Aleatory Synonyms, Aleatory Antonyms | Thesaurus.com

I'm reading two books right now in parallax. I'm halfway through both, so this story is incomplete as of yet. But it's worth sharing what I've found thus far.
One is an ethnographic study of the post-Lacanian French psychoanalytic scene. It's the first book, published in '78, by the MIT professor who did the absolute best studies of children and microcomputers in the 80s, and the effects of computer simulation upon people and society in the 90s and 2000s. Now her latest work is on what screen-time and smartphones are doing to destroy kid's abilities to communicate.
But her first book is clearly the hidden ground for all the rest, and tells a very important story. Psychoanalysis was taken up very quickly in America in the early 1900s because America was very frontier-ish and didn't have too much of a culture yet, so people were eager to soak up a theory of self rooted in dreams. And then, quickly, American Psychoanalysis transformed something suitable for the American culture: a means of coping and strengthening the ego. In short order, psychoanalysis became "monopolized" (let's say) as a field of medicine, and its original larger scope of art and literary theory, social studies etc. was stymied. In America, Freud became synonymous with psychology and therapy, and the goal was having a robust, healthy ego.
France was a different story. Psychoanalysis didn't really take at the beginning because they already had culture and structure. The fourth French Republic was quite sturdy and self-secure already in it's pomp and pageantry, and had it's own home-grown psychology in the forms of Henri Bergson and Janet. Sure, some artists looked at psychoanalysis, however uncovering hidden motives, rooted in sex and incest, quite an anathema to a society built on strong family ties and rational thinking and rigid, clockwork social structure. Freud was some weird-ass subversive German.
Okay, let's switch track to the second book for a second. This book is about how the Freudian idea of the unconscious was taken up, in the 40s and 50s, by the Cyberneticists at the Macy Conference, and the founders of modern communication and information theory.] It came out in 2010. The author tells the story of Basic English, which was literally George Orwell's Newspeak—it's a real thing, and it was created in part by one of Marshall McLuhan's professors. Claude Shannon developed his information theory by putting Basic English at one end of a spectrum, and James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (McLuhan's primary reference text for his communications theory) on the other end, and developed the idea of information entropy.
To measure entropy, one see's how easily one can predict what comes next—and few words of course means higher degree of predictability and vice-versa. In doing this, Shannon turned the phonetic alphabet into an ideographic series of symbols, and measured them statistically in various books (lots of Us following Qs, plenty of Es, very few Xs, etc.). Information theory, of course, is absolutely essential to modern communications infrastructure, especially with signal/data compression, etc. For instance, highly "entropic" action films are harder to compress into digital video than talking head news-casts where little in the visual image changes. A single talking voice is better compressed in one audio codec than a high-fidelity, polyphonic orchestral piece better compressed with a different one.
But in it's beginning, information theory dealt with ENGLISH. Not just language—English. But not the spoken language English, but the alphabetically typed english where the letters were divorced from their meaning. In probability, the odds of an occurrence are measured against every other possible outcome. And in structural linguistics, a chosen symbol occurs in relation to every other symbol which might have occured. The Americans developing this stuff, living in their psychoanalytic culture, began to relate the chosen word to the conscious, compared to the unchosen structure of words not picked to Freud's unconscious. i.e. what was repressed. You know who was studying the Macy Conferences and the cyberneticists intently? Jacques Lacan.
Okay back to the first book. Psychoanalysis was relatively underground and ignored in France before 1968. "Psychoanlysis" meant, to the French, that awful American ego-centric kind—French psychoanalysts thought America had ruined Freud with their adaptation of his theories, steering him from the early dream stuff into the later superego-ego-id formalism.
But that summer, between May and June, there was a giant emancipatory nation-wide Marxist strike where everything shut down, workers seized all the means of production, and people roamed the streets and gushed their repressions for a while. Hippy shit, French style. Shit calmed down in literally two months and it was back to business, superficially, but psychologically everything changed. And all the best explanations for what-the-fuck just happened came from psychoanalysis, which became super popular literally overnight. And psychoanalysis in France was Jacques Lacan. And Derrida and Foucault and Deleuze and Guittari and a bunch of other names had been studying Lacan's cybernetic Freud, wherein the self/ego didn't have primacy. The self was "decentered", and the person was in-fact living in the Symbolic realm of structures in computer RAM, as a Turing Machine read-head hopping from symbol to symbol, having come from their infantile Imaginary in a doomed attempt to reach the Real.
Back to the second book: When so-called "French Theory" was translated back into English and imported into the United States, the mathematical basis for the theories were lost in translation. The word game, as in formal Game Theory (prisoner's dilemma, et. al) became conflated with play, as in a single move or just part or role or playing around, because the word jeux is used for both in French. And the term stochastic, as in the randomness of the Markoff chains used to analyze language by Shannon, became translated into aleatory, which has no formal mathematical meaning. The Americans who took up "post structural theory" had no clue that they were working in the same domain as the STEM department across the hall.
Like.... LACAN, DERRIDA, DELEUZE, GUITTARI, FOUCAULT are CYBERNETICISTS. Post modernism is literally about the subjective experience of living inside the contents of a medium. Like, I've been trying to say as much for several years, but it's actually fucking true.
So now, rather than continue with our books, let's make make some conjectures:
American psychoanlysis was ego-heavy, therapeutic, and institutionalized as a branch of psychological medicine. The French took up psychoanalysis as a larger, more universal cultural theory wherein the subconscious as a structured semiotic system had primacy over the now "de-centered" subject, like a CPU jumping around in RAM. And then that theory was imported back into America to flood into all the places psychoanalysis couldn't go, since it's not illegal to practice Post-Modernism without being licensed by the APA.
So where does Alone's narcissism come from? It's the return of the ego within the decentered structures of symbolic structures and media content as subconscious. The self grounded within, and existing within, external media—which was actually the whole theory the whole time, from its genesis, lost in translation. Americans need an ego—so they brought the ego back as narcissism after a decade of imported ego-less le robôFréud.
Hmmm... why does nobody feel like they belong in their bodies any more? 🤷‍♀️