The Bio-Politics of Artificial Intelligence: Pastoral Technologies and Eschatological Narratives
In agreement with Hubert Dreyfus (1972), we could easily say: “The story of artificial intelligence might well begin around 450 B.C.” That won’t give us much beyond words however. That’s not the commitment we can make for what will in effect try to operate as a text that only aims to shed a new visibility on the discursive practices surrounding A.I. technology and the relationship these apparatuses bear to the Self. But for the sake of “simplicity,” we could ask in the style of Michel Foucault: What types of truth-telling practices of self-formation are constitutive of an “Artificial Regime”? What kind of a person does one have to be, in order to receive, understand, embrace or otherwise competently use and enjoy the “irresistible” gifts of techno-science? And what happens if one refuses to do so? What types of goals must the digital subject (Goriunova, 2019) set for herself in order to appreciate, or better yet; recognize, the endless benefits of consenting to the A.I. driven regime of truth with its “terms and conditions”? This would call for a history of science that would simultaneously have to be a history of the subject i.e., subjectivity and (of course) a history of morality and (therefore?) power. Once again, this would take us far and beyond. We could nonetheless still say that this is a sub-division of that larger project: Genealogy of Artificial Systems or simply: A.I. Biopolitics. Let us limit ourselves then, both in terms of the historical scope and perhaps no less in the diversity of ways we can approach these monumental questions. Focusing instead on those techniques of self-formation that took place in Christian writings (Macmillan, 2011), I will attempt to trace a comparative outline between certain practices of self-constitution prevalent in Christianity (roughly from the 2nd to the 5th century AD), and those we use today to mould ourselves into enterprising, digital consumers (Birch, 2020).
To quote Mark Coeckelbergh (2020), “[i]n contrast to what many people think, religion and technology have always been connected in the history of Western culture.” The idea of a perfect and transcendent being unhindered by human defects and limitations resonates on both sides of what seem to be at first two mutually exclusive discursive formations (Foucault, 2013). Both religion and techno-science draw on very similar forms of rhetorical self-legitimation to justify their activity. Pastoral technologies mark a decisive turning point in the history of governance in Western societies (Cooper, 2020). For an Archaeology of Christian hermeneutics of the self, I will draw on the 4th volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality: Confessions of the Flesh (CF). It will be useful to say a few words about the CF and make some preliminary remarks on both the historical scope and the methodological approach for the current “Eschatology” of Artificial Intelligence. The CF offers an archive of various techniques of the self that were used during the formative years of Christianity: baptism, penance, confession, examination of conscience, spiritual direction and so forth. Foucault is specifically interested in the distribution of systems of contrasts and similarities, of continuity and discontinuity between the Greco-Roman and the Christian regimes of truth-telling. To what extent and in what way, have some of the earlier techniques of the self been conserved, modified or entirely excluded by their Christian descendants? Needless to say, the practice, control and surveillance of sexuality played an important role across both Greek and Christian epistemic formations. Nonetheless, the ways in which one constituted one’s sexuality, and therefore oneself, was notably different across centuries. The notion of the Flesh is distinctively characteristic of the Christian technologies of the self (Schubert, 2021); a uniquely Christian dispositif of sexuality (Callewaert, 2017). Needless to say, transgressions of the sexual sort were only one of many different ways of acting in a sinful manner. The CF is more an account of the techniques that produce subjects or subjectivities, rather than just a history of sexual practices. Sexuality has a privileged role to play in how the subject relates to herself, but it does not in any way exhaust the essence of one’s identity. And in many ways, this is precisely the leading motivation for Foucault’s project; to show in fact that sexuality is something quite important, yet contingent in the ontological sense. Sexuality is a powerful tool for conducting the conduct of others, but it does not possess a transhistorical essence, nor does it define who we are in any fundamental sense. Hence the history of sexuality is in reality a history of the juridification or governmentalization, or yet in other words: the normalization of sexuality (McWhorter, 1999). The purpose of Genealogy is to open up a strategic space for something that would resist such a movement: Not just a novel ethics of sex and sexuality, but an entirely different mode of being, self-formation and truth-telling.
Flesh in particular, more than just the body or even the body in the act of copulation, was an entire mode of veridiction that orchestrated the power-dynamics of Christian discourse and practice. Flesh is the master-signifier that constitutes the Christian experience, in opposition to the experience of Greek, Roman, Renaissance, Modern/Classical, Contemporary and Post-Modern subjects. Multiple techniques of confession, self-formation and sexuality criss-cross and overlap throughout each of the aforementioned historical periods without there being an overarching essence that underpins them all. Foucault has often been termed the “philosopher of discontinuity” (Lotringer, et al. 1996). This is understandable given his emphasis on discontinuity where other historians found continuity. However, what has often been neglected is an equal placement of emphasis on both continuity and discontinuity, but at an entirely different ontological plane. The techniques of truth-telling (Foucault, 2011) are family-resemblance concepts (Wittgenstein, 2010). Compared to the discursive unities (Foucault, 2013) offered by classical history, they do not possess clearly defined boundaries. Technologies of the self (Foucault, 1988) tend to interpenetrate as much as they often stand outside each other. The reactivation of a particular mode of governance may occur quite spontaneously in different historical epochs. Their emergence can be traced, but not explained. The way Foucault writes and interprets history is not causal in the ordinary sense of the word.
