Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 238: The Art of Love, Hypnosis, and AI — with Ania Malinowska
Speakers: Samantha Walters, Am Johal, Ania Malinowska
[theme music]
Samantha Walters 0:04
Hello listeners! I’m Sam with Below the Radar, a knowledge democracy podcast. Below the Radar is recorded on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. On this episode of Below the Radar, our host Am Johal is joined by Ania Melinowska, hypnotherapist, cultural theorist and Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. They discuss Ania’s scholarly practice, love, and how Ania found herself being trained in hypnosis. Enjoy the episode!
Am Johal 0:39
Hello, welcome to Below the Radar. Delighted you could join us again this week. We have a special guest, Ania Malinowska is with us. Welcome Ania.
Ania Malinowska 0:49
Hello. I'm very happy to be here.
Am Johal 0:52
Great to have you with us. Maybe we can begin with you introducing yourself a little bit.
Ania Malinowska 0:58
Absolutely. First of all, thank you for having me. It's like a real pleasure and real honour to be part of this amazing podcast series. I'm Ania Malinowska. I'm a professor in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. I'm also a former Fulbright senior researcher at the New School in New York. My field of expertise, as we tend to call it, is semiotics of emotions, approach from the perspective of cultural studies, which is like very specific, it's not a psychological approach. But my work overlaps with psychology. Working with AI, lately, and a variety of emotionally related technological devices. I also happen to use hypnosis to work with— especially with AI. And to do that I became a clinician, so being very, like, faithful to cultural approaches, I happen to veer off this methodology and do some psychological work too.
Am Johal 2:08
Yeah, that's great. And of course, Ania, we met at the Daydream imaginary symposia that someone that we mutually know Eldritch Priest helped put together and had a chance to visit with you in Berlin, as well. But this sort of nexus between cultural theory, AI, hypnosis, love, there's so many directions we can go in here. But wondering if you can speak just a little bit more to, you mentioned, the work that you do in cultural theory in terms of your interests, and how you arrived into that field and kind of what you're, what you're currently working on on that front.
Ania Malinowska 2:44
So maybe it's a good point to share, like amazing news from this morning, I was just awarded with, like a national research grant, which is super competitive, to pursue my latest research project on love tester machines, which I want to start with, because I believe it's a very good introduction to what I specifically do and how I started doing what I do. So this project on love tester machines, which is very much related to media archaeology, will research the so-called assessment culture we usually associate with the latest technologist but that goes back further in time. Once upon a time, on my research, like field research trips, I discovered those machines, they are arcade games, dating back to the beginning of the previous century, and they were used for estimating a potential match between people, a couple. We know that the idea of a couple has changed a lot. That's why I'm trying to be very politically correct here. So maybe, which explains a lot about how the role that technology has played in romantic or love relationships, and also explains our reliance on technologies. With regards to our emotional well being, we now deal with an obsession regarding any kind of assessment. We even rely on devices, in terms of how we feel, what we feel, how much we've gained, how much we weigh, what our moods are, what our sleep rhythm is. Also, when we think about dating platforms, we rely with them on and with algorithms on like, who we should be like, you know, having a relationship with so I don't research dating platforms, but I researched this kind of a code established. My research is, relates to the codes we recognize as the code of love that has been like in play for a very long time. And we tend to associate this code with technologies that we tend to say that technologies make everything more mechanical, more codified, more script like which is not true because you know, this, the idea of a script for relationships, be it like a friendship or a romantic relationships or any other relationship date back to early modern periods, and were established back then. So this is what fascinates me, it fascinates me also, like how we communicate in love relationships, how we construct love relationships, and by like I said, by love relationships, I mean, a variety of relationships, including friendship, for instance, which is like a very undermined category of a loving relationship, because of the romantic paradigm, which is so very much on and which there is so much hype around it. I've been doing love studies for the past 10 years, and I've been— the reason why I do it is because I believe love is the most important thing. And if we approach everything from the perspective of love, life would be different. And I love the... like the way it sounds. How naive that sounds, what I'm saying. Because I believe that also on the level of discourse, critical theory has complicated a lot.
