Draft: Lacan in the LLM age

I have to admit that this week, I think largely due to the work I've been doing on Arca lately and the associated mental strain that comes with trying to do business while neurotically structured, I've been struck by a degree of writer's block. I don't like going too long without publishing though, and so I spent a long time scrolling through my notes trying to think of something to write. While browsing my vault and trying to figure out what to do, I found this incomplete draft wherein I was looking at ChatGPT and management culture through the lens of Lacanian psychoanalysis. It's incomplete (and I do intend to finish expanding on this in due course), but I think this is interesting enough to bear publishing as is. Given the superego injunction, reinforced by the economics of everything, to keep publishing frequently, I figured I'd drop it and see how it goes.

One note without which this will probably be completely incomprehensible: the Real in Lacanian psychoanalysis is reality in its pure form, unmediated by sense or symbol. Per Lacan, this is an impossible category: it cannot be spoken about or conceived because as humans, we process everything in symbolic terms. The Real thus becomes the point at which words fail, we can't speak meaningfully about something which we nonetheless feel is very important, and unless we deal with it somehow, we have the tendency to go a bit mad. In general, there are three main ways in which we deal with the wound which the real represents: the neurotic, in which we accept the Real into the symbolic order and then push it under the rug, the perverse, in which we play both sides, enjoying the violation of the symbolic order by the Real, and the psychotic, in which we actively exclude the Real from the symbolic order, making the whole order brittle and unstable in the process. The psychotic structure is the one that we're mostly interested in here.

The Real behind the traditional capitalist order was, at base, the fact of exploitation. Using capital seized during colonialism, the enclosure movement and all the other wars and acts of violence and expropriation that marked the early modern transition from a broadly manorial social system to something resembling a modern industrial one, and by exploiting the workers that they relied on, the magnates of industry in the olden days accumulated great wealth by profiting from productive work. The fundamental truth that they had to repress to be OK with this is the truth of that exploitation: the truth that they were profiting from the blood of others. Thus, we see the likes of Andrew Carnegie and the Rockefellers attempt to repress this truth through acts of philanthropy and attempts to justify exploitation intellectually by saying that the massive increase in the availability of manufactured goods made up for it. On the whole, I think this is the symbolic order of the workplace that most of us are comfortable and relatively familiar with.

By contrast with this, the obscene Real underpinning the industry and the business world in 2025 isn't the Real of exploitation or of a founding act of violence but rather the Real of illegitimacy. The fundamental truth being disavowed by our leaders is that there is no reason that they should have any of the money, power or adulation that they do. The founding acts of robbery, seizure and slavery that put Elon Musk and his ilk in power are far too detached from the people themselves to be integrated into a symbolic order: had Musk personally looted South Africa and enslaved its inhabitants he could choose to repress it ("I had no choice, and what I did wasn't that bad"), reaffirm it ("Yes, they were subhuman and deserved to die") or in some other way integrate it into the symbolic order of why he's so rich. But he can't do any of that: it all happened far enough in the past that he can't effectively integrate his wealth, because, in the end, it was a case of pure arbitrariness that he holds the wealth that those who came before him seized. By hook or by crook, they have to disavow the fact that not only does nobody else believe that they have their money for a good reason, neither do they themselves.

If this was their problem alone to deal with, we could probably leave this here. I'd write something clever about how tech executives are psychotically structured and we could go off and feel pleasantly superior. Unfortunately the kinds of leaders we're talking about, being both social elites and a significant fraction of our society on the whole, are precisely the kinds of people who tend to create the social expectations that lead to superego injunctions. Their Real, therefore, becomes society's Real.

And this, for us, is a real problem, because the kind of law built around this Real is fucking unbearable. First off, while exploitation can be disavowed or repressed with roughly similar degrees of ease, it proves much, much easier to disavow illegitimacy than to repress it: illegitimacy, when inscribed into a symbolic order, is so much more destructive than the mere fact of exploitation that its integration likely leads to the person's entire psyche shattering. This tilts society decidedly away from preferring and creating neurotically-structured people to creating psychotically structured ones. Given that psychotically-structured people tend to exhibit traits such as narcissism, antisocial behaviour, disregard for rules and laws, compulsive lying and the whole gamut of the abuser's playbook, we have good reasons to find this undesirable. Donald Trump, for example, is a direct result of this shift from neurotically-structured preference to psychotically-structured preference: had we not been living in a society where we reward complete confidence and disavowal of any flaws that a person might have, Donald would have been a simple failed businessman and nothing else. Even among people not exhibiting traits of actual psychosis or narcissism, the prevalence of psychotically structured people in the upper echelons of society is very, very high, because we disproportionately reward people with a limited capacity for self-reflection or learning. Behaviours associated with neurotic structure, such as being oriented more towards things outside yourself than inside yourself, confidence in things outside yourself more than self-confidence ("I know how to do this" as opposed to "I am clever") tend to be heavily penalised in this environment, and so we wind up with the bulk of people with control of money and power being, quelle surprise, psychotically structured.

