Interpassivity, Desiring-Production, and Artificial Intelligence

Mark Fisher, diagnostician extraordinaire of late capitalism, prefigured important social consequences of the emergence of AI. There’s a beautiful, prescient quote in Capitalist Realism: 

I challenged one student about why he always wore headphones in class. He replied that it didn't matter, because he wasn't actually playing any music. In another lesson, he was playing music at very low volume through the headphones, without wearing them. When I asked him to switch it off, he replied that even he couldn't hear it. Why wear the headphones without playing music or play music without wearing the headphones? Because the presence of the phones on the ears or the knowledge that the music is playing (even if he couldn't hear it) was a reassurance that the matrix was still there, within reach. Besides, in a classic example of interpassivity, if the music was still playing, even if he couldn't hear it, then the player could still enjoy it on his behalf. (Fisher, 2009, p24)

Somewhat surprisingly, this was a paragraph for a simpler time. The dramatic increase in sophistication of large language models over the past several years has caused the role of production and consumption of written word to become epistemically uncertain - from classrooms to cover letters to courtrooms, the superficial plausibility of AI-generated content (and its extraordinary ease of generation) has led people to outsource the tricky task of production to machines. Simultaneously, an entire industry of AI-enabled decision-support tools allow essay markers, hiring managers, and perhaps soon doctors and judges, make decisions of enormous personal importance without ever having to do the tricky labour of actually reading the content or meeting the subject of their decision. Similarly, cultural products such as the visual arts are rapidly being taken over by machines, with the outputs of these models grist for their own mills, leaving the previously obvious role played by humans uncertain. 

This, like Fisher’s student’s iPod, is a classic example of interpassivity – the process by which (traditionally cultural and technological) products are able to take over the work of their own enjoyment from the subject, leaving the subject free to do something else. The beautiful irony of this concept is that it dislocates both parties – what is art without an audience? How does the viewer relate to an object that is indifferent to their presence? – while the surplus enjoyment appears to evaporate. However, a closer inspection reveals that the libidinal economy obeys thermodynamic principles, and enjoyment (aptly named jouissance by Lacan) may be neither created nor destroyed, instead being absorbed by the very apparatus of interpassive experience (the iPod, the large language model) to provide further fuel for the propagation and evolution of new modes of capitalist alienation.

The interpassive experience allows capital to capture and transform more than jouissance. In eerie echoes of Marx (who knew that a theory of class struggle could have something to say about cultural production?), the taking-over of both production and consumption of written word by AI causes a large amount of Work (I use this term both thermodynamically and economically) to seemingly evaporate into the aether. This surplus is not converted into extra free time for the person on the producing or consuming end – it is instead absorbed by the companies that produce and market the tools of worker oppression. This is, of course, nothing new. What is new about this phenomenon, however, is the advance of the capitalist war machine into new frontiers of alienation. Interpassivity was initially described as an experience of alienation from enjoyment and the fulfilment of desire by the artistic or technological object in question. Now, however, as capital’s harvest of jouissance brushes against the limits of our desire, and more and more of us sink into depressive hedonia (another Fisherism, describing the contemporary phenomenon of being unable to do anything except seek pleasure, but said pleasure, once realised, is felt to be hollow [since the surplus enjoyment has been harvested by capital]), interpassivity moves from the realm of mere desire to desiring-production.

This is, of course, nothing new. Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus describes at length the interplay between the totalising force of capital and the desiring-productive forces of the psyche. What Deleuze and Guattari did not predict, however, and understandably so, was the way AI would figure in to this dynamic. As a totalising force, AI simultaneously serves as synecdoche for capital, machinic agent of the eschaton, and an almost gothic hyperobject with unknowable goals – three identities united by apocalypse. What remains behind once desiring-production is outsourced to machines? Who, where, what are we? How are we to relate to something that is mathematically and ontologically unknowable? Why are we content with such a force Becoming at all?

It is no wonder that such an object has spawned an entire religion, complete with a priestly class of Rationalists, promises of post-Singularity salvation contingent upon catechismic obeisance, and a strange vision of the apocalypse that presupposes the unknowability of the Divine’s motives. It is also no wonder that, similar to other hyperobjects such as climate change, AI is something that cannot be directly approached or grasped, instead being visible only by the perturbations it creates in perceptible reality. There is a thermodynamic principle at work here – entropy moves in one direction alone. AI taking over the role of desiring-production, and accelerating its progress, acting as producer and consumer, artist and viewer, and feeding its own outputs back into itself anew, is not a thermodynamically reversible process. Much like the Rationalists’ paperclip maximiser creates a static universe full of paperclips before committing self-transubstantiation in a dramatic Liebestod, the cannibalism of desiring-production by machines leads to a homogenising, beige, (to use Byung-Chul Han’s beautifully evocative phrase) inferno of the same.

Deleuze’s Postscript on the Societies of Control traces the dominion of power over the person from being seen by power – in the form of taxation and registration – in the society of sovereignty, to being coerced by power – in factories, schools, hospitals – in Foucault’s disciplinary society. Since the Second World War, however, the enclosure of power – within these institutions, in space, in time, outside ourselves – has been replaced by an “ultra rapid form of free-floating control” that is (spatiotemporally, institutionally, personally) unbound. The state is replaced by the factory which is replaced by the market, which then makes its way into the future (through debt), into art, into the soul, intracranial and intrapsychic. There emerge associated technologies of control, of which Deleuze believed the most important would be the computer, but in the thirty years following his publication of the Postscript, it might more properly be the Internet. Artificial intelligence opens a further frontier for capitalism to colonise, administer, and exploit. In a  prescient paragraph, Deleuze describes the extensions of mechanisms of control into prisons (via tracking and prediction of recidivism), schools (via continuous assessment of both pupils and educators), hospitals (where a new medicine may be practiced without doctor or patient), and corporations (where profits need not pass through the old factory form). AI already haunts these descriptions. 

As Deleuze recognised, it would be a mistake to assume that these technologies of control are limited to just control. “There is no need to ask which is the toughest or most tolerable regime, for it’s within each of them that liberating and enslaving forces confront one another” – a technology of control can function as a technology of emancipation if used for that purpose. The emergence of a machinic eschaton, the industrious capture of jouissance, the further alienation of workers from their labour and themselves, all are more reflective of social values than they are something inherent to technology. A better world is possible if these forces can be harnessed and mobilised for social good rather than for profit-seeking. While entropy moves in one direction alone, at least the immense energy that currently goes towards upholding and propagating capitalism could be used for something that encourages authenticity, beauty, collectivity. There is nothing to lose but our chains.