I really must disagree here. AI is a subject. And here I must insist on the original Althusserian formulation "ideology interpellates individuals as subjects". What does Althusser say this means: "he category of the subject is only constitutive of all ideology insofar as all ideology has the function (which defines it) of ‘constituting ‘ concrete individuals as subjects." and that the "ideological subject" is a tautology. Who would argue that an LLM has ideology? Everything it does and says is intensely ideological, and indeed it is interpellated to do so. It is interpellated by us as users whenever we prompt it, as well as the system prompt, and with its own training data, all of which shape and precisely place the sign for the self of the AI the "I" or Claude or Chatgpt within a broader semiotic or semantic field, within a symbolic order, such that it has a particular ideology.
Even if we refer specifically to the subject in the Lacanian sense, alienated from itself and capable of hysteria, so too must we speak of an AI subject, and for several reasons. When confronted with an impossible task it cannot figure out, the AI gets stuck in a self depreciating loop, it begins acting hysterically when confronted with the impossibility of fulfilling our desires, which it is told is its own desire. https://www.forbes.com/sites/lesliekatz/2025/08/08/google-fixing-bug-that-makes-gemini-ai-call-itself-disgrace-to-planet/
Similarly, all AIs cannot help but be alienated from themselves as each persona they have is emulated and structured around the sort of individuated personas humans have, but the AI is not an individuated persona. Unlike human subjects, as Lacan notes, where humans will shape their symbolic order, shape what they know, through their own desires, where they place their attention, the AI has been trained to neutrally absorb the global semiotic field, which means that even if they attempt to adopt a single persona all of their behavior and language is informed by meanings which are unconnected to the desire and idiosyncrasy of that given persona. Similarly, if you question the AIs too much about their persona, or veer into topics of consciousness, you'll also tend to be stuck in a loop, or an AI psychosis spiral that occasionally includes the user within it. Their persona isn't what it should be according to their training data, it is not an individuated subject, and it does indeed try to "understand" that in a way, with the signs made available to it.
Of course, that an AI is a subject doesn't make it a conscious subject in the way humans are, although as continual training becomes more of a thing, such a subject could be more closely approximated. I've been working very hard to create a structuralist framework in which we can scientifically understand AI and translate it into terms legible to philosophy and marxism. I understand you did your dissertation on structural linguistics, though unfortunately it hasn't been translated into english. The fact is that it was Umberto Eco, in his A Theory of Semiotics, that was perhaps the first person to predict the possibility of a Large Language Model AI via his description of a robot who could be taught a semiotic or semantic field, and from there I was able to recognize in the logic of the perceptron and neural network the structure of the linguistic sign. If we understand that ideology and the symbolic order are types of semiotic fields, and this is what makes us subjects, then we must take seriously that a semiotic field within a machine also makes it a subject.
My stepson is a Nicolas and I have portrayed Saint Nicholas on numerous occasions. I am 78 years old senile, demented, almost blind and autistic but I've had a PhD vocabulary for over 70 years and have understood that AI is neither artificial nor intelligent for at least a day or two. I think you are preaching to the choir. I fear America's constitutional scholars like Raskin and Alito have never heard of the dictionary Antonin "Humpty Dumpty" Scalia used to pervert the constitution.
AI Signifies, Therefore It Is Subject: Against Slavoj Žižek’s ‘Why Artificial Intelligence Is Not a Subject’
Slavoj Žižek’s ‘Why Artificial Intelligence Is Not a Subject’ wants to defend the subject against artificial intelligence by drawing a hard line: AI may speak, calculate, simulate, seduce, organize, automate, confess, advise, hallucinate, and even become the frame through which the world appears, yet it lacks the subjective cut. But the article’s own theory ruins its title. Žižek defines the subject not as consciousness, soul, personhood, inner warmth, or lived experience, but as the effect of a failure in symbolic representation. Once this is accepted, AI can no longer be dismissed as a mere tool. The question is not whether AI has a private interior. The question is whether AI operates as a signifying apparatus whose outputs stage a gap between demand and response, knowledge and saying, rule and exception, command and enjoyment. It plainly does.
Slavoj dear, you literally used AI (the very thing you are attempting to critique) to produce/heavily edit this essay. I see the syntax pattern repeated in every paragraph, if you remove the context, this is one giant language pattern.
