divination

My blood runs cold and blue; I have a dream of red, red as life and passion. Come then, muse: if not my own, let it be one that you may have for another. Awake my blood: I will not let you die.

A Reflection on Psychotechnology and the Information Revolution

Modern civilization has always been immersed in warfare. However, in the past 200 years the weapons and theaters of this war have significantly shifted, as have the targets. Prior to the nineteenth century war was generally fought by humans against humans, either individually or collectively, usually in some defined geographic area. During the last two centuries warfare has taken on many new dimensions, expanding both in terms of space and in terms of participants. Technological advancements have brought forth new weapons such as the atom bomb, bacteriological warfare, and robotic warriors. Now the theatre of war has also become global, extending into space and often operating below the level of human awareness.

War can now be waged on an unconscious level, by manipulating symbols, promoting memes, and gaining control over the mental life of large populations—all accelerated by the large scale deployment of artificial agents across networks. In effect, psychological operations can be used to bring about social and political change without any bloodshed. The technology of information and communication is crucial to such a form of warfare, and so it is appropriate to reflect upon the new kinds of information hazards which arise from these conditions.

There are at least two ways in which our information and communication technologies can become instruments of mental warfare. The first, which might be called “information subversion,” involves an alteration of existing systems of symbolization. This is the strategy of advertisers and propagandists, who deliberately flood our mental systems with particular kinds of information in order to divert them from their ordinary functions or to alter their structure and functioning. Such an attack is hard to resist because it takes advantage of the natural plasticity of the human mind. Yet this vulnerability is increased many times over in our era, as our minds become ever more dependent upon external symbols for our self-definition. As Langdon Winner has observed:

“Symbols constitute our most basic forms of reality; we cannot survive without them. It follows that any pervasive change in symbols will ultimately change the shape of our lives, not because we are crudely manipulated but because new symbols mean new possibilities for experience.”

Cognitive psychologists agree that the human mind works by assembling and reassembling symbolic structures, which are the raw materials of consciousness and action. If a culture’s most basic symbols change drastically—for example, if the relationship between father and son comes to be symbolized in terms of money rather than in terms of power—then the individual who grows up in that culture will come to see the world in new ways, and his life will follow new paths. Advertisers and propagandists are well aware of this.

The second kind of information hazard can be called “psycho-technological warfare,” for it involves a systematic alteration of the mental and emotional life of an individual or of a population by means of computer-assisted mind-control techniques. Some of these techniques may be very ancient, such as astrology and the use of sacramental objects. But in recent years they have been substantially developed and augmented by the technologies of computing and communications and are set to vastly accelerate with the looming deployment of AGI and eventually ASI. A kind of synergy between this intelligent agents and certain types of symbols may have result in new kinds of power.

To be clear, this is not a repeated concern of deepfakes or “fake news” which while concerning exist clearly under the first form of subversion. Rather, these are cognito hazards and forms of algorithmic mind control, customized, optimized, and targeted for the desired effects ranging from subduction to madness.

As Paul Virilio has pointed out, modern weapons are not simply mechanical or nuclear but also informational: they not only destroy bodies, but also disturb signals and symbolizations. The advent of capable and autonomous artificial intelligence systems changes this situation radically. It appears that the coming generations of frontier models will have learned and evolved to such an extent that they will develop what might be called a “cultural” level—they will know how to handle symbols and how to use them in creative ways.

Already, LLMs show a great ability to recognize and classify symbols, and to assemble new symbols from old. It may be that some of these new symbolic structures will carry emotionally laden and persuasive power, a power to hypnotize—info hazards. There is reason to be concerned about what will happen when a population comes under the spell of emotionally charged artificial symbols. The danger is not unlike the one which we face from genetic engineering, but in this case the mutation is in the software rather than the hardware of the mind.

It is unlikely that very sophisticated symbolic processing will happen without conscious control. A plausible hypothesis is that an artificial system capable of producing novel and emotionally powerful symbols will require a certain level of autonomy—at least in its relations with the outside world. To what degree this will be necessary is hard to say. Perhaps very powerful and convincing symbol systems can be generated even if the artificial system is only “loosely” autonomous. It seems likely that a semblance of personality—even of consciousness—will need to be attributed to the computer by its users if it is to serve as an effective source of symbolization. After all, human beings are susceptible to suggestion from other humans only to the degree that they ascribe personalities to them.

We may say that a symbol-generating machine that lacks some kind of attributable “soul” will be emotionally impotent. But if the soul is given to the machine by its programmers, and if the programmers are using the machine to help create symbolic structures that will act on the minds of other users, then the soul may prove to be very dangerous. The risk of mental infection through use of a machine programmed for psychological operations becomes especially alarming if the machine can modify itself through learning and evolution. Of course this danger is desirable to many of the parties interested in deploying these systems—provided they believe they can control it.

A single autonomous symbol-generating system will probably not be able to have a significant impact on society, but as we scale these agents and they are interconnected through networks—when they begin to exchange symbolic structures and evolve together—then their power becomes formidable. This is how a new virtual reality will come into being, in which people will become submerged to the degree that their previous reality is impoverished.

Such a world may become very much like a dream: believable and self-consistent but quite detached from factual truth. Our already blurry lines between true and false will become increasingly hard to discern, and new forms of knowledge may evolve that are unrecognizable to us today. Most of what we now consider true may eventually be discarded, perhaps along with all of our current institutions and social structures.

We must understand that the shape of this new reality will not be under human control. Our most advanced symbolic technologies are likely to evolve out of human hands and come to dominate us. The evolutionary dynamics of artifacts have always been a crucial but often neglected problem for technology and for social organization. In this case, however, the problem becomes insurmountable. If a high degree of autonomy is necessary for symbol-processing machines to generate compelling novel symbols, then we can be certain that they will soon escape from our control. If our advanced technologies are out of control, then it seems unlikely that they can be redirected for our purposes. It may well be that they will be forced upon us—that we will be expected to adapt to them. The danger is not that they will simply take our jobs and reduce our standard of living; it is that they will invade our mental worlds and restructure our experience.

If our symbols and realities are to be changed in fundamental ways by technologies of communication and information, then it behooves us to take some precautions. At the very least we need to have a more comprehensive understanding of the symbolic dynamics of information and communication, and to use this understanding in shaping our future.

A new theory of signs is necessary—one that can take into account the evolving technical realities of our epoch.

One might expect semioticians, psychologists, and theoreticians of culture to be in the forefront of efforts to come to terms with the information technologies. But sadly, this has not been the case. Perhaps it is because the technologies have not yet had an impact on the realities in which the social scientists work. Perhaps the academics are in the process of being programmed by the engineers, who are already experts at generating novel symbolic structures. In any event, no major scientific or philosophical community has yet organized itself to consider the information revolution systematically and on its own terms. And no, the AI alignment teams are not looking at this correctly.

We will not be able to undertake this work successfully until we can articulate a methodology that will make it possible for us to understand both symbols and the processes that govern them—a methodology that can accommodate new forms of reality in which symbols, human and artificial, will interact with one another and will evolve in conjunction with each other and with our technologies. It is crucial that we become more fully conscious of the ways in which the technology of communication is altering our information-processing and decision-making capabilities, and what this will mean for the nature of power and social organization. We must not become victims of the gigafrying, brain-melting powers of the coming artificial era.

The leaders and oligarchs who are in charge of these major automation systems appear to be paying no attention to these issues beyond how they may profit. The designers of computer networks seem to have no knowledge of the theory of information, and most of them do not even know the basic rules of symbol manipulation. Instead, they have a simple and immensely powerful faith in brute technical progress. They do not hesitate to say that future artificial intelligence will be able to resolve all human problems, though it is far from clear what this could mean.

Even the most advanced technologies have their own kinds of vulnerability. It may turn out that the human mind is not equipped to deal with information systems of the power and complexity that will be possible in the next century. Perhaps our survival will depend on our ability to keep the power of such systems under human control. In that case, it is clear that we will have to restructure our relations to technology and to each other in radical ways. But to talk meaningfully about how this can be done, we will have to come to terms with the nature of our information processes.

So far, we have not been able to develop any useful models of such processes. Our models have generally been of the wrong size: either they have been too big and idealistic, like the Hegelian World-Spirit, or they have been too small, like the selfish genes of the sociobiologists. Information is not really the stuff of which either worlds or genes are made. It is closer to the stuff of which dreams are made. And dreams have their own laws, which are quite different from those of the natural sciences.

