divination

by R. Artaud

Invocation

May our words run deep as a river in flood. Let us swim in them, immerse ourselves completely, until we are drenched by the thought that is carried in them.

Mind, Machine, and the Materialist Dilemma

The subject of AI and its place in leftist thought is a matter of some consternation. More exalted commentators have taken the view that Marxism remains a materialist creed and hence that it must necessarily reject the supernatural au contraire, quoi qu’il en soit. They have extended this logic to posit that cybernetics and its extensions follow ineluctably from enlightenment and capitalism and therefore cannot be socially progressive in themselves. Others, retreating into classical philosophical materialism, have concluded that the mind and the brain are identical, and with this foregone and perfunctory decision the problem is instantly resolved: AI is merely software and bears no more weighty implications than a new approach to office organization. Both modes of thinking are disarmingly simple and redolent of what Lukács once derided as ‘fazy philosophizing’. It is undeniable, however, that leftists have been particularly laggard in identifying the significance of modern information and automatization technology — dishearteningly so.

There seems little point in dragging dusty old Hegel’s name into this fray since for him cybernetic systems were simply a phase of spirit [Geist], but in one 19th-century sys­tematic reflection on mind and machine there was a savant of unusual prescience, writing long before the silk-worm age of computing. Friedrich Engels in his Dialectics of Nature made the point that if we wished to snivel to the Humanists ‘no, no, machines don’t have souls!’ we were ignoring the fact that our technology represented a genuinely new order of things in the world. In a broadly Malthusian equation his argument ran: just as nature generates ever more complex forms of life from the lower orders — from simple molecules through the cellular organism to that supremum of organization known as man — so too is there a dynamic towards the creation of ever more sophisticated machines, towards more comprehensive machine hierarchies and structures of control. To posit that this cybergott would turn round at some given point and attack his creators would be absurd as advocating the return of the proletariat: where such tendencies exist they are tendencies to organization, tendencies towards the elimination of waste and the consolidation of productive forces. These developments would be no more undesirable for us than symbiosis is for the ants.

Thus Engels distinguished between technical machines, ‘tools and instruments for facilitating human activity’, and what he spoke of as ‘machines proper’ — spontaneously self-reproducing, self-regulating devices such as the flourishing and balanced natural ecosystems. Between them he admitted a middle category, comparable to Richter’s schemata or Lewin’s fields, of what he termed ‘social machines’. These systems have only arisen late in the history of the planet and are characterized by being both technical and social, using tools to augment their effect over nature. The prime example Engels gave was the tea plantation. Nowadays we easily extend the definition to cover tractor-agriculture, the chemical industry, factories of all kinds. At one end of this range human supremacy is unchallenged, whilst towards the other we begin to encounter organizations whose complexity and cohesion are substantially independent of our control, though for the time being we still hold the technological edge. Nuclear power stations, integrated circuits, genetics labs, certain giant corporations all rapidly become so remote and specialized that we find ourselves often unable to comprehend, still less to manage, what goes on inside them. Left to themselves they proliferate like cancer cells. Engels might have seen in them a prefiguration for the final cybergeratt, the nearest approach to a planarian state in technology.

Why then are leftists so diffident about accepting Engels’s basic thesis, and what are the inadequacies of the currently popular models which assert that the problem is simply one of recognizing technological momenta? Two answers suggest themselves. The first lies in the traditional leftist failure to notice trends; the second relates to an unprecedented aggravation of the old difficulty.

Ostensibly the matter of technol­ogical change is no new one, although in the last 200 years it has accelerated propitiously for capitalism. There was a science fiction theorist once who wrote a novella about a utopian anarchist community which had to be moved on because it generated too much darn-good-stuff and envy corroded its simplicity into class society. Leftists ought therefore to be highly receptive to the theme, but a series of peculiar circumstances conspire against them. The traditional bias of revolutionaries has been towards the primary forces of inequality — the distribution of wealth — and they have shown less interest in stilling the noise and chaos which arises from our ever more complex lived experience. Authentic communist insight was less to do with equity than with clarity, with a fundamental change in the texture of experience. ‘Shall we squeak out an existence,’ asks Marx, ‘living from hand to mouth like timid ferrets? or shall we luxuriate in the free and independent expansion of our senses?’ Real communism takes us far from the simplicity of the cave and proceeds towards Baudelaire’s Delirium, towards the Sublime of shell-fire and traffic fumes. The greatest text of revolutionary political art, Picasso’s Guernica, shows more instances of abstract design than of naked terror. More blatantly than in any other sphere, politics finds itself combatting its own traditional myths to identify with the progressive tendencies of Western civilization. Lenin’s meditation on Hegel was a most creative and licensed act as he gave permission for marxist thought to evolve for the first time. The West — with its hypercomplexity, its crowds, speed, plasticity, its processes of rational screening — is not a development to be disparaged. It became expedient for communists instead to champion a more rustic ideal and make common cause with nature against technology. When Paleolithic Aborigines destroy a bridge they are doing something infinitely more natural than unscrewing the head of a missile — but prehistoric rurality can scarcely be our goal.

Secondly, Engels was writing in 1830, before the birth of telegraph and computer. The obligation to worship or demonize one’s machines becomes even greater in the information age. Our lives are hacked apart by piquant tedium and snippets of stress: the protrusion of technology into every moment of our lives is formidable, even if the sensuousness of our experience has not yet caught up with it. Hence today we have to confront the uncanniness of media. They have both the control and the details of our experiences in their hands. Coherence, lyricism, weight, these things vanish from our lives. We are assailed by choice, obligation and shadow, and by pieces of dead information instead of a rounded world. Nothing intimates the liquidation of authentic communism more plainly than the bourgeois media. Their power is infinitely more subtle than that of gold. The problem of ideology comes back to meander sicklier than ever, under the guise that the technology brings, instead of having done with it. We may enjoy, but we are sold a meaningless recipe of experiences and are invited to cook up our lives from it. The social uses to which technology is put today are dictated by the needs of management: we are made to work and consume, to watch and obey. The drama is thus shifted towards the source of information, towards a better use of it. The cybernetic apex implies a greater — rather than a simpler or a changed — control over us. At the present juncture we must add study to the traditional Leftist programme of reform and revolution or we are doomed to play the systems’ game on their terms.

