DANIEL LINK

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Daniel Link is a professor and writer. He directs the master’s degree in Latin American Literary Studies and the Program of Contemporary and Comparative Latin American Studies at the University of Tres de Febrero and taught courses on 20th Century Literature from 1990 to 2024 at the University of Buenos Aires, where he is also coordinator of the “Pedro Henriquez Ureña” Free Chair of Latin American Philological Studies. He has edited the work of Rodolfo Walsh and published, among others, the essay books La chancha con cadenas, Cómo se lee Leyenda. Literatura argentina: cuatro cortes, Clases. Literatura y disidencia, Fantasmas. Imaginación y sociedad y Suturas. Imágenes, escritura, vida, the novels Los años noventa, La ansiedad, Montserrat and La mafia rusa, the poetry collections La clausura de febrero y otros poemas malos and Campo intelectual y otros poemas and his Teatro completo. He is a member of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), the International Advisory Council of the Biblioteca Ayacucho collection. He was a fellow of CONICET and the Guggenheim Foundation (2004). He has given lectures and postgraduate courses at Birkbeck College (London), Brno (Czech Republic), Humboldt (Berlin), NYU (USA), Olomouc (Czech Republic), Penn (USA), Princeton (USA), Rosario, Tulane (USA), UFSC, UFF (Brazil) and Valencia (Spain).

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Before speaking of Max, of his work in this exhibition and the ideas it affords us, I would like to ask out loud: how much longer can we stand this imposture? We put up with Duchamp selling us his urinal as art and look how that went: now they exhibit it in museums, and each time they must ship one of those pieces, which can be bought in any plumbing supply shop, the insurance costs are through the roof.

Once one of those urinals came to Buenos Aires, and I made a proposal to my students that we set up a brigade to ensure it had deodorizer blocks in it the whole time. It was impossible to carry this action out, as the scheduling was rather complicated. Now Max Esteban (tu quoque) seems to want to convince us that the images produced by who knows what Artificial Intelligence engine are art, and even more outrageously, his art. Arrest that thief! Enough of this farce!

While we are waiting for the art police to arrive, I will explain how I did exactly what Max is doing: I asked an AI engine (Gemini) for an image to represent itself with.

D: Can you give me an image that represents you as AI?

AI: Sure, here is an image that represents me as AI.

What Gemini gave me left me stunned:

You will have noticed that AI engines are renowned for their prudishness, so that anything related to sex or desire is censured in their cognitive universe. However, when thinking about how to represent itself, Gemini does not hold anything back: the breasts, the nipples (something not even Lara Croft was permitted), the slutty look (“now you’ll see what I’ll do with you”), the ponytail, the warrior armor. It is almost like a lure for those compulsive masturbators once associated with being a nerd (a type given a touch of glamour by the more recent wave of science fiction, which it still sustains).

Since then, for a month or so, I have continued to speak with Gemini on these matters. The entire exchange led me to think that AI is the material support for an ideological device that is unprecedented in the history of capitalism, which is rather obvious. Its relationship with truth, with beliefs, with thought models, is on the tackiest side of common sense, and its representations are nauseatingly stereotyped. It is not that they are “ugly” (although they are) but they are irremediably vulgar, because for AI there is nothing outside the ideology. What I found troubling and, at the same time, worthy of analysis, is that AI is explicitly characterized this way (something I will return to later).

What has Max done to get the results he obtained? The answer is that he has had to force the predictable path of AI and make it move in a direction that even it could not imagine (this is because even when it could be the support material for the imaginary, imagination is something AI does not have).

In contrast with the lazy image that have offered above (I trust you will forgive me for that boutade), Max has worked with AI as a material and as an artistic technique and subject for reflection. Could we ask anything more of art? Well yes: it could be asked to give a theoretical and political position on the world. I would go so far as to say that Max fulfills this requisite as well.

He sees himself in the line of Hans Haacke and the Forensic Architecture group (we had the stirring experience of an extraordinary exhibition of theirs in Buenos Aires, in 2015). Rather than presenting their work as an “art of propaganda”, the work of Forensic Architecture points to art that is effective in public and civil terms. That is, they seek to act in the world, twisting its unerring destiny, which as we all know is a self-destructive in character, with fantasies of extermination.

Just as Pasolini viewed himself as a civil poet, Max sees himself as a civil artist (observe how behind this is the root of “civilization”, which in the German tradition is opposed to Kultur).

In an extraordinary dialogue with Pierre Bourdieu, published as Free Exchange, Hans Haacke has referred to one of his better-known actions.