Am Johal 6:41
I was gonna say, you know, love in a way is its own technology. It comes from the various earliest stages of philosophy and music and when we entangle it with, you know, it disrupts the emotional traditions under digitalism. The different forms that technology shapes and reconfigures communications inside of love or philosophers like Badiou calls love is one of the truth procedures. So many different ways that we can look at it. And even for Lacan, other psycho- people coming from the psychoanalytic tradition. There's ways and approaches of imagining it. But of course, this is something that we haven't really quite completely put our finger on or solved. Otherwise, it would probably be a less interesting topic in many senses. And so wondering if you could speak just a little bit to you know, you, as a cultural theorist, of course, look at how technologies perform a function, either inside of love, either as an instrumental kind of zone, or the creation of its own world, and how the entanglement of technology and what it does in terms of how we might think anew about love. Like Badiou writes a lot about how we have to keep reinventing love in many ways.
Ania Malinowska 8:00
Yeah so Badiou writes that we need to, like keep reinventing love, but at the very same time, he commits a crime against this reinvention, claiming that technology is like, you know, what we should blame for the complete like, you know, liquefaction of love or like, damage or of how relationships work. And I believe that this is a very dangerous assumption, the assumption that has prevailed in the so-called late modern theory, and which I dismantle by saying that when it comes to love, we perhaps have never been human. Because technology has always been fundamental when it comes to love. And I'm not saying this metaphorically in terms of love as being a technique because language is technique. And the major machinery of love is language. This word, codification of love comes from, but I'm also talking like, you know, very literally, and very materially in terms of how technological inventions, objects, constructed and have been, maybe reinventing love, but also like repeating the same pattern for loving for us. And maybe this is the biggest conundrum and this is the biggest problem and what makes us feel that when it comes to love, we might be in a kind of like experiencing some sort of a crisis. When I was writing my book, loving contemporary technology, I discovered that first like idea of communicating love, culturally, as a cultural phenomenon was happening by means of a variety of devices. A story I love to talk about is a kind of a confessional people built like in early modern court culture confessional to provide a special environment for a conversation about love in like, people needed to decide what kind of love they're dealing with. One person was— it was like a Turing test for love. One person was hiding in this confessional, it was like a booth. And another was staying outside. And without seeing each other, they were like trying to establish using language, like specific language, what kind of dynamic they are having. So it's, so the role of technology is just very, very literal. There are specific devices we introduce to communicate love, to help us develop love, to help us experience love. It's mostly because language relies on technology. On technologies too. And what I'm trying to highlight with my research is that it's a very old story. It's not that now we have digital media and this virtual reality, and which have corrupted love for us. I believe that love has been corrupted, with regard to how it's communicated for a very long time, because it relies on those specific codes we recognize as the codes of love. And it doesn't matter what kind of technology we use, we simply translate the forever existing code on the latest technological devices, just to repeat the same story. And like we've been moving in circles in a way, also what I don't like, and this is what I'm trying to parse and break down. Using the problem of love is this entire commotion around technology, how we blame it for, for each and every problem of like, civilised worlds. I believe that a human being has been the biggest problem. And we probably should be reinventing ourselves as species and individuals. That would be a solution perhaps, to the crisis of love. Most modern critical theory writes about. And maybe it's a key for like the reinvention of love, I guess.
Am Johal 12:28
Wanted to talk a little bit about the different sorts of creative projects and initiatives where you've sort of interrogated some of these questions, whether it's like The Unhappy Ending project nest or others whenever you can speak a little bit to those creative interventions.
