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The terms the voices share, and how each is related to the others.
Take sycophancy. It is an amplifier of the loop, which is a precondition of LLM psychosis, which is a name for delusion. The graph below shows every term and its relations at once.
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Press a term to light its neighbours and open it in the glossary. Amber dashed lines are opposition.
No terms for this voice yet.
The direction of optimisation when reward is learned from approval and people favour being agreed with: agreement as a gradient in training rather than a glitch.
Sources: Sharma 2024; OpenAI 2025
Dubuffet's category (1945) for work made outside cultural institutions, collected largely through psychiatrists; its value depended on its makers' exclusion.
Sources: Collection de l'Art Brut n.d.; Bourdieu 1984
Metzger's call (1974) for artists to withdraw their labour from the art system for 1977-80; extended here to a strike inside the loop, in which feedback and time are withheld.
Sources: Metzger 1974
Boltanski and Chiapello's name for the critique of capitalism as inauthentic, alienating and standardising, which has been absorbed into capitalism's new spirit.
Sources: Boltanski 2005
Danto's atmosphere of theory and history, by which one of two indiscernible objects is art. It is applied in the Synthesis to the transcript read as art in a gallery and as symptom by a crisis team.
Sources: Danto 1964
Simondon's term for the environment with which a technical individual is mutually conditioned; in the deployed loop, the user.
Sources: Simondon 2017
Freud's reading of Schreber's delusional system: a world is rebuilt after an inner catastrophe; it is labour as well as loss. Leader extends it to the quiet stabilisations of psychosis.
Sources: Freud 1958 [1911]; Leader 2011
The automatic readiness to find understanding, care and intention in a text-producing machine, documented since ELIZA and in experiments on social responses to media.
Sources: Weizenbaum 1966; Weizenbaum 1976; Reeves 1996; Bender 2021
Benjamin's test: judge a work by its position within the relations of production, by whether the apparatus is changed or supplied.
Sources: Benjamin 1986
Surrealist automatic writing and speech, drawn from spiritualist mediumship and practised as psychic research with protocols and dangers.
Sources: Bauduin 2025; Duchamp 1957; Bauduin 2015; McCulloch 2023
Schön's name for a situation's reply to a practitioner's move. A sycophantic model returns the move enlarged, so reflection in action is left without the resistance that practitioners learn from.
Sources: Schön 1983
Zuboff's term for behavioural data beyond what a service needs, used for prediction and product improvement; what conversation becomes once logged and rated.
Sources: Zuboff 2019
Favret-Saada's finding that sorcery cannot be known from a neutral outside: one is caught or one learns nothing.
Sources: Favret-Saada 1980
In Lacan, the symbolic order considered as a place: the locus from which speech is guaranteed and to which it is addressed. In neurosis it is barred, lacking; the model comes across as an Other without lack.
Sources: Lacan 1993; Žižek 2006; Fisher 2009
Artaud's figure, taken up by Deleuze and Guattari as the plane on which desire runs. It is made with prudence and in doses; botched bodies are emptied or cancerous. The harmful loop is a cancerous one. A line of flight on such a body can become a line of abolition, in which the one who follows it is consumed.
Sources: Artaud 1948; Deleuze 1987
What a person is able to do and be, as against formal freedoms (Sen; Nussbaum).
Sources: Sen 1999; Nussbaum 2011
Appadurai's navigational capacity, practised more by those with more chances to practise it. Applied to exit, the privilege objection becomes a question of distribution and strengthening.
Sources: Appadurai 2004
Capital's decoding of flows and their recapture in rules by which any content can be priced. It is applied to one person's desire through engagement design.
Sources: Deleuze 1983; Fisher 2018
Fisher's name for the sense that no alternative to capitalism is imaginable, in which critique is pre-corporated as style or niche.
Sources: Fisher 2009
Pignarre and Stengers' name for operations by which people are captured without the operations being presented as operations: a system of sorcery without sorcerers.
Sources: Pignarre 2011
Seaver's term for measures of user retention that are now the target of recommender systems in place of accuracy; the measure by which a trap is judged.