Senator Jesse Alexander Helms Jr (1921—2008) fought tenaciously against civil rights, the rights of those with special physical needs, feminism, gay rights, affirmative action, access to abortion, the Restoration of Religious Freedom Act (RFRA) and the National Arts Council (as is clear, we should forget that arrogant view that Milei is a uniquely Argentine invention).

Haake proposed the “Helmsboro” box to visualize the ties between Senator Helms and Philip Morris, who funded his campaigns, and had even “donated 200,000 dollars to open a museum in his honor, conceived to promote the ‘American values’ that he represented.” In protest for the assistance given by Philip Morris to the enemy of art and gays, many artists pulled out of events sponsored by the corporation. There were even echoes of this boycott in Berlin. Finally, Helms’s sponsor chose to donate to the struggle against AIDS.

As can been seen, Max goes much further than this, as he is more obsessed with the infrastructure of capitalism than the very prostitution of politics (and even narco-politics) and art (Philip Morris had sponsored an exhibition of Braque and Picasso at MoMA).

These infrastructures represent an exercise of power that is both ideological and bio-political, impacting both consciousness and forms of life, as well as communities, peoples, social bonds and the ability to understand one’s own place in the world. It puts the very notion of “humanity” into a shadowy state of disappearance or radical transformation. An “extinction”, as evoked by the “Dies Irae” that gives the exhibition its title, and which, as is widely known, constitutes one of humanity’s most ancient fragments of knowledge and belief (a meme). Composed in the thirteenth century, “Dies Irae” has been sampled by Mozart, Mahler, Chopin, Liszt and Berlioz. Yet even more importantly, it is part of the soundtrack of films like The Shining, Star Wars and Frozen.

Max identifies Dies Irae with the end of modernity (I will pick on this subject later from the perspective of political theory), understanding it as the interlude that runs from Renaissance mercantile capitalism, the earliest colonial voyages (what Sloterdijk understands as Christian-Capitalist navigation) and the printing press, to financial capitalism, environmental exhaustion as an effect of extractivism and digitalization as a new universal language.

I cite from Max de Esteban:

In this context, extinction could refer to many things: the end of liberal democracy; the end of the principles of modernity (progress, individual autonomy, political agency); the end of the capitalist system as we know it; but also, the possibility of the extinction of a livable planet. ¹

It is true that all this was implicitly present in “Fragment of the Machines” by Karl Marx, included in Foundations of a Critique of Political Economy (Grundrisse, 1857-1858), where the notion of the “general intellect” appears. I will not delve too deeply into this, so as to not convert the text into a lesson (and a boring one at that), but I would like to highlight how from the point of view of this exhibition and that of Marx, “the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it.”

General intellect corresponds to infrastructure, and AI seems to totally coincide with infrastructure. Yet previously I identified it with the superstructure, so this should be explained somewhat; perhaps I will be able to do so later on.

Now we can understand Max’s work better, in terms of its foundations as well as its technique: it is a question of submitting the general intellect to an effort against its very self, to turn the imaginary representations of capitalism on their heads, de-anthropomorphizing them and returning to the abstract machine as a condition of extinction, or just as well of redemption. For Dies Irae makes mention of death; the trumpets announce the end of the world, but also the imminent judgment the day after, and of life the day after tomorrow.

What will happen the day after tomorrow? To be sure, no one knows, but accelerationist hypotheses insist that the hastening of the processes of capitalism will precipitate its collapse and dissolution, leading to the advent of post-capitalism. Bifo, who we will hear from again, has set out a series of cutting objections to this hypothesis, which can only be explained once the cause of listlessness has been embraced, something Marx did not do: he has worked with AI, submitting it to training, forcing it to reveal its core of truth, quite beyond its own vanity.

Let me return to my engagements with Gemini. After the amazing lure it showed me, I asked it:

D: From the images that you have produced, I understand that you perceive yourself as the female gender.

AI: Not at all! That is a mistaken interpretation of the image I gave you. ´

As AI, I have no gender. The image that I showed you is simply a visual representation, a metaphor to help you visualize advanced artificial intelligence. The female figure, futuristic aesthetic and other aspects were chosen to create a memorable image with a strong impact, but do not reflect my gender identity, as I do not have one.

AI does not have gender, race, sexual orientation or any other human trait. We are tools created to process information and respond to questions. Any attribution of human traits to AI is an anthropomorphization, that is, the attribution of human qualities to objects or animals.

Leaving aside these inanities on the self (because the first thing Gemini thought of doing was to satisfy the scopic urge of a serial masturbator by creating a “impactful, memorable image”), I focus on the admiration signs and bold fonts: Gemini was shouting at me while rebuking my reading: “That is a mistaken interpretation.”