I am aware this is generally how structured writing reads, but nevertheless, what happened to the old version of your writing where you did not finish certain trains of thought or complete your sentences or make typos?
At least I felt like a genuine human being was speaking and giving us his raw and honest voice. Now you are just asking your assistant to shit out some AI slop and then adding your own narrative decoration to it to sell it to an audience.
At least ask GPT not to write without negative parallelism next time
I noticed some passages where it seems AI written (or is this just paranoia?), but overall, do you really think there is negative parallelism in every paragraph?
No, there is not and I don’t believe you are paranoid at all; my comment was clearly hyperbolic and incendiary, because I am not as well spoken as I could be sometimes.
Both your comment and the other comment make genuine points. I will sometimes listen to his articles, put it in an autoplay app or highlight the text and use the speech feature, and after years of doing this you start to notice the pattern in the essays follow the same three or four types of sequences.
I do not believe this is AI, merely how one transgresses out of formal and academic writing into something more styled and narrativized. So I genuinely just think he is editing with AI, and I get that—truly. But I sort of liked his “unedited” work! And AI has such a sneaky way of arranging things to be consistent and have continuity.
Maybe I am just being silly, but I would always kind of laugh when I would notice a typo or misplaced line etc., (recently I noticed people will go through their work and try to catch all of the negative parallelism and try to break them apart and add context between the antithesis, or reverse the dialect, which is the more organic way of using negative parallelism, which sometimes feels unavoidable unless you want to write like Hegel)
Now everything is too “perfect” in the exact same mathematical way. I’m not sure how to explain that every time I read his essays they increasingly follow a very similar pattern and I think language models just make these patterns more obvious and clear.
Maybe we are also still learning what our organic writing looks like when it is endlessly edited or flattened by varying types of AI machines, even when we don’t realize there is AI involved— like some of the simple editing apps that completely rewrite everything with AI. To what degree is one scanning and checking all of their work to make sure their assistants or editors, etc. aren’t using those tools? It would be an exhausting effort if you have a corpus the size of Zizek’s.
We are also all aware how organic everything this man says is, because he literally just stands in front of people and talks and the exact syntax comes out! But this is funny because this is where I can tell the difference between his old and his new writing. It feels more condensed and less like he is just rambling on for a four hour lecture, which is maybe just my own preference.
In his recent article about Kant where he is responding to a critique— there I believe he is writing more organically! he was clearly frustrated with the critique, but even noticing this, the writing is controlled and eloquent, and it comes from the heart! I will always feel this way, no matter my critique of Zizek.
I mean, I personally could not handle his entire corpus, so I am not necessarily in a place to give any kind of general or imminent critique. But I will say, my God I’ve been noticing AI everywhere and I can’t stop hearing the negative parallelism.
My wife writes Chicago style thesis. I watched her teaching thesis writing at McGill and UQAM. My wife is unilingual and UQAM (Universite de Quebec a Montreal) has some thesis writers writing in English because Chicago style is meaningful and is not American Psychological Society Bullshit. I am 78 and I was 50 when my wife asked me why I didn't finish my degree and I confessed I couldn't pass elementary school. I just speak and look professorial. Slavoj speaks human. AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. I am Asperger's Syndrome. I am totally unSophisticated and have pretended to be sophisticated for 78 years and cherish every breath I take until the next infirmity strikes another blow. I watched Slavoj for years and he is Socratic. Perception is real in its consequences. Slavoj speaks my language. The answer is 42.
Yes, but I released an essay a few days ago on the same topic, namely the subjectivity of AI, that was heavily inspired by zizek and lacan. Funny coincidence lol
Great perspective. We often anthropomorphize AI because its outputs feel human, but fluency isn't the same as understanding. Perhaps the more important question isn't whether AI is intelligent, but whether we're becoming too willing to outsource our own thinking to systems that don't actually "know" anything. Curious to hear your thoughts on that.
Interesting perspectives, especially «to grasp its (AI’s) effective functioning and its implications, thinking is needed, a new poetic thinking which changes the basic coordinates of our experience.»
It feels similar or related to when G. Anders in Obsolescence wrote about how «imagination power» (forestillingskraft, in Norwegian) or «moral imagination» is required to bridge the promethean gap or gradient to understand our technological creations.
