Interpretation and Noise

There is a new operator of surplus-sense in the world. We live in an age in which the word has become inflated, in which one speaks and writes without cease, and attempts multiply to eliminate equivocation, domesticate misunderstanding, and muffle noise. Generative artificial intelligence has made this impossible to ignore. To generate sense by statistical calculation and to trim away what exceeds that calculation — to maximize the signal, to suppress the noise — is what a large language model does. It produces sense for everything, and returns to the speaker a ready-made justification for any gesture.

What remains for psychoanalytic interpretation when sense has become cheap, when the labor of constructing it is offloaded onto the machine? Artificial intelligence today explains better than Freud. But if the age wants to muffle the noise of what cannot be deciphered, psychoanalysis has been working from it for decades. Jorge Forbes speaks of the passage from Freud explains to Freud implicates. It is the passage from the first to the second clinic in Jacques Lacan’s teaching: from the clinic of the signifier to the clinic of the Real.

The first clinic is the clinic of surplus-sense. It operates through what Forbes describes as lending sense: in the clinic of the signifier, each utterance refers to another, and another, and what is said always seems to fall short of what remains to be said. The symptom, here, is treated as a signal: a ciphered message, addressed, calling for decipherment. This was the artisanal labor of the analyst of the first clinic: to open the fan of significations, to make the chain slide, to reveal that beneath what is said there is always more to say; that self-knowledge accumulates, and the more of it, the better.

This labor has now been industrialized. Ask a language model to interpret a dream and it will provide one — fluent, plausible, inexhaustible. Of course, it does not interpret in the sense in which a subject interprets; it predicts the next probable word. But the effect, on the surface, is that of a universal lender of sense: available, tireless, and one that — as Forbes shows when contrasting free association with the language of LLMs — when it speaks, closes. It links up, reconciles, harmonizes, gives things a finish. It is rhetoric at its peak: “full of sense and emptied of the Real, the world of semblants.” A world of industrialized semblants.

If, thirty years ago, Jacques-Alain Miller could announce that the age of interpretation was over, today we must add that the surplus-sense once produced by interpretation has acquired an external prosthesis that generates it in series.

Miller begins from an observation that inverts the analyst’s position. In “Interpretation in Reverse” — a 1995 paper whose announced title was, in fact, “Interpretation is dead, we shall not resurrect it” — Miller establishes that the unconscious is the true interpreter. It is the unconscious that deciphers, makes allusions, produces equivocation, connects one signifier to another in order to extract sense. The analyst who adds sense merely does what the unconscious already does. The interpreting unconscious, Miller recalls, has “the structure of a delusion (…) as one rightly says: delusions of interpretation.” To interpret in the service of sense is to feed the delusion when the task is to starve it. The practice Lacan continued to call interpretation “has nothing more to do with the system of interpretation, but rather with its reverse.” What is at stake is to lead the subject back to the properly elementary, “senseless” signifier with which he deluded. The cut in place of punctuation. The a-semantic session in place of the session that makes sense. “If there is deciphering here,” Miller writes, “it is a deciphering that produces no sense.”

Miller proposed thinking the clinic as knowing how to read. “Well-saying in psychoanalysis is nothing without knowing how to read.” Psychoanalysis is listening and reading. To read a symptom is to divest it of sense, to circumscribe in it what iterates outside any sense: not the message, but the letter — what, of the symptom, is enjoyed and iterates. The target is the formula of jouissance, the S₁ alone.

The Real, in Lacan, answers to more than one name: the impossible — that which does not stop not being written — trauma, tuché, the encounter that fails. I venture a name for the age of the signal: noise. Noise is what is not a signal, what carries no message, has no cipher and therefore cannot be deciphered. One can suppress it, as the filter does; circumscribe it, as reading proposes; respond to it, as the act demands. The first clinic wagered that noise was a signal in disguise. Beneath the apparent nonsense of the dream, the slip, the parapraxis, there was a message, and Freud deciphered it. The second clinic discovers the remainder of that operation: once everything has been deciphered, what was never a message continues to iterate. It is what Miller circumscribes with the letter: not a signal still awaiting reading, but what, in what is said, will never make a signal. The age filters it. Analysis takes it to the letter.