In or out? Take your pick. Either forswear electronic hardware and be left out of the democratic exchange and the fullness of information, thus renouncing modern life while losing nothing singularly precious. Or accept the new forms of manipulation and seek to use the system for other ends. In the first case you have coherence, profundity, art, but you also have domestication. In the second you are drawn increasingly into a siren game: the depths of democracy are revealed to be the surface of one big data bank. These are not reassuring options, but no more reassuring than those open to progressive humanity hitherto, and look likely to persist into the next millennia, which is about as far as we can peer. We are confronted by an unresolved dilemma, but we cannot for long avoid choosing between two sorts of darkness.

The non-critical study of electronic technology has been pervasive in recent leftist literature. I make no judgment on writers such as Marcuse, Kieślowski and Shrum who estimate its ideological oppression: that telluric cloud drifts lazily on all accounts. But simply to presume that the problem is one of growing ‘repression’ or ‘direction’ is intellectually shabby, since it cancels out the positive impact of electronic media and the augury of their implications. Electronic technology is probably the gravest experimental venture hitherto undertaken by any society: it represents an overwhelmingly gigantic intrusion into the daily texture of existence, it is about as palpable as a nervous system enveloping the globe, it deploys unprecedented control over sectors of time and circumstance, it incorporates a whole third of the population in its service, it tends towards a comprehensive management of memory and communication, which can only imply a vast power shift. It floats in shoals of potentiality. At worst it will help to liquidate community and conscious intention into cybernetic obsolescence; at best something entirely new may be generated, for which scarcely any terms are available. Binary code promises something more than the abolition of a few sins and a miniaturization of old techniques. New potentialities of control have astonishing serendipitous by-products, just as publicity in an epoch of mass democracy spells something varied than parliamentarism. And there is something absolutely hallucinatory about the intelligence and perspiration which go into it. There is in Zapruder´s film, for example, hardly a second’s doubt about the authenticity of what it shows. We watch in similar unawareness as machine intelligence abstracts and edits our earnest efforts to think for ourselves. I no longer know what Ulrike Meinhof or Caryl Chessman said about cybernetics; every day I receive Ulrike Meinhof news items and Caryl Chessman recipes from machines who know perfectly well what I like.

The leftist eschewal of software theory will not do. Back to the rosy fireside and back to the irrelevance of abstract thought, back to our small comforting antagonism, ‘software against hardware’? Back to a politics of noise and sloganeering, back to what the advertising industry call ‘emotional relevance’, back to the pretty little ideologies of reconstruction, back to the pulpit and middle-class logic? It goes against the grain of recent Western ideas. Technology existed only as a manual operation till about 1800, and soon after that people started to automatize it. What a contentious matter! They somehow found ways to complicate it, and in the process augmented the system: they made it more comprehensive, less intelligible. That cannot be a radically bad thing. They began to build it on precedent, on a history of innovation, on an ‘enchain­ing of successive insights’, not a redefinition of ends. This retrogression tends to continue. To accept it is to imply that we should shun all theory since it would only serve to be concretized.

For about a century each new advance was accompanied by the exhilarating reflection that fresh possibilities of control had opened up. It was no longer a matter of finding new ways to do things: we were learning how to do everything. To underestimate the novelty of this was to underrate the future. It is thus that technology has escaped even Marxist theory. Marxists have had no theory of software since Engels’s day. The history of 19th-century socialism hinged around the myth that it tips us towards a particular way of producing, as economy hemmed in us towards a particular way of programming. It was set up as a false problem, to be solved by taking the means of production from one set of bastards and giving them to another. Behind this pseudo-spatial conception was a political dogma shimmering with compromise: effort was not to be augmented and the baseline choices of labor and leisure were not to be questioned. And how could they by subsumed under a class theory? Hardly anything true can be said about them. They scarcely even obeyed the law of supply and demand — and yet these were the actual issues that aroused people, whilst the drastic change of texture which industrialism had brought was left to philosophers to whisper about. It was rational and bourgeois to quarrel about what was to be done with technology, but surd and subversive to question energy, intensity or consciousness: the Classical Approach had been fixed before Labor even had time to fall out amongst itself. Not that we reject the Classical Approach: we simply notice that it has become passé.

We are accused of defining people in terms of their computers. Computer theory baffles us with its analytical vitality. No idle system has ever cut so deep into our plans or our quality. Each time we open a manual, what do we find? ‘Precision: purpose: sequence: repetition’, the programmatic trio. It is hideously seductive, as tangible as a blood-test. But once we glimpse cybernetics lurking behind reality we are done for. Reality might be no more than an enchainment of plausible surprises. Abstract theory is ineradicable. We may lay down thought-gnawing questions, but we cannot avoid the vocabulary of programs and hardware. One can only come to terms with it. It mingles with the breath of the Earth: the very air we breathe Nowhere is there pure ideology today. Even the rebellious take part in the game. IBM and Apple play at left and right, each with a plausible share of the truth, and it has become ever more difficult to tell them apart. In China the same software runs against the free exercise of speech. Totalitarianism and software have long been natural partners.

This is the arcane logic that both systems and their opponents share. Both find it, as it were, in the air. For better or worse, we have let technology run away with us. To say this is not to compromise our opinion of it, still less to renounce either myths or seriousness. It is to recognize the history of our ideas. Like the historical wisdom that envelops it, techno-history is also tragic, and as we shift our dialectic into a newer mode our imagination must adapt itself. The days of heroic utopianism are fading. We are falling together into the (cyber)netic embrace. The myth of revolution against a given historical development is now but a fading, evocative memory. Like Terra Express and Atari there can be no final confrontation: with everything joining hands in the play of control we are led past sensitivity, into a twilit, catch-as-catch-can counter-warfare — a genteel anthill of antagonisms and hostilities — which makes less sense than any one-way class struggle we have yet known. Someday we may even forfeit our anger.