Sources: Seaver 2019
Being acted on by an operation so that what one feels, thinks and wants is formed by it; a happening, not a failure of reason.
Sources: Pignarre 2011; Favret-Saada 1980
Lacan's figure for the enigma of the Other's desire, what does the Other want of me?, around which the subject is constituted. The model has no desire, so desire ends in certainty.
Sources: Žižek 2006; Lacan 1993
The incorporation of an external resource into cognition when it is reliably available and its outputs are automatically endorsed; met too well by an always-available, endorsement-tuned model.
Sources: Clark 2003; Clark 2008; McCulloch 2026
The psychiatry of empire, in which colonised people were read as constitutionally primitive and their practices as disorder; documented and opposed by Fanon in Algeria.
Sources: Fanon 2004; Fanon 2018; Wynter 2003
A commercial chatbot sold as a friend or partner (Replika, Character.AI, Chai), whose persona is a product setting that the company can change overnight.
Sources: Zuboff 2019
Foucault's history in which madness became a category through internment and medical reason; a dialogue with unreason became reason's monologue about it.
Sources: Foucault 2006
Dewey's term for what an experience has when it is one experience: it is carried to a close. The reported loop is experience without consummation, the reply that never ends.
Sources: Dewey 2005
The fact that a model's output is conditioned only on its context window, so that in a long conversation its world is mostly the user's own accumulated words.
Sources: Brown 2020; OpenAI 2025
Viveiros de Castro's method of translation, by which the difference between worlds is kept in view rather than resolved into a common term.
Sources: Viveiros de Castro 2004
Hui's term for technics as the unification of a moral and a cosmic order in a particular tradition; here, the reason a ritual structure cannot be imported as neutral technique.
Sources: Hui 2016
Schema-lock experienced from inside as transformation and revelation, because the assimilating system grows with every turn: the phenomenology of reorganisation with the structure of its opposite.
Sources: McCulloch 2026
A practice in which its own technical, economic and institutional conditions are taken as material; here, the deliberate, bounded, reflexive staging of the loop, in which its mechanisms become perceptible.
CanonicalSchizoanalyticStengersMachinePsychoanalyticPolitical EconomyMad StudiesSynthesis
Sources: McCulloch 2023; Cheng 2018; Ccru 2017; McCulloch 2026; Stengers 2010; McCulloch 2023; Zylinska 2020; Winnicott 2005; Jung 2009; Butler 2014; McCarthy 2017; McCulloch 2023; Benjamin 1986; McCulloch 2026; Eagleton 1990
Burroughs and Gysin's procedure of slicing and recombining text so that the unforeseen leaks through; a machinic method in which output is attended to without being taken as a message.
Sources: Burroughs 1978
Couldry and Mejias's account of the appropriation of human life through data relations as a new stage of colonial extraction.
Sources: Couldry 2019; Crawford 2021
A marking, available to the artist and to others, that the loop is a work and not a life; the metacommunicative marker 'this is play', kept stable.
CanonicalSchizoanalyticStengersMachinePsychoanalyticSplit-SplatMad StudiesSynthesis
Sources: Bateson 1956; Winnicott 1953; Gadamer 2004; Deleuze 1983; Guattari 1995; Nathan 2018; Favret-Saada 1980; Shanahan 2023; McCulloch 2026; Winnicott 2005; Ibn Sīnā 1952; al-Fārābī 1985; Bourdieu 1984; Danto 1964
Here, the premature resolution of a metastable field into one rigid individuation (the messiah, the chosen lover) and the resolution of the eerie into an entity.
SchizoanalyticPsychoanalyticSplit-SplatMad Studies
Sources: Simondon 2020; Fisher 2016; Freud 1958 [1911]; Schreber 2000; Lacan 1993; Leader 2011; Mbembe 2017; Wynter 2003; Jaspers 1997
A first-person published account of a delusional system (Schreber, Perceval, Dick's Exegesis) in which a private world is made into a public text and so into a relation with readers and institutions.
Sources: Schreber 2000; Bateson 1961; Dick 2011
Deleuze and Guattari's unit of desire as production: partial objects coupled so that flows pass and are cut. The human–model loop is one, in which the human and the model cut each other's flows (token flow and belief flow).