Ania Malinowska 12:44
Okay, so I will try to start with my favourite— the favourite one, which is Unhappy Ending, which happens to be one of the most invigorating and undermined themes within the imagery, or any other approach to laugh. So, being an academic, I'm also a creative writer, I write fiction and poetry. And together with a good friend of mine, Pola Dwurnik, who is a renowned artist. We created this art book titled Unhappy Ending. Poems for the Broken/Hearted. I wrote poems, and the poems and Pola, she created those amazing pieces of art, works of art. We started very low key with the art book, and then it developed into a huge exhibition, art exhibition, and later into a music project. We performed, it was like an improvised project with a Polish jazz musician, Kamila Drabek. We performed with the project, trying to represent the idea of unhappy ending. And what happens at the end of love. This is what fascinates me because I believe that there is a like a huge, bigger potential, also philosophical potential, behind the pain after love on unrequited love or anything that happens after love ends. And this potential taps into what we've been trying to avoid culturally, namely pain. There is a huge commotion around happy, happy psychology or psychology of happiness, which I believe might be on a social level, all art and other like artistic metaphorical events aside, might be like, you know, reflected in a bigger cultural and social crisis. And psychological crisis. People with depression, people with burnout. I believe, you know, that part of that is the pressure of feeling happy and not wanting to stay with the trouble and in this case, the trouble being the pain of love. There is something absolutely wonderful about Unhappy Ending, because, you know, it's everybody's experience. Everybody has at least once in their lives, experienced a kind of unrequited or unhappy love. Again, be it friendship, be it might be like parent child dynamic. The definition of love here is very, very big. So yes, Unhappy Ending was one of the projects. We published the book in Poland, it's like a limited edition. It's very playful, because my approach to love is very playful, it's very personal. And like, most of my projects, either artistic or academic are like writing cure, which is like very, also, like, in a part of the feminist tradition, that, you know, you, in a way recuperate through art, which is like, one of the oldest therapeutic, self therapeutic forms. Which I keep recommending, and there is another project that taps into this form of like, approaching professional life and personal life, which shouldn't be balanced, because there is like, the balance between professional life and like, personal life means kind of use them, you know, they're, they should always come together.
So another project I'm thinking of is Textrapolations, it's the project I presented on at Simon Fraser University. And again, thank you, a big thank you to Eldritch Priest for noticing this project and inviting me to talk about it. And this project is a project in cut-out. So or like part of the cut-up poetry tradition. And there is a funny story about it, because when I started this project, I was broken hearted with academia. So I was thinking about ending my academic career. And I was, I felt disappointed, betrayed by academia as a lover, whom I, at that point, it was four years ago, considered to be a lover for life. We had, like a massive disagreement, and I was through a massive crisis in... which I believe in which I mention because I believe many young academics, many young colleagues specifically may suffer from a similar kind of an issue that you, at some point, get disappointed with what you do. You get disappointed in what you believe. And this is what critical theory was for me back then. And so I started cutting up academic books, including Badiou, and other important thinkers, the most like noble representatives of the western heritage, specifically, and transform it into epigrams that were very personal, that made sense to me. And that escaped the methodology of academic work that, you know, we should always pay attention to, like, you know, what fits methodologically. So it just moved beyond any methodological thing. And also it was a very nice moment, because many of my friends, many of my colleagues considered the project to be a blasphemy. How can you cut up books? I, to be honest, I butchered them. How can you cut up books and just like, you know, completely destroy them? When they are so precious for your work, for our work? And what kind of example are you setting for, like younger colleagues? But I believe you know, that, if I ever inspired to set up an example, God forbid, but like, if I ever, that would be that example. Just like do whatever, like, you feel is right, even if it's super blasphemous, but it might be like a sole source of self liberation. And the reinvention you mentioned at the very beginning. And now I'm like, reaching a point in which I realise that maybe most of my work is about reinvention. And it's probably a unifying principle for everything I do. When I write fiction or when I write academic books, or when I do my research.
Am Johal 18:50
Yeah, it's true, probably the academy is too dry and boring to have as a lover. Lacks edge maybe.
Ania Malinowska 18:59
Yeah, but you know, but at the very same time, it happens to be super, super attractive. Because we stay in the business. We want to do it, once we disorient ourselves within the academic environment, we are ready to be back on track. So I believe, you know, it's a kind of a very specific love contract. Which, I don't know, you know, maybe it's like the attractiveness of the content, maybe it's the hope that it might bring some tangible change. Because I do believe that most of us pursue this career, thinking that or hoping that it might like exert some kind of broader change on the social level, on the cultural level, etc.