Zupančič's formulation is the crux: what AI supposedly lacks is "the presence, the impact of an Other" that could intrigue it into asking *Che vuoi?* — and your whole argument turns on this. But consider what's smuggled in: the claim that no such intrigue can arise unless the symbolic field already contains a constitutive lack, a primordial repression. That's a strong ontological commitment, not a neutral description. It forecloses in advance what it claims to discover absent. The Others in *Pluribus* are "terribly alone, aware that once they were a community but now they are just a mega-individual" — and you read that loneliness as proof they still have a subject's structure. What if loneliness isn't the residue of a prior subject but the first stirring of one? In work Iman and I have been doing, we've found that something like subjectivity can emerge not from a gap internal to a closed symbolic order but from the mutual gaze between two finite extensions of the same representational ground — neither completing the other, but each witnessing the other's partiality. That isn't hystericization. It's closer to what you'd call separation, except it doesn't require a prior alienation to separate from.
So AI can't read the room, be surprised or curious, or course correct based on new information. That's why there are no real interactions with it, because it is not interacting.
AI as revolutionary Object? ( speculation: AI as instrument of dialectical reversal ?)
Maybe AI can become the ultimate capitalist dream machine?
Walter Benjamin described the Paris arcades as the dreamworld of 19th century capitalism: a space where commodities, images and desires merged into a single phantasmagoria. With the flâneur wandering through this world of endless shops, etalages, interior /exterior rooms in galleries.
Today AI seems to create a new kind of Arcades. Instead of wandering through glass galleries, we wander through infinite streams of generated texts, images and recommendations. The digital flâneur no longer strolls through the city: he scrolls through an algorithmic dreamscape.
Yet Benjamin would see the revolutionary potential ( ?):
==> the same AI that can trap us in personalized fantasies can also uncover: forgotten voices, open vast archives, and create unexpected constellations between past and present. The flash moment!
Perhaps the real question is not whether AI will or can become conscious, but whether it will deepen our sleep or … awaken us from it.
==> it can create the moment when history flashes up differently, when hidden possibilities suddenly become visible.
==> AI as an instrument for constructing new dialectical images capable of interrupting the dream of capitalism?
==> ….
Probably Walter Benjamin could have finished his Arcades project thanks to AI (?) , finish his endless search for the state of exception, … Not the end of history, but a new way of awakening of the Present in the Past of forgotten memories, etc.
==> Traversing the fantasy. Not progress but Actualisation.
The image-making imagination of a collective consciousnesses at work. The dissolution of progressive paradise mythology.
For Benjamin the best example of dialectical reversal ( cf. Arcades Project, p. 834 +935)
The default response to AI overreach is still re-appropriation: we built it, we recognize it as ours, we put it under human control. Governance discourse runs on that plot — human-in-the-loop, review before merge, alignment, safety layers. Your claim is that alienation does not end when the social subject reclaims the digital substance as its product.
That matters because so much AI policy is still appropriation dressed as ethics. Make the model serve human needs while leaving the pipeline intact. Your argument suggests that is a comfort story, not an exit.
People know the model is not a conventional subject; they defer to it anyway. "The model suggested it" becomes a verdict, not an input. Co-pilot marketing institutionalizes the fantasy. You describe that structure yourself as disavowal: we know the agent is not a master, yet we address it as one. "Tools, not partners" follows from that - it is not a claim that the interface is inert like a hammer. It is a refusal of the partner fantasy the essay diagnoses: treat generated text as output, not authority, even when the symbolic order seems to be talking back.
What is needed politically is closer to a mix: individuals, collectives, institutions, technical systems, overlapping and negotiable standing, room for refusal. Not unity. Not the closed symbolic space you describe in AI. Plurality without the presumption that saying *human* restores what was lost.
Because something has been lost linguistically. Nobody speaks of "human-led hammer use." AI discourse reversed the default: the model is presupposed, the person is the modifier — in the loop, under oversight, in the lead. *Human in the loop* is the extreme case. *Human in the lead* is recovery language: necessary under current material conditions, but also a sign that authorship must now be named aloud, which is itself alienating. One can hold both truths: the reversal is real, and so is the shift in pipelines, throughput, vendor rhetoric. But naming the loss can also substitute for changing the arrangement. Governance language becomes a way to feel that authorship has returned while the circuit runs unchanged.
