Kristeva on Exile, Artificial Intelligence, and the One-dimensional Universe

Abstract

In the beginning of the twenty-first century, when algorithms are monitoring our most intimate activities, the data-driven relationships created by digital hyperconnectivity attempt to reduce the distance between us and flatten our differences. Kristeva’s question, “Can the ‘foreigner’ […] disappear from modern societies?” (Kristeva 1991, 1), raises concerns about this ostensibly frictionless future. She sees the difference inherent in foreignness as a flux of possibilities to be explored, rather than a quality to be homogenized, as data algorithms do. However, the desire to encounter the “essential enigma” of foreignness (Kristeva 1991, 33; emphasis in original) both with regards to an external Other and to our own unconscious, has been rendered not only redundant but progressively vestigial by the intellectual, cultural, and material vacuums created by artificial intelligence (AI). In an age when the superficial comfort of hyperconnectivity proclaims to alleviate the sense of being uprooted “from a family, a country or a language,” Kristeva reminds us that “[w]riting is impossible without some kind of exile” (Kristeva 1986, 298). To attempt to resurrect the potential of dissidence Kristeva sees in exile would be to dissolve AI’s maniacal efforts to categorize identity in favor of disarticulating it – a task at the heart of Kristeva’s intellectual project. It would also imply undermining the centrality of efficiency in neoliberal societies, because the quest for efficiency culminates in a system for the accounting-like management of life as well as in the adolescent “malady of ideality” (Kristeva 2019, 322), which seeks to extract a neatly structured order from the disorganized plurality of human activity at the nexus of the semiotic and the symbolic. This essay aims to provide not only a Kristevan critique of AI’s flattening of life’s dimensions, but also open potential avenues for revolt based on Kristeva’s psychoanalytic and political work.