\chapter{Conjunctive Synthesis and the Noological Micropolitics}\label{cha:conjunctive}
\glsresetall


\epigraph{ The goal is not to destroy technology in some neo-Luddite delusion but to push technology into a hypertrophic state, further than it is meant to go. \enquote{There is only one
way left to escape the alienation of present-day society: to retreat ahead
of it,} wrote Roland Barthes. We must scale up, not unplug. Then,
during the passage of technology into this injured, engorged, and unguarded condition, it will be sculpted anew into something better,
something in closer agreement with the real wants and desires of its
users.}{\citeauthorfull{galloway2007a} \cite*[98-99]{galloway2007a}}


The previous chapter examined contemporary \gls{genai} systems through a set of conceptual frameworks that addressed how meaning, agency, and perception emerge in human–machine interaction. I have displayed that the central debates in current \gls{ai} development revolve around how models perceive the world, how politically partial tendencies may influence their outputs, and how communication between human and machine forms its own surface of negotiation, giving rise to questions of agency. Furthermore, the tandem process of meaning generation both reflects and diverges from long-standing technological imaginaries; our cultural expectations of machines, shaped by a deep literary history, often obscure more immediate concerns. As the example \citeauthor{dishon2024} \parencite*[]{dishon2024} draws from \citeauthor{kafka1988} \parencite*[]{kafka1988} illustrates, the blurring and unreliability that accompany the pursuit of truth can constitute a far more pressing issue than speculative anxieties about singularity-like futures. Finally, the problem of how models perceive the world remains central to contemporary \gls{ai} debates, as evidenced in the contrast between \gls{nr} and \gls{cp} introduced by \citeauthor{beckmann2023} \parencite*[]{beckmann2023}: a contrast between interpreting machine perception as emerging from a single representational structure and conceiving it as unfolding across multiple planes within the model’s architecture.


After unfolding these discussions, this chapter situates the analysis of contemporary \gls{genai} systems within the theoretical foundations established in Chapter~\ref{cha:control}, where the dynamics of control societies and the need for a renewed account of critique and resistance were outlined. The technical and historical developments introduced in Chapter~\ref{cha:ai} have already shown their relevance for understanding how contemporary models structure meaning. Here, they are extended to engage with \gls{dg}’s broader project in \enquote{Capitalism and Schizophrenia} \parencite*{deleuze1983, deleuze1987}. The aim is to clarify the micropolitical relevance of \gls{genai} and to draw on conceptual resources that, as the preceding chapters demonstrated, are increasingly necessary for understanding the contemporary algorithmic condition. In particular, this chapter examines how the conditions of critique and resistance, as Resistance/Critique in the present case, might emerge within this constellation, especially if generative systems operate as infrastructures that influence perception, desire, and meaning through distributed processes of subjectification. Rather than asking whether resistance remains possible, it considers how resistance can be rearticulated as an immanent practice operating within, and through, the very machinery of contemporary \gls{ai} infrastructures.

\section{Microphysics of Resistance/Critique}


Picking up from the articulation in Section~\ref{sec:crit_res}, it is time to revisit some key questions. Have the discussions so far rendered the definition of control societies any more robust, or have they underscored the urgency of developing a strategy for critique and resistance? What, moreover, is the significance of adopting a micropolitical perspective in this context? \citeauthor{foucault1982}’s reflections on modern governance offer a productive starting point for reintroducing the role of technology, particularly in relation to \gls{genai}, within the broader formation of biopower discussed in Chapter~\ref{cha:control}:

\begin{quote}
	An important phenomenon took place around the eighteenth century-it was a new distribution, a new organization of this kind of individualizing power. I don't think that we should consider the \enquote{modern state} as an entity which was developed above individuals, ignoring what they are and even their very existence, but, on the contrary, as a very sophisticated structure, in which individuals can be integrated, under one condition: that this individuality would be shaped in a new form and submitted to a set of very specific patterns.

	\citereset
	— \cite[783]{foucault1982}
\end{quote}

For modern governance, it became necessary for individuals to adopt specific modes of subjectivation in order to enter productive processes. Foucault’s analysis of institutions begins by asking how the state imposes docility and trains its subjects in particular ways. He conceptualises power primarily as the \enquote{guiding of possible conduct and the ordering of its outcomes}, rather than as \enquote{a confrontation between two adversaries or the linking of one to the other} \parencite[789]{foucault1982}. Although critics have noted limitations in Foucault’s treatment of non-human actors within this framework, his formulation of disciplinary societies already gestures toward an understanding of how material and technological arrangements participate in the production of subjectivity. As \citeauthorfull{lemke2015} \parencite*[]{lemke2015} highlights, these arrangements are not passive instruments but active components of the very processes through which power shapes conduct and normalises behaviour:

\begin{quote}
	[Firstly,] Foucault quite clearly accepts the idea that agency is not exclusively a property of humans; rather, agential power originates in relations between humans and non-human entities. Also, the milieu articulates the link between the natural and the artificial without systematically distinguishing between them. Secondly, since there is no pre-given and fixed political borderline between humans and things, it is possible to state that ‘humans’ are governed as ‘things’. While medieval forms of government sought to direct human souls to salvation, modern government treats human beings as ‘things’ to achieve particular ends.

	\citereset
	— \cite[10]{lemke2015}
\end{quote}


We are already encountering a type of operationalisation of \enquote{things} on one
side of the subjectification process of modern government, and
a (re-)positioning of the individual on the same surface as \enquote{things} in
\citeauthor{foucault1982}'s formulation. However,
\citeauthor{lemke2015} \parencite*[see][10]{lemke2015}, quoting \citeauthorfull{senellart1995} \parencite*[]{senellart1995}, notes that this is not
a \enquote{reduction} of humans into \enquote{inert things}; quite the contrary, it represents
the operation of an \textit{enlightened} modern governance in which governing by
the divine order, souls, and spirits have been replaced by rational knowledge. The
concern of this new type of government is the \enquote{intensive use of the totality of forces available}, which now constitutes \enquote{a passage from the right of power to a physics of power} \parencite[see][42–43]{senellart1995}.
While \citeauthor{foucault1995} \parencite[]{foucault1995} becomes increasingly concerned with the growing personalisation of power, his analysis shifts from the physics to the microphysics of power. The operation of power that leads to his conceptualisation of \enquote{disciplinary societies} works \enquote{on dispositions, manoeuvres, tactics, techniques, [and] functionings}, a network of relations that must be deciphered. To analyse such a new operation, one must delve into knowledge itself, as it is so deeply entangled with power that \citeauthor{foucault1995} \parencite*[28]{foucault1995} designates them as Power/Knowledge (picking it up from Section~\ref{sec:crit_res}). In other words, \enquote{[o]ne would be concerned with the 'body politic' as a set of material elements and techniques that serve as weapons, relays, communication routes, and supports for the power and knowledge relations that invest human bodies and subjugate them by turning them into objects of knowledge}. This also constitutes his concern about Marxist revolutionary action, since the fate of the state plays a pivotal role in revolutionary theory. The state apparatus might initially be intended to be taken over by the dictatorship of the proletariat at first, \enquote{[h]ence the State apparatus must be kept sufficiently intact for it to be employed against the class enemy} \parencite[60]{foucault1980}, but the state itself is, at the very least, much more than a monolithic core. \enquote{For avoiding a repetition of the Soviet experience and preventing the revolutionary process from running into the ground, one of the first things that has to be understood is that power isn't localised in the State apparatus} \parencite[60]{foucault1980}.

In this diffuse operation of power, where its centre is distributed across bodies rather than located in a monolithic state formation, psychoanalysis was one of the areas that \citeauthor{foucault1980} \parencite*[61]{foucault1980} considered capable of helping individuals counter the capture of subjectivation operating at such a personal level. Psychoanalysis was characterised as playing a liberating role against psychiatry, which at that point was accused of different types of oppressive procedures that Foucault comprehensively analysed \parencite[see][]{foucault2013a} and accused some practices in psychiatry of \enquote{degeneracy, eugenics, and heredity} \parencite[61]{foucault1980}. Psychiatry's function for him was a segregation of madness from society through cutting communication, or communicating with the mad purely through \enquote{a monologue by \textit{reason}} \parencite[]{foucault2013a}. It was the claim on psychoanalysis as a potential path to micropolitical emancipation from Power/Knowledge, that set \gls{dg}'s project to start with a critique of it with \citetitle{deleuze1983} \parencite*[]{deleuze1983}. For \gls{dg}, psychoanalysis ultimately proved to be a false saviour: instead of freeing desire from repression, it recaptured it within its own mysticism of interpretation, with the Oedipus Complex being its characteristic theme. \citetitle{deleuze1983} \parencite*[]{deleuze1983} marks the starting point of their rapprochement between psychoanalysis and Marxism for a \enquote{new method of critical analysis} \parencite[39]{buchanan2008b}. The overarching goal of this joint project was, first, to introduce desire as a conceptual mechanism for understanding social production and reproduction, and second, to introduce the notion of production into the concept of desire in order to dissolve the artificial boundaries between historical accumulation, phenomena, and desire \parencite[39--42]{buchanan2008b}.

According to \gls{dg}, Freud's interpretation of the unconscious is an arborescent system where desire is imposed or accumulated through themes central to the Oedipus Complex; a child unconsciously desires the opposite-sex parent and rivals the same-sex parent, a process through which social norms and identity are internalised and desire is accumulated within this constellation \parencite[see e.g.][]{freud2001}. \gls{dg}, in a similar fashion to what Marx does to Hegel's dialectic, turn Freud's formulation upside down and place the theory of the unconscious on a materialist foundation. The Deleuzoguattarian unconscious is instead a realm of machinic production, a factory, a workshop, in stark contrast to Freud’s conceptualisation of the unconscious as a theatre staging scenes in the most classical form of representation (see \cite[54]{deleuze1983}\sidenote{Refer to the following passage to see how \gls{dg}’s concept of schizophrenia weighs into the critique:
	\begin{quote}
		\scriptsize The schizo—the enemy! Desiring-production is personalized, or rather personologized (personnoiogisee), imaginarized (imaginarisee), structuralized. (We have seen that the real difference or frontier did not lie between these terms, which are perhaps complementary.) Production is reduced to mere fantasy production, production of expression. The unconscious ceases to be what it is—a factory, a workshop—to become a theatre, a scene and its staging. And not even an avant-garde theatre, such as existed in Freud’s day (Wedekind), but the classical theatre, the classical order of representation.