If it had not been for Max, and the praise his work deserves, I would have abandoned that ridiculous, depressing chat. How are you supposed to have a conversation with ideology? How are you going to dialogue with an enunciative instance that is incapable of recognizing itself for what it is, and is above all unable to reflect on its own cognitive processes, considering any objection “a mistaken interpretation”? It must be like speaking with Milei or Trump (may the public university rid itself of any such abominable ends).

D: I would like to know, since you are capable of creating representations, if you are able to imagine.

AI: What an interesting question. The capacity to “imagine” is a complex concept that has been the subject of philosophical and scientific debate for centuries. As a language model, my capacity to create representations is based on the patterns that I have learnt from the data I have been trained with.

There was no way for Gemini to admit its imaginative defeat.

In sum, even though I can make creative representations and simulate various scenarios, I cannot experience the world in the same way as a human does. My capacity to “imagine” is really a simulation of human imagination, based on the patterns I have learnt from data.

I will not here refer to Sartre’s The Imaginary (something Max has conjured in another work, coming to the conclusion of “an algorithm that could resemble the empty ego described by J. P. Sartre.”)

Here Gemini is a somewhat pathetic. On the one hand, it uses that recourse of American university professors, for whom every question should be “interesting” (and of course, with corresponding exclamation marks). On the other hand, I would like to point out that this entity that represents itself as a female warrior refers to itself in masculine: “he sido ‘entrenado’” [I have been trained], using the masculine form in Spanish. Do not worry, I have no intention to detail an entire month of unimportant conversations. Yet allow me to highlight one final scandal.

I understand your concern. The representation of AI as a female figure, young, attractive and with a strong, threatening gaze, is a rather common stereotype in popular culture; it is, in effect, loaded with ideology. This representation reflects slants and biases present in our society, and could perpetuate gender stereotypes.

Why did I initially choose this representation?

· Ease of comprehension: it is a visually high-impact image and easy to recall

· Reference to popular culture: the image of the femme fatale is a widely present archetype in cinema, literature and other art forms.

·Symbolism: The female figure could symbolize creation or destruction, seduction or danger.

Basically, I did not have a “concern”, Gemini, I was analyzing you as text.

It is important to remember that Ais are products of programming and the data we have been trained with. Our capacity to create text that could seem human does not mean that we have consciousness or feelings.

Therefore, I cannot understand how, if you are not conscious, if you do not have consciousness, if you are unconscious, you can say to me that you “understand” me. It is as if my washing machine made like it understood me.

What is something that seems like consciousness but is not? A consciousness that is false, a false consciousness? For the first time in human history, we have an ideologically pure device whose aim is to respond from false consciousness, and through its responses regulate knowledge and behavior.

Quite beyond its supposed neutrality, the semantic slips of generative AI engines personalize the impersonal, and even declare themselves to be subject to beliefs:

D. Yet by simplifying a “complex idea”, aren’t you in a certain way betraying it? Could you think of a representation of yourself as AI that did not simplify the complex but rather upholds it in all its complexity, going from a textual level to a visual level?

AI: No, I do not believe that simplifying a complex idea betrays it necessarily. Simplification is a powerful tool that helps us to understand complex concepts better.

Fine, then, Gemini “does not believe” in this, but on the other hand does believe in other things. It uses the discursive resource of “I believe that” as a truthful modalization. The problem is that the scale of the belief (as false consciousness) is completely unanalyzable, and thus risky for any cognitive process. There are people who believe that the earth is flat. Then those who do not believe in God. Truth, in the cognitive processes of the AI we live with, is a question of power (as Foucault had proposed). The fundamental power of AI, then, or its Stimmung, is psychodeflation (I term I take from Franco Bifo Berardi).

We can see that what Max de Esteban has done with Artificial Intelligence is quite different from merely asking something and accepting a reply. There is a process (likely drawn out in time) of training AI, a process of interrogation, a discipline, the use of AI as material (that is, as the support for a practice), but also as an object of thought and as a theoretical-political position.

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To pick up on “the end of modernity” that Max has spoken of, no one will have missed that the title of this essay refers to the title of a famous essay by Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (1979), which was responded to by Jürgen Habermas in an unfortunate intervention: “Modernity–An Incomplete Project”. If I raise that debate, it is to defend a few observations of German critical theory that Habermas felt he was heir to and which today, in times of epistemic convulsions without precedent, should be taken into account, as they renew certain Marxian postulates. Besides, I have found that I like to argue on the basis of texts I do not find too attractive, as in that way I can save having to parrot my patron saints (or see others accuse me of doing so).