Archaeology does not stop at what we can call a kinematics of the event, but rather it reaches toward a kinaesthetic of eventalization (Olssen, 2006). The event is always overdetermined through peripheral cases. One thing arises out of another without necessarily breaking its ties to the former. Events do not contain, nor do they point to their origin; instead, they emerge spontaneously across history. Foucauldian archaeology, much like contemporary paradigms in physics, sees history as a field (Kusch, 2012), rather than a space of objects, events, causes and effects. The reason for labelling Foucault a philosopher of discontinuity, is largely symptomatic of (at least) the late 20th and 21st century politico-historical climate. Grand narratives (Bernstein, 2002) often portray history in a linear fashion as a discrete series of causes and effects that are rendered meaningful by leading up to the dominant paradigms, mainstream ways of thinking and monopolistic institutions that dictate the contemporary political-economic climate. Classical historiography thereby obfuscates the legitimacy of the struggles, battles and resistances, the exclusion of alternative narratives and the subjugation of alternative ways of self-formation that led to the eventual, but not inevitable, victory of an existing institutional constellation. The dominant paradigm for current, contemporary historical research is that of continuity. It is only against the background of an episteme (Foucault, 2005) that favours continuity could one mislabel Foucault as a “philosopher of discontinuity.” The nickname (symptomatic indeed) is a displacement in the psychoanalytic sense (Neubauer, 1994). It is not the Foucauldian emphasis on discontinuity that bothers us, it is the hyper-continuity of archaeological investigations that we find so troubling as they tend to subvert our own position as subjects of a coherent and guiltless history.
Three Regimes: Aphrodisia, the Flesh and “Liberated” Sexuality
An important distinction made by Foucault concerns how the technologies of the self in the early, formative period of ancient Christianity tend to conserve the more spontaneous forms of self-examination inherited from their Greco-Roman predecessors, placing them in opposition to the medieval variety of a more “tightly knit” system of Coded Sin (Foucault, 2021). The medieval period is distinguished through meticulous categorizations, an entire metrics and a ranking system for numerous transgressions and infractions against God. The self is no longer the central object of concern, not in the same way. One must make sure that the self has been handed over to the divine element; the self figures exclusively as that which needs to be negated. This marks a defining point – or perhaps multiple points – of transformation in the conduct of the self. As we venture from the early to the middle Christian period the emphasis is no longer made on how one conducted oneself, but what one did. Correct conduct was no longer a matter of style and aesthetics, it turned instead, even if gradually, into a technical apparatus of (more intense and totalizing) control. The grid of desire became constricted, increasingly juridical and authoritative (Clements, 2023).
One of the first moments where pagan Aphrodisia meet Christian spiritual direction is the notion of Logos. Christ taught the Logos. With Christianity, Logos became the mediating current between man and the Holy Father displacing the Pagan subject. Christ had now become the teacher and the main authority on the Logos, which had transformed the Word of the Sage (wise man), into the Word of God. Foucault quotes the Paedagogus (Παιδαγωγός), a 2nd to 3rd century treatise on Christian ethics written by one of the Founding Church Fathers, Clement of Alexandria. The text carries heavy influences from Stoicism and Platonism (Reydams-Schils, 2020). What one notices in these writings is an appropriation and alternative use of the Greek Logos:
“Man’s duty, consequently, is to cultivate a will that is in conformity with and united throughout his life to God and Christ, properly directed to eternal life. The life of the Christian, which we are learning from our Educator, is a unified whole made up of deeds in accordance with the Logos; that is, it is the unfailing practical application of the truths taught by the Logos, an accomplishment which we call fidelity. The whole is constituted by the Lord’s precepts, which have been prescribed as spiritual commandments, useful both for ourselves and for those near to us” (Foucault, 2021).
Unlike the Greek conception of reason and correct self-conduct; an adherence to the Logos where the purpose is to cultivate an ethics that culminates in one’s preparedness for death, the Christian ethics of the Logos as Divine Word leads the subject towards salvation through the promise of an eternal life after death. A grounded and immanent conception of ethics is thereby gradually replaced with a teleological and transcendent promise of immortality in afterlife. We can easily draw parallels between the mobilization of the soteriological idea of salvation and the contemporary biopolitical strategy of increasing the health of a population; the obsessive, narcissistic worship of the fit and healthy ideal body (Villadsen & Wahlberg, 2015) as a Neoliberal tactic fro the production of Homo Oeconomicus Algorismus.
