Jacques Lacan vs. Google -- Psychoanalytic Theory Smackdown!

Jacques-Alain Miller, son-in-law and inheritor of the mantle of famous French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, has pronounced Google "stupid" and "totalitarian." His reason? He believes Google turns us all into the sum of our clicks, then fails to understand our true meaning as clickstreams:

Our query is without syntax, minimal to the extreme; one click… and bingo! It is a cascade – the stark white of the query page is suddenly covered in words. The void flips into plenitude, concision to verbosity. Every hit a winner . . . In the project to scan all the books, plunder all the archives –
cinema, television, press, and beyond – the logical end of
“Googleisation” is the universe: an omniscient gaze, traversing the world, lusting after every little last piece of information about everyone. It puts everything in its place, turning you into the sum of your clicks until the end of time.

Is Google Big Brother? How can you not think so? Hence its need to make an axiom [“Don't be evil”] of its essential goodness . . . Is it wicked? What is certain is that it is stupid. Meaning evades Google, which is able to codify, but not to decode. It is the word in its brute materiality that it records.

Why should you care what a famous French psychoanalytic philosopher thinks about Google?

Because philosophy can be a powerful weapon for changing the world -- just look at how the philosophy of rationalism took us out of the Dark Ages by teaching us about things like evolution and physics. But if philosophy is to avoid evolving into a lot of pointless wankery, its practitioners should know what the hell they're talking about. And that's why Miller's little treatise matters.

In his effort to put contemporary technoculture in its place, Miller does nothing more than show us how little he understands the technology behind Google. Worse, he barely comprehends how to interact with it as a user. As other critics have pointed out, it's quite common to query Google with a phrase that has some kind of syntax. Plus, Google isn't just "recording"
the "brute materiality" of words. Its search algorithm seeks out social meaning, measuring the relevance of search results by counting how many people have associated a given word, phrase or sentence with a particular URL. Google is decoding social meaning exactly the way a good little
Lacanian subject is supposed to -- by scanning the world of language for sources of cultural authority and then converting that authority into "the proper answer" as if by magic.

Google should be the perfect subject of inquiry for a technologically-savvy fan of Lacan -- the algorithm is an unconscious mind structured by language. Somebody like Miller should be using Google as an object lesson in the way our minds are pummeled and confined by the syntax of social convention. Instead, he's dribbling about how "stupid" Google is because he gets bad results when he types one word into the search field. There are many things about Google that are "totalitarian," but the algorithm isn't one of them. Won't somebody please think of the graduate students? They need smart critiques of the world from their elders, not symptomatic pontification from a guy who has spent too much time learning the Law of the Father and not enough time searching the Web for porn.

Jacques-Alain Miller on Google [via Antigram]