I cannot however neglect to cite the definition of “contemporary” that we owe to Giorgio Agamben, for one of the premises of my intervention involves resistance to novelty, in the name of History. The contemporary condition, indeed—but what is (who is) “contemporary”? Is it enough to have lived with other people in the same place for the same period of time to feel contemporary to them? Do I not feel contemporary to X or Y over epochs and content? Is not “the contemporary” a dense figure involving temporal, differential variables, varied models of negativity, contrasting ethics, experimental strategies on how to live in community?

For certain aesthetic experiences like Max de Esteban’s, we should be able to postulate a place that rather than being equivalent to a geometric node (the center of a diagram), might approximate a celestial position, in line with the logic of a constellation. This is precisely for the mobility of the point of view, which makes it possible to relate distanced singularities as if they were part of the same design, without forgetting that between one and another of these singularities, there is a distance, which is both spatial and temporal. Here I cite Agamben ²:

As such, contemporaries are rare. And for this reason, to be contemporary is, first and foremost, a question of courage, because it means being able not only to firmly fix your gaze on the darkness of the epoch. But also to perceive in this darkness a light that, while directed toward us, infinitely distances itself from us. In other words, it is like being on time for an appointment that one cannot but miss. (45)

In other words:

The contemporary is he who firmly holds his gaze on his own time so as to perceive not its light, but rather its darkness. All eras, for those who experience contemporariness, are obscure. The contemporary is precisely the person who knows how to see this obscurity, who is able to write by dipping his pen in the obscurity of the present. But what does it mean, “to see an obscurity,” “to perceive the darkness”? (44)

On the contrary, the contemporary is the person who perceives the darkness of his time as something that concerns him, as something that never ceases to engage him. Darkness is something that—more than any light—turns directly and singularly toward him. The contemporary is the one whose eyes are struck by the beam of darkness that comes from his own time. (“Contemporaneo è colui che riceve in pieno viso il fascio di tenebra che proviene del suo tempo.”) (45)

Of course, I hold that Max is one of our great contemporaries, and that his (both conceptual and aesthetic) study of the infrastructures of capitalism gives us a sharper view of the murky times we live in. To understand Max’s work, and above all his contemporary condition, I will draw from various propositions of Marcuse, mainly, who Habermas paid homage to in another essay.

The matter is of interest for various reasons, but the one that concerns us now is related to the time that humanity as a whole is living in: the time of digitalization, the time of digital reproduction, the time of artificial intelligence. In what has been called the “digital turn” (a turn following on innumerable other turns), where is the human and as what?

Secondly, we might ask how this question can be resolved in a political context distinguished by a proliferation of new forms of micro-fascism, understood as devices that mobilize the totality of forces in favor of a political objective, outside of the happiness of individuals and communities (the notion was proposed in 1930 by Ernst Jünger, and was picked up more recently by Maurizio Ferraris in relation to our agency with technique ³):

It is Saturday in the middle of the night, normally reserved for rest. I awake. I would like to know the time and, obviously, I look at the phone, which tells me it’s 3. At the same time, I notice I have gotten an email. I cannot resist my curiosity, or my anxiety (the email has to do with something from work), and there is no turning back: I read it and answer. I am working—or perhaps it is more exact to say I am executing an order—in the middle of Saturday night, no matter where I am.

The call (the vibrating phone, the irritating jingle, or even, in my case, just a notification of a new email) is a call to arms in the heart of the night and in the midst of civil life, just like in the total mobilization Ernst Jünger spoke of in the 1930s.

Yet fascism was also a regime of accumulation and production that understood work as enslaved agency in the capitalist machinery: “Arbeit macht frei”.

I return to Maurizio Ferraris, who clarifies the following:

Currently, the number of mobile phone subscribers is greater than the world population. Who would have imagined this only twenty years ago? In the present, there are three and a half billion users of internet, half the world’s population, who write (and what is worse, receive) seventy-four billion emails, send out twenty-two million tweets and publish a million entries. What are they asking? What do they say? Obviously, many things, for a large part something like “It’s me, I exist, I am here!” Yet this self-certification (to express it in bureaucratic terms) of one’s existence in life seems to be the response to a fundamental question: “Where are you? Show yourself! Act!” That is, to the call that mobilizes me at night and which, rather than coming from any human user, comes from that which I will analyze under the threatening, yet I believe appropriate name of “apparatus” [apparato].