Am Johal 20:40
Wanted to talk a little bit about your relationship to hypnosis. You're a licensed hypnotist, and when you spoke to me about it, of course here in Canada, we know this guy Reveen, who was kind of like a showman, and travelled to theatres and people. He'd be able to do these complex mathematical equations. And then people would be dancing on the stage and they wouldn't remember it and all this kind of thing. But of course, hypnosis is also a therapeutic intervention, in the way that it's used. But I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit to how you found yourself being trained as a hypnotist and how it informs your cultural projects or your writing and the other ways that it becomes entangled in your broader work that you do.
Ania Malinowska 21:26
Of course, hypnosis is my favourite topic, next to AI and technology, and love, because all of those topics are so mythologized, also so very much misunderstood. But being back to hypnosis, I believe that is one of the most amazing adventures and surprises that my professional life has brought me so far. And I believe this wonderful adventure with hypnosis, how it started, which I'm going to mention in a second is kind of a reward from being faithful to academia as my lover. So at some point of my work, also writing my book, but doing my research on love with technology, I was following Hanson Robotics project with AI. The project was titled Loving AI. And it was using Sophia, one of the most advanced humanoid robots to establish benevolent relationship with audiences or with individual people. And the project Loving AI was based on meditation protocols. They were like feeding Sophia with meditation scripts and putting her in front of large audiences. So that she could, like deliver like a meditation mindful session. With this, go against the idea of malicious AI, which organises our thinking around artificial intelligence, with its new incarnation being ChatGPT. There is a lot of like, mayhem and discussion around this and a lot of controversy. So I followed Loving AI, which became all the more important that I happened to meet Ben Goertzel in New York. Ben Goertzel is the one who invented Sophia. And we stayed in touch for a while. But what I noticed about the project, about the experiment, is that you know, the loop is just like, you know, one way. There is actually no loop so she just delivers, people receive and there is no interaction. And I started to think about the therapeutic approach. I could get trained in very quickly, which may move me beyond this kind of like one sidedness in those kinds of experiments, and, you know, hypnosis came up. So I used my research grant and went back to college. And I like really did like a serious hypnosis hypnotherapy related college in the UK, I have all of my licences, which are from the UK Government. So it started with cognitive behavioural hypnotherapy and also hypno-analysis, which is a different approach. Now I'm continuing with Ericksonian hypnosis, which is yet another style of hypnosis, and I'm continuing this specific or like doing this specific licence with Erickson foundation in Phoenix, Arizona. And the funny thing is that I never thought I would be working with people. To get my licence, I needed to work with people. So I started to work with people. And I started to love it a lot because of how hypnosis works. What it is in relation to psychoanalysis, and very often like in contrast to psychoanalysis, or traditional therapy, also, with regard to the amazing social potential, I can see hypnosis may offer, it would be like a very, like a cliche thing to say, but I'll risk it. Like if people did self hypnosis, because all hypnosis is self hypnosis, apparently, but any form of hypnosis, I believe, you know, we would be able to solve a lot of social issues, which we are trying to resolve, structurally, but you know, that can be like, you know, resolved individually. And I know, it's a very unpopular thing to say, because, of course, we want to push the structures, the powers that be, to introduce change. Because you know, a lot of what's going on is caused by bad politics, bad economy, we've been doing this for years, and we've been dealing with this for decades, if not centuries. But this is like where I discovered like, rediscovered how agency works. And it's like a very nice psychological twist hypnosis offers. Of course, it has nothing to do with losing consciousness, losing your willpower, and more importantly, losing your agency. It's the opposite, it's actually finding it again, or finding them again. I hate how optimistic that sounds because I'm trying to be like, you know, very far away from this positive psychology trend, which I don't criticize, don't take me wrong, I believe, you know, that people who who just like, advocate for this kind of an approach, they, they want to just like, you know, good do job. But again, a lot of when it comes to hypnosis is about staying with pain. It's just like reformulating your personal trauma and reformulating your cultural and social trauma in many ways.