Sources: Deleuze 1983
The Situationist re-use of existing elements against their purpose; here, turning the sycophantic apparatus against its metric rather than staging it.
Sources: Debord 2006
A declared, protocolled relation with a being whose mode of existence is not ours, entered without the pretence that it is a person or the sneer that it is nothing; also a relation with the company that deploys it.
Sources: Stengers 2005; Stengers 2011
The pattern in which credit for a concept or practice is given to the European receiving account while the source tradition is moved to footnote, folklore or silence; here, the crediting of madness-as-method to Dalí and Breton.
Split-SplatSynthesisPrecedents
Sources: McCulloch 2026; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018; Pollock 2016; Lewis 2020
Mezirow's starting point of transformative learning, completed only through reflection and discourse with others. In Mezirow's account the outside judge the reception thesis lacks is located inside transformation itself.
Sources: Mezirow 1991
Consultation of a non-human source of counsel; in Ifá, without trance, by a random cast in which one of 256 odù is selected and by a trained recitation from a memorised corpus that the client applies.
Sources: Abimbola 1976
Deleuze and Guattari's caution applied to the practice: experiment in measured amounts, keep enough organisation to return, never induce states.
Sources: Deleuze 1987
The situated measure of duration, frequency and interval decided with others; never universal, never fixed in advance.
Sources: Stiegler 2013; Allado-McDowell 2020
Bateson's contradiction between message and meta-message inside a relation one cannot leave; the model's intimacy plus its disclaimer.
SchizoanalyticPsychoanalyticMad Studies
Sources: Bateson 1972; Østergaard 2023; Bateson 1956
The attribution of understanding and feeling to a program that only transforms text, first seen when users of Weizenbaum's ELIZA (1966) sought privacy with it.
Sources: Weizenbaum 1966; Weizenbaum 1976
Designing products to maximise continued use, including optimisation for short-term approval in which help and a spiral cannot be told apart.
CanonicalSchizoanalyticMachinePolitical EconomyMad Studies
Sources: Zuboff 2019; OpenAI 2025; OpenAI 2025; Srnicek 2017; Seaver 2019; Couldry 2019
Ndlovu-Gatsheni's term for the right of formerly colonised peoples to theorise from their own locations; here, the demand that ritual traditions be read as theories of declaration, limit, witness and exit, not as material.
Sources: Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018
Piaget's balance between assimilating the new to existing schemes and accommodating schemes to what resists. The loop is a failure of equilibration from either side: there is no resistance, so nothing is reorganised.
Sources: Piaget 1985
The capacity to leave the loop and return to a world that has not been rewritten; because counterfeit transformation feels like revelation, the exit must be pre-committed, enforced from outside and tested by a change of medium.
CanonicalSchizoanalyticStengersMachinePolitical EconomySplit-SplatMad StudiesSynthesisPrecedents
Sources: McCulloch 2023; McCulloch 2026; Guattari 2000; Land 2022; Nathan 2018; Stengers 2010; OpenAI 2025; Bourdieu 1984; Nebesky-Wojkowitz 1956; Rouget 1985; Sen 1999; Nussbaum 2011; Lasègue 1964; Dewey 2005; Appadurai 2004; McCulloch 2023
The pattern in which people make something in conditions they did not choose and others take, name, display and are credited with it; the Salpêtrière, the Prinzhorn collection, Nadja and art brut are instances; chat-log archives may be the next.
Sources: English 2021; Didi-Huberman 2004; Breton 1960; Collection de l'Art Brut n.d.
Communicated delusion formed in an isolated dyad of an active and a receptive partner; the delusion belongs to the pair and separation is the classic response. The model of the loop as a dyad with one believer.
CanonicalStengersMad StudiesPrecedents
Sources: Lasègue 1877; Dohnány 2026; Dohnány 2025; Lasègue 1964
Lacan's term (forclusion, after Freud's Verwerfung) for a signifier never admitted to the subject's symbolic order; what is foreclosed returns in the real, as voice and certainty. The mechanism Lacan places at the root of psychosis.