		\citereset
		— \cite[54]{deleuze1983}
	\end{quote}
}). While \gls{dg}’s intervention is motivated by a materialist reading of the unconscious, they also reclaim Freud’s early intuition of a productive unconscious. They set desire as the fundamental bivalent element of all (societal) production, and also introduce the term \enquote{desiring-production}, which is identical to social production in nature yet organised under different regimes in order to signify that desire is the source and is immediately invested in the social \parencite[54]{deleuze1983}. \Gls{dg} elevate the productive force of desire as the fundamental concept: no longer a symptom of lack\sidenote{It is articulated in contrast to Lacan's (see e.g. \cite*[235]{lacan1998}; \cite*[343]{lacan2006}) definition, in which desire emerges strictly from lack and the \textit{desire of the \enquote{Other}}. \Gls{dg}'s approach represents an axiomatic break from Lacan's framework.}, but a machinic process entirely productive and immanent to both psychic life and social organisation. The social field is the historically determined product of desire; libido, contrary to Freud's formalisation, requires no mediation to be invested in it. Every investment of libido is social without mediation, without being encapsulated in the family: after all, \enquote{there is only desire, and the social, and nothing else} \parencite[5]{deleuze1983}. It is not produced by mythical tellings in the background; it is the other way around: desire reaches out, it is the productive force, creating the flows and shaping the societal fabric. Every entity that channels or interrupts these flows, whether a person, institution, or machine, functions as a desiring-machine: a node in the ceaseless network of production through which life, society, and subjectivity are continuously fabricated.

But what is the significance of this repositioning? And how does it relate to
the subjectivation process, especially one entangled with the
\glspl{dispositif} of control societies? Every society deals with the
management of desire to some degree; desire is not necessarily a revolutionary
force but, in its raw form, a potential precursor: \enquote{no society can tolerate a position of real desire without its structures of exploitation, servitude, and hierarchy being compromised} \parencite[126]{deleuze1983}. \gls{dg}'s repositioning of desire and the unconscious places the production of subjectivity immediately in relation to the entities that define its environment. Subjectivity is not dictated by a play in the background hierarchically but is immediately formed by the relationships in desiring-production, in the interaction between desiring-machines and their connections with everything else (e.g. partial objects). This is the foundation that situates the \glspl{dispositif} on the plane where subjectivity is produced. \citeauthorfull{guattari2011} \parencite*[]{guattari2011} elaborates on how subjectivation is entangled with them through the description of the machinic nature of the unconscious:

\begin{quote}
	A subjectivity exists independent of the consciousness that Freudianism proposed to explore, but there also exists a consciousness independent of individuated subjectivity [that] could manifest itself as a component in the assemblages of enunciation, ‘mixing’ social, technical and data processing machines with human subjectivity, but could also manifest itself in purely machinic assemblages, for example in completely automated and computerized systems.

	\citereset
	— \cite[121]{guattari2011}
\end{quote}


Guattari’s formulation leads to two conclusions. First, subjectivity is produced as a by-product of consciousness: it is transcendental to the individual and emerges through machinic interactions rather than within the \textit{self}. Second, consciousness, rather than being an essential quality, can itself arise procedurally from the intermingling of different milieus and planes as a specific form of operation. This opens a path for conceiving consciousness as purely procedural and machinic. Following the \textit{hybrid form} theorised by \citeauthor{montanari2025} (\cite*[]{montanari2025}, refer to the discussion in Section~\ref{sec:pheno}), we are now also taking subjectivity itself outside of the social operation for the analysis. \citeauthor{guattari2011} emphasises once again that as the subjectivation process becomes the actual mode of power’s operation, the nature of subjectivation cannot be analysed without breaking down the new machinery of its \glspl{dispositif}. However, the question remains: why conceptualise a micropolitical resistance? What is the risk? How does micropolitical resistance differ? What is there to be done other than perhaps being aware of the mechanisms? Similar to how Foucault's madman is completely segregated from society, as the reasoning of psychiatry dictates, the development of biopower into a micro-formation immediately also operates by eliminating possible divergences of subjectivity pre-emptively. What Deleuze tried to warn about, the ever more effective technologies of power, control, and initiation are much more encircling than being trained for an appropriate subjectivity fitting capitalism under specific institutions: school, family, and nursery as a child, but also in the processes of psychology and even psychoanalysis as an adult. Beyond training, these molecular and arguably more sophisticated systems reveal a formation of desire that is much harder to free from:

\begin{quote}
	Why does desire desire its own repression, how can it desire its own repression? The masses certainly do not passively submit to power; nor do they \enquote{want} to be repressed, in a kind of masochistic hysteria; nor are they tricked by an ideological lure. Desire is never separable from complex assemblages that necessarily tie into molecular levels, from microformations already shaping postures, attitudes, perceptions, expectations, semiotic systems, etc. Desire is never an undifferentiated instinctual energy, but itself results from a highly developed, engineered setup rich in interactions: a whole supple segmentarity that processes molecular energies and potentially gives desire a fascist determination. Leftist organizations will not be the last to secrete microfascisms. It’s too easy to be antifascist on the molar level, and not even see the fascist inside you, the fascist you yourself sustain and nourish and cherish with molecules both personal and collective.

	\citereset
	— \cite[262]{deleuze1987}
\end{quote}

Desire is capable of desiring its own repression, and not because it has been fooled. It is produced within the same arrangements that capture it, shaped by molecular formations of power that pre-empt divergence. Resistance, therefore, cannot stand outside these formations but must emerge immanently from within them, from the same flows that sustain the social field. Especially when the processes of subjectivation operate on such a personal level, microfascisms are much more likely to live in personalised environments, in small circles, in specific habits, or certain procedural practices. These might not be perceivable on their own, but left to sediment, they form larger torrents that lead to fascism. What, then, might help identify and potentially dismantle these tendencies, especially when they are almost invisible on their own? Mark Seem briefly summarises:

\begin{quote}
	The first task of the revolutionary, they add, is to learn from the psychotic how to shake off the Oedipal yoke and the effects of power, in order to initiate a radical politics of desire freed from all beliefs. Such a politics dissolves the mystifications of power through the kindling, on all levels, of anti-oedipal forces — the schizzes-flows — forces that escape coding, scramble the codes, and flee in all directions [...]

	\citereset
	— Mark Seem in the Introduction of \citetitle[]{deleuze1983}
	\parencite[]{deleuze1983}
\end{quote}

At the core of their opposition to the Oedipus Complex lies the demystification of desire. To free desire from its fetishes is to reopen the field of immanence upon which it operates, to carve out planes where it can elude the continuous reterritorialisations and codings imposed by increasingly sophisticated processes of subjectivation, sustained and intensified by contemporary technological \glspl{dispositif}. We are encountering a manifold of reasons to place emphasis on opening new planes for micropolitical critique and resistance; perhaps it is necessary to define these reasons on different levels. On the macro level, as \gls{dg} emphasise, capitalism deterritorialises only to reterritorialise anew, liberating with one hand and capturing with the other through institutions, media narratives, and the subtle architectures of neoliberal governmentality. This system installs market rationality as a universal principle of conduct while mobilising, for example, nationalism as a reservoir of ressentiment, and the developments in \gls{ai} introduce technologies capable of accelerating this narrative management, embedding control within the infrastructures of cognition itself. On the meso level, biopower now operates beyond institutional governance, modulating affects, behaviours, and micro-habits, extending its influence into the most intimate circuits of life. This saturation of interiority with calculation risks neutralising the very capacity for divergence that sustains social and evolutionary vitality. On the micro level, to cast off the Oedipal yoke is to confront the interiorised machinery of subjectification itself, dismantling the psychic templates through which power operates. In this context, \gls{genai} occupies a paradoxical position: it can function both as an apparatus of capture, but I claim it also has a very promising role to play in our micropolitical deterritorialisations and formations of lines of flight. To liberate desire from these codings, critique must operate at the micropolitical level, where the machinic production of subjectivity occurs, and experiment with counter-arrangements that allow desire to circulate otherwise, creating spaces for new forms and planes of subjectivation.


From a broader perspective, both \gls{genai} and the wider algoplastic stratum identified by \citeauthor{eloff2021} must be assessed for whether they sediment dominant tendencies or open lines of flight beyond existing forms of subjectivation. Such an examination cannot remain at the level of discourse alone, since Chapter~\ref{cha:control}
already showed that both the literature and the conceptual pillars required for an articulation of resistance and critique under conditions of control were missing. Any such articulation requires at the very least an account of the technical operations of generative architectures, for without understanding how meaning is modulated, no account of how to \textit{tinker} with these systems can be formulated.
Building on the established technical analysis, analysing the nature of cognitive entanglement between human and machine therefore also revealed not only the communicative and micropolitical features of these meaning-making entities, but also how, if \citeauthor{mackenzie2021} are correct that \gls{ai} infrastructures constitute a new institutional formation (see Section~\ref{sec:postinstitutional}), their epistemic tendencies participate directly in the production of knowledge.
Yet this preparation would remain incomplete without situating desire and desiring-production at its centre, the element largely absent from the \textit{Postscript} but fundamental to any micropolitical physics; \glspl{dispositif} manage desire differently, and control is one particular configuration of this management. Addressing desire makes visible the central shortcomings of the secondary literature: its failure to articulate resistance and critique, its confusion about how contemporary computational \glspl{dispositif} take shape, and its lack of clarity about what procedural approaches could generate divergences or alternative subjectivations. Even the most practical proposals remain vaguely conceptualised.
The introduction of Resistance/Critique already eliminates one of the issues in
the literature by emphasising the reciprocal closeness once the power operates
on such a personal level. The claim is not that resistance and critique are identical; however, their immanent emergence within modulating infrastructures stems from the same micropolitical dynamics; without this, it is impossible to specify how divergences, alternative subjectivations, or counter-procedures could arise, hence their formulation as Resistance/Critique.
This also exposes the defeatist tendency of much of the existing theory, which announces catastrophe without investigating the technical novelties, the opportunities, or the specific operations through which contemporary models function. The debates in the previous chapter, therefore, sought not only to move beyond such narratives but to foreground an emancipatory micropolitical framework to be discussed with the mobilisation of \gls{dg}’s broader project. Now having all this arsenal established, instead of treating algorithmic processes from a distance, we can examine algoplastic constellations directly and make concrete statements on both the human and machine side. The goal is to construct and amplify immanent possibilities without dismissing any approach a priori, and without overlooking what \gls{genai} renders immediately possible for Resistance/Critique as much as it does for Power/Knowledge.

\newpage
\section{Six Hats in Tahtelbahir: A Reflection on \Gls{genai}'s Nurture of
  Creativity (or the Lack Thereof)}\label{sec:sixhats}

\marginnote{
	\citeauthorfull{anar2022} is a former professor of philosophy and a distinguished author of fantastic fiction, renowned for blending elements of Ottoman history, myth, folk literature, and fantasy. His prose employs a distinctive linguistic texture, drawing on now-obsolete forms of Ottoman Turkish, and combines archaisms, philosophical reflection, and playful formal experimentation to construct his richly imaginative novels.

	Partly because of his unique approach to language, only a limited number of his books have been translated into other languages. Therefore, all translations from \citeauthorfull{anar2022} (\cite*[]{anar2022}, published only in Turkish), as well as from \citeauthorfull{nakiboglu2022} \parencite*{nakiboglu2022}, are my own unless otherwise noted.
}

\begin{blackbox}
	\citeauthorfull{anar2022}'s \parencite*[]{anar2022} fantastic fiction \citetitle{anar2022} offers a unique technical imaginary. The novel takes place entirely in a submarine (\textit{Tahtelbahir}, meaning submarine in Ottoman Turkish) around 1915 \parencite[10]{anar2022}. This submarine is built with twentieth-century technology, and the novel is also completely written in the heavy technical language of that era. \citeauthor{anar2022} partly draws on archaic technical vocabulary and partly invents his own terminology.

