are marked by individualism, direct, explicit communication of information and an ease of entrance¹⁶. Yet, in this very decoding at the core of “low-context cultures” there is more subtext than ever before.

Consider America, which is largely considered to be a low-context culture: what I noticed must be introduced in order to grasp the discourses at the core of American culture is a difference between what Americans actually do, and how they tend to talk about what they do, the difference between how they actually talk, and how they talk about how they talk. There is a gap between discourse and meta-discourse. At the level of the latter “meta-discourse”, many American expressions are characterized by what I previously called “obsessional neurosis”, which may be conflated with “low-context”: a tendency of rigid planning and organization, classification and categorization – everything must be labelled and put ‘in its proper place’ (think of a person with either OCD or OCPD, as a metaphor/analogy). But this doesn’t necessarily mean that it applies to the former “base-level” discourse: if Americans largely tend to talk about what they do as if they were all obsessional neurotics, that doesn’t mean they actually are. The “as if” is very important here. Take a random stupid example such as this: Americans often say how someone is “being bullied for something”? Everyone who is bullied is being bullied for something specific. They almost talk as if the bully rigidly planned-out in advance, in an “obsessionally neurotic” way, the very act of bullying. In the middle of the fight: the bully stops everything and explicitly explains to everyone why they are bullying you. Everything is rigidly organized, classified and put in its proper category: this kid is being bullied for being fat, this one for wearing glasses, etc. Like the villains in those superhero movies, the bully, before executing his diabolic plan, explains it to the viewer of the movie.

I can only imagine that the reality is not as exaggerated as this, but an everyday expression such as “being bullied for something” gives one the impression that it could be. It’s the same with popular myths and expressions like ‘the third-date rule’, etc. – no one takes them seriously at an individual level, and yet they somehow still function in American society (the “big Other” of American culture¹⁷ takes them seriously). American discourse is marked by a weird mix of talking about what people are doing as if everything was rigidly planned out in advance and properly organized while the reality itself being the exact opposite – nothing is that rigidly organized, identities are flexible and fluid. The directness of this “low-context culture” is not direct towards itself. This is the lesson of Hegelian dialectics: if all identities hide their own opposite inscribed within them, then indirectness has directness implied in it and directness has indirectness implied within it.

EDIT: What a coincidence. Today, one day after writing this article, a new season of Black Mirror appeared. The very first episode ("Joan is awful") is about AI deep fakes, identity, free will and touches upon most of the topics that I discussed in this article.

 

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NOTES:

1: https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/indirectness

2: https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/indirectness

3: Ștefan Lastrevio, “Love, Politics, Social Norms and Sex”, Chapter XVI: The First Move Is A Myth

4: Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, p.126

5: G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, Introduction

6: https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-65298834

7: https://twitter.com/rpnickson/status/1639813074176679938

8: Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, Introduction

9: Slavoj Zizek, Organs Without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences, Chapter 1.2: Becoming versus history

10: Slavoj Zizek, Less Than Nothing, Chapter 2.3: The Death of God

11: https://www.lacanonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Interview-with-Jacques-Lacan-LExpress-1957.pdf

12: Slavoj Zizek, Less Than Nothing, Chapter 1.3: From fictions to semblances

13: Byung-Chul Han, The Agony of Eros, Chapter 7: The End of Theory

14: Is Therapy Speak making us selfish? - https://www.bustle.com/wellness/is-therapy-speak-making-us-selfish

15: Jean Baudrillard knew this very well, see: “The Transparency of Evil”

16: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-context_and_low-context_cultures

17: That’s why Slavoj Zizek says that the best jokes start with “Do you know the one with…” – no one knows exactly where they heard it from, but everyone has heard them. These are jokes that are inscribed in the very ‘big Other’ of a culture.