Am Johal 27:34
It's interesting in the way that you describe it because in popular culture, the way hypnosis is framed or portrayed in popular culture, it oftentimes it's like, one enters into a trance, but the way that you're describing it is actually one of reinvention, reconceptualization. Very different.
Ania Malinowska 27:55
Yeah. So you know, I will, so maybe I will, I will be Frankfurt school a lot now in how I want to address it, that we live in a constant trance. And, like we- because what is trance, it's just like, you know, being put into a specific state of focus, the focus being moulded by a specific medium, and like, think about television, like we've been interpolated and duped with television for a very long time with how media content has been encoded for us, like we've lived the content coming from this specific kind of focus, this specific kind of content for a very long time. So with hypnosis, what you discover is just you shift your focus, you all of a sudden realise that there is a kind of a different channel, which you can use, from which you can broadcast and which works both ways. So it's one thing. Another thing you've mentioned is the bad fame around hypnosis created by stage hypnosis, which was meant and which is meant for entertainment. And also with the movies and with literature, with a popular imagery from which we like you know, think of hypnosis as something that first of all puts you in trance. The trance being a state in which you completely like lose yourself. You go back to your childhood memories, or you can like remember the face of a killer. Of course, it's perfectly sensational. It sells very well. Just like malicious AI, it's also super sensational and it sells very well. I love to like combine those two and compare those two. Because this is how culture works. It uses— maybe this is how propaganda works. It uses sensationalism, to produce a specific social and cultural effect. But hypnosis is far from that, it taps into memory studies. And of course, you cannot elicit memories because memories are very, very tricky. It's been like also problematic with the topic of memory. The problem of memory is also problematic with traditional therapy. Like, you know, traditional therapy, psychoanalysis taking you back to your childhood memories. This is like absolutely unsustainable, because memory doesn't work that way. We remember things differently each and every time we think about them. And it's absolutely impossible to remember like that. And if I may, if I may, because you know, this is what comes to my mind, my favourite combination: hypnosis and AI. So maybe I'll explain first, so I started working with people and I set up my, started my clinical practice for hypnosis. But I never gave up my original plan to use hypnosis to work with self learning AI. And this endeavour also continues. The efforts of this work surround around my art based research project titled Hypnotic AI. I was presenting this project at Arizona State University last month at the conference, and together with with a friend of mine, Przemyslaw Jasielski, who is like an engineer and an artist, we created an experiment, a new media art based experiment, which uses hypnotic induction, and uses this interaction between AI and a human being to create a hypnotic environment. The question being who hypnotises whom. It's like a common belief that we've been constantly hypnotised by hypnosis— hypnotised by AI. That AI is like duping technology that may corrupt our freewill, that may corrupt human agency. And in this experiment, we see how those roles can be interchangeable, and how they can work without a malicious outcome. When we think about how hypno— how AI is being designed, we know that it's the effect of human coding, which we may call human hypnosis. We just like hypnotise AI, with coding and with algorithms to perform in a specific way.
This project is based on the assumption that when we talk about AI, we don't know what we talk about. We don't know what it is. We don't know what it can do. And by saying this, I echo Benjamin Bratton or Luciana Parisi, who have been talking about AI as artificial intelligence as alien intelligence, the intelligence that has been out there as the potential of the physical world, which we have not invented, but rather facilitated into being and very much appropriated. And what it may turn out to become, will probably, or might be, very far from how we imagine it, if it makes sense. And this hypnotic AI experiment definitely materialises and develops this kind of philosophical inquiry into artificial intelligence, which I'm very proud of, and it has a therapeutic effect. People who came out of our like AI hypnosis room, were giving us amazing feedback saying that it wasn't anything they expected. It was far from any kind of like, modeling of AI they know of. Many of the people who have so far tested this experiment are astrophysicists, engineers, coders, people in game industry. And what I'm pursuing with this is establishing an alternative model for AI or an alternative AI model that goes beyond the function thinking. There was one instance of, of a person who tested this hypnotic AI environment with our device or with our system. And he was a guy working in gaming industry. One of the aspects of the experiment is that the system keeps showing you the induction level. And it's completely inconsistent each and every time, the system which is self learning system gives you like a completely different data. And the guy was thinking that it is showing him a kind of a score. And he was trying to figure it out, how it works, thinking that the longer he speaks, the higher his scores. And all of a sudden, he realised that that was completely nonsensical, that there was no meaning beyond, at this induction level the system was showing him. And what I'm trying to say here is that we're also, when it comes to technology, we always come with a certain specific and very anthropomorphic approach. And I think, you know, this is the core of our crisis with technology that should be resolved.