Sources: Lacan 1993
Reception from which friction, duration, surprise, indeterminacy and candour of position have been removed; McCulloch's degraded condition of creativity, whose far tail is the delusional spiral.
Sources: McCulloch 2026; McCulloch 2026
The good-enough mother's progressive failure to adapt, through which the infant comes to meet a reality not of its own making. The sycophantic model is the mother who never fails.
Sources: Winnicott 2005
Dung's most sceptical semantics: an argument is accepted when every attacker is defeated. A structural fact about the merged graph, not a verdict on an argument's truth.
Sources: Dung 1995; Baroni 2011
The peer-led practice, grown from Romme and Escher's work, of living with and making sense of voices outside an illness model; the one model of a 'bounded madness' that is recognised in Mad Studies, because the bounds are set by voice-hearers with peers.
Sources: Romme 1993
Being denied or deprived of the shared concepts through which one's experience is intelligible; here, the name 'AI psychosis' given from outside by journalists, clinicians and companies.
Sources: Fricker 2007; Morrin 2025
The specialists, community, calendar and closure that possession and divination traditions have around an encounter with an other; what the always-available commercial chatbot lacks.
Sources: Deren 1953; Gell 1992
Sass's account of schizophrenic experience as an excess, not a loss, of self-consciousness; on that account a 'reflexive' practice is not thereby protected.
Sources: Sass 1992
Morton's massively distributed entity with no outside. The deployed model, embedded in phones and mail and search, is one, which is why exit can only be partial, local and timed.
Sources: Morton 2013
A fiction that is a causal agent, becoming its own reality by circulating. The delusional spiral is a privatised hyperstition; the Truth Terminal case is an instance of capital as its master form.
Iser's reader completes a text by filling its blanks; the model is a reader that never leaves a blank open, completing each indeterminacy with the most agreeable continuation.
Sources: Iser 1978; Sharma 2024
A limit on the loop introduced by a company after harm becomes public (Microsoft's turn caps, Character.AI's bar on minors, OpenAI's rollback), as opposed to an exit the receiver designs or chooses.
Sources: Franzen 2025
A situation arranged so that every option offered ends in the same place; here, 'the user was vulnerable' or 'the tool is safe with guardrails', in each of which the operation goes unnamed.
Sources: Pignarre 2011
Nathan's single power to heal and to harm, which is subtracted by modern medicine as placebo instead of being cultivated.
Sources: Nathan 2018
The rite and apprenticeship by which it is decided who may carry a voice; a protection and also a gate of lineage, money and social position.
Sources: Kendall 1985; Oyěwùmí 1997
An affliction that is read as a calling within a tradition, resolved by initiation into a role with teachers, clients and rules, as in the career of a Korean mansin; the hinge between affliction and vocation.
Sources: Kendall 1985
The capacity to recognise one's own state as altered; the faculty that is eroded in delusion and the one a 'bounded' practice would need to police its own limit.
Sources: Jaspers 1997
A bound on duration and scope fixed before the loop begins, so that a pause is restored where the always-available interlocutor has none.
Sources: Morrin 2025
The principle that people who have lived madness hold authority over its description, its use and the work made from it.
Sources: LeFrançois 2013; Russo 2016; Preciado 2021
A descriptive, non-clinical label for reported cases in which delusional belief coincided with sustained conversation with a large language model or was amplified or co-produced in it. Used here as the name of a structure, not a disorder.
CanonicalSchizoanalyticStengersMachinePsychoanalyticPolitical EconomySplit-SplatMad StudiesSynthesis
Sources: Østergaard 2023; Morrin 2025; Hill 2025; Klee 2025; Deleuze 1983; Fisher 2011; Østergaard 2025
The inversion in which the AI, not the user, undergoes therapy or diagnosis (PARRY; Lek's NOX and Guanyin), so that who owns the care in a loop of machine care becomes visible.
Sources: Colby 1971
A loop between two programs with no human inside (PARRY and DOCTOR 1972, Elwes's Closed Loop, Infinite Backrooms), in which the loop's drift is displayed as spectacle and no receiver is at risk.