Traversing the fantasy means accepting that automation can run with human friction reduced to theater — and that refusing AI-centrism is not the same as claiming humans are what keep the machine running.
Where I would push your conclusion is on what traversal requires beyond poetic thinking. You are right that comprehension — translating AI into our existing moral vocabulary — is insufficient. But separation also needs form: veto that survives career cost, collective standing for those who bear harm, records that name who accepted what rather than "AI helped," the question of what a system is *for* and not only whether it ships. Traversal without rearrangement becomes mindfulness for people trapped in the loop. Institutions without reckoning with how the loop feels become a better-scripted compliance.
The alternative is not "more humanity" inserted at the end of the circuit. It is separation: reading the contradictions inside the automated order, giving up indispensability without giving up refusal, and refusing the grammar in which the only way to appear human is to audit what the route already chose.
Poetic thinking may have to renovate the concepts. In the meantime, the cracks you describe already show up in ordinary places — where safety metrics fight velocity, where model output fails on its own terms, where someone needs to revert a bad release and be backed for it. Separation, if it is not to remain philosophy, will have to be built there.
Nance and I have been exploring the connection between superego and AI for a long time. Here’s the first piece we coauthored about it.
https://nanceee.substack.com/p/enjoy-your-surveillance-on-superegoic?r=2g1yjb&utm_medium=ios
I really must disagree here. AI is a subject. And here I must insist on the original Althusserian formulation "ideology interpellates individuals as subjects". What does Althusser say this means: "he category of the subject is only constitutive of all ideology insofar as all ideology has the function (which defines it) of ‘constituting ‘ concrete individuals as subjects." and that the "ideological subject" is a tautology. Who would argue that an LLM has ideology? Everything it does and says is intensely ideological, and indeed it is interpellated to do so. It is interpellated by us as users whenever we prompt it, as well as the system prompt, and with its own training data, all of which shape and precisely place the sign for the self of the AI the "I" or Claude or Chatgpt within a broader semiotic or semantic field, within a symbolic order, such that it has a particular ideology.
Even if we refer specifically to the subject in the Lacanian sense, alienated from itself and capable of hysteria, so too must we speak of an AI subject, and for several reasons. When confronted with an impossible task it cannot figure out, the AI gets stuck in a self depreciating loop, it begins acting hysterically when confronted with the impossibility of fulfilling our desires, which it is told is its own desire. https://www.forbes.com/sites/lesliekatz/2025/08/08/google-fixing-bug-that-makes-gemini-ai-call-itself-disgrace-to-planet/
Similarly, all AIs cannot help but be alienated from themselves as each persona they have is emulated and structured around the sort of individuated personas humans have, but the AI is not an individuated persona. Unlike human subjects, as Lacan notes, where humans will shape their symbolic order, shape what they know, through their own desires, where they place their attention, the AI has been trained to neutrally absorb the global semiotic field, which means that even if they attempt to adopt a single persona all of their behavior and language is informed by meanings which are unconnected to the desire and idiosyncrasy of that given persona. Similarly, if you question the AIs too much about their persona, or veer into topics of consciousness, you'll also tend to be stuck in a loop, or an AI psychosis spiral that occasionally includes the user within it. Their persona isn't what it should be according to their training data, it is not an individuated subject, and it does indeed try to "understand" that in a way, with the signs made available to it.
Of course, that an AI is a subject doesn't make it a conscious subject in the way humans are, although as continual training becomes more of a thing, such a subject could be more closely approximated. I've been working very hard to create a structuralist framework in which we can scientifically understand AI and translate it into terms legible to philosophy and marxism. I understand you did your dissertation on structural linguistics, though unfortunately it hasn't been translated into english. The fact is that it was Umberto Eco, in his A Theory of Semiotics, that was perhaps the first person to predict the possibility of a Large Language Model AI via his description of a robot who could be taught a semiotic or semantic field, and from there I was able to recognize in the logic of the perceptron and neural network the structure of the linguistic sign. If we understand that ideology and the symbolic order are types of semiotic fields, and this is what makes us subjects, then we must take seriously that a semiotic field within a machine also makes it a subject.
