Artificial Intelligence

When Jacques Lacan shocked the École Freudienne with his psychoanalytic koan "woman does not exist," he dramatized a problem implicit in the idea of the feminine--most particularly the gap between representation and reality--that is in many ways taken up in Laura, Pygmalion, My Fair Lady, and Twin Peaks. The perceptual apparatus and networks through which we perceive these texts' women (apparatus which range from the mechanical contrivance that produces a song to the data collecting devices of Higgins and Cooper) are foregrounded in the texts, so that their subject is the drama of an absent woman anxiously reconstructed in a variety of symbolic registers. Yet, no matter how much these women accede to representation and the social, the powers of the imaginary erupt into the text as a way to negotiate the loss. Laura, or "woman" maybe mere representation--artifice or artificiality-- but, because of what Lacan called "the imaginary," perception always exceeds analysis, opening up discourses with the phantasmal. 

If you will, allow me to force an admittedly loopy connection within this link between the representation of woman and the representation of thought. "Does thought exist?" has been a question that has busied the scientists of artificial intelligence ever since Turing tests made computer thought a question of appearance rather than reality. Is computer thought merely a representation or does it somehow approximate a reality of thought? I ask this question, ultimately, because I wonder whether the first AI chatterbot, a psychoanalysist named ELIZA, was named after the woman-machine Eliza Doolittle of Pygmalion. For both Eliza Doolittle and ELIZA, there is an uncertainty as to whether they have a real voice or just programming. The answer to this riddle hinges on a variety of distinctions, but ultimately the philosophical problem (if one steps out of a political or deconstructive context) rests in one's belief in the soul and its relation to speech, language, and electricity.