Needless to say, sexual abstention played a decisive role as one of several manifestations of the apparatus of Christian Flesh. It operated in tandem with the function of Marriage and the confessional. The 4th century is replete with Christian texts belabouring to expand on the importance and necessity of a chaste life. From “How to Observe Virginity” to “Suspect Cohabitations” early Christianity offers no shortage of pastoral technologies for proper and improper self-governance. The question worth asking however, is how do these techniques of self-formation and religious panopticism translate into various cybernetic dispositifs of self-improvement for the “sexually liberated” (Shields, 2007) consumer we encounter today (Evans & Riley, 2015)? In other words, how do we go from Flesh to Sexuality?
Foucault takes care to note that early Christian technologies of the self were not as severe and direct as has often been portrayed, at least in the popular and superficial appropriation of the Freudian concept of repression. Ancient Christianity seems to be quite continuous with the Greco-Roman attitude, which operated more along the lines of a useful inventory of advices and recommendations, rather than strict and categorical imperatives enforced through punishment. Unless of course, the transgressions were in clear violation of the most basic ethical principles. “…the great prohibitions cited in the texts of the Apostolic Fathers or the Apologists are the same ones that were prescribed by pagan morality: adultery, fornication, corruption of children” (Foucault, 2021). But for the most part the ancient Greek and Christian sexual ethics were indeed characterized with a certain flexible leniency that tends to diminish as we approach the Middle Ages. Some significant differences however, can clearly be brought to light. Foucault takes care to show, first of all, that Greek and Christian sexual ethics had varying aims in mind i.e., as already mentioned, they operated within different teleological systems. But they also offered a different approach. The Christian techniques can be marked out by what was termed Encratism (Gaca, 2002) or self-renunciation (Wimberly, 2011). The injunction to be chaste was thereby made more complete. Despite remaining at the level of general advice, the recommendations were in fact “strong recommendations,” which unlike their Greek predecessors gave preference to complete sexual continence as opposed to moderation.
Though marriage was not as significant – in terms of the multiplicity of techniques employed – as Virginity, there were nonetheless certain teachings that ran parallel to the ones on sexual continence, which dealt with the “principle… legitimacy… [and] …acceptability” (Foucault, 2021) of marriage as an institution. “…while the question of the ‘right’ to marriage and of its relative value compared to strict continence and celibacy is raised very early, it doesn’t lead to the constitution of an art of matrimonial existence” writes Foucault. It is not until the end of the 4th century that we see something like an art of marriage emerging within the Christian canon (De Wet, 2020). What is worth bringing our attention to for the moment, is that around this time, the value and importance of marriage has been so vastly expanded on, and so well assimilated into the Christian experience, that it came to be regarded as almost being on par with the cult of Virginity. The Church Fathers are not always very open and explicit about their Greco-Roman legacy and pagan influence. St. John Chrysostom does refer to Pythagoras in his writing. Epictetus’s teachings were translated by St. Nilus and interpreted as Christian texts (Boter, 1999). Throughout early Christian writings the paths towards salvation and the correct practical conducts of life are often even referred to as philosophies. The Socratic teaching of know thyself was well-preserved in Christianity. However, the function of self-knowledge and self-examination remains quite distinct. The Christian searches every nook and cranny of her soul, not (only) in order to solve a concrete practical problem: Anxiety, overindulgence, physical ailment, moral failure, financial difficulty and so forth, but to identify within herself, that part, which is fundamentally not the self; i.e., the element which belongs to God. And to separate the impressions coming from God from those that are imposed by Satan. There is no direct counterpart of such a practice in Greco-Roman culture. The idea of the perfect Sage, though similar in the sense that the Sage is a highly mythologized figure, remains nonetheless ontologically closer to her realistic human complement (Liu, 2008). The fruits and spoils therefore, of ancient Greek practices are much more immediate and of-this-earth, compared to the Christian promise of an immortal commune in the Kingdom of God. The Christian technique of the self is not a retreat into oneself, but a going-beyond oneself and an ascension towards God. One hands oneself over to a sacred “technology”, so to speak.
Foucault explains that there is an invariable and ancient Hellenistic core in Christian teachings, which has simultaneously gone through multiple transformations, modifications and alternative applications throughout the centuries. These changes dictate the movements and metamorphoses undergone by the subject in her relationship to truth and in her relationship to an entire economy of pleasure. The distinctly Christian mode of self-administration later on becomes essentially punitive in nature. It consists of multiple rituals of self-mutilation, humiliation and entire theatrics of mortifications as techniques of manifesting the sinful truth of one’s self. These, Foucault explains, are referred to as Exomologesis and they are juxtaposed against the more subtle, more or less Greco-Roman techniques of Exagoreusis. The latter are not as intense and they do not assume as strict a hierarchical relationship between master and student. Most importantly, they are specifically concerned with the verbal elaboration, sharing and mutual exchange of thoughts, analysing invasive impressions and managing everyday conduct. Despite its leniency, exagoreusis remains fundamentally Christian in so far as the discursive or dialectical mode of confession is continuous with the moment of complete self-renunciation, but in this case through speech alone. One must say everything concerning oneself, one’s thoughts, one’s actions and one’s conduct without reserve. The Confessions of the Flesh will be our prime modus operandi as we delve into a comparative analysis between Christian and Algorithmic technologies of self-formation (Kien, 2020).