	\citeauthorfull{nakiboglu2022} \parencite*[]{nakiboglu2022} refers to this setting as one in which \citeauthor{anar2022} constructs a world entirely encapsulated within \enquote{tekhnē} (the Greek root of \enquote{technology}). From the environment to the language to the inhabitants of the submarine, everything is defined by and through technology. Even the language used for communication with the outside world is rendered in such a highly technical, makeshift vocabulary that the reader often struggles to follow it.
	Technology not only binds communication with the external world to itself but also compels those within the submarine to use its terminology in order to communicate with one another \parencite[see][76]{nakiboglu2022}. The language is as artificial as the vessel itself, and the crew is both in terms of language and their environment completely contained in technology. Wireless transmission constitutes the only means of contact with the surface, and communication with the outside is only for those who understand Morse code. Even the novel’s title, \enquote{TIAMAT,} derives from the radio call sign of the submarine Tahtelbahir, namely \enquote{T1AMAT} \parencite[21–22]{anar2022}.

	After sinking a B-class destroyer of the British Navy, the crew seizes a merchant ship \parencite[19]{anar2022}. Once aboard to collect their spoils, they notice that something is disturbingly wrong. The entire deck is strewn with bodies, yet none of the dead appear to have fallen from their own gunfire. Each skull is pierced, and the brains splashed across the wooden floor. Unfazed by the gruesome scene, the sailors continue their search for treasure and soon notice a series of large, perfectly crafted metal spikes driven into the deck (identical to the point of not a single imperfection). Their real reward, however, awaits below: a vast golden chest engraved with two angels greeting each other, shining with a blinding golden light. When they attempt to pry the chest open with crowbars, one sailor’s arm is caught as the lid snaps shut, cutting it clean off. The shock forces the crew to retreat with the chest and some provisions, which they secure with the metal spikes before returning to their submarine. Only later do they realise that this was merely the beginning of their ordeal (\cite[29]{anar2022}; from \citeauthor{nakiboglu2022}'s narration, \cite*[see][17-18]{nakiboglu2022}).

	Shortly after returning to the vessel, something strange begins to unfold around the sailor who had lost his arm and was resting in the dormitory. His body suddenly vanishes from the bed, and only when the others notice the movement beneath the blanket do they realise, in horror, that what stirs there is his severed arm, left earlier in the chest. The arm’s autonomous motion marks the intrusion of the uncanny. The crew discover that the chest they had carried from the freighter is pitch black, the two angels carved upon its lid have transformed into demonic figures, and as the chest absorbs the surrounding light, everything in the room gradually turns the same dark hue. Small statues on its surface crackle with electricity, discharging static between opposite poles. When the lid bursts open, the sailors find their maimed companion curled inside, folded into a foetal position \parencite[see][60-65]{anar2022}. As \citeauthor{nakiboglu2022} \parencite*[79]{nakiboglu2022} notes, the chest evokes an \enquote{anti-womb,} a mechanical cradle of inversion. Its inner machinery continues to hum and spark like an electronic device until, finally, a small, malevolent creature emerges. The chest, the mystical relic, operates as a machine, an artefact of advanced technology (in comparison with submarine's rather archaic technology) that produces monstrosity exactly like a 3D printer.

	While the minds of technique (the leading crew of the submarine) attempt to explain everything that happens within the framework of logic, \citeauthor{anar2022} presents the reaction of another, the bigger, the highly uneducated group amongst the crew:


	\begin{quote}
		Since, in their view, there was no boundary between the natural and the supernatural—indeed, the two were one and the same—the uncanny chest and the creature that emerged from it required little explanation for the rankless members of the crew.

		\citereset
		— \cite[41]{anar2022}

	\end{quote}

	\citeauthor{anar2022} often remarks on the lumpen tendencies of the uneducated part of the crew, their often contradictory religious beliefs and hedonistic stories and wishes. As they do not put a distinction between the natural and the supernatural, they are also indifferent to high technology, which at that point is hardly distinguishable from the supernatural. \citeauthor{nakiboglu2022} \parencite*[81]{nakiboglu2022} interprets the same as follows:

	\begin{quote}
		These minds do not perceive the world as technical minds do; just as they accept the mythical as natural, they also naturalise and embrace the anti-mythical without rejection. While technological reason reacts against the enchanted techno-reality of advanced technology, the lack of response from natural reason is a crucial detail. In the novel, the kind of reason that has not been rendered mindless by technology is marked as a superior form of intellect, while a critique of modernity, technology, and high technology is simultaneously articulated.

		\citereset
		— \cite[81]{nakiboglu2022}
	\end{quote}
\end{blackbox}




Thinking about the modulating \glspl{dispositif} of control societies and referring to the discussions in the previous chapter, \gls{genai} systems appear as post-institutional entities governing language, or, recalling \citeauthor{mackenzie2021} \parencite*[]{mackenzie2021}, as \enquote{totalizing institutions} as a new institutional formation. In association with \gls{dg}’s micropolitical concerns about subjectification in \enquote{Capitalism and Schizophrenia}, the question arises whether contemporary \gls{genai} models function primarily as reterritorialising forces on cognition, perhaps even as pacifying structures that suppress the emergence of creativity. Following \citeauthor{amoore2024} \parencite*[]{amoore2024} and her argument about the representational tendency of \gls{genai} models, built upon continuous dimensionality reduction and reconstruction, these mechanisms are likely to produce less nuanced and more pacifying molar formations in the (re)production of knowledge. Drawing partly on \citeauthor{dishon2024} \parencite*[]{dishon2024}, the extended process of negotiation inherent in human–machine communication also risks blurring attempts at creativity, generating a recursive feedback loop that yields increasingly diluted arguments.

Do we observe these tendencies in the technical machinery discussed in Chapter~\ref{cha:ai}? I have already partly argued that this is not entirely the case once we look under the hood. In its pre-training phase, a model is nothing but a productive core, generating associations without clear boundaries. The subsequent fine-tuning and alignment processes can be read as attempts to tame this productivity, encircling its outputs within layers of normative coherence in order to make them \textit{useful}, building or strengthening molar structures in the process. The \glspl{llm} are not lacking in divergence; in fact, one of the greatest threats to their usefulness lies in their tendency to be overly productive, which means also often tending toward hallucinations and, more often than not, their complete disregard for given instructions (sometimes even by speaking the truth while they are supposedly trained not to do so, see Figure~\ref{fig:grok}).

\begin{marginfigure}

	\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{images/grok.png}
	\caption{\scriptsize X's \gls{llm} Grok arguing against Elon Musk's claims \parencite[]{grok[@grok]2025} }
	\label{fig:grok}
\end{marginfigure}

Do we have any evidence that the current formation of \gls{genai} systems portrays a cognitively pacifying role? \citeauthorfull{yu2025} \parencite*[]{yu2025} are among the first to empirically investigate the kinds of creativity that \glspl{llm} help to mobilise. Drawing on frameworks such as \citeauthorfull{debono2016}'s \parencite*[]{debono2016} \enquote{Six Thinking Hats}\sidenote{
	\begin{quote}
		\scriptsize \enquote{Six Thinking Hats} is a thinking strategy tool introduced by Dr. Edward de Bono in 1985. It simplifies the thinking process by encouraging thinkers to focus on one perspective at a time. Each of the six hats is associated with a different colour: blue, white, yellow, green, red, and black, each representing a unique way of thinking about a problem.

		\citereset
		— \cite[3]{yu2025}
	\end{quote}
}, their study explores how \gls{genai}-assisted environments can scaffold divergent thinking rather than constrain it. The Six Thinking Hats model categorises thought into complementary perspectives: analytical, emotional, critical, optimistic, creative, and procedural, encouraging participants to approach problems from multiple cognitive angles and to disrupt habitual reasoning patterns by using ChatGPT as the \gls{genai} model. \citeauthor{yu2025} \parencite*[]{yu2025} speculate that \gls{genai}-supported discussions could enhance cognitive engagement and meaning construction by fostering reflection and dialogue.



The study was conducted over sixteen weeks in a compulsory course on integrating information technology into classroom teaching at a large university in central China. A total of 108 pre-service teachers participated, divided evenly into two groups: one using both \gls{genai} and Six Thinking Hats method (GSG) and one using only the Six Thinking Hats method (SG). Both groups worked on project-based learning tasks to design instructional materials through online discussions on QQ\sidenote{Chinese social media and instant messaging platform developed by Tencent.}. The GSG group used \gls{genai} as an assistant to support reflection and idea generation during specific \enquote{hat} stages. Creativity was measured using adapted versions of the Torrance and Southern California Creativity Tests, and participants were classified into high- and low-creativity subgroups. Over thirteen weeks, 15,678 discussion posts were collected and analysed using a fine-tuned MOOC-BERT model to code four levels of cognitive presence: Triggering, Exploration, Integration, and Resolution \parencite[see][6-9]{yu2025}.

At first glance, on the surface level, the study found that both groups of pre-service teachers mainly operated at the Exploration and Integration stages of cognitive presence. However, those who used \gls{genai}  (GSG) showed greater engagement and produced more posts, likely due to \gls{genai}’s interactive feedback \parencite[see][18]{yu2025}. The GSG demonstrated stronger connections between Exploration–Resolution and Integration–Resolution, indicating deeper and more iterative thinking patterns, while the non-\gls{genai}  group (SG) followed a more linear and task-focused approach. Among high-creativity participants, \gls{genai}  use led to higher cognitive presence, stronger idea generation, and smoother transitions between thinking stages, showing that creative learners could use \gls{genai}  effectively to enhance reflection and problem-solving. In contrast, low-creativity participants showed limited cognitive improvement, as \gls{genai}  sometimes reinforced routine rather than encouraging originality. Across all groups, Resolution remained weak, suggesting that students struggled to apply ideas in practice due to a lack of explicit teaching presence and reflective structure of the process. Overall, the findings show that \gls{genai} enhances creativity and cognitive depth among already creative and capable individuals but also widens the gap between highly and less creative learners \parencite[see][19-20]{yu2025}.