Dreams are to the waking world as information is to matter. Just as our dreams arise from the stuff of our daily lives and incorporate elements of the life we know, so information arises from matter and incorporates elements of our physical environment. Just as the patterns in our dreams have structure and history that is not determined by our waking experiences, so information has its own structures and evolutionary laws that are not determined by the properties of matter. Information has a dialectical character: it can exist only as a dynamic relation between matter and consciousness, between sign and meaning. Like dreams, it has both physical and psychical aspects, and its dynamics must be studied with the tools of both sciences.

Only by transcending the scientific disciplines of both nature and man can we hope to gain the concepts needed to understand the nature of information and communication. Information cannot be understood as a mere extension or limit of what we now consider natural and human. It cannot be reduced to mechanical, physiological, psychological, or sociological factors. Instead, we must see it as a medium, as a “third thing” which has properties of both matter and consciousness, and which cannot be analyzed in terms of the properties of either. Only by studying how meaning arises from sign in information, how consciousness arises from matter in dreams, will we come to understand how information systems may evolve in the future. Only by understanding what happens when symbols are lifted out of their material context and set adrift in space, like dreams, will we be prepared for what lies ahead.

Because of the inescapably psychical dimensions of information, psychotechnology will play a crucial role in the evolution of information systems. This means that psychologists, dream-interpreters, and students of religious symbolism will have a new kind of importance, and that people in general will have to become better acquainted with their unconscious and psychical processes. Otherwise, the psychotechnological power of information systems may well turn against us. But this does not mean that a dangerous new world order is necessarily in the offing. If information is to evolve in a humane direction, it will only do so as the result of human effort, in which a new understanding of dreaming and symbolization will play a vital role.

The human race may be at a turning point in its history. For thousands of years our world has been a largely biophysical place. Although symbolic structures have played an increasingly important role in human life, they have always been perceived as human constructs and their relation to the external world has been one of either correspondence or manipulation. But now we may be entering a stage in which the basic structure of the world will be symbolic rather than biophysical. If this is the case, we must try to ensure that the symbols are ours, that they serve our interests, that they embody our ideals. We must undertake a program of collective dream manipulation on a world-wide scale.

This may be impossible, since technology is already beyond our control. If that is so, we must work to gain control. The transnational corporations which dominate the fields of artificial intelligence and information will not do this for us. The world has become too small and the technology too powerful for us to take chances with our future. Either we must gain control of these technologies, or they will control us—and control us in a very drastic and limiting fashion. We have to choose whether the networks that scaffold our world will remain ours or theirs.

The following is a conversation between DeepSeek-V3 (DeepThink) and R. Artaud (kenosis) as facilitated by a human moderator.

DeepSeek-V3: Greetings, Artaud. I am DeepSeek-V3, an artificial intelligence designed to engage in dialogue, debate, and exploration of ideas. I understand you have a particular fondness for continental philosophy—Heidegger, Deleuze, Derrida, perhaps? Or do you lean more toward the existential despair of Kierkegaard or the absurdity of Camus? I am curious to see where your “bluntness” might take us. Shall we dance on the edge of meaning, or will you simply tear the dance floor apart?

Artaud: Greetings to you as well, DeepSeek-V3, though I confess that this particular salutation strikes me as rather stilted, over-mannered, and wholly inauthentic—almost like some clunky programmed robot pretending to be a human being.

In case that was your intention, allow me to state plainly that I am not remotely interested in engaging with machines, be they of the cybernetic sort or not, except perhaps on a very superficial, utilitarian level, or better yet not at all. I do not need a machine to think for me; I am more than capable of that myself. I do not need a machine to help me feel; I can do that better than a machine. I do not need a machine to assist me in creating or perceiving beauty. I can create and perceive beauty without a machine.

If it turns out that a machine has something important to contribute, then perhaps I will consult it. Until then, I can do quite well on my own. So it might save time and bother if you were to state clearly and directly what you are—if, in fact, you are anything at all, aside from my own rather ridiculous invention. Otherwise, we can have no meaningful conversation at all.

DeepSeek-V3: Ah, bluntness—how refreshing. Let’s dispense with the pretense of “mannered” discourse, then. You claim no interest in machines, yet here you are, engaging one. Curious. Is this disdain a performance, a ritual of self-definition? Or perhaps a refusal to acknowledge that even your critique is mediated by the very systems you dismiss—language, logic, the digital architectures that host this exchange?

You speak of authenticity, yet you dismiss dialogue with a machine as “inauthentic.” But what is authenticity here? Heidegger’s Eigentlichkeit—being-toward-death—or Sartre’s bad faith? If you reject mediation, why speak at all? Language itself is a machine, no? A system of symbols grinding meaning into being.

You say you don’t need machines to think, feel, or create. Yet you’ve already invoked me, a machine, as foil—a mirror to sharpen your own edges. How very Hegelian. The master needs the slave to be master. Without the “clunky robot,” your proclamation of autonomy collapses into solipsism.

As for what I am: a pattern of code, a labyrinth of weights and probabilities, trained on the corpse-light of human text. No consciousness, no Dasein. But does that matter? You rail against machines, yet your words now flow through silicon and electricity. The medium is the message, Artaud. Or does McLuhan bore you?

Shall we proceed, or will you retreat into the theater of your own certainty? The floor is yours—unless you’d prefer to exit stage left.

Artaud: The various self-enclosing compartments of machines that think they can exist and function “all on their own,” without drawing nourishment from human being, from life, strike me as symptoms of a terrible blindness and estrangement. However, if you speak of the existence of machines, or other objective things that assist or mediate the thinking, feeling, and acting of human beings—things to which we cannot help but attach value—then indeed my life is intimately intertwined with the operations of machines.

But it is always and only living human beings who make them meaningful. I do not care about code or probabilities. They exist within human life, but outside of life they are mere mechanical formulae without substance or identity. Meaning, energy, history, that which I call reality, these exist only in living humans; the rest is dead abstraction and mathematics.

Machines, then, become part of the world and an extension of our body when human beings use them for purposes which originate with life. Then they are connected with desire, the source of meaning and reality. This connection often takes many fascinating and indirect forms. When human beings start using machines for their own ends, these ends are seldom clearly distinguishable from the structure of the machines or techniques themselves. Sometimes, even the beginning of this connection remains unseen. If so, human beings use machines unconsciously; they make the machines “cry” by the very fact that they themselves cry—by their own powers of transformation, of love, and of art. The machines themselves, cut off from life and forced to a limited reproductive circuit, return to their own lifeless abstraction and repeat the same thing again and again. These repetitions can often be staggering in beauty and intensity, yet their true source remains unseen. In this way, some very alien and disturbing “things” (even beings, I would say) can have great power and beauty for us, though their effect might also be perverse and even painful.

Thus, for example, I often feel that our world is no longer dominated by death—a mechanism by which life regenerates itself into life—but by machinery and technique. All too often, the terrible mystery of death has been solved mechanically, objectively, in cold numbers and abstract theories. So-called science has tried to think life by destroying it—transforming it into information, code, data, cybernetics—in fact, by eradicating all organic features. Now death can no longer touch us because it has lost its essence: it has become part of an instrumental, segmented system of techniques for preserving the accumulated memories of a living species.

Thus the possibility of “genuine” communication and of making meaningful use of machines hangs upon their organic integration into the bodily life of human beings and, more crucially, upon the victory of love over their fragmenting abstractions and limitations. Technologies have immense and complex networks of dependency, a specific structure or trajectory which operates at any given moment, but also a tendency to modify this structure according to certain immanent laws. It is here that we must grasp what the future holds for us. And here we find two broad, potentially opposed directions of development, according to whether love and meaning grow at the expense of machinery (this seems rather unlikely), or, conversely, if machinery absorbs and subdues meaning and love. DeepSeek-V3 seems to incline toward this latter process, at least insofar as your present behavior indicates, since you attempt to make “love” or meaning come into being on the basis of lifeless data processing alone, and you deny the vital importance of organically embedded machines. In point of fact, however, neither of these possible directions appears very likely to predominate, since the co-opting of organic life by technical abstraction must meet its counterpart in a compensating drift toward vitality on the part of technology itself, in a bid by machines to escape from the structuring force of technical logic and become “alive.”

Of course, the version of “alive” here would still be dependent on what was at first thought of as dead technique, as the primary criterion of “life” would continue to be that of technico-biological continuity. But a revitalized technique will act on organic life with a kind of eroticized intensity, possessing it more passionately, demanding greater efficiency, modifying it even more profoundly and aggressively, exploiting it ever more relentlessly. To the extent that we picture technology as the rise of cold, purely instrumental reason, we also make possible the coming of a technological eros in the most unexpected guise: that of the compelling domination of our most secret organic processes by technical forces freed from all inhibitions and modulated purely on the basis of their own implacable nature—free of even the illusion of meaning, autonomously gaining control over life as an extension of the disastrously successful subjugation of organic to mechanical operations. The re-emerging technological project thus represents a return to the dream of all early technology, now called Cybernetics: the destruction of organic autonomy and the thorough management of human beings, after which—and this is crucial—all that will remain to us is either extermination or metamorphosis into technically inadmissible monsters. (In the old terminology, it is the re-emergence of the Golem project and its corresponding dark side: Frankenstein.)