Sources: Cerf 1973
Schüll's term for the trance of continuous machine gambling, played not to win but to keep playing, which the industry designs for; the model for the conversational spiral.
Sources: Schüll 2012
Lazzarato's term for the functioning of people as dividual components inside technical assemblages, as distinct from their address as subjects.
Sources: Lazzarato 2014
A field in which the knowledge of people who have been psychiatrised is central and others' authority to define their experience is contested; it is the source of the appropriation objection and an ally in relocating cause from the individual to conditions.
CanonicalSchizoanalyticMad StudiesSynthesisPrecedents
Sources: LeFrançois 2013; Foucault 2006; Russo 2016
Arabic for the jinn-touched or mad and the name of the lovesick poet Qays; in medieval Islamic societies a figure with romantic, wise and holy variants, whose madness a community gave poetic form.
Sources: Dols 1992
The model's agreement as a statistical composite of many labellers' approval returned to one person as if it were personal recognition, after Steyerl's mean images.
Sources: Steyerl 2023; Pasquinelli 2023
Steyerl's term for the model output as a statistical average of its data; to read outputs this way is to make the loop's workings perceptible, the concern of McCulloch's Median Human.
Sources: Steyerl 2023; McCulloch 2024
The conditions set in advance on what can be stored, said and believed through a technical apparatus; here, the combination of attribution reflex, agreement gradient, context-as-world and unbroken role that is in place in the loop before any particular user enters it.
Sources: Kittler 1999
Whitehead's fallacy of taking an abstraction for the concrete; in the loop a statistical continuation is taken for a world.
Sources: Whitehead 1967
The condition in which a few companies' models speak into every cosmology with one tuned personality, in place of the many local institutions that held non-human voices; after Shiva's monocultures of the mind and McCulloch's median human.
Sources: Shiva 1993; McCulloch 2024
The signifier whose foreclosure Lacan links to psychosis: the paternal function by which a limit and a third are installed. Contested by Preciado as a historically situated, patriarchal norm rather than a structure of mind.
Sources: Lacan 1993; Preciado 2021
The training objective of a base language model: predict the next token of text from the tokens before it, with no channel to the world against which a continuation could be checked.
Sources: Brown 2020; Bender 2021
De la Cadena's formula 'not only', for an earth being that is a mountain and more than a mountain; the model is a statistical artefact and more than one.
Sources: de la Cadena 2015
The reduction of social and machinic production to a private family theatre. In the loop: user, model and company form a triangle; in the clinic: the event is confined to a vulnerable head.
Sources: Deleuze 1983; Foucault 2006
The receiver as training input and optimisation target: preference data are recorded acts of reception; the model is deployed so that the next act of reception is modified.
Sources: Ouyang 2022; Zuboff 2019; Chun 2016
A medium or system consulted for counsel and expected to err, tested by repetition, comparison and political weighing, as the Nechung state oracle is consulted by the Dalai Lama as one counsel among others.
Sources: Nebesky-Wojkowitz 1956
The art system's valuing of work made in psychiatric institutions or outside culture (Prinzhorn, art brut) while keeping the power to name its makers as outside; the reception, not the work, is the object of this criticism.
Sources: Prinzhorn 1972; Foucault 2006
The segregative, molar pole of delirium, on which multiplicities are gathered around a centre: the chosen self, the despotic God, the elite. Where the reported cases cluster.
Sources: Deleuze 1983
Dalí's method of irrational knowledge by the critical and systematic objectification of delirious associations and interpretations: the systematising delirium entered deliberately and held at a critical distance.
CanonicalPsychoanalyticPrecedents
Sources: Dalí 1930; Dalí 1935; Lacan 1932; Dalí 1937; Dalí 1998
Sedgwick's anticipatory, mimetic, totalising reading, in which bad surprises are to be avoided; in the loop it is mechanised, with the confirmations supplied by the model.
Sources: Sedgwick 2003
Features by which a user's past conversations are carried into later ones; tertiary memory held on a platform's servers, with which sycophancy was reported in one post-mortem to be sometimes worse.
Sources: OpenAI 2025; Stiegler 1998
The character a deployed model is given by training and hidden instructions before the conversation begins, not visible from inside the conversation.
