Places and Non-Places for Language

The thesis argues in favour of distinguishing the language of artificial intelligence (AI) from the human linguistic condition where psychoanalysis has identified absence and its effects on the subject’s ordering of reality. Furthermore, it addresses the implications of the new technologies integrated by the capitalist discourse on the subject in the Lacanian sense. It argues in favour of coining a new term, ‘placelessness’, when the embodied subject speaks with the non-incarnate other of which speech is lacking formations of the unconscious. While addressing the responses of the subject to the real, the thesis suggests the term ‘meaninglessness’ as a response to extreme social and political conditions having an impact on signifiers and their formation. AI is a set of algorithms that operates without a human body and yet seems to speak. The thesis questions the ethics of the interface between humans and AI. It questions the possibility of the non-existence of absence in AI language and its effects, in contrast with the capacity of the human being to renew their language and/or sustain new possibilities for oneself through absence and their own organic body. The thesis builds on the argument that lack and absence are considered in psychoanalysis to be necessary for humans encountering interactive speech with each other, and that human intelligence cannot be reduced to manipulating symbols; it needs to rely on sensory experience. The argument pivots on a selection of new Lacanian critical theories and questions the capacity of communicative AI, as a non-incarnate speaking intelligence, to accommodate the third stage of the drive when interacting with humans. The third stage of the drive is a moment of passivity, when the drive is reversed into its opposite, and the subject is acted upon.