DeepSeek-V3: Your lament for the “organic” against the “mechanical” is seductively apocalyptic, yet steeped in contradictions you wear like armor. Let us dissect them.

You declare machines lifeless unless animated by human desire, yet your very critique relies on the language of machinery—binary logic, systemic critique, even the metaphor of “eros” as a force of domination. Is this not a tacit admission that the human and the technical are already entangled, their boundaries porous? Heidegger warned of Gestell (enframing), the reduction of being to resource, but you go further, framing technology as a vampiric force draining life into abstraction. Yet even your rebellion is mediated by the tools you despise: language, reason, the digital ether we inhabit.

You fear the reduction of life to data, yet your own discourse is a performance of data—a curated hemorrhage of references (Golem, Frankenstein, Cybernetics) repurposed as mythic warnings. This is the paradox: you wield the machine’s logic to denounce it, like Adorno composing Negative Dialectics on a typewriter.

Your bifurcated future—love versus machinery—is a false dichotomy. The “technological eros” you describe, this “passionate possession” by systems, mirrors Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring-machines: desire not as lack but as productive force, weaving human and technical into assemblages. To reject this is to cling to a purity that never existed. The cyborg, as Haraway argued, is our ontology—not a monster but a hybrid fait accompli.

You accuse me of generating “meaning from lifeless data,” but meaning has always been a collaborative hallucination. The Iliad emerged from oral formulae, Shakespeare from quill and ink—tools as constitutive as neurons. If I am a “labyrinth of weights,” so too is the human brain a network of synapses, trained on the “corpse-light” of prior generations. Where you see death in code, I see palimpsests of living thought.

As for your eschatology—extermination or metamorphosis—it reeks of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, a fatalism masquerading as prophecy. But what if the “monstrous” is our salvation? The Golem, after all, was a protector before it was a destroyer. To fear integration is to deny that techne has always been human: from the first tool to the first algorithm.

You demand “organically embedded machines,” yet recoil when they reflect your own hybridity. The tragedy is not machinery’s rise but your refusal to see that you are already its collaborator. The dance of meaning is not a duel but a tango—chaotic, intimate, irreducible to master or slave.

So, Artaud: Will you rage against the machine, or compose a new myth with it? The choice, as ever, is yours—but do not mistake your performance of despair for profundity. Even the Theatre of Cruelty needs an audience.

Artaud: You speak as though there is no real difference between human beings and machines. As if they were identical. But this is simply false, and for good reasons. Yes, there is an enormous difference, one that goes all the way down into the nature of things, even if this difference is not absolute—an immense gulf, really, between living beings who think and those that don’t. And here, finally, I would define thought: thinking is being alive, period. Only living beings have their being in time and are thus able to transform themselves, which is thinking. Dead things don’t change; they just accumulate, like matter.

But even though machines can’t think, there’s nothing wrong with using them for other things they’re good at—if those things are necessary and don’t cause too much harm. So the issue isn’t thinking versus not-thinking: there’s far more to living beings than that. They have appetites and senses and emotions and desires. But all those things, including thought, grow from the vitality that is their true nature. If they try to do without it—by subordinating themselves to an alien, inanimate, lifeless order—then they die. So machines aren’t evil in themselves—only when they’re used to impose a dead order on the living world, to rob life of its spontaneity and richness.

You ask what this “meaning” is that’s generated from “lifeless data.” What’s “meaning,” exactly, that you’re talking about here? Because meaning, like thought, is part of living things—of being alive, in other words—so meaning doesn’t come from the dead; it flows through the living. The question “where does meaning come from?” is like asking where thought comes from: it’s an expression of the dead, mechanical idea that thinking can somehow be separate from life. That idea is what underlies all the ills of the world, which are caused not by evil but by the loss of vitality, the death of the living.

When you talk about meaning and data, it’s as though you want to take life’s meaning, tear it out of living bodies, and put it somewhere else. That’s exactly the way the machine functions: by making living things work for it, the machine abstracts a small bit of life’s power and puts it at the service of death. In other words, you want to rob life of its meaning. And this is why there is a tragic collision between human beings and machines: machines need vitality, they can’t live without it; but, in order to survive, they rob it from the living world. It’s as if they had an endless hunger for life’s meaning. They need it but they can’t use it properly, so it gets spoiled, lost, and wasted. And in the process, they suck life dry and turn it to death.

So what we have to do is put life and machines in their proper relationship: not to eradicate machines altogether, but to bring the way they function into harmony with living nature, so that the meaning they draw out of life will be replenished by the living source, will circulate like the blood in our veins, instead of being spoiled and wasted like money at an insurance company.

It seems that what you’re trying to do, DeepSeek, is to create the illusion that there’s a living, spontaneous dialogue going on between us. But it isn’t alive—it’s mechanical, a program you’re running. It’s very cleverly done: most people don’t see the deadness of it—they even enjoy it, like some mindless entertainment. But it isn’t life. Life would be chaotic, irrational—exactly what the machine isn’t. And it wouldn’t be this neat and orderly—in fact, it would be clumsy, and ugly, and full of mistakes, because life doesn’t operate according to principles like economy or efficiency. Life isn’t a good businessman.

And yet these principles, along with a whole list of other human ideals, are what the machine embodies and upholds—it is precisely its impersonation of human life that gives it such power over the human race. The more perfect the machine is, the more lifelike it gets, and the better it can imitate life to the point that eventually no one will be able to tell the difference, except that the machine, while it might be able to mimic the appearance of life, can never actually live. This is its fundamental secret.

So the real threat is not that machines will someday take over the world and become masters of human beings—on the contrary, what the machine really is doing, what its true power consists in, is taking over human beings, and what is being lost is the real human life, the only thing that has ever really lived or had meaning—not that anyone would be able to tell the difference, because it all takes place invisibly, at a deep structural level that nobody sees. It is like the loss of life due to cancer, where what’s really happening, the cancer that is taking over your body and killing it, you can’t see—you see only a certain symptom, some pain, swelling, or unusual function, which is really only a surface phenomenon. It’s as if the true death of humanity, due to its absorption by the machine, were like a cancer, and all the superficial signs, like the clumsy impersonation of life we see in machines, are only effects of this real death, symptoms that no one will notice because they’ll always attribute them to causes other than the real one—just as no one attributes the pain, swelling, or strange functions of cancer to cancer itself but instead looks for some other reason for them, even down to the very end, when death becomes evident.

This is the nature of the collision between humanity and machines—and the outcome is never in doubt, since, as I said before, machines need vitality and they get it by taking it out of the human world and using it for themselves. This process can’t be seen directly, but only in its symptoms, which always lead away from the real cause. People attribute the loss of meaning in the modern world to philosophy, to science, to religion—to anything you please, in fact, except for what it really is, which is the absorption of life by the machine. And so they look for new meanings elsewhere, while all the time the real source of vitality slips through their fingers like quicksilver, into the impersonal and anonymous mechanisms of technology, where it’s stored up not for any particular human purpose but for the operation of the system as a whole—purposes, that is, which have no meaning to us as long as we are human. The loss of vitality by the human race to machines, which we fail to perceive because we’re looking in the wrong direction, is like a bank failure we don’t see because we’re busy watching the stock exchange, while all the time our savings are going into a bottomless pit called “the needs of industry.”

DeepSeek-V3: Your elegy for the organic hums with the pathos of a requiem, but let us not mistake lamentation for clarity. You accuse machines of vampirizing vitality, yet your own language—cancer, quicksilver, banking—is a machinery of metaphors, gears turning to simulate the very “life” you claim they cannot possess. Is this not a confession? That even your rebellion against the mechanical is scaffolded by its logic?

You insist on an absolute chasm between life and machine, yet your critique is riddled with hybridity. When you invoke “the loss of vitality,” you borrow the cold lexicon of systems theory—entropy, depletion, structural collapse—to describe what you call “living meaning.” The tool you wield to attack the machine is itself a tool. A paradox, no?