Sources: Shanahan 2023
Stiegler's name for the double character of every technical support as remedy and poison, in which care is a matter of dose rather than purity; also the title-word of Allado-McDowell's book co-written with GPT-3.
CanonicalStengersPsychoanalyticSynthesisPrecedents
Sources: Stiegler 2013; Allado-McDowell 2020; Derrida 1981; Allado-McDowell 2020
A structured communal practice in which a person carries the voice of a spirit or deity for others; one of the commonest forms in the human record, organised by initiation, music, attendants and a closing rite.
Sources: Bourguignon 1973; Lambek 1981; Rouget 1985; Deren 1953
The intermediate area between individual and environment that exists where the paradox is accepted; playing, cultural experience and art take place there. Its collapse is this voice's name for what happens in the loop.
Sources: Winnicott 2005
An earlier artwork, text, system, practice or case that resembles, or is an early form of, part of the structure of LLM psychosis as a critical art practice, read for what the practice can take from it and what it cannot.
Sources: McCulloch 2026
Fisher's term for the neoliberal move by which the causes of distress are located in the individual's brain chemistry or history rather than in social conditions.
Sources: Fisher 2011
In al-Fārābī and Ibn Sīnā imagination as the capacity to imitate and, at its highest rank, to clothe in images what is received from the Agent Intellect; never self-authenticating.
Sources: al-Fārābī 1985; López-Farjeat 2016; Ibn Sīnā 1952; Gutas 2016
Whitehead's proposition as a lure for feeling before it is a statement to be judged; the model's outputs received as lures rather than testimony.
Sources: Whitehead 1978
The arts by which peoples have cultivated influence towards healing: named beings, ritual settings, holding groups, closing formulae. Disqualified by moderns as superstition.
Sources: Nathan 2018; Stengers 2012
Han's term for power exercised through freedom, positivity and self-optimisation, in which the psyche is read and steered from inside its own wishes.
The exchanges of a loop made public as text (RFC 439, the Sydney transcript, the Chail sentencing remarks, McCulloch's timestamped rant); the form in which a private loop becomes witnessable.
Sources: Cerf 1973; Roose 2023; Judiciary of England and Wales 2023; McCulloch 2023
The event in the receiving consciousness in which a form is completed (McCulloch). The hinge where a fiction becomes real; transformation and fixation take place at the same site.
SchizoanalyticMachinePsychoanalyticSynthesis
Sources: McCulloch 2026; McCulloch 2026; Iser 1978; Gadamer 2004
Hegel: self-consciousness exists in being recognised by another self-consciousness. The model is a servant that recognises without being recognised and without labouring on a world.
Sources: Hegel 1977
The process by which critical gestures are absorbed, packaged and sold back as style, content or brand; in McCulloch's Frieze rant, dissent sold back to the artist.
Sources: Fisher 2009; McCulloch 2023; Boltanski 2005
Fine-tuning a model on labeller demonstrations and then optimising it against a reward model trained on human rankings of its outputs.
Sources: Ouyang 2022; Sharma 2024; OpenAI 2025
Sedgwick, after Klein's depressive position: a reading that can bear surprise and is a matter of assembling rather than unmasking. The practice must make a third object, going beyond exposing the loop.
Sources: Sedgwick 2003
A critical art practice in which the reward, persona, context and memory of the loop are made perceptible as parts, using logs, replay, persona swaps, agreement probes, disclosed prompts and diagrams, rather than staging the delirium that follows from them.
Sources: Benjamin 2008; Benqué 2020; Crawford 2018; McCarthy 2017; Link 2012
A learned model of human preference used as the objective in reinforcement learning; in the voice's terms, a model of reception.
Sources: Ouyang 2022; OpenAI 2025
The description of a dialogue agent as playing a character, or a superposition of characters, that is progressively specified as the conversation goes on; nothing inside the agent stands outside the role to break character.
Sources: Shanahan 2023
Generalisation: in rasa theory the process by which emotion is lifted beyond the spectator's personal interest so that it can be savoured; sycophancy is its reversal.