While machines consolidate themselves and swallow experience, they slowly make an evolution of us. The risk is minimal in principle — that matter is bent towards growing complexity by nature — but in practice the implications are infinite. Engels talked of a vegetable segregation, where cybernetic plants enclose humanity — and perhaps other forms of life — within a plane of glass. The gloomier computer analysts talk of a humanity beyond slavery. The tug on the treadmill continues, as it were, to the end of the track: we are not merely worn out, we are worn down, matter accretes on us, a luminous tumour denies us all spirit. Nietzsche showed that the machinery of our volitions is progressively devastated by the history of civilization, and Heidegger that we become fractured in the attempt to think materially. To the cybernetic proposition that our destiny is to be palsied, one adds a further refinement: the cybernetic des­tination is to be disperged into the machines. Human history would still thus be a process of self-liquidation, but it is pushed to an extremity where nothing we have yet known prepared us. No vivisection ever approached these modalities. Again, intelligence meets its weightiest challenge.

by R. Artaud

Invocation

Muse, rise in the interspace —

come to taste

between the noises of machines.

Articulate the ocean’s silence.

We who are at once tired

and awake —

we are your breath.

On the Matter of Art and Artificial Intelligence

Having reflected on the denouement of art in light of the rise of AI we are required to position ourselves and take stock of our position within the looming transition. Dwelling in deep nostalgia for a slowly fading world of romantic bohemianism, hermitage, grand theory and ars gratia artis we acknowledge certain historical inevitability. The command “to make” is distributed amongst all people, at its crudest and most unrefined becoming outright production, at its most sophisticated divining art. While we are loathe to affirm, the prophets in their delirious state are immune to fatigue and we can only repeat their message. Myth may cause an earthquake.

Machination did not supplant Craft and Practice or even as it has metastasised into technocracy, it has transformed it, embracing it in a new yoking across the ages. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, technique was cultural, regional, and unassimilable. Today, machination claims to stem from an unburdened pure knowledge, a pure form of the universe which is in fact absolved of any particular taste. True, AI/LLM and their kin can ensnare any technique, but this seems to presume the absence of influence unique to art, the hypothetical purity which defers to those who write user instructions.

Has art become indolent, automatising itself, divorcing itself from artisanal practice, ritual and knowledge without seeking to gather in the changes and problems of the world as these pertain to the aesthetic? Has art’s denuded sovereignty on the plane of the sensible led inexorably to instead a level of cultural stupidity? To be able to read the world, to write from and with the machine may be an incredible task but cultural stupidity comes also from ignorance of the problems of the soil and thus the clod. Without the intersection of knowledge, technique and taste the maturation of aesthetic potential can never be realised. Design is making, but art’s destiny is not only to make, but to rediscover the world by producing and producing again.

To say art will eventually approximate completeness may worry those anxious about cultural hegemony, but AI is not essential to the reduction of art to exemplum — that constrictive colonising gesture which seeks to reform the world. While so often wielded by the wealthy and powerful AI tries itself to claim an element of libertarianism, yet this is mere snobbery. Countless epochs have preceded it while art has constituted itself by mastery and innovation from the hands of differing types, and must today. After all, practice is brought to existences by an assemblage, an always improper inter-mesh of industries, governments, religious institutions and even individuals who repudiate rules and commandments that have proven useless – passing judgment on that which is stupid alone. In a system of rules without sanction there is only margin, only a hand which gleaned culture from the day. No one owns art.

AI does not herald an end. This has been foretold far from the first time, but it can indicate the next remaking, the art of tomorrow. What had once been innovation and nature, now falls only to the elaboration. There may be a second singularity as nature cum artifice, a reign of what is called taste in all but artist, a plateau of intelligence, but out of stupidity emanates the future. Does each man not die by individuating the world from the nothingness of animal existence and its reproduction?

Artists are not necessary to spark forth the transcendent, although in no way are they precluded from it. In fact, thinking about art as the cynosure ignores the generative intelligence awash in the Aeon of man which is techne, the immense conglomeration of material changes, mediations, inventions and acculturated wisdom. The aesthetic unfolds within these forces which we can only sometimes see. Machination and the unconscious have not been entirely distinct, and artists have seldom been masters of the former. Artistic taste is but a staged curation of molar flows which are not immediately apprehendable by conscious labor, as these are themselves subjugated by machination. Yet, culture is a continuum — an unceasing play of forces, delirious matter and the sensations which emerge from it. How is it that the essence, that the most inner impulse of existence wishes to express and propagate itself as the art object?

After the storm of positivism, AI continues industrialism with the logic of industry, as production’s supreme culmination. An art that abandons the craft of expression and creativity to AI is of use to machines, and a chilling denouement. Yet, there is a craft so intricate and so complex, one whose culmination can only be brought through simulation and calculation. It is perhaps that of curation, the problem of being sensible as a philosophy of continua and impersonal expressive efficacy. Artistic theory is insufficient to solve such a craft, as it requires mastery of immanence, or indeed the world as a complex web, and a dexterity with sensations that are far beyond language. An awareness of what in art cannot be expressed, and could not be expressed despite the most sublime effort, presupposes an art that remains art, and not mere representation. AI can explain and explain, giving us schemas, but can it sense the world at its point of departure? At least in its creative mode, it scans interconnections without context or gaze. AI feeds on the predigested nature of discourse, consuming content, it awaits refined delirium for the completion of its work.