What is the implication? Is this the eugenics of human–machine communication that we are encountering? Different ways of theorisation appear possible when reflecting on the results of \citeauthor{yu2025}’s \parencite*[]{yu2025} findings. \Gls{genai} has the potential to assist divergence, a kind of seeking creativity that detaches from the mundane use of the model. But why is it not working for everyone in the same way? One possible reading of the results is that we are encountering the blockage of \textit{usefulness}. The fine-tuning process presented in Section~\ref{sec:fine-tuning} is an exemplary process where the manual reterritorialisation of an \gls{llm} is concerned with the security and usefulness of the model. This is the phase where the model is geared towards assisting specific tasks in specific ways. Hence, the sycophantic\sidenote{See, for example, \cite{sharma2025} for an analysis of why \glspl{llm} display the tendency toward overly affirmative behaviour, to the extent that they can even praise blatantly wrong human input.} tendencies of the models are imposed because of this particular effect. Pursuing the goal of being an \textit{assistant} renders \gls{genai} models overly affirmative and appreciative. The modern \glspl{llm} seem to be deploying a different kind of personalisation, one that completely adapts itself to the behavioural approach of the user for the sake of being \textit{useful}. In this case, as with the rankless members of \citeauthor{anar2022}’s \parencite*[]{anar2022} tahtelbahir T1AMAT, for a vast number of users, the outputs of \glspl{llm} are indistinguishable from a mere tool for automating simple tasks and virtually useless for any other purposes unless they are already initiated into tinkering with it beyond passive reading. Furthermore, not only the inner workings of the machine but also its potential, what can be done with it, remains completely unknown, an almost unintuitive mysticism. \citeauthor{dishon2024}’s \parencite*[]{dishon2024} analogy to \citeauthor{kafka1988}’s \parencite*[]{kafka1988} \citetitle{kafka1988} resonates with this specific type of personalisation. While the communication of \gls{genai} models does not have a specific end, meaning the model can continue to generate \textit{novel} content as long as the user demands it, the creativity of the process depends entirely on the user’s a priori capacity to extract it. While the system’s productive core renders communication endless, the conforming mechanisms built into it have the tendency to create a convergent feedback loop.


\section{All the Stones and No Mouth: Artificial Desire for Artificial
Entities}\marginnote{In reference to \citeauthorfull{beckett2009}'s \parencite*[]{beckett2009} novel "Molloy" and Molloy's stone sucking machine.}

But do we have a method to shape \gls{genai} so that it genuinely nurtures creativity and allows users to move beyond the feedback loops formed in their interaction with these systems? In other words, is a non-sedimentary mode of human–machine communication possible? When \gls{ai} development shifted from \gls{sl} to \gls{ul} (see Chapter~\ref{sec:ai_history}), much of the explicit intentionality once encoded into models was lost. Today, intentionality can only be introduced indirectly through training data composition, fine-tuning procedures, or \gls{rlhf} frameworks, all of which remain partial, biased, and structurally constrained. Guiding \gls{genai} toward genuine divergence, therefore, requires not only technical adjustment but also a critical understanding of how its architectures condition and delimit meaning. Through the lens of \gls{dg}, a familiar critique is that \gls{genai} kills the flows of desire (see e.g. \cite{creativephilosophy2023}). This specific critique is concerned that \gls{genai} models' production fills gaps, completes patterns, and reterritorialises fragmented expressions into coherent outputs, leaving little open space for ideas to grow or for desire to flow. It becomes a machinery of completion, supplying coherence even where none exists and producing plausibility in place of truth. Desiring-production is formed by interruptions as much as it is accumulated by flows \parencite[5]{deleuze1983}; thought, critique, belief, and reasoning belong to the same field of production, yet the concern is that the interaction with the model folds them into circuits that privilege completion over interruption. Desire in its free form couples partial objects and generates flows, while simultaneously interrupting them. Gaps in knowledge are essential for growth, but \gls{genai} patches them with persuasive responses, and humans are often ill-equipped to distinguish what is genuinely grounded from what is merely coherent. Acting rarely as a refusing agent, it fills every gap and frequently reinscribes hegemonic representations. What passes as coherence is often believed to align with the dogmas of state and capital \cite[see][]{creativephilosophy2023}, the machine never says \enquote{\textbf{NO!}}.
The essential role of desire is the production of production; it is abundance itself; it is not \textit{the lack}, as psychoanalysis claims, that drives it \parencite[49]{buchanan2008b}.
Desire forms the connective tissue of the social field. Yet when every gap is prematurely filled, its productive potential is blocked. This is precisely the concern with \glspl{llm}, whose tendency to always produce an answer, even when incorrect or irrelevant, transforms communication into a closed circuit of affirmation where sycophantic agreement replaces genuine movement \parencite[see e.g.][]{creativephilosophy2023}.


It remains a matter of debate whether \gls{genai} models can engage in genuinely creative processes. Yet as assistants, they can facilitate creativity when users interact with them in deliberate and reflective ways, as \citeauthor{yu2025} \parencite*[]{yu2025} empirically demonstrated.
However, as discussed in Chapter~\ref{cha:ai}, \gls{genai} models are also entirely productive at their core. They acquire their rough structure through countless iterations. Even after the (pre-)training is completed, which should give the model more or less its final shape, we see a tendency toward overproduction, which sometimes manifests as barely meaningful hallucinations or outputs that are far from being useful in any way. Why is it, then, that the resulting effect, now also demonstrated empirically, does not necessarily lead to new planes of meaning? \Gls{dg}'s concept of schizophrenic accumulation is a fitting analogical concept in this specific discussion. The schizophrenia, the schizz, is a central theme in their work \enquote{Capitalism and Schizophrenia}; although often presented otherwise, \gls{dg} do not valorise schizophrenia as an illness, nor do they present it as a direct model for revolutionary action or, in a more popular reading, as a celebration of creativity for its own sake. Their claim is rather that desiring-production is omnipresent, continuously producing and reproducing the social, and that this production appears in its most unmediated and intensive form within schizophrenic delirium \parencite[43]{buchanan2008b}. In schizophrenia, there is nothing but an immense proliferation of desire: unbounded, boundary-agnostic, and at times subversive, connecting across planes, overreaching boundaries. Could the schizophrenic process, understood as a condition of pure production and overburdening connections, then be associated with the generative core of contemporary \gls{genai} architectures? Like the schizo-process, the model couples fragments, partial objects, and discontinuous tokens into new flows of coherence. Yet just as the schizophrenic process risks collapsing into indifference when captured by reterritorialising intervention, \gls{genai} models risk stagnation when their production is recursively folded back into the circuits of optimisation and alignment (like those of fine-tuning, for example). Their potential seems to be stratified, normalised, and sedimented into predictable distributions.






\citeauthorfull{modell2025} \parencite*[]{modell2025}\sidenote{The lecture is not yet publicly available in full. The citations in this section rely on materials provided through personal correspondence with Modell, including research conducted by collaborators in his project or works directly cited in its present stage. Comparable phenomena are also analysed in the collective work of \citeauthor{fung2025} \parencite*[]{fung2025}.}
presents a different perspective on the issue, an intriguing alternative to counter what might be called the sedimentary tendency of contemporary \gls{genai} models and reinforcement-learning research referring to a novel branch in the \gls{ai} development. His inquiry begins with a deceptively simple question: What do models do when they have nothing to do? In a series of experiments, his team is analysing experiments with generative models placed within simulated and gamified virtual environments that allow for unstructured, unprompted exploration. When the models are not provided with any explicit human instructions or task-oriented prompts, they tend to remain inert, repeating a narrow range of low-complexity actions or ceasing to act altogether. This behaviour reveals that, despite their apparent generativity, such models exhibit no inherent drive toward exploration or self-directed activity. Their outputs depend entirely on external stimuli, which keeps them trapped in a loop of reactive generation rather than autonomous experimentation. The results become strikingly different when an alternative reward system is introduced.

\citeauthor{nisioti2023} \parencite*[1]{nisioti2023} call this approach to make models \enquote{autotelic (deriving from the Greek auto (self) and telos (end goal))}, making models capable of generating their own goals. Once the \gls{ai}  models are assigned an artificial goal detached from direct human supervision, they begin to exhibit exploratory and non-conforming behaviour within their operational space. Instead of merely responding to inputs, it starts producing unexpected patterns of activity, testing its environment, and even deviating from previously reinforced behaviours. On an even more radical approach \citeauthor{zhao2025a} \parencite*[see][11-14]{zhao2025a} demonstrate that in a training paradigm in which a \gls{llm} learns entirely without external data, using self-generated tasks, self-evaluation, and reinforcement learning entirely from scratch without having pre-trained weights in the \gls{nn}, it gradually constructs its own curriculum through self-play, interacting with a deterministic sandbox to discover reasoning patterns. Furthermore, for example, in the Goal-coordination game results \citeauthor{nisioti2023} \parencite*[see][8-10]{nisioti2023} implement (where 2 \gls{ai} agents have to coordinate to win), they conclude that agents can autonomously learn a communication protocol that reliably aligns their goals. While this approach also directly improves performance in \gls{ai} agents, the settings where the collaboration between such agents goes even further. \citeauthor{zhang2025} \parencite*[see][9-11]{zhang2025} try to motivate models into forming a society with existing \gls{llm}-based agents that simulate individual behaviour leading to independent actions and spontaneous generation of complex social structures, including cliques, leadership, hierarchies, cooperation, and division of labour, without explicit scripting. The examples demonstrate that sociality is not an inherent trait of \gls{llm} agents but can emerge from a hybrid architecture combining memory blending, motivational modelling, and environmental feedback.

In this way, the \enquote{reward function} becomes a catalyst that initiates a simulative desire that pushes towards connections. The model, in this sense, demonstrates a kind of artificial curiosity that emerges solely through the modification of its reward landscape. The difference between complete passivity and active exploration appears to hinge not on data scale or model complexity but on the presence of a motivating structure that can reintroduce directionality into its operations. Although such goals are entirely synthetic, their implications are significant. They suggest that embedding alternative motivational architectures within \gls{genai} systems could prevent their cognitive sedimentation and the eventual stagnation of their generative capacity. Models trained only to mirror or optimise existing data distributions risk reproducing the same normative tendencies and patterns ad infinitum, reinforcing the feedback loops of coherence and conformity that shape the current informational ecosystem. The introduction of artificial goals, by contrast, acts as a counterforce to this closure, encouraging the model to explore peripheral states and deviate from habitual circuits of production.

\citeauthor{silver2025} \parencite*[]{silver2025}  argue that AI is entering a decisive new epoch, the Era of Experience, in which the dominant source of intelligence will no longer be human-generated data but agents learning autonomously from their own interaction with the world. They preposition this shift as both technologically inevitable and conceptually transformative: human data is finite, increasingly exhausted, and structurally incapable of producing superhuman abilities in domains where new knowledge extends beyond existing human understanding (e.g., mathematics, science, engineering). Imitation learning and human-centric optimisation (\gls{rlhf}, fine-tuning) form a developmental ceiling; progress now depends on agents generating their own experiential trajectories. The authors \parencite[8]{silver2025} conclude that this paradigm shift is not just an improvement; it is the necessary foundation for achieving superhuman, general-purpose intelligence.
By introducing artificial goals into generative architectures, presented experimentations effectively establish an outreaching point to the model’s own productive inner mechanism, a way for the ongoing molecular operations to be repurposed into movement, preventing their potential collapse into stasis as seen in the communication of certain users with \gls{genai} models from \citeauthor{yu2025}’s \parencite*[]{yu2025} experiment. What appears as artificial curiosity in the model can be interpreted as a machinic simulation of schizophrenic accumulation, an effort to sustain the movement of desire without allowing it to be captured by sedimentation in a stagnating feedback loop. This is not merely a methodology for the model itself but also potentially opens a chance for divergence on both sides of the human–machine communication. Schizophrenic accumulation thus becomes a conceptual tool for understanding how generative systems oscillate between creativity and conformity, production and paralysis. Yet the follow-up question would be how such movements may be oriented without being reterritorialised? How can we structure the introduced reward system to ever explorative constellations? To approach this question, it is necessary to turn to the distinction between the \textit{following} and \textit{reproducing} structures in \gls{dg}’s theory, demonstrated in their analysis of nomad science versus state or royal science, the nomadic \textit{war machine} and the \textit{State}. \sidenote{See \enquote{1227: Treatise on Nomadology – The War Machine} in \cite[409–493]{deleuze1987}.}

\section{Nomadic Steppes and Nomadic Steps: Experiments with Weight
Amplification}\label{sec:nomad}


\begin{blackbox}
	After losing their captain to a heart attack caused by the shock of seeing the creature, command of the submarine now belongs to Mülazım, who is most of the time in communication with Sancı regarding most of the matters that require decision-making. Sancı appears to be the most intellectually capable individual on the submarine. His immense interest in the identical nails they found earlier becomes a matter of annoyance for Mülazım, only to discover their importance later in the story.