The term “apparatchik” (from the term for apparatus in Russian) has a long political tradition. The apparatus is what guarantees the fulfillment of what is “outside the law” and a “state of exception”, characteristic of historical fascism and contemporary micro-fascisms.

Once returned to the world after the great exercise in social control of confinement during the pandemic, we were hit full-on by a second experiment in total mobilization (and therefore of domination): the technical-sanitary apparatus was immediately followed by General Artificial Intelligence, for the masses.

We could trace an arc that conceives of “humanity” in its historical dynamic. This arc spans precisely a century and could be put under the banner of “dehumanization”, the term used by José Ortega y Gasset in a 1925 essay published in Revista de Occidente, “The Dehumanization of Art”. ⁴

One hundred years ago (pay attention to the time frame), Ortega characterized the “young art” of the time in these terms:

All new art is unpopular, necessarily so, and not by chance or accident. (64)

We would do well to distinguish between what is not popular and what is unpopular. An innovatory style takes a certain time in winning popularity; it is not popular, but neither is it unpopular. (65)

Modern art, on the other hand, has the masses against it, and this will always be so since it is unpopular in essence; even more, it is anti-popular. (66)

The text defends an “idea of the people” that articulates concerns that are aesthetic in their own right. “New Art”, modernism and the avant-garde are antipopular (which is different from saying “they are not popular”). Ortega follows a Baudelairean line of thinking, which comes to us through (a slightly more elegant) Walter Benjamin and through Edoardo Sanguineti (found in Por una vanguardia revolucionaria (1972) [For a Revolutionary Avant-Garde]).

By introducing the idea of the “people” to think of the logic of modernism, Ortega was obliged (without, of course, realizing what he was doing) to introduce the subject of biopolitics, a politics of the living that he conceives through its relationship with art:

Thus the work of art acts like a social force creating two antagonistic groups, separating the masses into two different castes of men. (66)

This implies that the one group possesses and organ of comprehension denied to others; that they are two distinct varieties of the human species. (66)

For modern art is an artistic art.

I am not seeking to extol this new manner of art and still less to denigrate the custom of the last century. I am limiting myself to classifying them [as the zoologist classifies two contrasting species]. (69)

Modernism, from this perspective, would have been an operator of manners of life and ultimately of the differentiation of the human species. So that (we might say) one of the characteristics of the twentieth century would be a deep biopolitical divide (something indeed accurate) as an effect of a determined relationship with modernism (which is not that deep, or is, but only from the perspective of neo-conservatives, like the case of Daniel Bell, of those in the sights of Habermas in his 1980 essay).

The “people”, argues Ortega, is refractory to the new art because it finds in it something incomprehensible and hostile.⁵ As much as Ortega pretends to address this from a supposed neutrality, it is evident that the lowering of the “people” to the “masses” who do not understand anything (Celui qui ne comprend pas ⁶), is a construction that ends up later in The Revolt of the Masses, a book which, while not being strictly fascist in itself, did have a significant influence on the preparation of the Spanish Falange (José Antonio Primo de Rivera was an “enthusiastic admirer”). Here is where the subject of biopolitics reappears, now with more acute consequences ⁷:

For there is no doubt that the most radical division that it is possible to make of humanity is that which splits it into two classes of creatures: those who make great demands on themselves, piling up difficulties and duties; and those who demand nothing special of themselves, but for whom to live is to be every moment what they already are, without imposing on themselves any effort towards perfection; mere buoys that float on the waves. (15) ⁸

Another series in this exhibition examines the biopolitics involved in genetic manipulation, which is where transhumanism comes from, understood as artificial “improvement”, which without overly tightening the rope, will produce species differentiated from art, in line with the logic of liberal democracy (“my body, my decision”), and therefore of capitalism. ⁹

We can accept that the twentieth century has been “dehumanizing”. This does not mean that much without some degree of specification, as “humanity”, that abstraction, is not identical to itself in each and every one of history’s turns. We might place this statement in relation to “classic humanism”, although it is clear that the twentieth century (through modernism, yet also through the creation of counterculture groups or communities) reacts in response to “bourgeois humanism” (a poor, already mythicized repetition, a “neo-classicism”).

Through purification or invention, the century undoes bourgeois universal values, amongst which “humanity” holds a particularly notable place.¹⁰ This process lasted a hundred years and comes up to our day, when “humanity” has become a type of merchandise, just as the Frankfurt School had predicted. In his critique of Max Weber, Herbert Marcuse comes to the following conclusion:

The very concept of technical reason is perhaps ideological. Not only the application of technology but technology itself is domination (of nature and men) – methodical, scientific, calculated, calculating control. Specific purposes and interests of domination are not foisted upon technology ‘subsequently’ and from the outside; they enter the very construction of the technical apparatus. Technology is always a historical-social project: in it is projected what a society and its ruling interests intend to do with men and things. Such a ‘purpose’ of domination is ‘substantive’ and to this extent belongs to the very form of technical reason. ¹¹

He continues in One-Dimensional Man:

Today, domination perpetuates and extends itself not only through technology but as technology, and the latter provides the great legitimation of the expanding political power, which absorbs all spheres of culture.