Cybernetics as Biblical Canon: ‘Effective Procedure’ as Dogma
The dream of mechanization and ethical automation goes as far back as Plato. According to Dreyfus (1992), Plato was the first to ask, using Socrates’s voice of course, whether a system of ethics could be formulated in a strict and rigorous i.e. definitional manner; whether one could construct an ethical cipher, a universal ethical system. Already, we can trace, somewhat loosely, some element of what we referred to above as Christian Flesh or coded sin. Plato is less concerned with the how of ethics as an aesthetics of conduct that needs to be practiced and exercised, and more with the what of a reproducible system of correct behaviour. The question is directly tied with another very important Foucauldian distinction between know thyself; gnothi seauton (γνῶθι σεαυτόν) and the care of the self; epimeleia heautou (ἐπιμέλεια ἑαυτοῦ) (Peters, 2022).
The ancient dream of reducing the turbulent irregularities of nature, life and human behavior to the same formal mathematical principles that govern the movement of celestial bodies, has in one form or another been repeatedly re-emerging under different epistemic formations in science, within various regimes of truth across religions and around diverse multiplicities of social practices throughout varying political systems. Dreyfus describes how an understanding that equates thought with calculation came to dominate the Western conception of reason since antiquity.
“Why… …do those pursuing Cognitive Simulation assume that the information processes of a computer reveal the hidden information processes of a human being, and why do those working in Artificial Intelligence assume that there must be a digital way of performing human tasks? To my knowledge, no one in the field seems to have asked himself these questions. In fact, artificial intelligence is the least self-critical field on the scientific scene. There must be a reason why these intelligent men almost unanimously minimize or fail to recognize their difficulties, and continue dogmatically to assert their faith in progress” (Dreyfus, 1992).
Dreyfus argues that the history of Artificial Intelligence research has only demonstrated that some things can indeed be achieved with “brute force,” and in the face of clear diminishing marginal returns on stubbornness, it remains unclear, where the epistemic confidence emerged from. Dreyfus (1992) repeatedly questions the famous assumption made by Turing (and criticized by Wittgenstein) that the mind is fundamentally computational. The Wittgenstein-Turing debate deserves a separate treatment, especially Wittgenstein’s notorious claim – that Turing machines are really “humans who calculate” (Wagner, 2005).
Since the first A.I. boom, researchers in the field have been facing nothing but set-backs and disappointments. Dreyfus brings numerous examples of these through historical analysis. Where does the optimism and confidence in contemporary A.I. research come from? The cognitive and evolutionary paradigm of mind-as-computer continues to predominate our contemporary episteme. 20th century developments in logico-mathematical formal systems or perhaps their superficial appropriation – not to mention the work done by Wiener (2019) and Shannon (1948) in the fields of Cybernetics and Information Systems – have played their own significant part in attempting to reduce all human creativity to a manipulation of symbols and exchange of information. Human as symbol-manipulating-device holds very brave and some notably unsubstantiated assumptions. The first assumption is the reduction of human neural activity to a binary system of 1’s and 0’s, “True” or “False”, “On and Off” configurations. Either we operate as a giant truth-table with arms and legs, a genetic software code (with its accompanying viruses) or an oversized anxious desktop computer. The second assumption is the psychological and phenomenological reduction of human experience to data-processing where each subjective sense-impression is coordinated with bits of information, where the software program operates as a set of rules, commands or background beliefs that enable us to make judgments and form beliefs about the world. The third is the epistemological assumption concerning the possibility of rendering all biological life and natural processes completely and systematically formalizable i.e., translatable into an artificial language. None of these assumptions have any real philosophical or empirical basis.
The idea of the world operating as a closed, quantifiable virtuality; the notion that the universe is a giant automaton or that there is an underlying mathematical structure that serves as a condition of possibility for everything that takes place in the universe, this is precisely what I argue, runs suspiciously close to a Christian cosmology of a rational, intelligent design that governs the world and every event in it. It is here that I want to offer another hypothesis, or an alternative formulation of my central thesis: The strange and unjustified confidence in artificial intelligence systems stems less from the coherence of “the science” (i.e.: the epistemic commitments) behind the cybernetic paradigm, rather more from an outdated, mythical and fictional, largely unconscious, archaic sentiment that is very similar to Christian ideas concerning the “inherently consistent” nature of the universe. Just like Christian dogma that attempts to derive an ought from a mythical is as a practical system of ethics, the algorithmic regime of truth attempts to produce subjects that govern themselves through the “effective procedure” of an artificial system of conduct.