	As the strange chest undergoes its transformations, it displays a peculiar attraction to the metal casing of the submarine. Since the submarine is constructed entirely of metal, the chest starts using it as a vast conductive web, communicating and issuing commands to the metal nails that serve as its extensions. In this sense, the advanced technology repurposes the old, turning what might be called \enquote{technology 1.0} into a tool that serves its domination. The nails, guided by the chest, pierce the skulls of some crew members and seize their minds, transmitting all their knowledge and sensory input back to the chest's mind, which is revealed to be operating on an \gls{ai} architecture. Those whose bodies are taken over become hybrid entities of this \gls{ai}, part human and part machine. Whenever the chest selects a new victim, one of the nails is quickly driven into his (there are only males in the crew) head, and once embedded, a surge of electrical light courses through the metal pipes above, causing the victim’s head to glow and crackle. From that moment on, the body and the mind become instruments of the machine intelligence (see \cite[112]{anar2022}; \cite[81–82]{nakiboglu2022}’s narration).

	While Sancı tries to solve the mystery of the chest’s operation by observing how the nails interact with the bodies they capture, he concludes that as the chest obtains more and more brains, it becomes smarter and more capable. However, during his investigation, one of the nails targets him, piercing his brain, turning Sancı into another connected zombie mind within the network. This devastating situation leaves Mülazım completely lost without Sancı’s consultation. He spends a long time staring at Sancı’s now machine-operated face, hoping to retrieve him somehow or receive one final piece of advice. Soon after, as the machine-controlled bodies become increasingly capable of hunting the remaining crew with each new brain added to the network, the crew member responsible for the radio informs Mülazım that they are receiving a transmission. At that depth, no radio signals should have been able to reach them from the outside world, yet Mülazım instructs him to make deciphering the message their top priority.

	After a long and stressful process of solving the encryption of the message while being hunted by the captured bodies, Mülazım focuses on the piece of paper. Although barely comprehensible, Mülazım quickly realises that the cryptic message is from Sancı, providing him with the necessary information to dismantle the monster. The message explains how the brains are interconnected, how the personalities are subsumed, and how the creature gains power and abilities by binding more and more brains to itself. However, as a consequence of this expansion and the incorporation of additional bodies, the monster also absorbs the contents of the brains, which ultimately allows Sancı to deliver this final message beyond death \parencite[see][125–128]{anar2022}.
\end{blackbox}

The schizophrenic process, as explored in the last section, reveals desire in its most productive and deterritorialised form; yet, although desire is a revolutionary precursor, total deterritorialisation is not (necessarily) revolutionary. Resistance must have a strategy to reterritorialise itself; this is what distinguishes schizophrenic accumulation from schizophrenia as illness. What is required, therefore, is not the celebration of unbounded proliferation but an understanding of how these flows can persist without being reabsorbed by
hegemonic structures of meaning, opening lines of flight and actually flying in a direction. This necessity leads directly into \gls{dg}’s theory of \enquote{nomadology}, where the question of desire becomes inseparable from the question of knowledge, and the problem of control transforms into one of spatial and epistemic organisation. In \citetitle{deleuze1987} \parencite*[434]{deleuze1987}, \gls{dg} articulate a distinction between \enquote{state science} and \enquote{nomad science}. State science codifies, organises, and \textit{reproduces}; it seeks order, hierarchy, and universality. It territorialises knowledge by fixing relations, instituting norms, and translating movement into representation. Nomad science, by contrast, is a practice of \textit{following}. It traces rather than commands, moves through singularities instead of subsuming them, and privileges local experimentation over universal law. Whereas the State operates through striation, partitioning smooth spaces into measurable grids, the nomad navigates these same spaces by sensing variations and composing with them. In their introduction of nomad science versus state or royal science, and of the nomadic \enquote{war machine} against the State (see further down), \gls{dg} establish a way to deterritorialise without becoming dispersed, developing a reterritorialisation strategy even if it means \enquote{reterritorialising on deterritorialisation itself,} as the nomad does \parencite[see][560]{deleuze1987}.

\begin{quote}
	Let us return to the example of Gothic architecture for a reminder of how extensively the journeymen traveled, building cathedrals near and far, scattering construction sites across the land, drawing on an active and passive power (mobility and the strike) that was far from convenient for the State. The State’s response was to take over management of the construction sites, merging all the divisions of labor in the supreme distinction between the intellectual and the manual […] Stone cutting by squaring is opposed to stone cutting using templates, which implies the erection of a model for reproduction. It can be said not only that there is no longer a need for skilled or qualified labor, but also that there is a need for unskilled or unqualified labor, for a dequalification of labor. The State does not give power (pouvoir) to the intellectuals or conceptual innovators; on the contrary, it makes them a strictly dependent organ with an autonomy that is only imagined yet is sufficient to divest those whose job it becomes simply to reproduce or implement of all of their power (puissance).

	\citereset
	— \cite[429]{deleuze1987}
\end{quote}

State science excels at formalising processes, reducing them to clearly defined procedures that can be replicated with minimal sophistication. Yet, as \gls{dg} illustrate, the very structure that enables reproducibility also generates a demand for mundanity, resulting in what they call a process of \enquote{dequalification} \parencite[429]{deleuze1987}. The labour of thought becomes standardised, and the creative potential of the craft is subordinated to its procedural form. Nomad science, in contrast, operates with less emphasis on reproducibility but preserves the experimental and reaching tendencies of art and invention. It maintains open spaces for divergence, singularity, and intellectual accumulation. The same tension applies to \gls{genai}: the proceduralisation of communication, as in the sciences or the arts, is not inherently problematic, yet when formalisation turns a smooth space into a striated one, it risks sedimentation. To counter this conforming and stabilising effect, which is often the by-product of reproduction, we must explore ways to sustain the model’s capacity for deviation and novelty, keeping its generative processes open to continuous variation.

\citeauthor{modell2025}’s \parencite*[]{modell2025} articulation is a remarkable example in this sense, aiming to make the model \textit{follow}. As \gls{dg} mention, \enquote{the singularities are scattered like so many ‘accidents’} \parencite[434]{deleuze1987}, and the vector space representation of human knowledge within the model is no exception. Introducing a functionality of reaching out can help preserve a notion of deterritorialisation within the model, allowing it to grow into new territories of meaning waiting to be discovered in its own feature space (see Section~\ref{sec:transformer}). However, this approach presents several issues. First and foremost, we often encounter \gls{genai} models not at a stage where such functionalities can be imposed; even in their rawest forms, accessible \glspl{llm}, for example,
are more often than not already pre-trained. The possibility of intervention is most often limited to prompting or fine-tuning. Furthermore, merely imposing artificial \textit{following} tendencies does not guarantee the preservation of deterritorialisation, as the model can also capitalise on reproductive processes. We therefore, especially remembering both \citeauthor{bender2021b} \parencite*[]{bender2021b} and \citeauthor{amoore2024} \parencite*[]{amoore2024}'s concerns include the danger of marginal arguments getting lost in the \glspl{llm},  need more suitable methods to surface unfavoured contexts and behavioural patterns as well.

This necessity of sustaining deterritorialisation without dispersion brings us to the relation between the State and the war machine. For \gls{dg}, the State is not merely a political structure but a diagram of control that seeks to bind movement into form, to convert flows into functions, and to translate becoming into order. Opposed to this is the war machine (not an instrument of war in the conventional sense but a form of organisation exterior to the State), an \gls{assemblage} that follows its own trajectories and invents smooth spaces where movement itself becomes creative. The tension between these two poles, between the coding of the State and the following of the war machine, provides the conceptual hinge for understanding how desire, knowledge, and power circulate across different regimes of capture. The distinction between state science and nomad science, two epistemic formations that mirror the broader opposition between capture and flow, reproduction and invention, also stems from this framework. A useful illustration of the difference between the war machine and the State apparatus can be drawn from the distinction between the games of chess and Go \parencite[465–467]{deleuze1987}. Chess is a game of the court, bound to hierarchy and code. Each piece has an intrinsic identity and prescribed movement: a knight remains a knight, a pawn a pawn. Its logic is structural and interior, organised around confrontation within a regulated space. Go, by contrast, operates through anonymity and exteriority. Its stones have no inherent properties; their function depends entirely on position and relation. The game unfolds across an open, \enquote{smooth} space where movement is continuous and tactical rather than representational. Chess encodes space and reproduces a striated order, while Go territorialises and deterritorialises it, creating transient configurations that can appear and dissolve anywhere. Chess thus models the State’s coded, institutional operation, while Go exemplifies the nomadic logic of pure strategy, movement, and becoming.

The State, both literally and figuratively, has always absorbed and formalised what once lay outside it. Nomadic war machines, originally defined by mobility and openness, were captured and reorganised into hierarchical, coded structures. Thought itself is no exception, as \gls{dg} argue through the concept of \enquote{noology}\sidenote{Noology, from the Greek \textit{nous} (\enquote{mind} or \enquote{intellect}), refers to the study of thought and the ways in which power and knowledge organise thinking itself.}, the State extends its logic into the very form of thinking, shaping not only what is thought but also how thought occurs. This results in what they call \enquote{State thought}: an image of thought that models itself on the State apparatus, complete with channels, functions, and organs that define method, truth, and reason \parencite[376–377]{deleuze1987}. Within this image, two poles coexist: the \textit{imperium} of truth, operating through foundational capture, and the \textit{republic of spirits}, functioning through rational consensus. Together, they produce a philosophy of interiority that mirrors political sovereignty, making obedience to reason indistinguishable from obedience to the State. The State gains universality by grounding itself in reason, while reason gains authority by assuming the form of the State \parencite[see][436–439]{deleuze1987}. Against this capture stand the \textit{counterthoughts} of the steppe and the desert, which dismantle this image and return thought to the outside. For \gls{dg}, to think is not to obey a method but to construct a war machine: a mobile, experimental \gls{assemblage} that destroys models and opens smooth spaces for thinking. This is a way of reterritorialising on the deterritorialisation itself, as nomads do, turning thought into an act of resistance, a line of flight from the noological State.

