The Body of an Octopus, Dreaming

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Several years ago I watched an octopus dreaming. It was as beautiful as anything else that I’ve ever seen in this world. Its dreams occur on the skin of its body, and they dance their way down its motionless legs. You can witness the vivid colors shifting in their intensity and hue. Except, there was no dance, since the body nonetheless remained motionless.

So, I was conned! It was a sort of con-dansation.

Obviously the octopus doesn’t work with metaphors; yet there it was dreaming within its own little world.

I’d like to isolate three loci of science’s death drive: new technologies, plagues, and artificial intelligence. I don’t have time to go through them each, but from the plague to artificial intelligence, science approaches the threshold of fiction. This point is essential. I remain more hopeful than my peers about artificial intelligence gadgets, precisely because they might reveal to us, in a way that wouldn’t be as threatening as the others, the bodily root of symptoms. One has a gadget like one has a body, or, if you like, a woman. My work in sublation magazine was to convince some of you about the gadgetry of intelligence: intelligence itself as a gadget.

The atheistic pretensions of Western science are therefore challenged by the scientific production of gadgets: man has transformed himself into a prosthetic god, a sort of god-all-alone, who ‘is whatever he says he is.’ During the latest period of science’s convergence with capitalism, out pops the penultimate object: intelligence. The blowjob machine, infused with intelligence and modeled off of your ex-girlfriend’s mouth, reminds us again that ‘woman is a symptom of man.’ As sex bots form a communion with intelligence gadgets, we are also better capable of recognizing the symptom as an event upon the body. It won’t be long until the gadget’s mouth slams itself shut again, and a vagina dentura appears where it always was within the death drive of pragmatic capitalism.

The body can enjoy itself through the substance of interpretations: it dreams of electric sheep fashioned by science. The symptom goes on counting these electric sheep to prolong its slumber. It is exactly as Lacan said in La Troisieme: the symptom can be fed with interpretation. But we should go a bit further: the dream perseveres without a subject. When it comes to the symptom, the s-barred, that is, the subject, is replaced by the One-dividual, the one undivided by its colorful and vivid interpretations.

Marshall McLuhan claimed that the age of electric sheep is all about the ear. It is a-so-spherical world, and sounds swirl around the body without ‘cut.’ You can’t so easily close your earlids, just as you can’t so easily stop interpreting. McLuhan said: “in the contemporary period, we wear all of mankind as our skin.” I propose that the non-dupes ears are in the dominant position today, in what Jacques-Alain Miller has referred to as the ‘cult of listening.’ Their certainty is striking, their dialogues infinite, and their interpretations everlasting. What’s striking is that the latest revolutionary discourse reinvents patriarchy through the backdoor of the real.

Perhaps you already know this, but scientists wondered until only recently whether or not an octopus could hear. In fact, recently they discovered that there are two sacks situated in close proximity to the eyes, through which some primitive sounds might touch upon the hairs of the body. McLuhan would have thought this creature quite interesting, having ‘eyes for ears.’

Anyway, there are quite a few of us here, which means that we have more legs than an octopus, so I will conclude with a point made by Yaron Gilat in The Lacanian Reviews Online: science teaches us that without a body, that is, without ears, the sound of a tree falling in the forest never happens. There must be an Other as a point of contact, which makes me optimistic that, for science, perhaps the Other could come in place of the symptom, even if it means that the price that must be paid is in stupidity.