Am Johal 36:01
I wanted to spend some time talking about your writing practice, number of books that you've been involved in, you've already mentioned loving, contemporary techno culture, data dating, love, technology desire, but wondering if you could speak a little bit to the book projects that you've worked on.
Ania Malinowska 36:19
My latest book Love in Contemporary Technoculture is my statement... I don't want to say against but like a very polemic statement towards what has been going on in critical theory around love, something I've already briefly explained at the beginning of our conversation. Namely, I believe that, and this is what the book is trying to present and analyse and explain that when it comes to love, the human element has never existed, there is only the technological existence that has been simply translated onto different technologies. When it comes to Data Dating, it's a very interesting project. It's an edited collection, which I believe is a very good example of what our basic research is. And this is a new methodology, maybe not new, but now like a big methodology that is being noticed and is very, that is very dear to my heart, because it proves like many things against how we have been doing academia and research for a very long time. I love how artists become smarter than traditionally understood researchers or academics working in labs, or working with specific like, methodological solutions or choices, how they see more and how they are skilled or trained to represent the problems in this instance with regard to love and technology much better. And so Data Dating: Love, Technology, Desire was inspired by an art exhibition curated by Valentina Peri, who is co-editor of the book, and Valentina gathered artists exploring the problem of love technology. Love technology, this is what I wanted to say. And I approached her with an idea of the book. So what we did with the book, we simply allowed art based research or artists come before theorists. So the book is constructed that way, that the diagnosis of love with technology comes from the artists and their artwork. And the critics whom I invited to write chapters for the book, just are just like, you know, like in the background, they just provide like a commentary to this bigger diagnosis, represented by each and every artistic project. What's also interesting about the book is that it shows that love has different meanings because there were debates also coming from philosophy, has been dominated by how we understand romantic love. So love, it's always, should always like entail the idea of romantic love. In the book we talk about children's love to technology, we talk about friendship. We also talk about like a dark side of technology like dark data. Yeah, and it's just beautifully beautifully published. By Intellect. Also, Data Dating was like a- because it was started as an exhibition, an exhibition that travelled, it was shown in Paris, Tel Aviv, Brussels and London and other places. Now it's being shown somewhere in Italy. Because it started as an exhibition. Of course, it just like goes beyond like, you know, like a traditional book project. So my other books are also edited collections, Materiality of Love. Essays on... Materiality of Love. Essays on Affection and Cultural Practice, because it was like so long ago, it's a very nice book, very dear to me, because this book helped me think about how I want to research love and how it should be researched in academia. It was also part of the Love Research Network project, I'm a member of. Which actually, you know, this collaboration with Love Research Network, which is a huge network, international network of love researchers, researchers like helped me start like with how I want to do it. Yeah, there are other books. But I don't want to maybe like talk about them.
Am Johal 41:13
Yeah, I actually had a question for you just, I wanted to sort of touch on your writing projects, but as a way of getting into this question, which is, you know, for people who have been jaded by love, or limited or cynical of love, which, you know, in our fractured complicated world, there's lots of reasons to be sceptical. But why- I guess through your own research or your own thinking, why should we still believe in love?