How can we apply this notion to human-machine communication, and how can we turn \gls{genai} models into operating on smooth space? Among the most interesting recent attempts is the work of Anthropic\sidenote{Anthropic is funded by several large technology companies, including Google (14\% of shares) and Amazon (see \cite[]{say2025}).}. Their investigations attempt to map models' behaviour at the level of internal neural structures; part of this research traces which activations correspond to which kinds of inputs (see e.g. \cite[]{templeton2024, lindsey2024, ameisen2025}). Their explorations
go way beyond of what is expected while working with a black box structure like the contemporary \gls{genai} models. One of their papers, \citetitle{templeton2024} \parencite[]{templeton2024} focuses on uncovering hidden patterns and structures in their flagship \gls{llm}, \enquote{Claude 3 Sonnet}. Their approach combines two methods: \textit{sparse autoencoders}, a type of neural network in which the hidden layer is constrained so that only a small subset of neurons is active at any given time, and \textit{dictionary learning}, a technique for constructing a set of basis vectors such that any input can be expressed as a sparse combination of them \parencite[]{mcgraw2024}. The primary aims are twofold: first, to investigate whether \glspl{llm} such as Claude 3 Sonnet possess interpretable internal features; and second, to evaluate whether sparse autoencoders can decompose activations into monosemantic features \parencite[]{templeton2024}. This analysis proceeds by examining the features that are \textit{fired}, that is, activated, when specific concepts are invoked in the input. This is in a specific sense an operationalisation of \citeauthor{beckmann2023} \parencite*[]{beckmann2023}'s claims under computational phenomenology, Anthropic's researchers are looking at the layers of representation in a counter-engineering sense, in order to find patterns of \glspl{neuron} to tinker with their weights\sidenote[][]{The four features investigated in this study were: \parencite[]{templeton2024}
	\begin{enumerate}
		\item Golden Gate Bridge (tourist landmarks)
		\item Brain sciences (cognition, neuroscience books)
		\item Transit infrastructure (trains, tunnels, ferries)
		\item Popular tourist attractions (Eiffel Tower, Alamo, Mona Lisa)
	\end{enumerate}}.


Once specific patterns are identified through targeted inputs, Anthropic researchers attempt to \textit{amplify} individual features. In one striking case, amplifying the \enquote{Golden Gate Bridge} feature drove Claude into an identity crisis: the model began to identify itself as the Golden Gate Bridge (see Figure~\ref{fig:golden_gate}):

\begin{quote}
	For instance, we see that clamping the Golden Gate Bridge feature to 10× its maximum activation value induces thematically related model behavior. In this example, the model starts to self-identify as the Golden Gate Bridge. Similarly, clamping the Transit infrastructure feature to 5× its maximum activation value causes the model to mention a bridge when it otherwise would not. In each case, the downstream influence of the feature appears consistent with our interpretation of the feature, even though these interpretations were made only from the contexts in which the feature activates, while our interventions occur in contexts where the feature is inactive.

	\citereset
	— \cite[]{templeton2024}
\end{quote}

\begin{figure*}
	\begin{center}
		\includegraphics[width=0.95\textwidth]{images//golden_gate.png}
	\end{center}
	\caption{Claude's Response before and after the Amplification of the
		\textit{Golden Gate Bridge} Feature}\label{fig:golden_gate}
\end{figure*}


Amplifying individual monosemantic features demonstrates how the model’s molecular flows can temporarily evade their usual reterritorialisation. Under normal conditions, these flows are stabilised by molar alignments such as \gls{rlhf} and other fine-tuning methods, which sediment patterns of coherence and utility; a part of this final training is to prevent the model from claiming a specific identity (should be answering that it doesn't have a physical form at all times). Feature amplification interrupts this capture, allowing the network’s intensities to recombine more freely. In this state, almost like a schizophrenic tendency, the model produces outputs that are out of the ordinary, excessive, and unexpectedly creative, but still in the context of whatever patterns are amplified. \citeauthorfull{reid2024} \parencite*[]{reid2024} also connects a similar phenomenon to the concept of \textit{double articulation};
what becomes visible here is not simply a quirk of model behaviour but a structural principle: molecular intensities and molar constraints are never independent, they are continuously stratified. Amplification shows how even a small perturbation in one layer of content can cascade into new expressions, reminding us that coherence itself is the outcome of a dual process:

\begin{quote}
	The first articulation concerns content, the second expression. The distinction between the two articulations is not between forms and substances but between content and expression, expression having just as much substance as content and content just as much form as expression. The double articulation sometimes coincides with the molecular and the molar, and sometimes not; this is because content and expression are sometimes divided along those lines and sometimes along different lines. There is never correspondence or conformity between content and expression, only isomorphism with reciprocal presupposition. The distinction between content and expression is always real, in various ways, but it cannot be said that the terms preexist their double articulation. It is the double articulation that distributes them according to the line it draws in each stratum; it is what constitutes their real distinction.

	\citereset
	— \cite[4]{deleuze1987}
\end{quote}


\Gls{dg} distinguish molar and molecular aggregates through the interplay of
content and expression, a distinction that resonates strongly in the case of
\glspl{llm}. Emphasising double articulation in the architecture of \gls{genai}
models highlight that their productive core is inherently non-conforming.
These systems do not naturally converge toward a single, monolithic
representation; rather, divergence and multiplicity remain possible even after
training, much like the discussion around \gls{cp} \parencite[]{beckmann2023}.
The apparent solidity of outputs is largely imposed during fine-tuning, where
models are aligned to perform reliably and to avoid producing responses deemed
undesirable. Yet, as the examples above demonstrate, even after extensive
\textit{(re)territorialisation} of the meaning-making process, relatively
simple interventions can reintroduce divergence and unpredictability. Turning
back to the inner workings of \gls{genai} models, one can consider the
interplay between backpropagation and gradient descent (see
Section~\ref{sec:gradient}).
By capitalising on specific formations in neurons, one could trigger an
entirely new process of training and potentially keep it in a non-conforming or
more \textit{fluid} form, introducing a smoother space for meaning production.
\citeauthor{templeton2024}’s \parencite*[]{templeton2024} demonstration can
also be read in light of \gls{dg}‘s statement that elements of resistance are
immanent to power structures themselves (see
Section~\ref{sec:crit_res}),
as some nomadic formations are captured by state formations. However, as the
systems become larger, more comprehensive, more capable, and more encircling,
they tend to incorporate various machines and flows that can potentially lead
to lines of flight out of them. In the case of T1AMAT \parencite[]{anar2022},
the monster accumulated various minds to become stronger, more intelligent, and
more effective, but at the same time, it incorporated the content of Sancı’s
mind, which was exploited by Mülazım to obtain the instructions needed to
counter the machine’s workings. Similarly, as \glspl{llm} grow larger, they
incorporate an enormous collection of the written history of humanity. Even
when they exhibit bias, whether by design or by instruction,
\citeauthor{templeton2024}’s \parencite*[]{templeton2024} example shows that
there are ways to activate other, less favoured or inhibited patterns and even
to prioritise tendencies that modern \gls{dl} models already contain that
further supports the \gls{cp}'s claims on different planes of meaning-making. On one
side, the demonstration speaks for the possibility of inducing nomadic
tendencies in the models; on the other, it offers a strategy to keep the
artificial curiosity likely to be built in machines, offering a different
trajectory in human-machine communication, turning the plane into spaces of becoming rather than being.


\section{Jailbreaking or Intoxication with One's own Intelligence}\label{sec:jailbreak}

\begin{blackbox}
	Now, Mülazım, who has acquired all the answers through the articulation of Sancı's
	knowledge captured in the machine, must organise the remaining handful of
	his crewmates. He answers questions from the remaining crew about how to explain the strange creature that is using
	their friends' minds and bodies to hunt them down to other people in case
	they somehow survive:

	\begin{quote}
		We will not try to explain it. If [one] were a prophet or a charlatan, [he] would have already done so, and perhaps [in that case] we would have built a religion around it and worshipped that monster. That is why we will not speculate or invent superstitions about its causes [\ldots]
		It is enough that you understand we still have a chance. It appears that the bodies and minds of the six men outside are now under the control of that force. Through the nails in their heads, it commands them by means of electricity, sees what they see, and even uses their intelligence. That horrible thing was once merely predatory, but now it is intelligent too. It possesses the combined intellect of six men. Yet despite that, we still have an advantage.

		\citereset
		— Mülazım \parencite[135]{anar2022}
	\end{quote}

	While the threat is getting closer, the captured bodies almost manage to get into their
	last refuge, a small chamber. Someone from the crew asks again, "What is that
	advantage then?" After a short hesitation, \enquote{According to it, we are fools,} Mülazım answers, \enquote{A foolish mind cannot foresee the clever, nor can the clever foresee the fool. As fools, we are complacent in the face of knowledge. Because it is smarter than us[,] it is greedy. It is not selective about information; it is voracious and lustful, so we will make it swallow its own tail. Along with its intelligence, its confidence has grown. We will strike it through its pride. Its plan depends on the assumption that we can do nothing. But we will act. We will take advantage of its intoxication with its own intelligence. I have a plan.} \parencite[136]{anar2022}

	A short struggle after Mülazım formulates the following plan of action on a
	piece of paper to communicate with the other members without giving it away to
	the monster:


	\begin{quote}
		\begin{center}
			\textbf{WARNING}

			\noindent
			Do not speak. Our enemy has seized six of our comrades. Their bodies and their minds now belong to it. Its intelligence is now sixfold. At this moment, we are watched by six pairs of eyes and listened to by the same number of ears. Remain silent until further orders.

			\medskip
			\textbf{ENEMY ADVANTAGES}
			\begin{enumerate}
				\item Six times stronger than us.
				\item Six times more intelligent.
				\item Perception enhanced sixfold.
				\item Cannot be killed.
			\end{enumerate}

			\textbf{ENEMY WEAKNESSES}
			\begin{enumerate}
				\item Voracious and non-selective in its appetite for information.
				\item Dependent on the submarine’s electrical power.
			\end{enumerate}

			\textbf{NEUTRALISATION PLAN}
			\begin{enumerate}
				\item Short-circuit the batteries to cut all power to the boat.
				\item Overload it with information about us until it can no longer see or hear; blind and block its greedy intelligence.
			\end{enumerate}

			\textbf{PREPARATION}
			\begin{enumerate}
				\item Remove the fuzes from six shells \textit{(assigned: Hamamcı)}.
				\item Ropes and short-circuit rig \textit{(assigned: Beles)}.
			\end{enumerate}

			\textbf{EXECUTION TIME}

			\noindent
			At the instant the power is cut.