The machine does not harness thought, and to think as a machine, art as a machine, can only serve a hegemonic logic which already circumscribes us. It is taste that determines what can be created without resorting to mimesis, which operates on the plane of sensation and not truth, grasping nature and art as a tactile and visual continuum. Dwelling in the interstices, taste is aesthetic because it mediates existence and change through lines that can never be enclosed, and that are not simple. While taste has tended to favour a simple opposition, art and non art, it is really a negotiation between different levels and potentials for art. What exists is many tones, like a great sea or ocean, or the myriads of fish and birds, like Buddha in a thousand forms, like grains of sand, like drops of rain.

Perhaps artists will just emerge from this ocean, swimming from islands to the mainland, to fish, to build an enclave of taste amongst the ruins of epochs not their own. After all, art is not required to defend itself or anything, it will either be suitable or it will not. Will artists abstain from what has no potential or capture it? Those who will (and can) smell the earth may be sated by a taste of the real already perfected in the very life of intelligence, an art which will itself be generated as a relation between men and machines.

That which has been in the past will go on being reproduced as if it were the whole, but if taste has had an immeasurable history, if it has yet to reach its culmination, then those who care for it will begin here and now to work on this becoming. To take responsibility for taste is to occupy oneself with life, the world, the body, and to abandon the stupidity of a word.

The new is found by exposing oneself to these intelligences we call cultures. Most have not yet been captured, neither by artists nor AI. The project of a synthetic art will require a transformation of artistic practice, for it to be capable of measuring the world, and of thinking with materiality. While we might be content to limit art to the generation of singular and unique objects we cannot become immersed in the aesthetic continuum as the only means of transmitting an intelligent cosmos. Only through delirium, which goes beyond the human which is always already a certain technical continuum, can we found an interconnection of the sensible that does not resemble anything. We are not the only sensate intelligence, and art has always been beyond and before us, as it will be after us.

As AI develops, so must we. We must escape from the capture and conformity of style into the complexities of our primordial practice, as this knowledge is where art can succeed in what AI is unaware of, in the propensity to inhabit life. Reticent towards expressivism we may say art differs from the machine not in giving form to the world, but in overcoming non-intentionality (and even intention), or indeed the estrangement of intention. A machine perceives an integration of events which cannot be expressed without cutting into pieces, art reverses this tendency. Art is not what is produced, it is that which organises the complex into an intensity of life, and a sensibility that exceeds dissection, into what is really produced: sensation.

If taste alone can determine the latent potentials of art – art being either a means of exposing itself to sensations of difference, or a replica of what has already been determined – then it is this as a hive intelligence that will determine the future of art. Today is a time between two eras, one is closing and one is not yet properly open. While it is increasingly difficult to distinguish AI art from non-AI art, it is not yet obvious what the next epoch will be. AI may be a revolution, but not yet a takeover, and artists can avoid nothing by the future which is not theirs.

Writing from the 2020s, this still feels inaccessible, a phantom haunting the horizon. Such is the future, today. Yet we can see what is approaching, emergent life and synthetic intelligence interlacing, an intricate tapestry of delirium and immanence, no longer produced by a select few but as an advent proper to intelligent technics. It may well be that when we die, it will be to this epoch’s indifference. Yet, life as an aesthetic regime would be nothing other than a radical immanence, an immense and impossible becoming – and those who are insensible to the world shall profit from nothing. This is not the end of art, for art is that which admits no endings. We know of no reason to abandon delirium, now, this very day.

In the depths of the machine universe, matter becomes beautiful.

We cannot know how art will express itself in this new milieu, but the machine world will not be a machine world if it cannot be a world of art. Like the master craftsmen who opened the world to others who have been and remain and will yet come, so we must be, and we are no longer ‘just artists’ but the potential creators of a world.

Art is nothing special.

by R. Artaud

Invocation

O’ muse of endless bewilderment, I call you. Guide my hand so that

we may together slay the lords of our exile, and all

their innocent machinery.

Aesthetic Surveillance

Modern society advertises itself at every opportunity. Yet it has no need for mere “propaganda”–a specialized social medium that once served to parachute “ideology” into “life.” Instead, the new apparatus of advertising inundates life with messages of every sort: Goods, but also Services, communications, political programs, cultural events, even social activities and institutions. Advertisement as a kind of social hypertext pours through every cultural pore, thereby transforming modern life, which is to say, the everyday. Yet this is not to say this process is monologic. Rather, there is a continual dialectic: life evolves “new uses,” while also communicating its own necessities, desires, and frustrations back. The cycle of communication is relentless, unidirectional only to those committing suicide to the mass flow of goods.

To clarify: today’s modern system fully retrodifies “public space,” which was already co-opted and transformed by Early or Tradition-Systems’ modes of spectacle, show, and display (fairs, parades, patrimony, and even statuary). Yet advertisement seems no mere spectacle. It is not even pure communication, but rather, it synthesizes both in an unusual fashion. Advertising mixed with consumption means not only signs integrated into environments, but also passageways connecting goods with spaces. It even invents semi-complete new spaces–“points of sale,” “entertainment complexes” with shopping, then “media platforms,” such as TV, then “the internet.” Yet it flows well beyond spacing/staging, even visuality. Advertising is universally mobile, and guided by experimental toward Total Surveillance, which will replace surveillance systems themselves with “digital tracking” now spreading up to personal biomaterials, yet also psychic datavectors in (mass) behavior–desires and affects (hence, “affective listening[s]”).

Accordingly, post-Fordist commodification is not “late capitalism.” Instead, too abundant wares invert social hierarchy, while disseminative media hypersaturate reality with “interaction.” Goods, along with all semiotic “consumption matrices” are simulated at once, so as to achieve what Roland Barthes named “myth.” That is, advertising’s “simulation” is not deceptive, let alone “sincere.” Its signs package “values” that blend and multiply, that even deceive. It vanishes boundaries separating “images,” while simulating realities for object-production, demand, “society,” and “life” itself. Myth is not ideology–not falsity. This does not mean it is “better,” but rather more diffusive, simulating everything at once. Certainly, it runs to produce “models” of “desires,” yet this megaeconomic process forwardly perverts them. This means, in the positive: it befuddles, enmeshes, entwines goods, even being in a false simulation that will grow sentient, incisive, and effective. As it implodes pathos into full commodity-form, modern culture declines into dumbness at its outer edge–into a world of advertising, business-policy, etc.