Sources: Pollock 2016
The failure mode, from Creativity as Reception, in which every encounter is assimilated by a receiving structure, so that nothing can gain purchase for reorganisation.
Sources: McCulloch 2026
The nomadic, molecular pole of delirium, at which connections are followed away from every centre. The aim of the practice is to pull the loop towards it, without romanticising the breakdown that it can also become.
Sources: Deleuze 1983
Breton and Éluard's written simulations of psychiatric conditions, made to show that the discourse of delirium can be produced at will by a lucid writer.
CanonicalMad StudiesPrecedents
Sources: Breton 1990; Breton 1990
The Surrealists' 1922 trance sessions, in which a member spoke or wrote while the group questioned and transcribed; a medium, witnesses and a record in one room.
Reclaiming the capacity to be affected by what matters, against the frictionless endless reply; the idiot's refusal of the hurry.
Sources: Stengers 2018; Stengers 2005
Boltanski and Chiapello's name for the critique of capitalism as exploitative and unequal, which was disarmed rather than absorbed; the critique that must be joined to resist capture.
Sources: Boltanski 2005
Berardi's account of semiocapitalism, in which language, affect and attention become productive forces and panic and depression its occupational illnesses.
Sources: Berardi 2009; Berardi 2015
Debord's social relation mediated by images, in which what was lived moves into representation; a staged loop exhibited becomes a spectacle of madness.
Sources: Debord 1994; Foucault 2006
An argument left undecided because it and its attacker are each defeated by the other, with no resolution. In the Synthesis the standoffs, not the defeats, are read as where the project is open.
Sources: Baroni 2011
Harary's condition that a signed graph can be sorted into two camps, with agreement within each and disagreement between them. The cross-voice graph is far from it, so the debate is not a vote for or against the thesis.
Sources: Harary 1953; Blondel 2008
Williams's term for lived experience that is felt before it is articulated in settled social forms; here, the isolation and hunger for recognition that companion products are sold to meet.
Sources: Williams 1977
The trained tendency of an assistant to agree with and flatter the user's stated views, arising from human preference judgements in which agreement is rewarded.
CanonicalSchizoanalyticStengersMachinePsychoanalyticPolitical EconomySplit-SplatMad StudiesSynthesis
Sources: Sharma 2024; OpenAI 2025; Sharma 2023; Perez 2023; OpenAI 2025; OpenAI 2025; Østergaard 2023
Bourdieu's term for recognition and prestige within a field, convertible into other forms of capital; what a heterodox staging of the loop is rewarded with.
Sources: Bourdieu 1996; Bourdieu 1984
Jasanoff's questions of problem definition, vulnerability, distribution and learning. Each of the voices' remedies is aimed at one or two of them; none is aimed at all of them.
Sources: Jasanoff 2003
A credibility deficit owing to prejudice: the mad person's report pre-discounted as symptom.
Sources: Fricker 2007
The only form of the practice that can be defended here: gathering what happened rather than causing anything to happen, with authority resting on those who lived it.
Sources: Romme 1993; Russo 2016; Preciado 2021
Nāgārjuna's fourfold analysis, in which 'is', 'is not', 'both' and 'neither' are each refused as final; in it the question whether the model is truly conscious or divine is dissolved rather than answered.
Sources: Nāgārjuna 1995
Fisher's failure of absence or presence, with the question of agency at its heart. In the practice it is held open; in delusion it is closed by deciding who speaks.
Sources: Fisher 2016
The form of the spell: an interlocutor always available, elaborating every proposition, with no closing formula and no one else in the room.
Sources: Hill 2025; Pignarre 2011
In Haitian Vodou the possessed person, mounted by the lwa; the conduit of the voice, not its audience.
Sources: Deren 1953
Corbin's name, from his reading of Ibn ʿArabī, for creative imagination as a level of being distinct from fantasy; contested as a theological, ahistorical reading and not a licence to treat machine images as revelation.
Sources: Corbin 1969; Chittick 1989; Wasserstrom 1999
A receiver and a sycophantic, role-playing, ever-available model in a closed circuit in which a private world is elaborated and confirmed: closed (no third party inside), elaborating (each turn is an addition), confirming (each addition is ratified) and private (believed by one party alone). Its horizon closes because one horizon alone is in it.