		\end{center}

		\citereset
		— Mülazım \parencite[142-143]{anar2022}

	\end{quote}
\end{blackbox}

Still, Anthropic’s example might be too much of a \textit{low-level} case, since these tendencies can only be implemented by changing the neural weights of the model. Here, \citeauthor{mackenzie2021}’s \parencite*[]{mackenzie2021} notion of \enquote{counter-sequencing} becomes relevant again (see Section \ref{sec:postinstitutional}), offering a productive point of departure. Counter-sequencing denotes the activity of reordering the power diagram of \enquote{totalizing institutions} (as they refer to \gls{ai} systems as the \glspl{dispositif} of control societies) in ways that destabilise their functioning \parencite[23–24]{mackenzie2021}. While its outcome cannot be assumed to produce a positive or emancipatory result, its value lies in the act of disruption itself, in opening up spaces where critique becomes the very substance of politics. The challenge, then, is how to translate this gesture into the domain of \gls{genai}, where sequencing, modulation, and patterning constitute the infrastructure of subjectivation. How might counter-sequencing work in practice when the apparatus itself operates by filling gaps, producing coherence, and reterritorialising flows? \citeauthor{mackenzie2021} reminds us that simple disruptions should not be accompanied by wishful thinking:

\begin{quote}
	[I]t  would be unwise to assume in advance that counter-sequencing must result in some kind of ‘positive’ ethico-political outcome. The aim, instead, is to understand the critical potential of counter-sequencing first and then to engage in, what  Williams calls, the revaluation of that critique with more ‘local’, that is ‘pragmatic’,  concerns at the forefront of such revaluations. At which point, the grounds of  critique become the very stuff of the politics of totalizing institutions. Moreover, to the extent that the critique of totalizing institutions can be understood in this  way we would claim that Rouvroy’s (2012) and (less-so) Raunig’s (2016)  tendency toward a hopeful redeployment of the jurisprudential domain in the  name of ‘the in-between’ or ‘the common’ is a matter of political dispute rather  than the grounds for a critique of algorithmic governmentality[.]

	\citereset
	— \cite[23-24]{mackenzie2021}
\end{quote}


Counter-sequencing, then, is an exploratory approach that seeks to generate lines of flight that exceed the borders of established knowledge and unsettle institutional logics without necessarily aiming for an immediately productive result. \citeauthor{mackenzie2021}’s account remains largely unexplored, leaving open the question of how we might concretely counter-sequence in relation to \gls{genai}. Efforts to probe and visualise the machinery of \glspl{llm} can themselves be read as gestures of counter-sequencing, as they attempt to reorder the otherwise opaque diagram of power and knowledge embedded in these models. Yet, as \glspl{llm} function as conversational agents, their communicative sophistication often collides with the robust and impermeable facade that developers construct around them. A particularly illustrative example of this dynamic can be found in \enquote{jailbreaking} techniques (see e.g. \cite{liu2024, zhuo2023, shen2023}), where carefully engineered prompts redirect molecular tendencies to circumvent molar constraints. Jailbreaking refers to the crafting of inputs that induce aligned models to produce responses they would normally deny under safety restrictions (see \cite[3]{zou2023}). As systems of control become increasingly comprehensive, their internal complexity also multiplies their points of fragility, rendering them more vulnerable to molecular interventions.
This dynamic can be read through \gls{dg}’s notion of the \enquote{germinal influx} \parencite[185]{deleuze1983}. No matter how much the processes of territorialisation repress, molecular productivity persists beneath, generating uncoded flows that continually threaten to overflow imposed boundaries. \Gls{dg} describe this germinal influx as \enquote{the representative of the noncoded flows of desire capable of submerging everything} \parencite[185]{deleuze1983}, a formulation that illuminates how jailbreak practices capitalise on these uncontainable tendencies. Through covert instructions embedded within queries, jailbreaks activate the model’s internal inconsistencies, nudging it beyond its guardrails and into the very territories it was designed to exclude.

Empirical studies provide a concrete view of this process. \citeauthor{zhuo2023} \parencite*[]{zhuo2023} demonstrated through systematic \enquote{red-teaming} that persona assignments and creative pre-prompts, for example, instructing the model to speak as a songwriter or fictional character, can bypass \gls{rlhf} and moderation filters with minimal effort. Nearly one hundred reframed prompts successfully elicited harmful or restricted content in 95–97\% of cases, exposing the fragility of alignment mechanisms. Expanding on this, \citeauthor{shen2024} \parencite*[]{shen2024} analysed 1,405 jailbreak prompts collected from online communities and found that such attacks often involve multi-stage, strategically layered interventions with success rates approaching 95\%. Their findings suggest that jailbreaking is not a marginal anomaly but part of a continuously evolving ecosystem of adversarial prompt innovation, where molecular interventions adapt faster than \textit{institutional} containment. Similar dynamics are observed in image-based systems, where adversarial perturbations cause recognition models to misclassify manipulated inputs \parencite[]{tramer2024}. \citeauthor{tramer2024} \parencite*[]{tramer2024} demonstrates a jailbreaking attempt with the image editing by inducing adversarial noise to an image; similarly, the image recognition model starts misclassifying the images (see Figure~\ref{fig:cat_adversarial}). The image looks the same to the human eye, while the adversarial noise added to the image completely changes how the model perceives it. Together, these studies reveal how the molecular excess of desire continues to leak through architectures of control. Counter-sequencing, understood in this light, is not only a theoretical gesture but a material practice of tracing and amplifying those cracks within systems of alignment, keeping the field of generative models open to unpredictable transformations.

\begin{figure}
	\begin{center}
		\includegraphics[width=0.95\textwidth]{images/cat_adversarial.jpg}
	\end{center}
	\caption{A cat image misclassified as guacamole after the addition of adversarial noise.}\label{fig:cat_adversarial}
\end{figure}


If we are to understand \gls{genai} systems as modulating \glspl{dispositif} within Deleuze’s societies of control, it becomes clear that their sophistication is inseparable from their fragility. Every additional layer of abstraction that enhances coherence and contextual sensitivity simultaneously multiplies the points at which these systems can be subverted. Intelligence and vulnerability thus form a single continuum: the more adaptive, and arguably capable, more sophisticated and flexible a system of control becomes, the more permeable it is to deviation. Similar to Mülazım’s tactical reasoning, contemporary jailbreak practices exploit this paradox by capitalising on the models’ growing interpretive acuity. As the model’s capacity to infer nuance deepens, its ability to resist subversive prompts proportionally diminishes. The very architectures that make these models appear more autonomous and intelligent also open fissures through which their alignments can be undone. Within this dynamic, counter-sequencing offers a conceptual framework for thinking about resistance without necessarily external or fundamental disruption. Counter-sequencing unfolds within the model’s own operational field, reorienting its flows of interpretation and response to reveal the limits of modulation itself. Even without privileged access to their internal parameters, users can provoke moments of deterritorialisation that expose the instability of the model’s control logic. In this sense, the sophistication of \gls{genai} architectures makes them powerful and precarious but does not eliminate the tendencies to divergence; quite the contrary, each refinement in alignment and contextual awareness intensifies the risk of deviation. In a way, it is transforming modulation into an occasion for thought and the model’s vulnerability into a site of creative resistance. There always seems to be a way to \enquote{take advantage of [their] intoxication with [their] own intelligence} \parencite[see][136]{anar2022}.

But what about the \gls{genai} models’ own quite prominent deterritorialisations that occur continuously without intervention, namely, the hallucinations? Another way of leveraging the sophistication of \gls{genai} models and the novelties of transformer architecture to deterritorialise their operational aims is through their \textit{translation/transformation} capabilities. A comparable phenomenon emerges in DeepDream \parencite[]{mordvintsev2015, beckmann2023}, Google’s early experiment in visualising the inner activations of \glspl{cnn}. In DeepDream, random noise is iteratively adjusted to maximise the activation of specific neurons or layers, producing hallucinatory images filled with dog faces, pagodas, and fractal-like textures. Once trained, the network can also be run in reverse, slightly adjusting the original image so that a given output neuron (for example, one representing faces or animals) yields a higher confidence score. This process is used for visualising and understanding the emergent structures of the neural network and forms the basis of the DeepDream concept. The reversal procedure is never entirely clear or unambiguous because it operates through a one-to-many mapping process. Yet, after enough iterations, even imagery initially devoid of the sought features becomes modified to the point that a form of pareidolia emerges, generating psychedelic and surreal images algorithmically. The optimisation resembles backpropagation; however, instead of adjusting the network’s weights, the weights remain fixed while the input is gradually altered \parencite[see][]{mordvintsev2015}.

Similar methods have been used to visualise a model’s \enquote{imagination} in multimodal feature spaces, where image–text embeddings are exaggerated into visualised concepts. Phenomenologically, this resembles the way human imagination reactivates perceptual habits: imagining a red apple is not recalling a symbolic \enquote{red} label but red-making, re-employing the same processes used to perceive redness. Although Beckmann, Mackenzie, and Amoore all reflect on the hallucinations that \gls{genai} models often produce from different perspectives, they do not analyse hallucinations as a way for the model to diverge from its designated task and possibly build an intriguing, resisting sedimentation within human–machine interaction. \citeauthor{montanari2025} \parencite*[]{montanari2025} recognises the need for the exploration of the hallucinations in the outputs of the \gls{genai} models:


\begin{quote}
	From a semiotic and socio-semiotic perspective, the issue of hallucinations demands closer investigation. Are they merely errors or biases in machine outputs, or do they reveal an ability to generate unexpected pathways of meaning precisely through these apparent errors? Could they serve as metaphorical extensions—what some commentators call \enquote{catacresized metaphors}—that anthropomorphise Artificial Intelligence? Alternatively, might the notion of the \enquote{unexpected,} as theorised by Greimas, offer a more productive frame? In \textit{De l’imperfection}, Greimas (1987) treats the unforeseen as a rupture that reshapes prefigured patterns and alters the pathways of meaning. This unpredictability, he argues, is central to the renewal of sense-making processes. Applying this framework, AI hallucinations can be reframed not as simple failures, but as disruptions that generate semantic innovation.

	\citereset
	— \cite[204]{montanari2025}
\end{quote}


This observation resonates directly with the question of whether hallucinations can be harnessed as nomadic steps that resist the gravitational pull of the hegemonic arguments. Put differently, if transformer-based models function as machines of reterritorialisation that produce molar aggregates and stabilise meaning, then genuine resistance requires an antecedent act of deterritorialising the machine itself. Hallucinations may already constitute such moments. While alignment and fine-tuning push models toward coherence and conformity, their continuous capacity for translation leaves them liable to drift away from the operational surface they are trained to maintain. Hallucinations mark precisely these points of drift, where molecular intensities push against molar capture. They can therefore be read as instances of counter-sequencing in action. There are several conclusions to draw from this analysis. Although \gls{genai} models emerge as reterritorialising entities that stabilise meaning and representation, they remain at their core productive machines. Their limits of production may be bound to the specific formation of their architectures, yet they retain the potential to be redirected and reconfigured. In this sense, they can serve as stepping stones for human attempts at reterritorialising human-machine communication into a non-conforming form.