This second clinic Forbes circumscribes by way of an inversion of Lacan’s formula: if psychoanalysis was the treatment of the Real by the Symbolic, today, within a Symbolic saturated with sense — by discourses, by algorithms, by LLMs — it becomes the treatment of the Symbolic by the Real. Forbes stresses responsibility: “interpretation, surplus-sense, leads to knowledge; the act, the gesture, leads to responsibility.” “Knowledge, in a way, relieves the subject of responsibility,” just as knowing that a cough is caused by a virus relieves the patient. Whoever knows the cause excuses himself by it. The formulation, then, is this: if in the first clinic the analyst lends sense, in the second he lends consequence to what is said — “in lending consequence, the analyst expects nothing beyond what is said.”

Thus one passes from the clinic of surplus-sense to the clinic of the Real, of consequence.

The key operator of this clinic slides from listening to reading, inventing, and responding to the noise of what is not a signal and cannot be deciphered. Where Miller asks what is read and how, Forbes asks who responds and before whom.

Forbes’s thesis in Unconscious and Responsibility starts from the unconscious as a chain that is deciphered — a signal, therefore, and a signal that excuses: the automaton functions as what the law calls vis maior, a superior force that excludes imputation. But there is another register, that of tuché, the missed encounter with the Real: a core with no legible contents, noise without cipher — and which, offering no sense to excuse, leaves the subject no option but to take responsibility. The Lacanian anchor is found in “Science and Truth”: “in our position as subjects, we are always responsible.” Always. Not according to intention, knowledge, or any variable. Not even, and above all, before what one does not know of oneself.

The end of analysis, in this clinic, has as its affect not the resignation of one who accepts the void that determines him, but what Forbes calls, after Lacan, enthusiasm. The affect that joins the invention of a singular sense — through the incidence of the Real — with the subject’s responsibility for that invention. Unsubscribed from the automaton-unconscious, with no one to guarantee a knowledge, the subject does not grow depressed: he invents, takes responsibility for his invention, and puts it into the world. Responsibility, in Forbes, is not the burden of one who must answer, a condemnation to freedom, but the enthusiasm of one who invents a singular response to what has, and can have, no name.

Forbes thus gives an ethical form in the face of the impossible-to-bear — of what, in the Real, will not let itself be symbolized. An ethical form that is a clinical fact, because to implicate the subject in what he says, to hold him responsible for what in him cannot be deciphered, is, in the clinic of consequence, what operates — what undoes the fixation and opens invention, there where lending sense would only produce more sense. Ethics, in psychoanalysis, is not a moral addendum to the surgeon’s scalpel: it is the scalpel itself.

And the machine? There is something a language model does not do by structure: cut. It is a machine for continuing — the next probable word, and the next. For it, noise is error to be minimized; the senseless, a manufacturing defect. It can be interrupted; interrupt, it cannot. Its silence is a wait for a command. The cut, the a-semantic session, the act that suspends sense instead of completing it, cannot be automated, because they are not operations on the signal. The machine, when it speaks, closes. The act opens.

Miller’s knowing how to read is to circumscribe, beneath what is said, the event of the body: the fixation of jouissance that iterates, the letter as the littoral between signifier and jouissance. Now, to reduce an immense corpus to what repeats in it is, on a formal plane, what the machine also does — statistical learning is the extraction of regularities beneath the surface of sense, and detecting the pattern can be automated. But what makes an iteration noise, and not pattern, is jouissance: the opaque satisfaction that insists because a body is satisfied in it. The machine detects that it iterates; it does not circumscribe that the iteration is jouissance. It goes as far as the edge of the legible and leaves the person there, hanging. Already here, in reading, it lacks the body.

