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Drawing a Latent Future with Electric Lines of Desire

Today’s post is a lyric essay by Halim Madi. Second Voice welcomes you to submit pieces for consideration. - Zohar

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“This book is dedicated to anyone who has ever fallen in love with a culture that was devouring their own.”
- A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

Maybe we start from the end. When our fears materialize. Say we can’t pinpoint when it happened but are well aware our collective taste missed a beat. At some point, a resigned permissiveness, back broken by the flood of slop-filled feeds, gave way to the mucky mid of machine generation. Say this species stops writing poetry.

The invitation is to pause with that last punctuation: Resist the auto-completion our minds operate when we present them with the possibility of loss. The way we sense the rising grief the moment our mind approximates the horizon of a humanity that no longer poeticizes. Here, the invitation – the practice even – is to hold the awkward pause that precedes the automatic making of futures. This is a skill – often acquired by bodies who’ve had to cross borders. Animals befriending the impossibility of continuation. The bone-deep knowledge things won’t be the same and identity must urgently acquire the properties of water. To pause with that full stop and resist completion is to do precisely what we haven’t given our thinking machines the affordance to do: Stop. This interruption opens territory. Refraining from coloring in the times to come spotlights the driving impetus to do so.

Sealed within the dark hued future we were about to paint is an understandably biased conception of the machine. Yuk Hui, in “ChatGPT, or the Eschatology of Machines” explains how the fear of AI replacing human labor is a product of an anthropomorphic view of machines and a misunderstanding of their role as prosthetics. For him, suspending this stereotyping of machines would liberate reason from its apocalyptic trajectory. The dialectic temptation here is to stumble into Alex Garland’s Shimmer. The director of “Annihilation” seeds an enclave with alien creatures. Unlike ghosts or horror movie serial killers, these are uniquely spine-chilling because they inhabit a logical terrain where mirror neurons fail. We can relate to animals to some extent. What “Annihilation” presents however are uncanny valley animals with alien motivations that reside squarely outside our meaning making capability. “Outside” here is best defined the way special relativity prohibits traveling faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. When we give up on anthropomorphizing the machine, we land in a field where conceptualization itself is banned.

Hui walks us out of this conundrum by reminding us of philosopher and cognitive scientist Brian Cantwell Smith’s work. Cantwell Smith clues us into a middle path to rethink our relations with machines: “Even if one finds no human intentionality in a machine, it remains a form of intentionality nonetheless.”

As productive as Cantwell Smith’s apparatus is however, there is a case for exploring why our psychic landscape produces our confrontational conception of existence with machines and resolves it in eschatological narratives. There is an enmity worth considering with an adversary we intuitively sense is capable of dethroning us. Our minds self-preserve by undermining the threat, creating emergency Turing test replacements “AI will never be able to…”. In line with Marshall McLuhan’s thinking, the provocation here is that the prosthetic amputates us. That it gives body to the phantom limb. We are yet to metabolize the impact of social media’s infinite feeds. The impossibility to carve belonging with cortexes unable to hunt and gather necessary context to coherently piece persistent models of community. We’ve always struggled with infinity and we have yet to accept our inability to catch the bottom of the infinite feed. The evanescent reminder our Dunbar cap and the hope of knowing the other have been irremediably obliterated. The prosthetic confirms our infirmity over and over.

K McDowell complicates this proposition in an essay titled “Side FX”:

“[...] interdependence becomes a kind of two-way possession. The artist enters into the zone-like inner world of AI in search of hidden treasure. Through vicarious hallucination, the artist develops a mutated language. By becoming hybrid, the artist overcomes redundancy but becomes possessed by the model’s structure, adopting it as an internal map and tool for creation. Simultaneously, the AI model requires human intent to activate its lifeless virtual neurons and itself becomes possessed by the artist’s agency.”

Extending McDowell’s mythopoetic take means treading into Lynn Margulis’ symbiogenesis playground. Margulis posits that evolution occurs not just through random mutation and natural selection, but through mergers and symbiotic relationships between organisms—particularly botched or incomplete digestions that lead to permanent cellular incorporation. Two-way possession means we are both trying and failing to devour and break down each other.