Even when one isn't psychotically structured, the superego injunctions coming from a law built on illegitimacy apply a lot of pressure on people to act as though they are. We're pressured to stop self-reflecting, to focus entirely on our external image at the expense of our own interiority and subjectivity (I will note, as an aside, that because a psychotically structured person's subjectivity doesn't work in the same way a neurotically structured person's does, the expectation is that we have perfect knowledge of how we are perceived: of course, actually believing that this is possible is in the realms of delusion) and to orient around ourselves rather than around what we do. Rather than being asked to develop confidence in our work, we're expected to develop confidence in ourselves, and rather than being expected to put the effort and learning in to becoming effective in business or in our careers, the injunction is to become a hustler: the slogan "the hustle never ends" has become distressingly popular in my neighbourhood of late. Importantly, unlike the older injunction to have a strong work ethic (which is much more compatible with a neurotic structure), in the hustle it doesn't much matter what you're hustling towards. Cryptocurrency is a hustle. LLM startups are hustle. Lying your ass off at an awards ceremony is hustle.

The outcome, in the end, is that a lot of people wind up attempting to conform to these superego injunctions to behave as though they're psychotically structured, but quickly find that they can't: they're too neurotically structured, too self-reflective and subjectivised and they simply can't live a lie in a way that a psychotically structured person can. This leaves them broken, miserable husks of people who feel as though they've betrayed themselves and can't muster the self-confidence to fight the people who lead them, or at least try and live lives in accordance with their own values. Rather, they listlessly work to maintain the structures that they don't believe in, trying to push others to conform and attempting to consume their way to some level of happiness. This is, I believe, a fairly complete description of your average workforce. And of course, as with all superego injunctions, the more you obey the injunction, the guiltier you feel. The more you hustle, the worse you feel about not having made a profit off crypto yet or not having revolutionised your workflow with Generative AI. It becomes very easy to feel truly awful about yourself, and of course, because the logic of our current symbolic order is one of disavowal, the pushing-away of these feelings makes it extremely hard to address them or change one's behaviour (if these feelings are admitted into they symbolic order, by contrast, they still, even if not consciously present, shape behaviour).

The consequences

Obviously, this is a whole lot of fairly abstract talk that uses some quite abstruse psychoanalytic ideas, and while I think it's good to discuss and understand how the behaviours we see in the wider world are inscribed symbolically, it's also not really useful unless you see how it manifests in concrete ways.

Obviously, because this is me, we have to start with the LLM thing. ChatGPT and its allied tools are the technology of disavowal and of psychotic structure. The things are, in essence, designed to give people the impression that they are capable and doing useful work when they're otherwise completely unable to do anything of the sort: they, in allowing someone to generate something the looks, to a first approximation, like the kind of work that an expert does, make it much easier to disavow the fact of the lack of capability and illegitimacy that the bulk of our leadership class is terrified of. They can make business plans and slides, create writing that sounds good and as though an expert wrote it, and they can even make nice pictures for board members to look at. It allows people, in short, to avoid or sidestep any situation that might make them feel inadequate or show up their lack of ability.

This still, however, risks being shown up by an actual expert, which is why so much of LLM discourse is about devaluing the value of real skill. All those posts about AI replacing artists, writers, software engineers and basically anything requiring real skill speak to an attempt to pre-emptively defang the threat that the real of actually existing people who can run rings around any of these apparatchiks. The idea that ChatGPT is smarter than all of us and that those of us who disapprove of it are actively insane follows precisely the usual logic of disavowal: I feel this, I know it, everyone has perfect access to my feelings, and therefore if someone criticises my use of the LLM, they're insane or deliberately trying to hurt me. Because I feel as though their arguments are illegitimate, they are. The LLM, in short, is the fantasy of every psychotically structured person: endlessly fawning, endlessly kind, never talking back and willing to let them take credit for its creations with no fights at all. And while this isn't really a part of the argument (I'm not really talking about mental illness here as such), it's striking just how much ChatGPT-induced psychosis is a thing that actually, really happens.

The draft drops off at this point. There are a couple of approaches I could take from here: notably, while LLMs have thrown a lot of fuel onto the fire, this has been a problem ever since we significantly disconnected workplace prestige and power from actually doing the task you're employed to do. The important message here, I think, is that you're not alone and that you aren't wrong for thinking the way you do: unfortunately what society expects from us at the moment is a mental structure quite different from what my readers generally have, and one actively hostile to us.