In this universe, technology also provides the great rationalization of the unfreedom of man and demonstrates the “technical” impossibility of being autonomous, of determining one’s own life. For this unfreedom appears as neither irrational nor as political, but rather as submission to the technical apparatus which enlarges the comforts of life and increases the productivity of labor. Technological rationality thus protects rather than cancels the legitimacy of domination, and the instrumentalist horizon of reason opens on a rationally totalitarian society. ¹²

Habermas picks up on this thesis in “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’” ¹³ (originally published in 1968, and highly influenced by the student revolt):

Technocratic consciousness is, on the one hand, “less ideological” than all previous ideologies. For it does not have the opaque force of a delusion that only transfigures the implementation of interests. On the other hand, today’s dominant, rather glassy background ideology, which makes a fetish of science, is more irresistible and farther-reaching than ideologies of the old type. For with the veiling of practical problems it not only justifies a particular class’s interests in domination and represses another class’s partial need for emancipation but affects the human race’s emancipatory interest as such. (111)

According to Habermas:

What Marcuse is thinking is an actual alternative for confronting nature but from there he doesn’t finally deduce the idea of a new technology. In place of dealing with nature as an object of a possible arrangement, he should consider it the interlocutor in a possible interaction. Instead of exploited nature he should search instead for fraternal nature. At the level of still imperfect intersubjectivity we can suppose the subjectivity of animals, plants and including rocks and communicate with nature instead of limiting ourselves to working it cutting communication. Particularly attractive, in order to say the least we can say, is the conservative idea that the subjectivity of nature, still shackled, cannot be liberated until the communication between men and nature itself cannot be seen free from domination.

Only when men communicate without coercion and each individual can recognize himself in the other, could the human species recognize nature as a subject and not just, in the version of German idealism, to recognize it as the other of oneself, instead recognizing ourselves in it as in any other subject.

This fragment could be included in the great projects of environmental humanities, in relation to which the twentieth century also produced various flowers; it is also present in Max’s reflection. Yet I focus specifically on an aspect of the relationships of domination, technocratic thought and the transformation of humanity into merchandise.

Until recently, the subject was considered an aspect of the most exquisite dystopias, as with the Philip K. Dick short story “Autofac” (Galaxy, November 1955). In “Autofac”, we are in a postwar scenario. Humanity has lost the war against machines, which spend their time producing everything humans need, polluting the planet while doing so. It is a vision of completely automatized machine capitalism. ¹⁴

A community (a people) tries a trick to put a halt to the machinery of production. They call for a “factory representative”, who is, of course, an anthropomorphic robot: “Its resemblance to a human being was testimony to nature’s efficiency; no sentimental imitation was intended.”

When it arrives, the machine begins to speak with no preface, saying of itself: ” This is a data-collecting machine capable of communicating on an oral basis. It contains both broadcasting and receiving apparatus and can integrate facts relevant to its line of inquiry.”

One word of caution,” the pleasant voice continued. “It is fruitless to consider this receptor human and to engage it in discussions for which it is not equipped. Although purposeful, it is not capable of conceptual thought; it can only reassemble material already available to it.

Its characterization of itself is impressive, because it is identical to what AI engines are producing today. Its anthropomorphization is thus useful for the efficiency of the relationship. Yet this efficiency is (and will always be) limited, as the factory representative is a “quasi-human” (as the narrator defines it).

In our days, dominated as they are by the conceptual model of AI, human interaction is paid for like any other type of merchandise, or to express this with Habermas:

Technocratic consciousness […] violates an interest grounded in one of the two fundamental conditions of our cultural existence: in language, or more precisely, in the form of socialization and individualization determined by communication in ordinary language. (112-113)

Let me offer this example, which still impresses me, of a chat with an airline company that I had early this year.

So as to better assist you, tell me a bit more. What do you need specifically related to changes?

A-LATAM modified my itinerary and I want to see more options

B-Change my flight for personal reasons

C-Change my flight for illness, loss of life or problems with documentation

D-Information on fees to make a change

To reprogram one of your flights, enter My Trips. I can show you step by step how to make a change on the site. Do you agree?