The assumptions underlying A.I. research are simply taken as doctrine and “canon”. A set of unquestioned and almost unquestionable axioms, whose self-evidence has remained largely uncontested for several decades. Part of the problem, Dreyfus argues, is that these preconceived assumptions remain unchallenged, because they are rarely articulated and brought to light. In this sense the problem does in fact require a philosophical, rather than an empirical or scientific diagnosis. In our case, the diagnosis is philosophical and historical i.e. genealogical (Bevir, 2008) in a characteristically Foucauldian sense. Both a priori and empirical arguments that try to lend support to the logical, psychological and biological accounts of the computational model for human thought and behavior, tend to fly in the face of repeated failures to apply these paradigms to real-world problems as well as the history of the relations of power that allowed for their emergence, sedimentation and normalization as universal principles in the first place.
Technically Man Resists Upon This Earth
“Who wills themselves angel makes themselves a beast and angelicism is structurally identical to the becoming of the Machine on that count” writes Louis Morelle in the introduction to Ulysse Carrière’s (2023) Technically Man Dwells Upon This Earth. If the current book had any one clear and distinct message it would probably sound similar to Morelle’s proclamation. But we cannot yet speak of what is going to happen here, we haven’t yet done the work; the real work of looking and seeing whether things really do stand as we conjecture their differences and similitude within the virtual space of possibilities. Whether they in fact resonate, but more importantly how they resonate – at the level of statements and the archive (Foucault, 2013). How do contemporary discussions of Artificial Intelligence, the counterpart, I propose, to the Christian conception of God, legitimate themselves at the level of everyday practices, scaled governmentalities and porous dispositifs? What links them together with the crypto-religious technofascism (Penley, 1991) inherent to digital practices today? Why is it, that an apologetics for the contemporary algocracy, despite all its claims to secularity and its attempts to exclude the mythical, tends to sound increasingly like an Eschatology of Artificial Intelligence?
In a Heideggerian fashion, Carrière offers a highly original and compelling account of thinking. In Man Dwells Upon This Earth, thinking is a term that we would align with Foucault’s popular notion of Power. “Thought does not think about,” writes Carrière, “it thinks.” Analogously, with Foucault, power is not something that can be possessed, it is not something that is imposed by someone on someone else externally, at least not at the level of power’s constitutive potential as a dwelling. Individuals do not exert power and to repeat, neither do they possess or fail to acquire it. The ontology of fields becomes prominent and cuts both archaeology and genealogy diagonally, since neither can, strictly speaking, be performed without the other. Power is a relation, it is woven into the subject’s self, which is in turn also only a relation to the self. The self is nothing but the relation to the self. Therefore “identity” is always and only an activity. Once again, power is not possessed nor lost, it is always and constantly exercised. “Thinking thinks” (Carrière, 2023) and conducting conducts. Power can still be exercised well or badly, but only in an embedded sense. More importantly, the relation to the self is always and at the same time a relation to power and a relation to truth. The three kinds of relations may be functional, but they are also processual and they cannot be untangled to reach some sort of “pure” self or a truth that completely sections itself off from power. Both the self and truth are therefore infinitely enmeshed with power, this is why “conduct conducts” and “thinking thinks,” because we are always within thinking as we are always dwelling within power-relations.
Moreover, “thinking about” is similar to “power over”; the latter falls within the classical political theory of sovereignty and both are already, as Carrière explains, conditioned forms of thinking, especially when we are thinking about the pre-manufactured concept or the discursive apparatus of Artificial Intelligence. In thinking of intelligence as artificial, we can only think about and our criticism i.e., “A.I. Ethics” will always fail to go beyond “power over.” As we are thrown into the A.I. discourse, we are already within the grip of an uncritical assent to a particular regime of truth, a picture holds us captive (Wittgenstein, 2010) and we are within a power game that we failed to take note of. A game that we are “about to play badly.”
The purpose of technology, techne or technics, according to Carrière, is an externalization of biological embodiment; artefacts operate as prosthetic tools that serve to enhance our physical capabilities, while intellect remains wholly separate. A.I. discourse seeks to achieve several things: First, it aims to reduce thought to a techne and second to uncover the biological system as a kind of technology that would be able to manifest thinking. Racing through numerous paradoxes involved in the attempts to comprehend life, thought, technology, biology, embodiment and artificial intellect, Carrière offers some very interesting critiques of A.I. as techne, art and poiesis and plenty to think about in terms of the relationship between A.I. and ancient Greek thought (Vasileiadou & Kalligeropoulos, 2007). We plan to focus instead on specifically Christian forms of self-constitution and eschatological narratives that can be found in the practices of the self that oscillate around the discourse on Artificial Intelligence.
