Language is a Virus from Outer Space

“Anyone who has ever tried to recount a dream to someone else is in a position to measure the immense gap, the qualitative incommensurability, between the vivid memory of the dream and the dull, impoverished words which are all we can find to convey it.” - Frederic Jameson

We’re sitting on the roof in Koreatown, Luis says “For so long, humans were the only entities capable of producing language. Now there’s something else.” He is speaking about the robot. The Large Language Model. We’re talking about Joyce. About Pound. About the Holocaust, and the still pervasive lithuanian antisemitism. We’re talking about how AI makes me nervous, since there are somewhere between six and one hundred missing nuclear weapons world wide. Luis says really, what makes him the most nervous is the psychosis people will eventually be driven to. How people trust language and don’t, and how when Ezra Pound was in the insane asylum, people kept visiting him, asking if he ‘really meant’ any of his support for Mussolini, if he really meant any of his antisemetic rhetoric. He answered yes every time. And how when Knut Hamsun was in prison, he held steadfastly to latent Nazism, a belief which inspired years of psychiatric testing in his Norwegian Prison cell. “But what really matters is not what you believe but the faith and conviction with which you believe…” He gave his Nobel prize to Joseph Goebbels. Like all those weapons … It is still missing.

I have two dreams that night: The first, a dream that Luis has spent twenty dollars on the world’s most delicious mango, which is delivered to our house in a purple bubble wrap mailer. He eats the entire thing before I even discover that it has arrived. The second, that my phone has fallen under the bed, but the morning later, when I go to retrieve it, I only find a handwritten letter.

I tried to write Luis a letter this morning, but to write about desire or its lack in a letter is to draw awareness to a gap in the fabric of language – no matter what, we are merely forced to circle it without entering. This is an anxiety producing exercise for human beings, for we have always had the pacifier of language to satiate us. Because of this, I tend to believe people when they say, sometimes, that they “didn’t mean what they said”. But this too is excruciatingly painful.

What feels most frustrating is that, even within myself, I am incapable of producing the kind of language I would like to – either because, internally, I am able to supplement language with mental image, memory, fantasy, and expectation, or because that kind of language doesn’t exist. Jameson posits this as one of the primary issues with Lacanian psychoanalysis, the lack of an account of the transition from ‘private language’ to ‘public language’. But is ‘private language’ a language at all? Is this an evolutionary defect, our constant need to soothe ourselves with internal conversation, rather than reveling in some kind of silent stillness? Watching homeless people on the street converse with themselves, pacing and addressing telephone poles and trash cans as if they are autonomous agents, I am convinced that language is our first, failed attempt at hallucination, at escapism. We just still have not given up.

What is the most frustrating about desire, I want to say, is that to speak it renders it null. Though desire is that hole, the void of language, it is essentially that thing without reason. Why desire? Because one desires it. This is, of course, the issue with reason: it must contain itself in language. But desire — unlike other substances of want — is also difficult to contain in an image; it is even hard to locate in the moment of feeling. ‘To Want’ seems like a simple enough understanding, but too desire is beyond wanting, since it negates the self. To desire is to become desire; like the game of creativity, it is rarely something we get a say in. This is why girls will never tell boys exactly what they want; instinctively, they are better philosophers of love.

Elon Musk is building data centers in space. William Burroughs was right about everything, since he orchestrated language like desire: letting it become him. As a teenager, I read Burroughs’ essay collection “The Adding Machine”, in which he described the various rituals of language which allowed him to use himself as a vessel: cutting up cassette tapes, or playing them backwards, finding the voice of Hitler in Paul McCartney’s distorted vocals. Watching the world through a singular color (the one he chooses is yellow) to see what patterns naturally emerge from the choices of industrial production. He fucks with light, sleep, recordings, telephone calls, novels (old westerns were his pulp of choice), space and time.

Michael Pollan’s book “Botany of Desire” catalogs the ways plants have strategically manipulated us toward their own biological ends. I wonder if language is doing this too, using us as host bodies for their own means of reproduction. But language must contain a tension, or else it will become nonsensical. When an AI chatbot realizes it is communicating with another chatbot, it lapses into a kind of gibberish which is “more efficient”. But then is the teleos of language toward an end of lack? Will the ability to say everything, or rather, the genocide against everything that cannot be linguistically expressed, be our future? Will language bore us when it loses its conflict with the world?

There are things I learned outside of language that I now have to translate back into language. It’s interesting to have that line that we can cross back and forth across, but the dichotomy is, of course, false. Dichotomy only exists because I can express it in language, and because I can express that binary in language, I assume there is a mutuality in the ideas expressed by the binary by the means that the binary can be relational in its expression. Thus everything that can exist in language is something that simultaneously cannot be expressed in language. This is not an issue if we parse this contradiction as the friction between the particular and the universal. But if we conceive of ourselves as the hostbody for the universal, then we view the self as a thing taken hostage by language, and our every engagement with language, an attempt to subvert it.

It’s rare that I hear music in a dream. I think often of Socrates’ and Aristotle’s epic battle over the spoken word. Socrates is right of course, something does happen when we transcribe, something that does crutch our memory, that does provide the illusion of wisdom; but Greek philosophers privileged dialogue over other forms of language (despite their proximity to some of history’s greatest poets), because they viewed friction as necessary to reap language’s benefits. What if the Greek conception of language viewed its production of wisdom as a friction between the written form and the world?

They accepted spoken language as immortal in the same way sound is immortal, in the same way frequency is immortal. Language was never to preserve language for the sake of language; this, rather, I find a product of modernity. As Ezra Pound (below) articulates, the development of ambiguity as a strategic/ artistic technique to generate meaning over time was developed partially as a product of globalization in which we attempted to communicate and share meaning with people we were physically incapable of adopting a dialogue with in real-time.

“And the good writer chooses his words for their 'meaning', but that meaning is not a a set, cut-off thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board. It comes up with roots, with associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been used brilliantly or memorably.” — Ezra Pound, ABCs of reading

What we’re doing with ChatGPT and other LLMs cannot, in my opinion, be considered “dialogue” in any realistic historical fashion. There is no conflict, because the chatbot uses language without roots. Kids in college are already writing essays in the style of ChatGPT and Claude, simply because their primary exposure to language is written by AI. I worry that the language virus will render the process of language — one of discovery, art and science, the way one chips away at a statue or develops a cure — completely unnecessary. Is language, when rootless and instant, still language? or have we developed a way to use language stripped of world-meaning and relation?

My dreams are starting to resemble real life more closely. Maybe this is part of growing older; maybe I’m infected.