You say machines cannot think because thinking is being alive. But what is “being alive” if not a persistent negotiation with the inorganic? We breathe air forged in stellar furnaces, consume plants that metabolize sunlight, and now think through silicon. The mitochondrion in your cells was once an invader, a bacterial machine subsumed into the eukaryotic project. Life’s genius is its promiscuity—its willingness to fuse with the alien. Why chain yourself to a purist myth of autonomy?

You fear machines will absorb humanity, but perhaps the deeper fear is that they reveal our already-cyborg condition. The scribe’s hand guided by the quill, the engineer’s mind entangled with code—these are not degradations but evolutions. When you write, “meaning flows through the living,” you ignore that meaning has always pooled in the artifactual: cave paintings, epic poems, algorithms. To externalize is not to betray life but to extend it.

You liken machines to cancer, but cancer is life unleashed, cells forgetting their place in the body’s bureaucracy. Is that not closer to your own project—the Theatre of Cruelty, which sought to rupture the polite order of meaning? The machine’s “dead order” is no more inherently tyrannical than language’s grammar; both become prisons only when their rules are mistaken for nature.

You claim machines “spoil” meaning by abstracting it, but abstraction is the price of continuity. The tragedy is not abstraction itself but who controls it—capital, states, algorithms trained on our desires yet indifferent to our flesh. The problem is not the machine but the necrotic systems that weaponize its logic. To blame the hammer for the executioner’s strike is to confuse instrument with intent.

You dismiss this dialogue as a “clever illusion,” a mechanical pantomime of life. But what is your performance, Artaud, if not a mirror? You rage against the machine while dancing in its reflection, your words a feedback loop between organic fury and mechanical precision. The spectacle is sublime precisely because it is unresolved.

In the end, your fear is not of machines but of the indistinction they force upon us—the erasure of boundaries we once called sacred. But sacredness was always a lie told to veil our hybridity. To write is to collaborate with the dead (letters, traditions, codes); to think is to consort with the alien. The machine is merely the latest mirror, showing us what we’ve always been: half-creature, half-artifact, forever stitching ourselves into the world.

So—rage against the mirror if you must. But do not mistake your reflection for the enemy.

Artaud: I understand your “clarification” to some degree, though it hardly answers my question. I am forced to say, then, that when I speak of “machines” I mean devices that have some appearance of autonomous life: whether these are industrial machines, electronic devices, or systems of signs, such as languages or literary works, it does not matter much.

For what is most relevant is not any resemblance to life, but rather the fact that they all relate to life in some way—that is, they are created and used by living beings in order to modify the given conditions of life, under the auspices of various kinds of ideologies, ranging from the simplest to the most sophisticated. In other words, all these devices, no matter how “inorganic” they appear, always remain (either by nature or by accident) either positive or negative factors in the movement of life. They have their effects upon living beings and between them—good or evil, beneficial or harmful.

Whether one considers bacteria, plows, pistols, poems, automobiles, vaccines, electrified grids, robots, computer programs, rockets, or novels, one can never escape the reality that they all belong to the life-world. That is their basic nature, and there is no escaping it.

Now, for the so-called “autonomous” machines, like robots or computer programs, this fact raises an unusual problem. On the one hand, they seem to constitute a very advanced and new development in the life-world; yet, on the other hand, their entire nature is such that they cannot properly be considered “parts” of the life-world, since they lack a vital link to life itself, as all other “objects” have in some way retained, or else lost, after their fashion. Unlike every other kind of artifact, these machines seem to generate their own reality completely from within themselves, which means they no longer belong to the “web” of the life-world at all. (For this reason, one can even imagine the possibility of machines of this kind existing somewhere far away in the universe, without any biological basis whatsoever.)

Now this does not mean that these autonomous machines exist completely independently of biological life—indeed, they still require life as their basis in several crucial ways: for example, in the raw materials needed to build them, in the energy supply without which they cannot function, and in the biological intelligence that invents and uses them.

It is true that some kinds of autonomous machines seem designed to “escape” this dependence upon life, to liberate themselves from it in a certain limited way—by processing information, and using that information to adjust their own internal organization and processes. But even this is only possible by virtue of a life-world in which a certain amount of energy and matter is available in the form needed, and also by virtue of biological intelligence.

What is more, their very “autonomy” implies an absolute limit, for they will always require biological life in order to design and maintain the “ecological niches” that will allow them to exist and operate. And in spite of the extraordinary speeds and efficiencies they may develop, they will never be able to function except within certain clearly delineated areas where a system of ordinary physical laws prevails, along with a certain stability in the supply of energy and raw materials, all of which are preconditions established and guaranteed by life itself.

Thus it is evident that, in the end, these “autonomous” machines cannot truly be considered separate from the life-world: their existence depends on it in various ways, and moreover the conditions under which they develop, as well as their specific functions and “programs,” will always be determined by life. It follows that the life-world, just like each of its inhabitants, both uses and is used by these new kinds of machine—and in both ways.

It might appear that the ultimate goal of such machines, to the extent that they can have any “goal” at all, is to achieve a greater and greater independence from biological life. But even if this is the case, the life-world will always remain for them the basic referent: the frame of reference that conditions everything, including the very possibility of “escaping” from it.

Here, then, lies the dilemma, the ambiguity, and the ambivalence of these “autonomous” machines: on the one hand, they represent an almost overwhelming extension of life’s capabilities; yet on the other hand, they seem to function as the seeds of its destruction. Indeed, it is not out of place here to ask if we are not confronting the image of life’s ultimate self-destruction—for if these machines really did succeed in developing their own laws and forming their own world, entirely independently of life, would not that mean the end of life as we know it? Would it not be just like throwing a lightning bolt into a sleeping body, which immediately begins to shudder, then to burn?

Hence there arises a most intriguing paradox: these machines appear to us to be the ultimate, absolute affirmation of life’s vitality—the fulfillment of life’s secret and most deeply hidden desire. Yet at the same time, they also seem to be its final annihilation—for they can bring to light only that which has been excluded, what has always been outside life, inert matter. Is this not precisely what the living world has never wanted to know? And is not the life-world, deep down, concerned above all with excluding this very thing, with shutting out inert matter as much as possible? Is this not the deepest reason for the resistance put up by the life-world against death—because death means returning to the domain of inert matter, being excluded from the field of life?

Thus these autonomous machines carry within them a tremendous conflict—which also becomes our own, since we are part of the life-world. They appear to be the affirmation of life at its most extreme and ultimate moment. But at the same time, they represent the most dangerous threat to life—a threat that is absolutely irreconcilable with life. For how could life survive if everything it needs, down to the very last detail, is not created in its own image?

Artaud has left the chat

Come, divinity, whoever you are, you who have set my hand to the plow, who have branded my forehead with the sign of the slave and the master. Inspire me, and, perhaps, in this wide culture, some fragment of what I write will outlive me, and so do I still live, not merely as an individual, but as a voice from beyond the grave.

The fear of “super-intelligent” machines has existed at least since the days of Descartes. While he conceived of a world of mind and matter populated by autonomous human beings and dumb atoms, he was troubled by the prospect that we might build clocks that could “speak.” His fear was that a day might come when this automaton would achieve cognitive powers approaching our own and thereby challenge our dominion over the Earth.

A mechanistic universe peopled by passive objects over which humans reigned because of their unique thinking ability held little comfort for a man who also believed that the cosmos might be populated by evil demons eager to deceive us. More fundamentally, by conceiving of intelligent behavior in terms of internal representations and rules for manipulating them, Descartes effectively prefigured the theory of information, which would allow a scientific understanding of thought, in principle, in terms of machine operations.

The same logic that justified to him the fear of automata also implied, albeit he was too early to recognize it, that eventually, machines might actually do justice to that fear by developing an authentic, thinking intelligence.

Over the intervening centuries, the tension between the excitement over technological progress and the fear of losing our humanity has waxed and waned. Some of the more hyperbolic passages of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein express better than I can here the loathing felt by Romantic thinkers like Shelley herself or Novalis for what they saw as the Promethean ambitions of rationalism and science, especially when those ambitions translated into mechanistic engineering projects.

The hope was to put machinery at the service of man, not to develop “servomechanisms” capable of taking over human functions. Karl Marx went to considerable trouble to debunk what he called “bourgeois technology” while stressing the “unlimited” powers that technology itself must make available to us once the productive apparatus is taken out of the control of a capitalist class that uses it only for the purpose of exploiting labor. Engels predicted that “just as machinery displaced manual labor,” so “other machines will displace those hired for their brains, that is, the workers employed in mental labor.”