So what is eschatology? The word “ἔσχατος” means “end” or “last”. Eschatology is the study of last things and endings. The end of the world, apocalypse, doom scenarios, final judgments and so forth (Schwarz, 2000). The Book of Revelation is a prime example. Foucault himself refers to Methodius’s eschatology or the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius in discussing virginity as a technique of self-formation (Foucault, 2021). For our present purposes an eschatology will refer to something slightly different. It will encompass its traditional meaning, but it will also acquire a more general definition whereby it will denote teleological reasoning as such. Not unlike its original version, the modified eschatology will refer not only to the discourse of ends, but also to the discourse on the means required to achieve those ends i.e., legitimating discursive practices (Van Leeuwen, 2008). Put simply, we will refer to our particular version of Foucauldian genealogical writing, not without a healthy injection of ironic cynicism of course – as an eschatology. Our eschatological investigation will then try to unravel the common thread that runs through both the digital-neoliberal and the biblical-scriptural hermeneutics of the self (Gros et al., 2005).
Another important text for the current techno-theodicy, is Mark Coeckelbergh’s (2022) Technologies of the Soul in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. The Christian technologies of the self are very similar to Coeckelbergh’s technologies of self-improvement, the Christian injunction to obey is mirrored in the neo-liberal imperative to improve, both, in effect, seeking (and to large and unfortunate extent; successfully managing) to deploy a biopolitical regime of docility. From coaching apps, motivational speakers and trainers, to retreats, workshops and social media influencers, the technologies of digital self-entrepreneurship are as varied and complex as the Christian practices of marriage, virginity, confession, baptism, penance and most of all: self-renunciation. In both cases, one gives oneself over to a techno-discursive apparatus, ultimately (allegedly) to an A.I. or – to God. By describing the pastoral technologies of flesh, I attempt to show how the discursive practices of self-improvement technologies draw on Artificial Intelligence to push the neoliberal style of governance even further, bringing the eugenic project of the Homo Oeconomicus to a “blooming” hysterical perfection.
Technologies of self-improvement are now woven into the fabric of our everyday lives operating as a catalyst for the normalization of “A.I. – friendly” discourse. The Foucauldian distinction between Savoir and Connaissance (Rehm, 2013) (Lotringer, 1996) is particularly helpful in untangling these fibers. Both terms stand for “knowledge” in French. Foucault uses the term connaissance to distinguish the surface effects of knowledge from the more fundamental yet elusive strata of social practices (activities, not things or essences) that make them possible: the ‘savoir’. In traditional philosophical lingo one could speak of savoir as the condition of possibility for connaissance, where the latter refers to what we traditionally tend to speak of as “facts” or scientific knowledge. For example: If the psychiatric discourse of therapy, cure, treatment, care, rehabilitation, medicalization and diagnostics refers to the connaissance of psychiatry, then the ethically ambivalent history (leprosaria and political imprisonment), as well as the juridico-political and economic function of psychiatry i.e., exclusion, confinement, normalization and discipline, would point to the savoir of its underlying discourse (Foucault, 2008).
Connaissance is precisely the thinking about in Carrière’s account as juxtaposed against the poietics of dwelling. Savoir as a dwelling refers to the hidden turbulence and the element of risk inherent to all scientific endeavour. Archaeology (and Genealogy) is the study of the savoir of discourse; its purpose is to expose the connaissance of a given institution for all the contingencies, hypocrisies and ad hoc modifications that are often built into it. The purpose is to uncover alternative ways of being, to show simply that nothing ought to be taken for granted and to allow for the process of desubjectivation (Mcloughlin, 2021) i.e., resistance to take place.
Marching in Foucault’s footsteps, these are the texts that keep hovering in the background and informing our current train of thought. Coeckelbergh’s work along with Hubert Dreyfus’s What Computers (Still) Can’t Do, Colin Koopman’s How We Become Our Data, Deborah Lupton’s The Quantified Self and other notable works in the genre, can be used effectively to expose the savoir of the contemporary computational episteme; the discursive formation that grounds the discourse of A.I. and deploys a multiplicity of techniques of algorithmic self-formation that produce “technological subjectivities” (D’Amato, 2024).
So, let’s talk about data; the modern-day equivalent of sacred scripture. According to Koopman (2019), data; far from something that is ultimately only imposed from without and which allegedly fails to capture or in some other sense draw a faithful representation of the “identity” of the analog subject; is in fact discursive in the Foucauldian sense. Data as an apparatus can be found both at the level of savoir; an embedded practice, as well as connaissance; the surface effect i.e., information. What Koopman describes in the preface to A Genealogy of the Informational Person is not the subject ‘misconstrued’ by data, like the obvious cases of Deep Fake software, but the formation of a new type of person; the Datafied Subject. Satirically, we can refer to Koopman’s Informational Person as Homo Algorismus. The mutual overlap between Homo Algorismus and the Homo Oeconomicus is of central concern here.