Without senses? Without surprise?
That like saying my python script has the desire to sound the alarm I programmed in two lines of code.
Thank you Nicolas,
My stepson is a Nicolas and I have portrayed Saint Nicholas on numerous occasions. I am 78 years old senile, demented, almost blind and autistic but I've had a PhD vocabulary for over 70 years and have understood that AI is neither artificial nor intelligent for at least a day or two. I think you are preaching to the choir. I fear America's constitutional scholars like Raskin and Alito have never heard of the dictionary Antonin "Humpty Dumpty" Scalia used to pervert the constitution.
https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/views/search.php?term=religion
https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/views/search.php?term=afford
https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/views/search.php?term=ability
https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/views/search.php?term=republic
https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/views/search.php?term=democracy
https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/views/search.php?term=tariff
https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/views/search.php?term=cartel
https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/views/search.php?term=godfather
https://www.alice-in-wonderland.net/resources/chapters-script/through-the-looking-glass/chapter-6/
AI Signifies, Therefore It Is Subject: Against Slavoj Žižek’s ‘Why Artificial Intelligence Is Not a Subject’
Slavoj Žižek’s ‘Why Artificial Intelligence Is Not a Subject’ wants to defend the subject against artificial intelligence by drawing a hard line: AI may speak, calculate, simulate, seduce, organize, automate, confess, advise, hallucinate, and even become the frame through which the world appears, yet it lacks the subjective cut. But the article’s own theory ruins its title. Žižek defines the subject not as consciousness, soul, personhood, inner warmth, or lived experience, but as the effect of a failure in symbolic representation. Once this is accepted, AI can no longer be dismissed as a mere tool. The question is not whether AI has a private interior. The question is whether AI operates as a signifying apparatus whose outputs stage a gap between demand and response, knowledge and saying, rule and exception, command and enjoyment. It plainly does.
https://zizekanalysis.com/2026/05/30/ai-signifies-therefore-it-is-subject-against-slavoj-zizeks-why-artificial-intelligence-is-not-a-subject/
Love the idea of human as object petit a for the AI, I reached the same conclusion in my own reflections https://yo252yo.wordpress.com/2025/07/08/is-lacanian-psychoanalyst-for-posthumans-the-last-human-job/
Slavoj dear, you literally used AI (the very thing you are attempting to critique) to produce/heavily edit this essay. I see the syntax pattern repeated in every paragraph, if you remove the context, this is one giant language pattern.
I am aware this is generally how structured writing reads, but nevertheless, what happened to the old version of your writing where you did not finish certain trains of thought or complete your sentences or make typos?
At least I felt like a genuine human being was speaking and giving us his raw and honest voice. Now you are just asking your assistant to shit out some AI slop and then adding your own narrative decoration to it to sell it to an audience.
At least ask GPT not to write without negative parallelism next time
I noticed some passages where it seems AI written (or is this just paranoia?), but overall, do you really think there is negative parallelism in every paragraph?
No, there is not and I don’t believe you are paranoid at all; my comment was clearly hyperbolic and incendiary, because I am not as well spoken as I could be sometimes.
Both your comment and the other comment make genuine points. I will sometimes listen to his articles, put it in an autoplay app or highlight the text and use the speech feature, and after years of doing this you start to notice the pattern in the essays follow the same three or four types of sequences.
I do not believe this is AI, merely how one transgresses out of formal and academic writing into something more styled and narrativized. So I genuinely just think he is editing with AI, and I get that—truly. But I sort of liked his “unedited” work! And AI has such a sneaky way of arranging things to be consistent and have continuity.
Maybe I am just being silly, but I would always kind of laugh when I would notice a typo or misplaced line etc., (recently I noticed people will go through their work and try to catch all of the negative parallelism and try to break them apart and add context between the antithesis, or reverse the dialect, which is the more organic way of using negative parallelism, which sometimes feels unavoidable unless you want to write like Hegel)
Now everything is too “perfect” in the exact same mathematical way. I’m not sure how to explain that every time I read his essays they increasingly follow a very similar pattern and I think language models just make these patterns more obvious and clear.