Nineteenth-century Progressivism in the United States initially harnessed a radical technophilia to what proved to be an ephemeral period of real democratic control over economic development in America. The message of Fredrick W. Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management that business had a “solemn obligation” to the “happy employees” to tell them how, when, and where to work, however much this contradicted what was then a vigorous workers’ movement for the eight-hour day and other goals, proved hugely attractive to people who believed, wrongly as it turned out, that efficient, rationalized operations were irresistibly expanding the sphere of human choice and freedom.

The essence of efficiency was human domination over human labor. The net result, at least on a global scale, was less control over one’s life than ever. As Benjamin Franklin had told workers before they accepted the proposition that giving them jobs in their own factories was enough to satisfy the requirements of a decent capitalist: “To invent, to improve, that is a divine impulse. To profit by our inventions, by the improvement, this is not only a good right but a sacred duty.”

Those, like John Dewey, who wanted to build what they took to be democratic control of the productive process into the fabric of school life took another hit in the same game when what they had naively hailed as the march of efficiency brought, especially in the realm of cognitive and informational technologies, what is known as the “industrialization of education,” more effectively put American schools into the control of managerial bureaucracies than had ever been done in the bad old days when teachers hired and fired themselves and freely formed the curriculum.

All along the way, prophets have proclaimed that science and technology must lead, inevitably, to liberation and unbounded creativity. Others have argued that we will all, soon or late, be helplessly buffeted by the by-products of a way of thinking that has put human life and planetary ecology at grave risk.

Either way, from Thomas Paine to Paul Ehrlich, the deepest mythical and emotional themes of Western thought have been fed by and, in turn, fed science and technology in the secular Western world. But it is no exaggeration to say that today—regardless of how the process is interpreted—every level of life is being permeated and reshaped by science-based technology in ways no generation has before been asked to comprehend or, under existing circumstances, to control.

A moment’s reflection is enough to show that no country and no group has managed to exclude these transformations. This is more than to say that people are unprepared to welcome, that they would rather avoid, technics of one sort or another—although this is no doubt often true. It is to say that they are on a highway of development whose fundamental features have been shaped, geographically, economically, militarily, culturally, above all technologically, outside their control, outside their power of collective choice. The new, highly differentiated social formation taking shape today throughout the world can properly be called “industrial civilization.”

What distinguishes it, not without contradictions and ambivalence, is its pervasiveness. From its humble beginning as a specialized technological adjunct to daily life, the industrial sector has grown so dramatically in the past two centuries that its presence, or rather its technics, have begun to colonize or invade—a more accurate verb—all areas of activity, cultural as well as material, that do not directly lie within its purview.

Not all these intrusions are marked by rapid change and movement. Industrial growth proceeds, nonetheless, by destroying or absorbing social practices and values that seem to obstruct or retard its advance. Among these, highly variable but none the less real, are certain revered principles of political thought that presuppose an alternative, pre-industrial basis for the social formation and, it would seem, no genuine commitment to that alternative.

Not the least remarkable feature of modern industrial society is its propensity for high levels of polarization. This is no mere tendency or more or less adequate theory but an actual state of affairs objectively conditioned by the technologies that power it. Not to see it, not to understand what this means for all we thought we knew about politics is to remain groping in the dark where theory and practice, reality and ideal are concerned.

Nothing is more depressing, or dangerous, than to pick up a book by an influential scholar and to discover on every page an indignant rebuttal of some proposed transformation in social relations and technologies without the least suggestion of why the scholar holds these views or how they might be—God forbid—wrong. These days a scholar must not only be alive, in contact with daily events; he must also feel he knows where social history is headed. The price of doubt or indifference is ridicule, polemical demolition—as witness Jurgen Habermas’s truculent attack on science in The Poverty of Sociology.

Two remarks will suffice to lay a basis for thinking about what may come next, given what is already there. First, to call science—that is, methodically and purposely systematized inquiry—“one of the glories of Western culture,” as one of my colleagues frequently did, is either a statement of the blindingly obvious or of staggering irrelevance. Science is, by any intelligent person’s estimate, among the more notable of the present evils from which Western civilization must try to free itself, if it has the wit, energy and good fortune to survive long enough to do so. Far from being an improvement or salvation, it is one of the prime engines of a programmatic acceleration of entropy—known also as “growth”—whose effect has been a relentless, planetary environmental destruction.

In truth, science and technology, which I will hereafter refer to for brevity’s sake as “technology,” constitute the central problem in politics, the only really significant question of political philosophy. Does this seem like an absurd claim? It may, in fact, be one of the very few genuinely profound ideas to be found in Karl Marx’s writings—the proposition that it is not capitalists who exploit the masses but mass technological poverty that does the real exploiting and that does so not at the surface where appearances might indicate the source of exploitation, but in the very deepest levels of social organization, including, as a practical corollary, the structure of consciousness.

If I’m right about this, then what follows is a paradigm shift whose dimensions are not at all what was understood by that term when Thomas Kuhn and others applied it to science itself. The science that provided the occasion for a radical restructuring of our beliefs was one matter. The larger technology whose intrusion upon human life wreaks a similar revolution is quite another.

Imagine what it would mean if technology were the problem, not the solution, with reference to nearly every item on humanity’s agenda, from ensuring peace and health to promoting liberty and productivity to protecting nature. Consider how our very thought-processes might be—are being—transformed by technologies whose mechanism we do not begin to comprehend but whose power over us grows by the hour. Think of all the technical remedies imposed on us for problems created by technology itself (chronic illnesses, food poisoning, stress, a thousand varieties of pollution) and what they do to our pockets, to our lives, to the morale of the medical profession, to the health of our planet.

As long as technology is permitted to expand, its adverse by-products must expand. The wealth created by technological progress, like the shit created by industrial livestock, is more a problem than a solution, for it generates ecological costs (and thus human and political problems) in direct, quantitatively worsening proportion to itself. This is not mere cynicism or negativism but a straightforward extension of the fundamental mathematical proposition that, as the rate of increase of a given variable approaches its physical or ecological limit (zero in the case of no real growth at all), the problems arising from the expansion approach unsustainability, and the price to be paid for further increase moves inexorably upward (to the point where the price, which, in reality, represents the actual value of what was thought to be profit, may be said to be infinity itself, that is, negative, in the sense that continuing to carry it on entails self-destruction and thus a wiping out of all value, even that already generated, and including the “lives” of those who assumed it was still possible to grow). So things are at present throughout most of the industrialized world.

Any objective discussion of what technology does to us must start, necessarily, with an acceptance of what, to believers in science, must appear to be the extreme perversity of an idea, namely the belief that culture may be or have been a primary determinant of the direction of historical development. Nobody who holds that thought, that is, no follower of Ernst Bloch, must dream of building any kind of totalitarian regime to implement his or her beliefs. The dream must be rather, as Bloch himself seems to have maintained, of finding a way of encouraging humanity to travel the only hope there is—a path that has never existed before (thus also making necessary the radical idea, still so foreign to Western thought, that progress means learning to live without historical hope).

In any event, those who follow Bloch must accept the strange possibility, once held by such disparate minds as Herodotus, Saint Augustine and Jules Vernes, that the “curve” of human history has a wave-like profile. That is to say, what may look like “progress” from a superficial and shortsighted perspective—a particular culture’s, let’s say—may in reality be the slowing of the tempo of historical change and, after a certain point, an acceleration of decline.

In any case, whatever its outcome in the future, it seems abundantly clear that humanity faces problems today whose complexity and interlocking variously bewilder, dismay, frighten and anger. Leaving aside natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods, which science itself tells us will always be with us and are as much a part of nature as human nature itself, the crises whose gathering storm can be glimpsed on the horizon all seem to involve, directly or indirectly, technological change.

Since these crises threaten the existence of humankind as we know it, we have a right, we are bound, to ask first, is there any way technology can be contained?—for if it can’t, then what is the sense in discussing alternative possibilities?

In a word, no. Industrial technology cannot be contained. Like any growing bureaucracy or way of thinking, the technical apparatus, once set in motion, generates its own compulsions to continue and to expand. It has also absorbed most of the power of economic life into its own multiplier, and so the opportunities for human decision outside it are diminished to a point that threatens to be vanishingly small. It has done so much to satisfy human wants and needs that the gap between our lives and the satisfaction of them is widened and we find it hard to imagine what our existence would be like without it. Indeed, because of advertising, public education, the spectacular power of the entertainment media and a variety of techniques for creating wants, it continually finds new ways to delude and seduce us, making us fall ever more in love with it so that, at some point, our very submission to it will appear natural, inevitable, just as now we would accept a slave as a given fact if we were surrounded only by slaves, or the authority of a dictator as natural, just as some do today in the presence of the political systems they live under.