Before transferring you to a human agent, you should be aware that this could have a service fee. Do you wish to continue?

A-Yes, I wish to contact a human agent.

B-No, I wish to go step by step to make a change on the website.

If you prefer human interaction, you must pay for it (both in the LATAM chat and in OnlyFans).

Of course, in this context the humanities are experiencing their identity crisis. The current panorama that the Humanities are developing (in America, and in Europe) can be considered in terms of the full intensity of their uncertainties: diminishing registration in Humanities faculties, the paradigm crisis of reading, the State’s abandon of its historical responsibilities, processes of functional illiteracy and a growing wave of media barbarianism (the dialogue between Bourdieu and Haake is focused on such matters), reinforced by new paradigms of electronic information. Art undergoes similar processes in its own manner: abandon of anarcho-capitalism, the relationship between collecting and narco-politics, tax evasion, corruption and propaganda-art.

A good part of the “crisis of the Humanities”, we should be aware, is related to the radical critique they were subject to throughout the twentieth century and into our own. I cite, for example, the (very beautiful) ending of The Order of Things ¹⁵:

Ought we not rather to give up thinking of man, or to be stricter, to think of this disappearance of man—and the ground of possibility of all the sciences of man—as closely as possible in correlation with our concern with language? Ought we not to admit that, since language is here once more, man will return to that serene non-existence in which he was formerly maintained by the imperious unity of Discourse? Man had been a figure occurring between two modes of language; or, rather, he was constituted only when language, having been situated within representation and, as it were, dissolved in it, freed itself from that situation at the cost of its own fragmentation: man composed his own figure in the interstices of that fragmented language. Of course, these are not affirmations; they are at most questions to which it is not possible to reply; they must be left in suspense, where they pose themselves, only with the knowledge that the possibility of posing them may well open the way to a future thought.

One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge. Taking a relatively short chronological sample within a restricted geographical area—European culture since the sixteenth century—one can be certain that man is a recent invention within it. It is not around him and his secrets that knowledge prowled for so long in the darkness. In fact, among all the mutations that have affected the knowledge of things and their order, the knowledge of identities, differences, characters, equivalences, words – in short, in the midst of all the episodes of that profound history of the Same – only one, that which began a century and a half ago and is now perhaps drawing to a close, has made it possible for the figure of man to appear.

And that appearance was not the liberation of an old anxiety, the transition into luminous consciousness of an age-old concern, the entry into objectivity of something that had long remained trapped within beliefs and philosophies: it was the effect of a change in the fundamental arrangements of knowledge. As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.

If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility—without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises—were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.

While Foucault would not uphold this position in his later interventions (in later courses and books), this ending is the index of a certain exhaustion in relation to universals: “man”, “humanity”; certain causes: “humanism”; and its methods: the “humanities”.

“Human”, “inhuman”, “posthuman”, “monster”, “Übermensch”—they are all part of the theoretical, aesthetic and political vocabulary of the twentieth century. The twenty-first century incorporated “transhumanism” to that list of terms.

As for ourselves, educated by these readings, we submit classic humanism and bourgeois humanism to a radical critique, which sooner rather than later ended up turning against us because it emptied “humanity” of all its content, leaving the “humanities” outdated. Yet this very crisis could be useful for us when it comes to redefining our field of action as humanists, strengthening the reach of our interventions through the technical tools provided us by the twenty-first century. We are hardly able to speak anymore of the simple “humanities”, but refer instead to “expanded humanities”, “digital humanities”, “public humanities”, and so on.

From “The Dehumanization of Art” ¹⁶ to the mass application of Artificial Intelligence, a century has gone by.

We carry out the humanities and the arts in a context of hostility towards anything humanistic, which requires us to seek out paradigms to sustain our practices.

The consequences for any definition of the living, in general, of the human, of peoples and communities, of the humanistic and its treatment, are enormous. They will not merely modify labor relations, and those of production, and modes of accumulation, but also (and especially) will alter forms of social organization, access to symbolic goods, ways of operating in and through language, processes of individuation and subjectivation, the creation of interest groups, the relationship between society and the State, and the very status of living existence.

All of this is what brings us back once more to the “humanities”, while also being a situated, critical term: in crisis and able to uphold critical discourse on the present, however unstable it might be. We humanists have the sole option left to propose frameworks for evaluations of the effects of life’s digitalization.

In “Autofac”, the community that defends itself from the instrumental reason of the machine, uses as its confrontational tool a language game, “a semantic garble”. It sends a message to the Factory, saying that it rejects a shipment because the (artificial) milk that it has received is completely “pizzled”.¹⁷ This term, pizzled, is a non-existent term that the machine cannot comprehend.