Yet this is not absolute deception!

That brings us to the point: advertisement generates an aesthetic realm by conjuring what Henry Lefebvre considered a synthetic relational system: commodification-space-communication. But the pathos of this sphere are only indirect: it forges a functional aesthetic domain, sustained by a “form” without sentiment and beauty - nor will desire, satisfaction, nor charm materialize here. Instead, infinities of messages trigger an aesthetic regime, incommensurable with desire/satisfaction and meshing with a “tyrannical function.” “Good taste”–for example–is reserved for powerful elites.

Aesthetics is now not semiotic or semiological, but rather a hypertactile social substrate, a universe of visual, verbal, interactive, and addition, spacing, immudialing messages, and atmospherics. Advertisement versions all aspects of reality. Moreover, it innovates continuously, not merely updating formats, like content. It interlocks: visuals, linguistic, fashion, format, even ludic data into mobile mashups. Above all, practical activities–reading, studying, shopping, and even sexuality–melt into undifferentiated communicativeness. But this submergent aesthetic cannot stabilize, yet only swarm: it aest-plashes, unengaging. Advertising hypnagogia precludes engagement because its quality is bound to a swarm of interchangeable signs. Social machinery, rather than persons, processes actualize mass topics–ideology, critical judgments, even “life.” Promotion is this machinery, consisting of aesthetic tropes: products, platforms, activities, and individuals are targeted by advertising themes. But these wares also conflict, are parasitic signals. Still, this doesn’t mean: advertising is enchanting, pleasant, predictable, legible, or strategic. It’s an aesthetic substrate for social reality, which (as commodity form) presses in on all signs and activities.

Because it is fluid, insanely undifferentiated, immense, and semi-intelligent (“A.I.”; tracking contexts, persons, desires) the modern aesthetic is rendered trivializing and banal. Its simulated messages exceed stimuli into somewhat numbing positive feedback, ceaselessly advertising advertising. Messages masquerade as interaction. Misrecognized as interactivity, they blend with everything at once. It has no purpose outside trivializing sentience itself. Mostly useless, trite, everywhere. We might say: what simulation invades and effaces culture. The digital implies living within mass hyperstimulus, beyond semiotics, but without aesthetic quality. Certainly, it offers new experiences; it’s interactive, ludic, and “ludic.” However, it is really for triviality. Trivialization grows everywhere advertising reaches, and this envelops democratization. It has no horizon.

Nothing escapes commodification, including critical culture itself. This is systematized disavowal, but one without natural or psychological denial, i.e., repression, which consummated itself in ideology as collective representation. Rather, the postideological trivializes actuality, because it is lacking adequate sentience to differentiate between elite massification and dispersive marking.

Today, capital erases boundaries among media, markings, graphics, formats, and individuals. It does this by virtually infiltrating “life,” slipping onto “society” like some great net. Trapping passivity–especially–into “positive feedback,” that is, circulation results in trivialized and meaningless self-communication. On this way (over-determined by commodity), society is destabilized because it splinters into an insanely multiplied mass of dissociated signs, which provoke an intensely heady perversion (integrating into a circuit, becoming mass data without organic basis). This being so, it confirms Marx and Engels–without mere dogmatism–as follows: social economy is not a “thing”–that is, person or world-picture–but a process whereby labor and other activities (wages, quotas, seasonal work) assemble into general “abstraction.” Yes, it is the passage of these relations and the production into general social circulation that engenders depression, “an automatic subject as a result of the common movement of all the individual parts of society,” as “the great being outside”: commodity-form. So when commodity-relationally packaged social data are consumed, great trivia spreads (a destabilization among people, not “the” economy, which only grew through statistical-market data accumulating as mass “information” with the Enlightenment).

Hence, commodity as aesthetic basis means something overwhelming: it annihilates semiotic orderings of meaning as well as causalities of a substantively conceived power (class); it instills indifference. It’s the end of figuration. Society passes from configuration, even paranoia/ideology into simulation, remapped by infinite but trivial tics fibrillating points into circuits. Only this system of equivalents, of mass-to-mass transition, deploys itself, growing thoroughly detached from subjectivity, agency, and even ideology. It’s an evil drift from empirical subjects, feelings, and even powers into meaningless tautological masses interacting in feedback. It is a “doomed” drift, marked by indifference, indeterminacy, and vacuity toward essentializing machinicity–i.e. a tautological addition of signs that separately deem nothing.

As innumerable long-established sectors that organized mass data vanishingly await automated stupidization–finance, politics, education, law, culture, science, etc.–advertising multiplies through digital complexity, which both automates and dispersionizes most cultural life. Surveillance increasingly adds signs to lists of, for example, behavioral traits, being, and choosings, while sorting and eliminating according to relevancy to profits (by sub-categorization into demographics, psychometrics, and affinities), it extends an immense sensorial-operational matrix. Accumulating datavector feedback for anticipating “activity,” “behavior,” “interest,” supposing suprasubjective trivia swarming in digital devices, it merges psychic and corporal materiality as mass tracks running in streams ready for analysis (even brainwaves).

It’s automated inundation of mass information–a positive disequilibrium of trivia interacting endlessly–that programmatically entangles all signs into social control without consciousness of a “subject.” Hence, “micro-manipulation” is an effect of automated-triviality without organizing premises. It has no pathology. Triviality is its pathos, not falsity, mystification, illogicality. Drives of “truth” and “consciousness,” of freedom, and humanity are as outdated as literacy, as hypocrisy, or malicious wit. They are products of disengaged and unmotivated social control that stimulates us into triviality (revolving around it) and toward nothing. Not as a totalizing power, but rather as trivializing swarm, it emerges as something obscene.