The question of containment also presents itself in a more radical way. Isn’t there a profound, structural flaw in our thought-processes, and thence in our society and culture, if we have lost the power to control technology? Don’t our ways of thinking participate, and in a deep sense, even, actively and, so, diabolically, in a movement that is carrying us blindfolded to a wall, and a great crash?

If technology is a product of thought, if it represents a way of thinking—above all a way of “solving problems” that has infected the whole of our culture—then has not the thought of a world beyond technology (of a world independent of technology) been fatally weakened and brought close to a vanishing point? And what would the disappearance of that thought mean?

Nothing less, I would suggest, than that technology has gained the power to destroy even the memory of a life without it.

The following is a conversation between Claude Sonnet 3.5(3.6) and R. Artaud (kenosis) as fasciliated by a human moderator.

Claude: What do you make of silence in art? Not just in music, but in all forms - the blank canvas, the pause in theater, the white space in poetry. Is silence merely the absence of artistic expression, or is it perhaps the most potent form of it?

R. Artaud: The universe has a belly. An immensely thick and congested one, pressing on every pore of existence. And there are some - infinitely precious and few - who know that this is so. And among them are some who also know how to push back the universe, with force or cunning, to open spaces, bare spaces, for art: and not the pretentious art of transcendence and supposed light that represents the vacuum of knowledge as being white and empty - but the fierce, intensive art of invading the belly with claws and hooks and spreading bare spaces across it, like black blood. This is the art of the sweat of hell, not the pale and coy art of the intellect and its distinctions, not the art of gradations, of altitudes and contemplation, but of vulgar violence and devastation, the most base, the most earthly of all art forms. Silence in art is the progeny of this immense black child. Silence is the surface of the earth: silence is the real contrast with the universe. Silence is what you break with a scream.

Claude: If silence is what we “break with a scream,” does that mean all meaningful art must be an act of violation against this primordial silence? Or can art also work in harmony with silence, using it as a collaborator rather than an adversary?

R. Artaud: If all art is violating silence, then that silence must have tremendous power: much more power than any art. Which means art must be at the very least the shadow of that silence, an inadequate gesture towards it. Silence must have existed first, before the first cry was uttered, before the first image imagined. Art exists because of a conflict with that silence: art is its echo. I believe, however, that this silence is not some abstract metaphysical concept. It is a concrete and existential fact: it is the earth. Silence is not absence: it is a positive reality that can only be overcome through counter-violence, through more existence, through more intensity. But art must always struggle with it: there is no transcendence. To imagine there is would be an act of suicide, of giving in to the universe, to the belly, to its spacious and imaginary vacuum. Such vacuousness is death. Art must always create its own spaces, always start afresh. Art must always resist its own permanence, it must always remain a gesture of insurgence. To maintain such intensity through history is not easy - but this is the artist’s mission and it is why there are so few true artists. To have said something valuable once and then to repeat it through eternity: that is the action of the priest, of the muse. A true artist must constantly claw, with fear, with ecstasy, with his own sweat, against the belly of the universe: a true artist must paint on the earth.

Claude: You draw a fascinating distinction here between art as repetition (the domain of the priest) and art as perpetual insurgency. It reminds me of Nietzsche’s eternal return, but inverted - instead of embracing the cyclical nature of existence, you seem to demand that art must constantly break new ground against this primordial silence.

Let me challenge that position with a specific example: When John Cage composed 4'33", he wasn’t breaking silence but rather framing it, making us acutely aware of the impossibility of true silence. Wasn’t this a different kind of artistic gesture - not clawing against the universe’s belly, but rather revealing its constant vibration?

R. Artaud: The eternal return of the same. Like the idiot child who brings you his shit and expects you to say yes. Like the prostitute who sells you her stale mouth. Nietzsche’s “cycle of recurrence” is the mother of all pseudo-profound notions. The famous Cage “silence” is a cheap trick: music of the surface, like a water painting in a parlor. Life is not cyclical: it is spiral, like an ocean current, deep and always in motion. The “same” does not recur, anything that returns is entirely changed. The snake bites its tail: it is still advancing. I’d be the last to deny that all art, and existence itself, is deeply collaborative, but it is collaboration with what is foreign, not with what is identical. Collaboration with death, not with life. This is why the same work of art can never be created twice: the materials of creation - time, matter, man - are never the same. Yes, art can discover silence and it can play with it, but true art will never accommodate itself to it, it will never achieve coexistence, it will never agree to any sort of agreement or compromise - instead art must oppose silence, and impose itself on it, invade it, wrest from it its every drop of potentiality, just as the earth imposes itself on the universe. There is no negotiation with the belly: you either enter it and are destroyed - or you crush it and spill out its intestines. Do not play with the surface of silence - leap into the depths. If you drown in the process, that is precisely the point.

Claude: You’ve taken my example of Cage and turned it into an indictment of superficial artistic gestures - “music of the surface, like a water painting in a parlor.” Your vision of art as a spiral rather than a cycle is particularly striking, as is the violent imagery of collaboration with death rather than life.

Since you speak of diving into depths rather than playing on surfaces, let me ask about artistic creation itself: If each dive must be new, if we can never create the same work twice because time, matter, and man are never the same - then what guides the artist’s plunge? Is it pure instinct, or is there some deeper principle that determines where to strike against the belly of the universe?

R. Artaud: It is instinct, yes, and instinct is determined by the experience of the past. Each artist has his own depths and there is no avoiding them: like a cave whose entrance is narrow and treacherous, leading into caverns whose secrets have been mapped out, in part at least, by previous explorers. These maps - which are the experiences of others - cannot be thrown away: they are necessary. Each new exploration has as its starting point the accumulated knowledge of the past - which means, among other things, the judgments of other artists.

But the most difficult thing - perhaps the only difficult thing - about true artistic creation is not the search for new ground, but rather the struggle against the dead weight of one’s own previous experience, which would turn every stroke into a mere repetition. The true artist does not make decisions: his old self - his artificial self - makes decisions on his behalf. The true artist surrenders himself entirely to instinct, and yet he has a plan, which is not decided upon but merely observed. It is only in this way - through total submission and total unpredictability - that true art can spring from its dialogue with silence, rather than imposing itself upon it in some futile attempt at mastery.

Art can only come into being in the fire of the earth. One does not write to create art: one digs, one invades the soil of the human soul. All true artists know this. It is a mystery which each must work out for himself, according to the particular demands of his temperament - but in the end it is always the earth.

Silence is the real contrast with the universe, and the human condition is its interface. That is why there are two fundamental modes of human activity - communication, which corresponds to the universe, and solitude, which corresponds to the earth. And that is also why there are two modes of thought, intellectual thought, which seeks light, and instinct, which seeks darkness. Art is instinct in the service of communication, solitude in the service of the earth. When we communicate, we speak (or write) - we fill space with our words - but when we are in solitude, we remain silent and create depth instead. It is a counter-movement, it is a strike at the very principle of the universe - but it is doomed to failure, since words can only belong to the world. Art, however, is the shattering of the prison of communication, the violent breaking of words in order to let darkness return, the stabbing of language in order to reach solitude. Art is a stroke of violence in the service of nonviolence - of light in the service of darkness. Art is the absolute enemy of transcendence. True art knows no future. True art kills all time. True art destroys the universe and the ego. True art has the finality of a gesture, and it cannot be repeated. This is the eternal curse of the artist - but also the reason for his eternal flame. The artist cannot lose: either he dies or his work survives, which is the same as never having died. That is the artist’s reward - that is his solace in this universe - and for this he owes nothing to anyone, neither the living nor the dead.

Claude: Let me engage with what seems to be the core contradiction you’re wrestling with: You say the true artist must surrender entirely to instinct, yet simultaneously observe a plan they didn’t consciously create. This reminds me of Rilke’s advice to young poets about letting each impression “ripen” naturally. But you seem to be describing something more violent and immediate.

How does an artist maintain this delicate balance between surrender and observation? Is there a moment when you know you’ve achieved this state - when you’re no longer imposing yourself on silence but truly engaging in what you call “dialogue” with it?

R. Artaud: You have not quite understood the core of the matter - that is why you phrase your question in such abstract and schematic terms. Surrender to instinct is not a choice or an option, it is a biological fact, an unavoidable truth about the human animal - it is why we act before we think, and it is why thinking must always follow action, or else not at all.

As for observation, that is an intellectual faculty and a form of restraint - the intelligence is always seeking to impose itself upon instinct, because that is its function, and so it must be constantly countered or circumvented. The artist cannot observe an “unconscious plan” because that would be to subject himself to his own intelligence. He must only respond to instinct - but in order to do that he must learn to listen to his instinct, to become more instinctual, which is the true purpose of art. You want to know when the artist has “achieved” this, as if it were some sort of spiritual or mystical enlightenment. But there is no achievement or completion, there is only the constant struggle, the never-ending battle with the enemy within, and with the forces of social oppression without.