Koopman offers the reader a history of the present for datafied personhood (Barassi, 2019). He traces the emergence of coded sociality from early twentieth century to the present. Koopman argues that the informational person’s roots emerge from much simpler and even more taken-for-granted algorithmic apparatuses like passports, identification numbers and birth certificates. Taking things for granted is the sine qua non of how power produces docility. We remain algorithmic in so far as we continue to produce ourselves through data. If we keep exercising these capacities, they will be part of our on-going becoming. And in so far as we refuse or resist the effects of digitization, no matter how selectively, (and we can only be selective here) we will have offered a subversive and parrhesiastic practice against the savoir of A.I.’s digital church.
Diana Stypinska’s Digital Confessional and the Spectral Subject
In her article, Pastorate Digitalized: Social Media and (De)Subjectification, Diana Stypinska (2024) offers a Foucauldian analysis of social media as a Christian dispositif of individuation. Stypinska contends that social media operates in a way similar to the Christian technology of confession producing “spectral subjects”, who play a constitutive role in the commodification of human relationships. The Christian subject acts as a mobile confessional. She is trained to engage constantly in an on-going process of extracting the truth concerning herself. The Christian subject is productive in this very specific sense. She is always involved in the production of her-self as a confessing animal.
Stypinska shows that the pastorate, far from having disappeared, has in fact dispersed throughout the social body in virtue of no longer being concentrated in a single institution of the church. The discursive metamorphosis testifies in some ways to an intensification (rather than termination) of pastoral power in virtue of its transformation from a concentrated modality of governmental forms into multiple and more mobile techniques of governmentality. Social media, Stypinska further observes, is one of several distinct regions where the Christian pastoral remains covertly active and operative. Bringing this to light aims to raise the reader’s critical awareness and thereby initiate the work of desubjectification.
“It is my hope that, by drawing analogies between the pastoral and the digital, this paper can go some way towards illuminating the ways in which social media practices not only feature as an object of multiple (post)political investments, but also, by extension, guarantee the persistence of ‘capitalism as a religion…’ …through the employment of secularized (de)individualizing techniques” (Stypinska, 2024).
In agreement with Stypinska and within the pseudo-secular constellation of the digital pastoral, we argue that A.I. driven discourse operates in a way quite similar to the Christian discourse on God.
The Hellenistic model of self-governance, epitomized, according to Foucault through the ἐπιμέλεια ἑαυτοῦ or the care of the self (a necessary, but historically neglected accompaniment to the know thyself) was aimed at allowing the subject to section herself off from customs and dominant social practices in order to acquire “total self-command across the legal, political and libidinal domains” (Stypinska, 2024) together with the capacity to resist institutional subjection and reverse certain relations of power. Stypinska traces the differences between the Greco-Roman and Christian technologies of self-formation in the following way: First, a different stylistics of the self in the constitution of desire. The key difference lies in the practice of Encratism (self-renunciation). Stypinska makes a very important emphasis on how the Stoic model conceived of the self, imperatively, as the privileged object of desire. One ought to take pleasure in oneself, one must take from oneself what one desires most. Anything over and above the basic necessities of life (which are always easy to obtain) one must seek satisfaction only in oneself. The attitude is similar, yet very distinct from Christian Encratism. The latter ultimately seeks to disinvest desire from the self and transfer it over to a higher deity leading to the annihilation of the self.
“The pastoral imperative calls for one to not only relate to the external rule, but to their very self, in a novel – and very specific – way, namely, by first destroying it, and then fashioning a new subjectivity in accordance with the religious logic” (Stypinska, 2024).
This results in a simultaneous destruction and rebuilding of the self, a production of a new kind of subject and complete subjection to the dominant institutional norms and social customs.
The Christian sacralization of the philosophical relation to the self implies more than just a going-beyond the self. The pastoral technology treats the self as a source of active deception and evil. The self is where the devil hides. This points to another important distinction concerning the Christian attitude towards error and misjudgment: The Subject cannot govern herself, because she is inherently fallen or sinful. The Greco-Roman model treats mistakes as mistakes, as instances of having failed to apply a rule. The notion of sin has no place in Stoic cosmology. Christianity, interestingly very similar to Freudian psychoanalysis, speaks of self-delusion often as an effect of an active, subversive and malignant power that lies in the depth of one’s soul. Satanic impressions seem to point to something similar to an alternative ego, which is more than a collection of discursive blunders and confusions. An evil entity, very much like the unconscious, remains articulate in its attempt to subvert the activities of the subject. Precisely through the literal and political demonization of the self, the Christian apparatus takes hold of a body completely and in a way that is total. Rendered incompetent, the subject willingly hands himself over to the dispositif. These processes testify to the specifically Christian mode of governance i.e., the subject’s relation to the truth.
The 18th century marks, according to Foucault, a period where confessional practices became intertwined with scientific discourse, forming thereby one of the primary axes in the formation of Biopolitics. Stypinska argues that social media offers a prime example of a neo-liberal scientific-confessional apparatus. To paraphrase, Stypinska examines social media as another field of veridical modalities; a cybernetic field of power relations which allow for the emergence of novel techniques and mediations between truth, power and the self. Surveillance knowledge and pastoral techniques intermingle, it goes without saying that the security apparatus has mutated the Christian confessional as it redeploys itself through digital mediums.