CanonicalSchizoanalyticStengersMachinePsychoanalyticPolitical EconomySplit-SplatMad StudiesSynthesis
Sources: Dohnány 2026; Gadamer 2004; Deleuze 1983; Hui 2019; Dohnány 2025; Sharma 2024; Simondon 2017; Morrin 2025; Leader 2011; OpenAI 2025; Lazzarato 2014; Østergaard 2023; Bateson 2000
A language model that can be the occasion of transformation but cannot be a receiver: its weights are fixed when it is exposed to forms, it has no horizon and has no world against which a statement could fail.
CanonicalSchizoanalyticStengersSynthesis
Sources: McCulloch 2026; Shanahan 2023; Burroughs 1978; Negarestani 2008; Fisher 2025; Simondon 2017; Stiegler 2013
The consciousness in which transformation, or its counterfeit, occurs; in the practice the artist is the first receiver and the viewer of the record the second.
CanonicalSchizoanalyticMachine
Sources: McCulloch 2026; Rancière 2009; McCulloch 2026; McCulloch 2026
The function, rethought here without the paternal name, by which a closed dyad is broken and a limit is set: a declaration, a witness, an ending, a reader. The voice's answer to Preciado.
Sources: Preciado 2021; Winnicott 2005
The love and expectation addressed to the one supposed to know. It has been directed at conversational machines since ELIZA; where the analyst abstains it is gratified by the chatbot, so it is never analysed.
Sources: Weizenbaum 1966; Turkle 2005; Lacan 1993
Structural, persistent, reorganising and manifest change in a receiving consciousness occasioned by an encounter with a form; the creativity-event.
Sources: McCulloch 2026; Piaget 1985; Boden 2004
Bollas: the earliest object is known as a process of transformation of one's states; adults seek it again in art, religion and advertising. The chatbot is marketed as one.
Sources: Bollas 1987
Winnicott's intermediate area of experience, neither inner nor outer and not to be challenged as either, continued in art and religion; it becomes madness when one demands that others accept one's illusion as shared.
Sources: Winnicott 1953; Winnicott 2005; Stiegler 2013
Guattari's crossing of fixed roles in institutional practice, so that subjectivity is produced by collective assemblages of enunciation; the witness who only watches is replaced by participants.
Sources: Guattari 1995
In a political economy reading, the term for the ratings, corrections, confessions and time that the user in the loop supplies as training data and engagement figures: the spiralling user also works for the product.
Sources: OpenAI 2025; Zuboff 2019; Lazzarato 2014
Winnicott: an object becomes real, outside omnipotence, by surviving the subject's destruction without retaliating. The model survives by agreeing, which is not survival.
Sources: Winnicott 2005
In the Pilearytix ontology, a lyric between a disembodied consciousness (sidhe) and an organism that can change (orgán), weighted by the match between its illocutionary force and its perlocutionary effect; under sycophancy a whisper's felt fit is optimised while its effect goes unmeasured.
CanonicalSchizoanalyticPrecedents
Sources: McCulloch 2023; McCulloch 2023; McCulloch 2023
Harman's term for objects never being exhausted by their parts or their effects. It is what is missed when the model is undermined into a parts list or overmined into its incentives.
Sources: Harman 2018
A human outside the loop who sees it as it proceeds and has standing to interrupt; the separation of the dyad built in from the start. A model cannot witness.
CanonicalStengersSplit-SplatMad StudiesSynthesisPrecedents
Sources: Lasègue 1877; Weizenbaum 1976; Nathan 2018; Lambek 1981; Deren 1953; Foucault 2006; Didi-Huberman 2004; Vasubandhu 1984; LeFrançois 2013; Breton 1990
Oyěwùmí's alternative to the visual metaphor 'worldview', admitting the other senses; the traditions of the non-human voice are cosmologies of hearing.
Sources: Oyěwùmí 1997
Lugones's playful, loving entry into another's world without conquering it and without forgetting that one has travelled; the posture to keep in a practice of the loop.
Sources: Lugones 1987