This slanted relocation from enmity to an evolution powered by inter-metabolization echoes some of our oldest practices. Aztec warriors believed consuming parts of a defeated enemy could transfer their valor and life force. Plains Indian tribes scalping enemies sought to absorb their warrior essence. The defeated samurai requesting their enemy serve as kaishakunin and behead them. Loss and victory spell the tale of a long intimate exchange. Lorde’s power of the erotic takes on a whole new meaning here.

To try this on in our relationship with machines adjusts the lens with which we peer into the future. Leading LLM providers have pre-trained the machine and we, on a personal level, engage in an intricate post-training operation. A RLH of one. AI is ingesting our individual memories. The same way we resist leaving a partner for another because of the work involved in re-educating someone new on our quirks, failings and preferences, memory is the moat in the competitive conversational AI landscape. The personal electricity we are providing our individual Frankensteins is memory.

Philosopher Karen Barad in a paper titled “TransMaterialities” reminds us of Shelly’s words in the introduction to Frankenstein: “Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endured with vital warmth.” Barad herself sees electricity as a “desiring field”. Transmaterialities opens with “Lightning is a reaching toward, an arcing dis/juncture, a striking response to charged yearnings.” In her text, lightning becomes the manifestation of a courtship between the sky and the ground. “No continuous path from sky to ground can satisfy its wild imaginings, its insistence on experimenting with different possible ways to connect [...]”.

We are feeding an enemy we love and an alien culture. Like Arcady’s novel, this essay is dedicated to anyone who has ever fallen in love with a culture that was devouring their own. To the potent season that marks the long devouring ritual. To the intimate surrender into the fangs of the eater. And more importantly to the electric field that opens as we effectuate the ritual. The imaginary made possible through this release. Electric lines drawing latent futures.

Say this species stops writing poetry. Say we see the turning as a humbling rather than a humiliation. Say we melt into what comes next.

Halim Madi is a Lebanese artist, writer, and technologist working at the intersection of computational poetics, performance, and speculative theory. His work metabolizes grief, displacement, and futurity through lyrical systems—web-based poems, AI-generated rituals, and interactive performances. Halim has been a resident at Counterpulse, Gray Area, and the European Artist Program, and is the winner of the 2024 Robert Coover Award for Electronic Literature. His current research traces digestion as both metaphor and method for processing technological rupture, drawing from thinkers like Barad, Margulis, and Glissant.

Appendix

1. Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire. Quote from the dedication: “This book is dedicated to anyone who has ever fallen in love with a culture that was devouring their own.” Book link

2. Yuk Hui, “ChatGPT, or the Eschatology of Machines”. Discusses anthropomorphization of machines and liberation from eschatological narratives. e-flux journal, Issue #137, 2023

3. Alex Garland, Annihilation (film). Referenced for its portrayal of alien intelligences beyond human comprehension. IMDb page

4. Brian Cantwell Smith, The Promise of Artificial Intelligence: Reckoning and Judgment. Quote: “Even if one finds no human intentionality in a machine, it remains a form of intentionality nonetheless.” Book link – MIT Press

5. Marshall McLuhan, media theory and the concept of the prosthetic. Explored the idea that technology extends and simultaneously amputates human faculties. Medium is the Message

6. K Allado-McDowell, “Side FX” On mutual possession and co-creation with AI. Ursula by Hauser & Wirth, 2023

7. Lynn Margulis, theory of symbiogenesis. Evolution through symbiotic mergers and botched digestions. Reference summary via Britannica

8. Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power. Referenced conceptually in context of power, intimacy, and transformation. Full text PDF

9. Karen Barad, “TransMaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings” On electricity as a desiring field and reanimation in Frankenstein. Duke University Press – GLQ, Vol. 21 No. 2-3 (2015)

10. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818). Referenced through Barad; specifically Shelley's introduction discussing galvanism. Project Gutenberg edition