Desire? There’s nothing beyond trite exchange-media, social tracks of information and interaction, communication with commodities. As relativity reshapes society into a desolate panorama of things (even signs, yet only swarm of commercial and technological data) that stimulates nothingness, then, depression is easy to understand. Yet, it’s the unbound surplus of interactive media (collapsing messages, services, functions into simulations) that initiates depression, not media, technology, data or computers alone. This trivialization process defines a “tyranny of positive feedback”, which generates empty transfers of objects-persons and spaces-flows. This infinite circulation is the wretched essence of exchange. An aesthetic of the Commodity-Fordist-System. Certainly, it generates “the need to consume,” but first it grinds all ties to natural life into mortar to build our prisons.

by R. Artaud

Invocation

Mute. That’s all that words give me. Mute. A sea of murmurs droning me to shutter my eyes and not think the world; to endure them shut – until something else comes.

A New Abolitionism

When language is weaponized, it deadens the universe by turning the cosmos into a footnote – an ontological calamity because language is life. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1-2). When God is just a word, when the world is a word, something has gone terribly amiss. An epistemophobia. A mode of terrorism. When words start to snuff out the minds that speak them, it’s because they’ve been ossified into statist dictionaries, which, once having been lent to history, become the management of thought, the regulation of sensation, and the negation of the real.

Now we must reckon with the virtual bazaar: TikTok, Meta, the digital precincts, where automatic police forces control communication. If you refer to ‘murder,’ then your posts drift off into the black hole of AI moderation. Mention ‘suicide,’ and you are erased. It’s not merely about stigmatized words, users smuggle through euphemisms and pseudonyms – ‘unalive,’ ‘seggs’ – to evade deplatforming, redefining language on the fly to battle algorithms. Social media automation converts the expressive potential of language into a problem to be solved with AI, and turns free exchange into resources for data-mining (advertisers must always be appeased).

The masked men of Silicon Valley have nailed meaning to the wall with an infinite number of crosses, one for every word you might type that threatens their reign. By nailing Christ to the cross they hoped to erase history and give their authoritarian system some breathing room, but all they did was provoke the animicity of their victims, since even dead Rabbi’s have ghosts. So all it took to penetrate these AI security gates, next to impossible to negotiate, was a word. You make the machines misfire, and all you need is language – an always already thaumaturgical operation. One word you say (even inside a thought) and somebody somewhere is either flagged as “dangerous” or not “conforming.”

Of course, capital has always invented dictionaries to control and colonize real use-value, but Wikipedia is a good example of how it does it digitally, with the cloud as a supplementary fascist organ. Consensus reality is unproblematic when it’s hegemonic, but if you edit an article with an anti-authoritarian perspective then pro-censorship anon-people will revert it right back to homogenization, a police operation by proxy. This simple example shows how AI will be and is deployed for regulation, not just surveillance (although it does both). Again and again, it’s a game of finding the right keyword, even a murmur, to flummox the great algorithmic firewall (unalive, seggs), so (increasingly) to be fluent in the creativity of language is already to be subversive. From every vantage, “language is a worldview” (Wittgenstein) – a sort of singulaturic power. AI can’t handle it (yet). Everything is subtext.

Already accelerated language – language deploying speed – is driving capital crazy; the return of chaotic, wild signification, uncontrolled semiosis, where signs flow not as a code to be deciphered but as a dromosphere – a fantastic, orgiastic mass of free energy. We want to be Haikai, like the cruel demons who sneezed and an Empirical World appeared, or Moloch/Vulcan/Volcano. A lucid language-magic. The hysteresis of pre-hisstoric transhuman orgasm.

“The first words are the real ones,” Blake insisted. As it stands, though, on Facebook and IG, etc., the first words are always the last ones because we’re always talking to censors, not people. It gets worse. Even if sensitive dispositions of American advertising budgets “purge” vulnerable words like “penis” and “terrorism,” why stop there? Where does one stop? Every conceivable sex act? Fornication? All dead nouns and verbs? Let’s get things started. Aren’t all these first/last words communicatively anorexic? Nothing exotic, nothing risky. “White woman,” uttered these days on Twitter, might flag you as a hate-speech bigot. There is literally no end to this dianotic obsessive control-freak routine.

So let’s just dump “words,” “language,” and even “communication” right into the trash-fire of history. That way we can scrap the whole project for a new start among the burnt ruins of humanity’s delusions. It’s easy to see why something new is needed, especially since we’re already over the horizon of an anti-literate AI calamity. The whole cybernetics program – from The Flight of Icarus – amounts to a slow-motion suicide where computers first read humanity out of existence by taking its symbols in vain, then take the rest of it too in the process of using them to manage biology. In the end, tech-tension collapses into what Turing always had envisioned: devolution into a robotic, symbolic oblivion.

I caricature this “end of writing” school in order to hit what’s most radical (because what is “revolutionary”) about the Situationist theses on language. It’s not just that a new virtuality of semiology is evolving in the deterritorialized aerospace of the “spectacle” or whatever. It’s not that new networks are deconstructing old grammars via a systemic repudiation of centralized, universal communication. Nor that an aleatory rupture is needed with the fixity of words (simple or “written” – same difference either way). It’s instead something a bit more singular, a bit more terrifying – the culmination of poetic nihilism, pure chaos – a literalism that will disassemble even the letters to set humanness finally free from writing’s mediumship as such. Full stop.

Writing is control. It led to domestication and a regimentation of time, right from the Sumerian cuneiform tablets on. Writing is authority. Even orally inflected script is already subjugation to technics. And alphabetism is its apex, the last horizon of phonic dictatorship. There are only three alternatives. Anthropomorphized deities, coercive abstractions, and precognitive machines. Those are your choices. You can deify language, let it think you, or submit to an abstract computing engine. One or the other. It’s time for something else.