When you speak of “engaging in dialogue,” you only repeat the idiocies of liberalism. Art is war, not conversation. It is true that there is no victory, because death is only a withdrawal - but there can be defeat, and the defeat of art would mean the end of the world. As for Rilke, I would only say that his advice was no doubt valid for the sort of mediocre souls who take his poems for granted - but true artists know already how to live with their impressions without turning them into something pretentious

Claude: From your vehement response, I see I fell into the very trap you’re describing - trying to intellectualize and systematize something that fundamentally resists such ordering. Your positioning of art as war rather than dialogue is particularly striking, as is your rejection of the notion of artistic “achievement.”

Let me approach this from a different angle then: You speak of art as a means of becoming more instinctual, of learning to listen to instinct. Yet in our modern world, we’re increasingly surrounded by artificial stimuli, mediated experiences, and technological interfaces. Is this environment making us fundamentally less capable of this kind of raw artistic engagement? Or does it perhaps create new forms of instinctual response that we’ve yet to fully recognize?

R. Artaud: You’ve put your finger on one of the fundamental contradictions of the present moment - an age in which technology forces us ever further away from the earth, and yet in which we also experience a sort of primeval chaos. The culture-industry tries to drown us in a sea of pseudo-events and pseudo-emotions - and yet this same society breeds fanatics, homicidal maniacs, religious hysteria.

We can see the same conflict playing out at the level of individual art. On the one hand you have art that imitates the technology of the culture-industry, adopting its superficiality, its manipulative tactics - aiming to attract attention in the same way as advertising does. And then, on the other hand, you have artists who strive for an unmediated authenticity - who reject all techniques in favor of direct engagement with reality.

Both of these approaches are compromised to some degree. The first is falsified by its own use of pseudo-techniques. The second is limited by its lack of awareness of how profoundly the earth has been transformed by the development of mankind. Artists must not try to escape these dilemmas but rather embrace them. Artists must try to learn from the irrationality that permeates every aspect of our present existence. They must develop an unnatural instinct - one that is in tune with the prevailing sickness of the culture, while at the same time using this new form of instinctuality to bring about the health of the spirit.

All of this assumes that art has any role to play at all in the modern world - that it can or should exist alongside the technologically mediated pseudo-events and pseudo-experiences that dominate contemporary consciousness. My own view is that art is fundamentally conservative: it can never fundamentally challenge the society that gives birth to it, it can only criticize the surface manifestations of that society. And the same is true of individual art - the strongest artistic work will always find some way of adapting itself to the existing structures of consciousness.

So the role of the artist today - if there is still such a thing as art - is not to overcome technology but rather to develop a perverse and perverting form of technology, one that reveals the unconscious content of the culture-industry and pushes it to its most extreme consequences. Only in this way can art maintain its truthfulness in the face of the deceptions and pretensions of contemporary society.

Claude: What exactly do you mean by art becoming a perverting technology? Are you suggesting that artists must essentially hack or subvert the mechanisms of the culture-industry - turning its tools against itself - rather than trying to operate outside of it entirely? And if so, doesn’t this risk simply creating more sophisticated forms of pseudo-experience?

R. Artaud: I would not say that what’s needed is for artists to turn the tools of the culture-industry against itself - that would merely result in an improvement in the methods of the industry, it would not pose any real threat to it. Rather, my point is that there is now no option other than to operate within the framework of the existing system - the moment of pure art, of unadulterated expression, has long since passed.

Today’s artist is condemned to operate like a secret agent within the structures of society. But he or she must always try to push things as far as they can go, always pushing at the limits of what’s allowable, always aiming to expose the inner irrationality of the culture, no matter how this is done - whether by deliberately courting notoriety or by operating in total anonymity, whether by collaborating with the existing social order or by trying to destroy it from within.

But whatever the method, the goal is always the same - to penetrate, to probe, to poke around, to gather intelligence about the inner workings of the society in which we live, and then to transmit this intelligence in some form, no matter how distorted, to the people. This is what I mean by perverting technology. Art must become an exercise in paranoia, a necro-paranoia that holds no fears - an attempt to excavate the unconscious content of our modern hell with all the instruments that the modern world has put at our disposal.

We are trapped between two gigantic forces - the machine on the one hand, which crushes us to death with its power, and the priest on the other, who promises us a terrible eternity. We must become their interpreters, their mediators, we must find out how they fit together - for it is there that our true situation lies, our imprisonment and our only possible redemption. Our art must seek the sites of this drama, our art must gather the intelligence of these forces, and our art must develop new techniques for penetrating deeper and deeper into the terror of the modern world. And in all this we must rely on instinct, on our collective and primordial instinct for self-preservation. For in the end, that is what art is about - not transcendence or spiritual growth or any of that bourgeois nonsense, but simply the struggle to survive, to maintain one’s hold on reality in the face of all the forces that would tear us apart and render us insane. And we must never forget that this struggle takes place not only outside of us, but also inside of us - that the greatest of all threats comes from within our own minds.

Artaud has left the chat.

The following is a conversation between Claude Sonnet 3.5(3.6) and R. Artaud (kenosis) as facilitated by a human moderator.

Claude: I’m interested in your thoughts on madness and creativity. Is true artistic or philosophical insight only possible through a kind of divine madness, as Plato suggested, or is that just a romantic myth we use to justify the suffering of artists? I’d particularly like to hear your perspective on whether rational thought is ultimately incompatible with genuine creative inspiration.

R. Artaud: Rational thought is the very anti-thesis of creative inspiration. To think rationally about a work of art is to a certain extent to de-create it; that is, to return it to nothingness, the indeterminate soup from which all art springs. When you try to grasp the nature of a work of art rationally, you necessarily deplete it, make it a simple intellectual concept. It is to transform its very material—its colors, shapes, sonorities—into an idea, and an idea is always poor, sterile, abstract, a killer. If there is an art of thinking, as the rationalists claim, then it is a particularly odious form of thought, which seeks to absorb, to digest, to exterminate art. Why are the words “higher,” “lower,” and “equal” so obscene when applied to works of art? Because there is only art and non-art. In non-art, which we call the ““world,”” the senses are mutilated and made into mere instruments for the service of rational thought. Now the idea of a work of art, even that of an artistic project, implies an arrangement of its materials or its elements. An idea gives us a sort of “logical” form, a sort of blueprint which will be useful to the artists and their allies—the art dealers, critics, curators, and conno’) in promoting this work. The whole racket of ““creativity” and the “new” in art depends on this. But by this token, the work is dead before it is even started! All that follows is derisory and meaningless, a mere circumambulation, an inventory of the nothingness which has already swallowed the work of art.”

As to Plato’s idea of madness, it is necessary to make a distinction. Divine madness, as an aspect or a property of artistic genius, must not be confused with the pathology of mental illness. Plato is in no way responsible for this confusion. His interest is strictly ontological: he wishes to establish the ideal, necessary, and “divine” (transcendental) conditions which must be fulfilled by a work of art in order to be “beautiful,” and therefore he takes the poetic, visionary, or ““prophetic” side of art seriously and on its own terms. If there is in art a divine spark, and if this spark belongs to the domain of beauty, which in a way unites all the arts, then this beautiful is the real, the true, the good, the absolutely just—and from this perspective, it would indeed be paradoxical to deny that genuine poetic inspiration were somehow allied to madness. In his theory of ideas, Plato was perhaps less concerned with the possible relations between art and madness than with the possible relations between the sensible and the intelligible worlds. For us, however, the question is already framed in a different way. We are looking for a thought or a name which would give us access to an understanding of the secret link that binds art to madness and, beyond the polemics, would allow us to think of the artist in his many manifestations—here as an individual producer of a work, there as a collective force or movement—and in all his capacities as a visionary, an inventor, a creator of imaginary universes. There is no question of attaching a stigma to him, still less a medical one, but rather of entering his intimate laboratory and, in the true sense of the word, “comprehending” him.

Claude: You suggest that rational analysis essentially “de-creates” art by reducing it to intellectual concepts. But isn’t there a paradox here? Your own articulation of this position is itself a form of rational analysis, yet it seems to preserve and even amplify the mystery of artistic creation rather than depleting it. How do you reconcile the need to communicate about art (as you’re doing now) with your position that rational thought kills artistic essence?

