Referential detachment. Or, what happens, when words stop meaning what we think they mean

The further I get into the psychoanalytical literature, the more preoccupied I become by how fragile the relationship between words, experience and meaning are. I can see four core mechanisms through which these are currently coming apart in our contemporary media system:

• The glut of ‘cheap’ writing produced by LLMs undercuts the relationship between writing, intention and meaning. We used to assume writing reflected time and energy. Now it can be produced at scale at close to zero cost.
• The novel dilemmas of life under these conditions creates new experiences which we struggle to find expression for within the existing idiom available to us
• Platform capitalism incentivises novelty but it does so at the cost of the collapsing semantic half-life of concepts
• It becomes much easier, indeed it can feel like a relief, to find micro-communities of reference to shore up what Lacanians call symbolic efficiency: we ensure words continue to produce the expected effects by narrowing the scope of the community within which we use our words. Indeed they become ‘our’ words in a newly radical and narrow sense

This I suspect is in some fundamental yet diffuse way a recipe for psychosis. Not just in the sense of individual outcome but a psychoticising tendency in contemporary media which we all must find a way to deal with as an experience fact of our existence. Not necessarily as a formulated problem but as a diffuse sense of an unravelling, a sense the scenery is shifting mid-performance, but there’s no man behind the curtain we can rely upon to ensure that the play continues in an acceptable form.

#digitalMedia #language #LLMs #platformCapitalism #psychosis #semanticHalfLife #SocialMedia #symbolicEfficiency