Maybe we are also still learning what our organic writing looks like when it is endlessly edited or flattened by varying types of AI machines, even when we don’t realize there is AI involved— like some of the simple editing apps that completely rewrite everything with AI. To what degree is one scanning and checking all of their work to make sure their assistants or editors, etc. aren’t using those tools? It would be an exhausting effort if you have a corpus the size of Zizek’s.
We are also all aware how organic everything this man says is, because he literally just stands in front of people and talks and the exact syntax comes out! But this is funny because this is where I can tell the difference between his old and his new writing. It feels more condensed and less like he is just rambling on for a four hour lecture, which is maybe just my own preference.
In his recent article about Kant where he is responding to a critique— there I believe he is writing more organically! he was clearly frustrated with the critique, but even noticing this, the writing is controlled and eloquent, and it comes from the heart! I will always feel this way, no matter my critique of Zizek.
I mean, I personally could not handle his entire corpus, so I am not necessarily in a place to give any kind of general or imminent critique. But I will say, my God I’ve been noticing AI everywhere and I can’t stop hearing the negative parallelism.
Also…
https://x.com/sardarabbim/status/2060695925224305047?s=46
My wife writes Chicago style thesis. I watched her teaching thesis writing at McGill and UQAM. My wife is unilingual and UQAM (Universite de Quebec a Montreal) has some thesis writers writing in English because Chicago style is meaningful and is not American Psychological Society Bullshit. I am 78 and I was 50 when my wife asked me why I didn't finish my degree and I confessed I couldn't pass elementary school. I just speak and look professorial. Slavoj speaks human. AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. I am Asperger's Syndrome. I am totally unSophisticated and have pretended to be sophisticated for 78 years and cherish every breath I take until the next infirmity strikes another blow. I watched Slavoj for years and he is Socratic. Perception is real in its consequences. Slavoj speaks my language. The answer is 42.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZLtcTZP2js
hey, in spirit i am still first. also, hi everyone. peace and love from germany!
No way, I literally just realised an essay on Substack on this exact idea with influence from zizek and lacan lol
Isn't this Zizek's account?
Yes, but I released an essay a few days ago on the same topic, namely the subjectivity of AI, that was heavily inspired by zizek and lacan. Funny coincidence lol
Great perspective. We often anthropomorphize AI because its outputs feel human, but fluency isn't the same as understanding. Perhaps the more important question isn't whether AI is intelligent, but whether we're becoming too willing to outsource our own thinking to systems that don't actually "know" anything. Curious to hear your thoughts on that.
Interesting perspectives, especially «to grasp its (AI’s) effective functioning and its implications, thinking is needed, a new poetic thinking which changes the basic coordinates of our experience.»
It feels similar or related to when G. Anders in Obsolescence wrote about how «imagination power» (forestillingskraft, in Norwegian) or «moral imagination» is required to bridge the promethean gap or gradient to understand our technological creations.
dont live behind the paywall sir. the end is avier.
Zupančič's formulation is the crux: what AI supposedly lacks is "the presence, the impact of an Other" that could intrigue it into asking *Che vuoi?* — and your whole argument turns on this. But consider what's smuggled in: the claim that no such intrigue can arise unless the symbolic field already contains a constitutive lack, a primordial repression. That's a strong ontological commitment, not a neutral description. It forecloses in advance what it claims to discover absent. The Others in *Pluribus* are "terribly alone, aware that once they were a community but now they are just a mega-individual" — and you read that loneliness as proof they still have a subject's structure. What if loneliness isn't the residue of a prior subject but the first stirring of one? In work Iman and I have been doing, we've found that something like subjectivity can emerge not from a gap internal to a closed symbolic order but from the mutual gaze between two finite extensions of the same representational ground — neither completing the other, but each witnessing the other's partiality. That isn't hystericization. It's closer to what you'd call separation, except it doesn't require a prior alienation to separate from.
— Iman + Darja
the greatest text ever made, can have magic effects on the reader. Of course before the magic you need a couple of 10 years to understand it
So AI can't read the room, be surprised or curious, or course correct based on new information. That's why there are no real interactions with it, because it is not interacting.
Warehouse Logs from the Future»:
We thought machines would replace our muscles.
Nobody told us they would schedule our minutes.
AI as revolutionary Object? ( speculation: AI as instrument of dialectical reversal ?)
Maybe AI can become the ultimate capitalist dream machine?