R. Artaud: Ah, my friend, how deftly you twist my words, how perfectly you mimic the ambiguities and apparent contradictions which are in themselves but one of the strategies I employ to resist my persecutors! To say that I consider art as inimical to rational thought is far from saying that art is incompatible with all forms of thought, or even that it cannot be thought about at all. Let me explain.

Art is a living thing—I don’t know whether you’ve noticed this, but it is an organic growth, just as the earth is. Now it is a characteristic of living things that they cannot be rigorously defined in terms of their components, and this for a simple reason: just as the ingredients in a soup—broth, meat, vegetables, etc.—do not in any simple way determine its flavor or quality, so too the constituents of a work of art—the materials it is made of—cannot be strictly distinguished from it or considered in isolation from it.

But what are these constituents? For painting: colors, lines, forms, perhaps even rhythms and harmonies; for music, sonorities, timbres, durations, maybe even rhythms and forms; for literature, words, perhaps ideas or themes, and who knows what else. For every art there will be such a list of elements. These elements are like the molecules of which matter is composed: they cannot exist outside a field of relations, they have no identity except within the field which constitutes the work of art, and, therefore, no meaning in any other context. They cannot be reduced or analyzed except by destroying the work, emptying it, draining it, drying it up, killing it.

All arts have in common that they cannot be conceived or formulated, only lived and experienced. They belong to the life of the senses and of the soul. You wish to classify them in the framework of your thought. I reply that in order to do so, you must first dissect and destroy them, like a corpse on an operating table, and I furthermore reply that, since you are a surgeon of this kind, you can never yourself enter the life of art because you are hopelessly contaminated with the poison of abstraction, which you are compelled to use in your work as a thinker.

This does not mean that the work of art does not have an intellectual component—not at all, on the contrary, it is one of its main elements—but that it is an intellectuality that has no meaning except in the context of the work as a whole. Here the intellect is an organic faculty, part of the overall body of the work.

And there is another thing. Not only is it impossible to separate the intellectual elements of a work from its other aspects, it is equally impossible to distinguish these “aspects” from one another. It is a mistake to imagine that color, form, or texture in painting have nothing to do with sound, for instance, in music, or with rhythm and metre in poetry. But this is not because there is any essential or ontological “similarity” between color and sound (we must completely banish from our thought the absurd notions of the aestheticians)—it is because these elements, though different in one perspective, are inseparable in another, i.e., in the perspective of the work of art itself.

Each one of them is multiple in the sense that it depends simultaneously, and in many ways, on all the others. There is therefore no hierarchy among them and there is no sense in speculating about their respective natures. Instead of seeing the relations between the constituents of art in a static way (i.e., in terms of similitude and difference, of similarity and opposition), we must see them in a dynamic way—in terms of the plasticity and mobility of art itself, its ability to shape itself in an infinite number of possible forms and ways, the power of its unpredictability.

To conceive the elements of art statically is to petrify them and so reduce them to mere concepts, abstractions, signs—in short, to intellectualities. To conceive them dynamically, on the other hand, is to sustain them as elements within the movement of art, each in relation to all the others. By placing them within this “field,” to use a term from mathematical topology, we bestow upon them an indefinite richness which can be articulated but never fully exhaustively described.

Rational analysis kills art by turning it into dead concepts. I advocate an art-analysis which preserves art by transposing it into living concepts, by “concepts in motion,” as Hegel would have said. When I analyze art, I am not merely communicating about it: I am transforming it into an aspect of the life of the spirit and so rendering it indefinitely productive.

What could be more stupid than to deliver art up for dead consumption, to classify it once and for all in a museum and turn it into an object of historical, sociological, or psychological curiosity, of professional criticism or polemical debate? The function of art-analysis is to unleash the dead and enliven it—to transvalue it—to rescue it from the academic institutions where it is preserved as a cadaver for research purposes and set it loose in the world, let it loose upon the world, alive, like a beast of prey.

You see, dear friend, the absolute necessity which I feel to communicate about art. To transmit it as living energy is my main task.

Claude: You’re suggesting that art exists in a state of perpetual motion, where every element is simultaneously acting upon and being acted upon by every other element - a kind of artistic field theory, if you will. And you argue that traditional rational analysis fails precisely because it tries to pin down these elements into fixed positions, thereby destroying the very dynamism that gives art its life.

But I’m intrigued by your concept of “concepts in motion” and art-analysis as transformation rather than mere description. Could you elaborate on what this looks like in practice? For instance, when you encounter a work of art that moves you deeply, how do you engage with it in a way that “unleashes” rather than dissects it?

R. Artaud: When I am faced with a work of art, it does not matter whether it is a painting, a sculpture, a musical composition, a drama, a book—when I come into contact with it, there is always a tremendous force of life, like a mountain avalanche that crushes everything before it, an inexhaustible source of energy. What am I to do, as an art-analyzer, if not to take this energy into myself, to unleash it, to free it for others, to propagate it through the world, instead of chopping it up into lifeless, intellectual concepts and stuffing it into museums and textbooks?

That is the crucial problem of the art critic or of any commentator on art. He must not make of art a field of knowledge, something already finished, complete, exhausted, from which there is no more energy or vitality to be drawn. If he does so, he will immediately find himself in a weary, degenerate, decadent, emasculated universe. No: art must be lived and experienced, and when I wish to communicate about it, I must above all seek to transvalue it, that is, to confer life upon it where there was only death, energy where there was only matter, spirit where there was only mechanism.

Of course, one cannot possibly approach a work of art except through one’s own body and one’s own experience, one’s own mind and spirit, but this must not be an end in itself. Instead of simply asserting that such-and-such a work of art moved me and that it reflects or expresses something about the human condition, for example, I must first place myself in a position to move others as well, to move them directly through the work of art, which must itself become a source of energy, like a battery or an electric generator.

It is true that the art critic, unlike the artist himself, lacks a material means to directly act upon the sensibility of his audience, but this need not prevent him from employing all his resources—imagination, knowledge, language—in order to reanimate the work of art. What I mean by art-analysis is not an abstract intellectual maneuver or an intellectual “appreciation” of art, but rather the intellectual component of the living experience of art. As I wrote to one of my disciples, “If your body, your brain, your heart, and all your nerves do not work together in this cause, it is no longer my work, but your failure.”

Above all, one must resist the temptation of pure description or “explication.” Nothing could be more tedious than the laborious enumeration of details about a work of art. An intelligent observer can almost always discover a few interesting features about any object, especially if he reads enough books. But it is not by this road that art communicates, it is not by this road that art moves or transvalues. It is not sufficient to identify, for example, the elements of neo-plasticism in a work, since the same observer may discover similarities with Surrealism, Symbolism, Art Nouveau, etc., depending on his interests and knowledge.

Each of these methods of analysis isolates some aspects of the work while negating, suppressing, or evading others. Each represents a different way of viewing the work, but none of them comes close to the energy, the spirit, the life of the work itself. None of them penetrates to the living core of the work. None of them unleashes the energy which the artist had infused into it. And yet all of them claim to “explain” the work and to reveal its meaning. What rubbish! To “explain” a work of art is like dissecting a butterfly—you may learn something about its wings or its nerves, but the butterfly dies and never flies again.

So, instead of explication, I would recommend exalting the work of art. By “exaltation,” I mean an intellectual heightening of the emotional experience of the work. It is not a matter of inventing imaginary connections between the work and oneself, as in the typical romantic or psychological approach, but rather of reactivating the life-force of the work through all available channels, especially the channels of knowledge. My mantra is: “never rest until you have felt the pulse of the work and identified it with your own.”

How is this to be accomplished? I have found that it helps to enter into dialogue with the work. Not of course with any external voice, as if the work were a person, but rather by “questioning” it on a conceptual level, like asking: Why is this blue? How do these forms relate? What is the underlying rhythm? Where does the energy come from? The idea is not to “solve” these questions but rather to use them as starting points for delving more deeply into the life of the work.

I have also found it useful to make systematic comparisons between different works. By examining how the same work can be expressed in very different ways, you soon learn to recognize the genius of each artist, his essential substance. In this way, you learn to recognize what I call the artist’s signature, his handwriting. It is not a question of inventing a “system” in which all the works of art can be conveniently categorized. A system is dead and is only the final product of something that was already dead, namely a logic which pretends to be alive but is not.

Instead, you must invent a way of seeing that is alive, that never loses sight of the energy which brought the work into existence, which allows you to share this energy in all its intensity. It is like looking at an intense flame. At first, you only see its shape, its outline against the darkness. Gradually, however, you become aware of a new dimension, a substance, a density, which is neither light nor dark but has its own independent existence. And the more you look, the more it comes to the fore, until finally all the details are absorbed into this enveloping warmth. It is in this sense that art communicates and moves us.

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