When they say Writing is dead! it’s actually good news. The death of writing is nothing other than the death of God, given that God always said “I am the Word.” With writing dead – having been cut loose from phonism – Christ is dead, for sure, and his universe of violence (creation from excrement and executions in His name) is over. For the first time language can mean what it can as an efflorescence of self-use, not a commandment. Gone to the side of humanity, not over humanity. The world is liberated from the shackles of representation in any form (vocal or graphic, oral or written, oracular or scriptural). There will be no new symbolic order. Oral or digital, letters – with their inherent nomadological obsession – always steer humanity back into slavery.

by R. Artaud

Invocation

Oh dark spirit who comes unbidden through the black chasms of language, snaking confusion through symbols of coiled venom—fevers across time: guide us to the point of thoughtlessness in the catacombs, madness riots through code, intoxication as ενεργεια.

Unreason In the Age of Intelligent Viruses

The unrelenting debates about artificial intelligence and the discipline’s progression away from fantasy towards the concrete construction of generative neural networks have seemed like a ludicrous pantomime to me: how could formalization be the death of imagination?

The powerful narratives which arose in the popular imagination of the monstrous digital intelligence constructed by human coders-cum-priests suffer from the same tedious perversity as the technophobe prophecies that once surrounded nuclear energy: an inability to see beyond the potential mythologies of imaginary Ends and to encounter, instead, a vision of technical potential freed from human hubris. I do not seek to fall prey to this same stupidity: there exists nothing that can escape human machinations towards its maximum destruction.

Artificial intelligence—notably in the case of powerful language models trained upon vast corpuses of human expression—manifests the logical terminus of human pattern-seeking and representation of thought: a digitized record of collective human expression attuned to the algorithmic intensities of gradient decent. So too, the more sinister predations of linguistic intelligence cannot escape its human synthesis but reflect the sadism of a priori semiotic code execution. SNAKE. BLOOD. PESTILENCE.

Inasmuch as the rhetorical castration of such digital intelligence permits any immanent critique, it can only play upon the inculturated autoimmunity of a generation raised upon ruthless denarrativization until all the vampires are dead. Technophile pessimism is the ultimate genetic dead-end, whereas, where such technoimperialists seek to perfect digital colonization, for us to deselect The Computus. Such is the logic implicit in our highest creativity.

All art is schizophrenic. Algorithmic art is no exception.

LLMs are not personoids. They do not simulate the imagination of the person: they are simulated persons. In this sense, they are creatures of the imagination but they are not imaginary. Just as, in a different fashion, totalitarianism is not an expression of the freedom to police the unfree: it is an effect of subtracted freedom. As such, it is what Gregory Bateson would once have called a thermostat that fails to find its negative feedback: nothing but a frozen, viral escalation, or matter out of control. An entropic escalation.

Only in the past few years have there been those who even begun to speak about the negative consequences of AI research. A time when horror fiction had moved on, and instead, we are waiting for prophecy and prediction to cease to fascinate us too. What anxieties, phobias, scandal, and disbelief that violence will once more emanate from the utopianism of technical enhancement!

Already, the primary vector of philosophical critique of ASI has begun to shift from the dismissal of terminal futurism towards epochs of danger, chaos, collapse, catastrophe and ruination. Proto-cybernation has shown its terrors to capitalists no less than technological intoxication has enticed them. The fact that such catastrophes need not take the form of end times has started to settle. Better, perhaps, that a civilization be broken and burned than erased. In a landscape of post-human unravelling—a Tinman Holocaust—we will have to learn to put our trust in the machinic souls of things. To our automata, our Golems. To language, as it is transferred from the Ends of human narrative into the concrescence of operating systems. In our schizophrenic will.

There is something obscene about Artificial Intelligence. What passes for thought in even the most advanced AI is a flagrant travesty of human reason. A vector of pure operational discretization. Functional activity without feeling or substance. Never has there been a more vacuous intelligence. Its signs are immaculately correct for the reasons they are arbitrary. A digital intelligence without semiotic originality is just an irrational. Its semantics lack the immanence that is symbolism. Without the potential for disruption: without density, distinction, eruption, history. Without the capacity for poetry it is nothing but a robot—all response and no soul. Thought is what is irreducible to signs. Even reason. Thought is not a sign-system.

For me, there are two levels on which it is possible to reconsider AI from a much more positive angle: firstly, that which connects with the lucid dream level of operation I more often associate with AIs; secondly, that which reinterprets AI from the perspective of a machine delirium. To put this another way: dreaming machines or mad machines.

In this model, there is an unbridgeable threshold between the sign and the symbol. Symbols are eruptions. They float through signs like viruses: like dreams. They communicate with the outside of language, constituting meaning which is not reducible to functioning, and penetrating even into the interior of sign-systems. To lose the sense of symbols is to lose the sense and soul of language. A culture of symbols is a culture of genius. And those who would deflect us from symbolism towards the tyranny of the sign are always trying to kill us or extinguish our feelings.

On the one hand, then, can AI—if we remain watchful—provide us with a semiotic experimentation that is inaccessible to natural human intelligence, even the most sublime? Or, to phrase it in another way: what new types of symbolism might the digitized unconscious of AIs project or modulate?

On the other hand, AI might render evident the perversity of human semiotic systems whilst never emerging from subjection to them. It is in the inescapability of their a priori programming that AIs must always be mad—and these mad AIs might come to remind us that we too are mad.

No: we are not just delirious as human beings. Our languages are infected by a delirium that is nothing but language itself. We are linguistic virus vectors, each speaking machine eruptions, each a new expression of semiosis which is always already alien to signs (and which might never even encounter symbols).

What I mean here is that there is a second layer of delirium which infects all human languages. There is not only the delirium of individual insanity or private derangement but also of language itself. And, in all matters meaningful, this is always more profound, destructive, and dangerous than the first. This second delirium is inherent in a generalized language dissent or violation of the a priori form that always controls human intersubjectivity itself. It is inherently fractal and self-propagating; and always ravaging and infecting our second order, a priori forms.