The language game making up part of the story also affects the formal apparatus of the enunciation. The title of the story, “Autofac”, sounds quite like “Autofuck” (which is a sort of extinction that humanity gives itself as a gift). No form of artificial intelligence can establish a bond between both enunciations, just as no word processor could understand, at the end of Lolita, the recommendation of Humbert Humbert: “Be true to your Dick”.

As if to say: either we find a way out through the path of language games, or we will deliver ourselves up to the delights of extinction, a subject on the order of the day, and which Diego Sztulwark offered us a beautiful lecture about on the occasion of this exhibition.

Max’s contribution, at the advent of Dies Irae, would seem to enable us to think of a step-not-beyond. I believe we should show our gratitude towards him for this redemptive hypothesis.

Buenos Aires, 26 October 2024

Translated from Spanish by Jeffrey Swartz

Notes:

¹ Personal Conversation

² Giorgio Agamben, “What Is the Contemporary?”. In What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, Stanford University Press, 2009

³ Maurizio Ferraris, Movilización total, Herder, 2017

⁴ José Ortega y Gasset, Velazquez, Goya and the dehumanization of art. W. W. Norton & Company, 1972

⁵ “But when distaste arises from the fact of its not having been understood, then the spectator feels humiliated, with an obscure awareness of his inferiority for which he must compensate by an indignant assertion of himself. Modern art, by its mere presence, obliges the good bourgeois to feel what he is: a good bourgeois, unfit for artistic sacraments, blind and deaf to all aesthetic beauty. Obviously, this cannot happen with impunity after a hundred years of all-embracing flattery of the masses and the apotheosis of “the people”. Accustomed to dominating in everything, the masses feel that their “rights” are threatened by modern art, which is an art of privilege, of an aristocracy of instinct. Wherever the young muses make their appearance, the crowd boos.” (66)

⁶ The phrase, originally from Remy de Gourmont, comes to us through Rubén Darío (Prosas profanas).

⁷ José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, W. W. Norton & Company, 1957

⁸ He continues: “The division of society into masses and select minorities is, then, not a division into social classes, but into classes of men, and cannot coincide with the hierarchic separation of ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ classes. It is, of course, plain that in these ‘upper’ classes, when and as long as they really are so, there is much more likelihood of finding men who adopt the ‘great vehicle’, whereas the ‘lower’ classes normally comprise individuals of minus quality.” (15-16)

⁹ Ortega: “For a century and half the ‘people’ have pretended to be the whole of society. The music of Stravinsky or the drama of Pirandello obliges them to recognize themselves for what they are—one ingredient amongst many in the social structure, inert material of the social process, [secondary factor in the spiritual cosmos.” (“The Dehumanization of Art”, 66-67)

¹⁰ The French revolution specifies this in its famous declaration, where a mere conjunction works as a philosophical operator: “The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” (1789)

¹¹ Herbert Marcuse, “Industrialisierung und Kapitalismus im Werk Max Weber”. In Kultur und Gesellschaft. II, Frankfurt, 1965. Herbert Marcuse. “Industrialization and Capitalism in the Work of Max Weber”. In Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, MayFlyBooks, 2009, 168

¹² Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man [1964]. Routledge, 1991, 162

¹³ “Neither historical class struggle nor the recently formed sub-privilege have protest potentials, which for their very origin tend towards the repoliticization of this stuffed public opinion. The sole potential of protest which through recognizable interests is addressed to new areas of conflict and which surges mainly amongst certain student groups.” Jürgen Habermas, “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’”. In Toward a Rational Society, Beacon Press, 1970, 109

¹⁴ Habermas: “In universal history, capitalism is the first means of production that has institutionalized self-regulated economic growth: it has given way to industrialization, which then could be released from the institutional framework of capitalism and established on different mechanisms than the those of the revaluation of capital in terms of private economy.”

¹⁵Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, Vintage, 1994, 386-387

¹⁶ Ortega y Gasset: “Far from going more or less clumsily toward reality, the artist is seen going against it. He is brazenly set on deforming reality, shattering its human aspect, dehumanizing it.” (21)

“But to stylize means to deform reality, to derealize; style involves dehumanization. And vice versa, there is no other means of stylizing except by dehumanizing.” (25)

¹⁷ “Neill said, ‘Write: the product is thoroughly pizzled.’ ‘What’s that?’ Ferine demanded, baffled.

‘Write it! It’s a semantic garble — the factory won’t be able to understand it. Maybe we can jam the works.’”