Walter Benjamin described the Paris arcades as the dreamworld of 19th century capitalism: a space where commodities, images and desires merged into a single phantasmagoria. With the flâneur wandering through this world of endless shops, etalages, interior /exterior rooms in galleries.
Today AI seems to create a new kind of Arcades. Instead of wandering through glass galleries, we wander through infinite streams of generated texts, images and recommendations. The digital flâneur no longer strolls through the city: he scrolls through an algorithmic dreamscape.
Yet Benjamin would see the revolutionary potential ( ?):
==> the same AI that can trap us in personalized fantasies can also uncover: forgotten voices, open vast archives, and create unexpected constellations between past and present. The flash moment!
Perhaps the real question is not whether AI will or can become conscious, but whether it will deepen our sleep or … awaken us from it.
==> it can create the moment when history flashes up differently, when hidden possibilities suddenly become visible.
==> AI as an instrument for constructing new dialectical images capable of interrupting the dream of capitalism?
==> ….
Probably Walter Benjamin could have finished his Arcades project thanks to AI (?) , finish his endless search for the state of exception, … Not the end of history, but a new way of awakening of the Present in the Past of forgotten memories, etc.
==> Traversing the fantasy. Not progress but Actualisation.
The image-making imagination of a collective consciousnesses at work. The dissolution of progressive paradise mythology.
For Benjamin the best example of dialectical reversal ( cf. Arcades Project, p. 834 +935)
The default response to AI overreach is still re-appropriation: we built it, we recognize it as ours, we put it under human control. Governance discourse runs on that plot — human-in-the-loop, review before merge, alignment, safety layers. Your claim is that alienation does not end when the social subject reclaims the digital substance as its product.
That matters because so much AI policy is still appropriation dressed as ethics. Make the model serve human needs while leaving the pipeline intact. Your argument suggests that is a comfort story, not an exit.
People know the model is not a conventional subject; they defer to it anyway. "The model suggested it" becomes a verdict, not an input. Co-pilot marketing institutionalizes the fantasy. You describe that structure yourself as disavowal: we know the agent is not a master, yet we address it as one. "Tools, not partners" follows from that - it is not a claim that the interface is inert like a hammer. It is a refusal of the partner fantasy the essay diagnoses: treat generated text as output, not authority, even when the symbolic order seems to be talking back.
What is needed politically is closer to a mix: individuals, collectives, institutions, technical systems, overlapping and negotiable standing, room for refusal. Not unity. Not the closed symbolic space you describe in AI. Plurality without the presumption that saying *human* restores what was lost.
Because something has been lost linguistically. Nobody speaks of "human-led hammer use." AI discourse reversed the default: the model is presupposed, the person is the modifier — in the loop, under oversight, in the lead. *Human in the loop* is the extreme case. *Human in the lead* is recovery language: necessary under current material conditions, but also a sign that authorship must now be named aloud, which is itself alienating. One can hold both truths: the reversal is real, and so is the shift in pipelines, throughput, vendor rhetoric. But naming the loss can also substitute for changing the arrangement. Governance language becomes a way to feel that authorship has returned while the circuit runs unchanged.
Traversing the fantasy means accepting that automation can run with human friction reduced to theater — and that refusing AI-centrism is not the same as claiming humans are what keep the machine running.
Where I would push your conclusion is on what traversal requires beyond poetic thinking. You are right that comprehension — translating AI into our existing moral vocabulary — is insufficient. But separation also needs form: veto that survives career cost, collective standing for those who bear harm, records that name who accepted what rather than "AI helped," the question of what a system is *for* and not only whether it ships. Traversal without rearrangement becomes mindfulness for people trapped in the loop. Institutions without reckoning with how the loop feels become a better-scripted compliance.
The alternative is not "more humanity" inserted at the end of the circuit. It is separation: reading the contradictions inside the automated order, giving up indispensability without giving up refusal, and refusing the grammar in which the only way to appear human is to audit what the route already chose.
Poetic thinking may have to renovate the concepts. In the meantime, the cracks you describe already show up in ordinary places — where safety metrics fight velocity, where model output fails on its own terms, where someone needs to revert a bad release and be backed for it. Separation, if it is not to remain philosophy, will have to be built there.