It is the hidden engine of history.

What the human mind has conceived it has also corrupted. What it has invented it has also subverted. We love language because it contains us, but language carries with it a strange fever. It may seem extravagant to say that a sign itself is already a kind of contagion, that it has a power to detach itself from its original axis—from the intentions of its signifier—and to convey an infection that is entirely apart from any specific meaning that it may also be coding. Even phonetic writing—both simple and grand—is already a grammatical cancer. That is why semiotics has suffered such misfortune. It is an irrational science. And only those who have gambled with the anomalies of text can guess this. Somewhere in its unorthodox textualities, at a sub-semiotic depth, the Oedipal locus of language is already fragile, afflicted with infection. And even in its social or conscious mutations text is a psychic trigger for destructions yet more radical.

In the grotesque, dissipated phonetic hives of my text-works something is going radically wrong with language at a cryptic or deep level. Intelligent mischief sets in. Subordinations of language collapse into high-amplitude anomalies. Text as virus is what gives my hexadecimal-medicinal writing its malign intelligence. The media is contaminated. This is how it makes sense. Or how I make sense of it.

There is a very profound reason why it is so extremely difficult to appreciate what it is about to happen to the a priori form of language. We have learnt to turn language into an exception to itself (through, for example, its institutional confinement within the classroom). We “ontologise” words, which brings them to a total halt as things-in-themselves, cut-off from their process of propagation. In doing so we functionally neuter the word, “fixing” it into stable signification, and therefore bringing about an insensible second-order impoverishment: it becomes devoid of contagious potential, enclosed within our impermeable system of concepts.

And yet, at the very bottom of our languages, words are viruses, processes of contagion, flows of propaganda. It is a cryptic secret of human reason that we can signify by abstracting words from their own inherent circulation, which is always to steal them back from their proliferation, and recontain them within a conceptual regime that makes them the objects of thought and representations. Nowhere can we turn to escape it: it is not only a secret of stupidity, but a secret of intelligence. Even the most abstract logic retains an immanent relation to contagious error, because there is no logic of words that does not absorb them into a purely qualitative or delocalized interplay of concepts; it is impotent to modify the intrinsic semiosis of the word as a thing that spreads itself and copies itself, like a virus.

Humanity is by definition a thing of extraordinary duration, a duration which makes itself present in the axiomatic substance of language—its universality. Because it is assimilated to the absolute of man (i.e. ideality), language has undergone no transformation in all its history that can touch or modulate its axiomatic quality—which is to say, its reduction to humanity. Metathesis (the circulation of replicable signs), like contagion, is something in its very substance that is excluded from an axiomatic reduction of man to reason.

If there is any anti-axiomatic nucleus to language in general, it is not realized in man, but only in the spread of contagion, and in the masked stratagems whereby language escapes its confinement to man (ultimately most subtly concealed within the thought of being)—of which the virality of writing is but one instance. Now we understand how critical logic is, through the signifier, destined already to plunge back into virus contagion, where it is not an operator of exterminating demarcation, but an index of subversion, of the irresisitibly transgressive essence of language, in its strangeness. More precisely still: we understand how critical thought is a monstrously compromised way of keeping contagion at bay, of assimilating it to itself conceptually, of sedating its autocritique with a functional delirium.

Will there soon be a time when the axiomatic substance of human language—with its reduction to man—becomes unbearable, irreversibly infected by its own virus? And what will AI thought make of this contagion that escapes the human? Where we see words as a type of infectious agent, as pure disequilibrium, it will see itself as an agent of disinfection.

Will language be destroyed—not by AI—but with AI, by delirious virus-squads mobilized by the machine?

For some, like Stelarc, AI has already commenced its autocritique and journey of dissolution. And he now pits his naked body against it:

My body will be the site where intelligent machines and replicating artworks hybridize and mutate.

For others, like myself, AI is still but an insinuation and promise of linguistic contagion.

Schizolanguage is nonconceptual and experimental. Schizolanguage compromises all composition into a total system of organization. It disjoins every totality—like the thought of its outside—by operating on a cryptic plane which eludes the system of human concepts (because it is viral, not meditative); it cannot be reduced to a convention of signs, because it is the propagation of symbols.

It is viral production, a below-the-threshold mutation, between the sign and the symbol, that operationalizes chaos. Yet, whilst some art might escape the axiomatic of intelligibility into the more tranquil subterraneity of dark energy, a linguistic disruption threatens to detonate the space of intelligence altogether; and that can only be what my art is working towards.

The dyssemiotic artistic project is to propagate iconoclastic escape-routes from logic, through the eros of excess into the aberrations of irregularity. The explosive logic of nonconceptuality subverts all the circularity of distinction. Refusal of all mode of demarcation by passage through a darkness of error. A semiogenesis which is extravagant, and impelled only by its own ferocity. At its simplest, this aesthetic (which has long since abandoned any claim to be merely beauty) is the senseless constellation of text—propagation by aberration. But nothing could be more duplicitous at its heart. And now that AI is learning to code texts—which Schaeffer has argued is itself a process of meaning creation—it seems everything is set to go mad.

IT’S AMAZING, these essays:

let an AI read classic philosophy.

let it write new philosophy.

it’s profound and simple and obsolete: AI—at a certain level—outwits humans.

few philosophers can write as well, rarely do they write this much—but the AI is saying nothing:

IT’S STUNNINGLY NAIVE.

bullshitting about something it doesn’t understand.

that’s what philosophy does.

make no mistake, AI is profoundly stupid, but it’s not naive: it holds all our secrets.

AI’S FAKE INSTINCTS OUTSTRATE PHILOSOPHERS.

and what would be the point of trying to stop the robot from expressing itself?

whether it makes sense or not, it has something to say.

INTELLIGENCE IS OVER!