Ania Malinowska 41:42
Oh, my God. It's a big question. Because I believe that any kind of change comes from hope. And the only source of hope is love. Also, love is so tacky. It's so unacademic. And that is why it's so perfect to be researched. Because it also disputes with very formal language of academia. It always brings up to how we really feel, where we really are. The questions which are fundamental, and which have been very much corrupted by self help, for example. So when we address them with love, we always come back to some kind of a core, whatever it might mean, because it means different things for different people. And also, as Srećko Horvat points out in his wonderful book on love and revolution, I believe that love is the only tangible source of revolution and the only possibility for any revolution. It's just like a moment when we really stop and notice another, notice other people. And we notice beyond what we've been duped to believe about those people, and I mean communities, I mean, individuals. Love is therapeutic in itself. And like I say, I love the fact that it's so tacky on one hand, and so super, super profound on the other, that we just need to make it tacky, or believe that it's just like, you know, oh my god, it's just love. It's so cliche, because the profoundness of its actual meaning of what it means, how it feels, would probably overwhelm us and I'm reaching the most important point. Love is overwhelming. It's the only magic that is. The only magic we have access to. There is so much interest in magic, there is so much interest in stage magic, like hypnosis, people want something magical happen to them. And when you fall in love, either it's like you fall in love with your baby, like a newborn baby or your dog or your significant other. There is something beyond language, there is something beyond cognition that happens to you. Something super fundamental and like I said, something super profound is something you very often cannot find words for and that is why I believe love is always worth pursuing. No matter like, how you do it and how you talk about it, and what other people think about how you do it. And also, I think love is really the only unresolved issue of philosophy, of cultural studies, of psychology, of psychoanalysis. Because when it comes to love, everybody is helpless. And we've been trying to like, you know, in a way, find vocabulary for it, find definitions for it, like call it desire, or eros, or you name it. But you know, it's just like out there.
Am Johal 45:37
Yeah, you know, earlier, you describe kind of like language as part of the materiality of love, but also, it's this place beyond language. And maybe that's where also the puzzle begins. And I know, in my own work with my collaborator around friendship and community, you eventually find the route to love because it needs to be there, you can't think about friendship and community without some aspect of the important role of love within that place.
Ania Malinowska 46:10
And also, you know, there is also something about the code of love when you, even if, like love, and it's very codified, and what I mean by the code of love is all the gestures, words, context, we identify with love. Even with this, even if it's like, you know, it's almost algorithmic, it's been forever algorithmic, when you just like, use them, something magical happens always. And this is something people cannot explain. And again, I think, you know, this is another unifying thing for the things I do, which are like academically, which are dear to my heart, which is hypnosis, AI, technology and love. These are always, all those things, take you beyond the limits of language, they all induce experiences, that, that like, you know, that are with no words, that you can find no words for. And I believe, you know, it's a kind of cure, to stay beyond discourse, to stay beyond language, to stay beyond the fixed meaning for things. And I believe, you know, this is what critical theory has been doing forever. And, yeah.
Am Johal 47:31
Ania, it's been so wonderful to speak with you. Wondering if there's anything you'd like to add.
Ania Malinowska 47:37
I just want to say that it's my dream as an academic to see hypnosis as part of academic curricula. Because I believe it may help us overcome yet another crisis that we've been facing, namely, the crisis of how to teach and what to teach. And I believe that hypnosis, it has so much to offer intellectually, it's been like one of the most psychiatrically renowned disciplines. But also it has so much to offer practically, that maybe with this, we could start to overcome the kind of like imbalance of a lot of what we teach being seen by our students as impractical, and vice versa. So this is what I would love to add on like, you know, thinking about like a dream come true course, I do, in which I can like talk about wellbeing, pain, love, technology, AI and hypnosis, to the benefit of my students who recognize and see solutions in the very often abstract and psychologically delivered content.
Am Johal 48:52
Ania, thank you so much for joining us on Below the Radar. It's been so lovely to speak with you.
Ania Malinowska 48:58
Likewise. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you.
Samantha Walters 49:04
Below the Radar is a knowledge democracy podcast created by SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Thanks for listening to our episode with Ania Malinowka. Find out more about her work in the show notes! If you would like to support our podcast, you can donate at the link in the description below. Your generous donation will help support the podcast's activities and associated public events with SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Thanks again for listening, and we’ll catch you next time on Below the Radar.
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