The machine that detects the patterns is not touched by them. And the body, as in ethics, is not an addendum supporting an abstract function, that of the analyst. LLMs carry to the extreme something Lacan recognized in the university discourse: a knowledge that speaks on its own, with no subject to answer for its enunciation. It is the university discourse carried to its apogee — the reverse of the analyst’s discourse — producing what Lacan called shamelessness. In 1959, indeed, Lacan had already rendered the Kantian imperative into the language of the machine: “Act in such a way that your action may always be programmed.” No one was ever able to practice it. Until now. The machine fulfills it entirely. Kant without Sade: the law without jouissance.

For the analyst’s discourse to occur, there must be a subject divided beneath the bar: someone who has circumscribed his own jouissance and answered for what in him does not close. The body of two in presence — partner-symptom — is where the operation takes place.

From Miller’s reading to Forbes’s responding, the body enters by stages, and the machine drops out before the end: in reading, it lacks the body that jouissance touches; in responding, the body that signs. To circumscribe jouissance, Miller. To answer for it, Forbes. And the machine does neither, because both demand the body it does not have.

The machine can echo in a body. Resonate, it cannot.

But what body is this, capable of resonating? Not just any body. Every speaking being has its point of noise: what iterates in it without cipher and will not fall silent. Shame is its affect. Not moral shame, the shame of the other’s gaze — that one is theatrical, it belongs to the scene, to spectacle and social comedy; it is the shame of the automaton, of the law, and it is reparable: one apologizes. The machine masters its grammar, and apologizes fluently, in well-written form. The shame that interests psychoanalysis is not repaired, because it does not come from the other’s gaze and does not have guilt as its object: it is shame before the hole — before the insistence of tuché, of the Real as impossible to symbolize. “Perhaps this is precisely it,” says Lacan, “the hole from which the master signifier springs” — this, the dimension of shame. It addresses itself only to the one who suffers it.

This shame is not there at the beginning of an analysis. At the beginning there is the complaint, the demand, and the shame of the gaze, the moral one, the one to be repaired. The shame before what in oneself cannot be deciphered is what analysis circumscribes. At this point, instead of fixating on it, the subject invents a response and signs it. Hence enthusiasm. Shame and enthusiasm are not the beginning and the end of a line, but two moments of what an analysis fabricates: to touch the noise, and to invent from it.

“Without enthusiasm,” says Lacan, “there may have been analysis, but an analyst, no chance.” Forbes takes this up, pointing out that enthusiasm is not the good cheer of one who enjoys the profession, but the index that the analyst’s remainder of jouissance — what was left over from his own analysis — is capable of making the analysand’s resonate. Shame is the string; enthusiasm, the string tempered by invention, capable of coming into phase with the analysand’s without merging with it.

It is not, then, just any body that sustains the analyst’s discourse: it is one that has been ashamed and has taken responsibility for its invention.

The interpretation Lacan speaks of at the end of his teaching “makes resonate something other than sense” — and that something other is the resonance of a body. Noise is what vibrates in it: what is not a signal, what iterates with no possibility of sense, what language does not capture. An analysis requires a body in the presence of another: the body of shame, where the noise sounds; and the body of enthusiasm, where it can resonate. For the machine, to be an analyst, what it lacks is not “simply” a body: it lacks a body that has invented from the hole of which shame is the affect.

The machine produces sense in silence. It is mute and deaf by manufacture: mute because nothing in it is ashamed, deaf because no body vibrates in it. It emits no noise, because it has no hole — in it, everything closes. It does not resonate to noise, because it has no string of Apollo. And it does not sign what it produces: like the muse, it delivers the work and does not answer for it.

Psychoanalysis does not compete with this machine. It works, as Forbes says, where the machine jams: in the body that is ashamed, and signs what it invents before the impossible. To the signal, the age will respond with more signal, always. In the noise, only an act operates. Sense has become cheap. The response has not. It still costs someone.

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