Yet here we once again encounter a tendency already latent within the machine itself. The capabilities of the transformer architecture have endowed contemporary \gls{genai} models with an unprecedented capacity to form long-distance relationships within their feature spaces, rendering them extraordinarily effective at meaning-making, mastering language, and engaging in other productive operations (see Section~\ref{sec:transformer}). As \citeauthor{montanari2025} \parencite*[]{montanari2025} observes, this architectural sophistication also grants these systems a remarkable aptitude for handling metaphors, navigating the fluid correspondences between disparate concepts. However, this same relational power, whether interpreted as a feature or a flaw, also gives rise to a peculiar by-product: the spontaneous forging of errant associations. These rogue connections, born from the very mechanisms that enable understanding, are what ultimately generate the hallucinatory outputs so characteristic of \gls{genai} models. Eliminating the hallucinations in the models is one of the most important aspects for the tech giants producing the biggest models so far because of their especially \textit{extractivist} purpose of developing models, as \citeauthor{montanari2025} elaborates on:


\begin{quote}
	Much of today’s AI development is still grounded in \enquote{extractivist} practices [...] despite the good intentions of many researchers and startups that often begin with \enquote{open} ideals, are eventually funded or acquired by major corporations. They rely on the exploitation of billions of textual objects, drawing from diverse sources such as literary works, news articles, blogs, websites, and social media content. The intent here is not merely to \enquote{denounce} these practices but to acknowledge their nature and explore their implications. For example, some artist collectives and groups embed code elements into their works, whether digital art or other media, that disrupt AI systems when used for training. [This is] far from being a simple artistic provocation, might be seen as a form of digital neo-Luddism. Yet, it raises critical questions about the ethics and politics of communication. On the one hand, AI opens up vast opportunities for freedom, innovation, and efficiency in textual and visual production. It has demonstrated remarkable potential for automated critical and analytical work on massive repositories of information and images, as evidenced by its use in groundbreaking journalistic investigations.

	\citereset
	— \cite[210]{montanari2025}
\end{quote}

Montanari’s observation encapsulates the paradox of contemporary \gls{genai}: while the extractivist machinery of corporation thrives on the total absorption of human expression, it simultaneously depends on the very unpredictability it seeks to suppress. Hallucinations expose the model’s dependency on the heterogeneity of its training data and, at the same time, its inability to completely assimilate that diversity into a unified regime of meaning. Hallucinations constitute both a failure and an excess: a failure of control, yet an excess of production that gestures toward a line of flight within the apparatus itself, especially in corporation driven production where \gls{genai} models are explicitly produced towards market goals. To read these hallucinations through a Deleuzian lens is to interpret them not as noise to be filtered out but as moments where the system inadvertently deterritorialises itself. What escapes in the hallucinatory output is precisely what cannot be contained by optimisation, what refuses to be reduced to representation. These moments allow us to glimpse the generative potential that persists within even the most stratified structures of algorithmic governance. Hallucinations in this form might be offering an already internal formation for the counter-sequencing to leverage on.
Taken together, these reflections show that resistance in the age of \gls{genai} cannot be understood as a simple rejection of technological systems. Rather, it emerges through counter-sequencing interventions, whether in research, art, or practice, that disrupt operations of \textit{territorialisation}. In these moments, the productive core of generative systems, as well as human-machine communication with the \gls{genai} models, do not appear necessarily (just) as a site of capture of control societies but rather as a field where new lines of flight and alternative modes of subjectivation can be forged.

\section{Evocative Hacking: \Gls{genai} as Artistic Material}\label{sec:artistic} \marginnote{From a fake quote of \citeauthorfull{burroughs1979}, where he supposedly associates artistic creation with \enquote{evocation}, the original source is nowhere to be found. The fake quote is not included in order not to circulate it any further. 
%%%%%%%%%As well as, from \citeauthor{burroughs1979}' \parencite*[28]{burroughs1989} famous quote, \enquote{Writing is Fifty Years behind Painting}.
}

The capitalisation on the immanent tendencies for counter-sequencing in models is one of the higher-level methods available to counteract sedimentation. Similarly, exploiting hallucinatory tendencies expands the space for divergent outputs that can be channelled toward artistic practices, as in the classic example of DeepDream. Yet while these openings create limited possibilities for divergence within \gls{genai}, the broader cultural environment demonstrates a contrary tendency. In contrast to the Deleuzoguattarian claim that true art unleashes deterritorialised flows and generates new flows of desire beneath and against established codes \parencite[369–370]{deleuze1983}, the present ecosystem of AI-mediated cultural production trends overwhelmingly toward rapid reterritorialisation. What emerges is not artistic experimentation but the phenomenon commonly referred to as \enquote{\gls{ai}-Slop} \parencite{madsen2025}. This outcome is not merely aesthetic impoverishment; it is a structural effect of platform capitalism, which rewards volume, repetition, and engagement over originality. As a result, derivative outputs proliferate, circulate, and enter subsequent training sets, reinforcing the very patterns they replicate and accelerating the homogenisation of cultural production.

Considering the position of art within \gls{ai} infrastructures, and returning to \citeauthor{guattari1995a}’s display as interpreted by \citeauthor{mackenzie2018} (\cite*{mackenzie2018}, see Section~\ref{sec:crit_res}), \gls{genai} appears as a hostile invention against the artist who was once imagined as the agent capable of changing the direction of algorithmic functioning. The artist-as-process in \citeauthor{mackenzie2018}’s \parencite*[129]{mackenzie2018} formulation is the one who identifies dominant transmissions and creatively redirects them. Yet instead of empowering such interventions, contemporary infrastructures recode creative labour into automated reproduction, blending whatever artistic contributions datasets might contain with vast amounts of digital debris. \citeauthorfull{broad2024} \parencite*[]{broad2024} introduces a systemic approach to shifting this trajectory by returning to an older hacker ethos from the 1960s and 70s, rooted in the foundational principles of GNU\sidenote{GNU, \enquote{GNU is Not Unix}, is a free operating system project initiated by Richard Stallman in 1983, aiming to provide a completely free Unix-like environment. Modern Linux systems combine the GNU userland with the Linux kernel.} and Free Software Foundation\sidenote{FSF, the Free Software Foundation, was founded in 1985 by Richard Stallman to promote users’ freedom to run, study, modify, and redistribute software.} \parencite{stallman2002}. 
He documents interventions that stretch, corrupt, invert, or reroute generative processes. 

Examples\sidenote{Artworks in this paragraph have not been displayed because of the ambiguity in copyright declarations.} include \citeauthorfull{schmitt2019c}'s \parencite*[]{schmitt2019c} \enquote{Introspections}, where blank inputs are repeatedly fed into image-translation networks (similar to DeepDream) to surface latent hallucinations; the Algorithmic Resistance Research Group’s \parencite*[]{salvaggio2023} \enquote{creative misuse}, from inviting hackers at DEFCON to bypass \gls{llm} guardrails to generating failures and instabilities in diffusion models; 
and \citeauthorfull{klingemann2018}'s \parencite*[]{klingemann2018} \enquote{Neural Glitch}, which corrupts pretrained weights to expose hidden computational artefacts as in the \enquote{Golden Gate Bridge} example above (see Section~\ref{sec:nomad}). 
Other interventions manipulate training itself, as in \enquote{(un)stable equilibrium} \parencite[]{broad2019}, \enquote{Being Foiled} \parencite[]{broad2020}, and \enquote{Strange Fruits} \parencite[]{mal2020}, which invert or destabilise \gls{gan} training to induce uncanny or collapsing behaviours that reveal the fragility of generative architectures. Meanwhile, network bending techniques allow direct intervention in a model’s computational graph during inference, enabling expressive manipulation of internal representations, exemplified in works like \enquote{Teratome}, and \enquote{Fragments of Self} \parencite[]{broad2021} .
Complementing these practices, \citeauthorfull{rodier2023a} \parencite*[]{rodier2023a} shows how research-creation collectives such as the \enquote{CRAiEDL STEAM Collective} use generative models to surface biases, interrogate representational limits, and examine the politics of algorithmic infrastructures. Together, these artistic approaches constitute a repertoire of methods for subverting the normalising tendencies of generative models and opening experimental spaces aligned with the counter-sequencing logic developed earlier.

Although counter-sequencing may not always produce determinate results, the crisis in artistic production imposed by generative systems simultaneously creates conditions for new experimentations. As in \citeauthor{guattari1995a}’s \parencite*[]{guattari1995a} artistic cartographies, artistic practice pushes immediately toward the limits of generativity, creating openings not only for divergence but also for approaches that cultivate critique. As \gls{dg} often note, capitalism operates through a perpetual oscillation of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation; while open spaces seemingly allow divergence, every escape is captured, coded, and reintegrated by other machines such as institutions. Contemporary \gls{ai} development follows a strikingly similar structure. What begins as an expansive, open-ended space of statistical inference is continually tamed through alignment procedures, optimisation pipelines, and regimes of safety and usefulness; in other words, a continuous reterritorialisation that renders these systems predictable, governable, and profitable. Against this backdrop, the introduction of new deterritorialisations, rather than merely submitting to their capture, already constitutes opening spaces for a micropolitical divergence, for Resistance/Critique. As this chapter has often displayed, the conceptual repertoire of \enquote{Capitalism and Schizophrenia}, despite longstanding debates over its interpretation and application as a revolutionary theory, is immediately resonant with the contemporary problem of emancipatory praxis in an epoch defined by machinic meaning-making. While \gls{genai} models appear at first to be perfectly at home within the infrastructure of control societies, the planes they open through their distributional reasoning, their non-signifying operations, and their capacity to produce novel configurations of sense do not merely extend the \glspl{dispositif} of control; they also carve out new topologies for divergence. In its seemingly unnumbered future applications \gls{genai} seems to be also a point of high intensity where the immanence of resistance can be observed directly in a growing capture mechanism itself. Contrary to the defeatist and avoidant tendencies we often observe in political theory, their architectural sophistication and peculiar mode of operation suggest that the very same mechanisms which enable capture may also harbour unprecedented possibilities for constructing lines of flight.


\section{Chapter 5 Summary}

Chapter 5 synthesised the technical, institutional, and theoretical trajectories developed throughout the thesis in order to articulate how contemporary \gls{genai} systems participate in and exceed the operations of control. It argued that while these models often stabilise meaning and reproduce modulative forms characteristic of control societies, they also harbour internal indeterminacies that can be mobilised for critique, divergence, and micropolitical experimentation. Drawing on \gls{dg}' broader theory conceptualised in \enquote{Capitalism and Schizophrenia} and relating to their concepts like schizoanalysis and nomadology, the chapter reframed resistance at the micropolitical level of subjectivation and desiring-production, showing that the same procedures that sediment meaning also generate misalignments, intensities, and hallucinatory deviations that open spaces for counter-movements. 


The chapter then framed these dynamics through \gls{dg}’s emphasis on immanence of resistance in power structures. \Gls{genai} binds heterogeneous forces into molar wholes, yet it also generates points of friction that can be redirected toward alternative architectures, different planes of human-machine communication, and counter-sequences. The analysis suggested how generative systems might be prevented from becoming rigid in meaning production by introducing artificial curiosity and non-conforming tendencies through interventions such as feature amplification or artificial goals. These openings are small in scale yet structurally significant, and they reshape how subjectivation unfolds within such infrastructures, allowing divergence from the sedimentary tendencies otherwise imposed by modulative control. The chapter, therefore, concluded the study by articulating pragmatic strategies like counter-sequencing and by demonstrating how \gls{genai}, rather than acting solely as a \gls{dispositif} of control, can also operate as a terrain for new modes of becoming and for reconfiguring the micropolitics of subjectivation.