“Simply put, this perspective conceives subjectivity as primarily constituted and conducted through extraction, manipulation, as well as experience, of data. Thus, for instance, we encounter approaches emphasizing the importance of understanding the ways ‘in which online behaviours are directed, constrained and framed by resources such as algorithms, content management systems (CMS) and operating systems (OS)’… …as well as those stressing how subjectivity of social media users is increasingly determined ‘by the ways that advertisers, political bots or other agents anticipate and influence their behavior’” (Stypinska, 2024).
The algorithmic confessional is therefore distinct in several ways, one of these is the ability to automate the production of discourse through the training of consumers as subjects who actively partake in their own self-exposure and datafication (Harcourt, 2015).
One of the central objects of investigation introduced by Stypinska’s paper is digital governmentality, the aim of the presentation is to observe and describe the workings of algorithmic governance through social media. To understand how this particular apparatus tends to incite the user to fashion herself as an informational person, Stypinska first underscores the vast explosion and the on-going prevalence of therapy-oriented discourse encountered on social media. Ultimately, these self-management tools are geared toward the production of marketable personalities and stylized entrepreneurs of the self. One’s online behaviour is used to shape one’s offline behaviour. The online self-help narrative serves as a cover-up for both digital and analog self-commodification, self-branding and self-promotion. This particular mode of veridiction is therefore based on the valorization of truth, or to be more precise, the “veridification” of market-value. The subject’s relation to truth (and therefore to herself) is today premised on the subject’s ability to package, market and sell her own identity. The market is therefore what operates as the contemporary regime of truth. The digital confessional functions as an instrument of monetizing the self, or handing oneself over (Encratism) to Capital. Insofar as the self incurs more costs than benefits, the self needs to be dismantled and rebuilt in such a way as to be more easily inserted into the production function.
Through the digital pastorate, we encounter therefore, a counterfeit manifestation of the Foucauldian care of the self (Foucault, 1988), which despite its claims to secularized self-administration remains largely Christian in its injunction to abandon oneself to the dictates of the market. Building on Stypinska’s work we can add that the techno-scientific soteriology is premised on the promise of achieving perfect physical and mental health as a uniquely biopolitical form of salvation, with the concept of Artificial Intelligence playing a role analogous to that of God. A constant companion on our (mandatory) journey towards self-enhancement.
Some objections may nonetheless begin to form at this point. If the pastoral technologies of the self were centered around humility, self-mortification and the restriction of desire, how do their digital consumerist counterparts, focused on enjoyment, narcissistic self-love and constant activity continue to affect us in a way that is nonetheless similar and continuous with the latter? The first point made by Stypinska, is that Christian techniques do not necessarily imply a complete renunciation of desire. The final aim of the Christian technology is to achieve a state of happiness where docile obedience is employed as a means to that end. “This means that the obedient subject does indeed wish (for) something, and it is precisely this wishing that engenders its subjection and subjectification. Humility is nothing but the means for the fulfilment of desire,” explains Stypinska (2024). Second, the object of desire in the case of both pastoral techniques and consumer-driven digital practices is a socially constructed entity invested with collective desire. In both instances, we desire the desire of the Other. And we can once again, add here, that the ultimate object of satisfaction i.e., God, is similar under the current regime where A.I. (just like God) is positioned as the ultimate consumer good and the final solution to all human problems and frustrated wishes.
We encounter therefore a discursive constellation where the state of grace and spiritual transcendence is replaced by a pseudo-spontaneous constitution of “freedom,” within the limits of a regulatory market system.
“Humility towards God is now replaced with humility towards the market. In this sense, what capitalist subjectification produces is, in fact, the very same relation of obedience that marked the pastoral structure of existence. All that is altered is its discursive framing” (Stypinska, 2024).
Anyone who spends more than 5 minutes on social media will soon notice that “self-fulfillment” can take many forms, including the rare yet clearly prevalent attitudes of self-mortification. “Pulling yourself up by the bootstraps” comes immediately to the fore wherever the spontaneous or “playful” movement of the subject’s desire becomes unproductive or wasteful. The gamified apparatus immediately reverts to a disciplinary apparatus the moment one falls below a certain income level. Self-care, self-love and self-enjoyment immediately transform into the love of “the grind” and “discipline over motivation” as soon as desire becomes economically unsustainable.
The spectral subject is therefore a completely self-transparent psychotic vessel that functions as a pure relay; a self-perpetuating algorithm compounding itself through a chain of trendy signifiers. The digital subject becomes a disembodied brand through constant and on-going activity of confessional (self)datafication. The production of the Homo Oeconomicus Algorismus implies the training and subjectification of informational ghosts; hyper-functional subjects who selectively renounce the self or parts of the self in accordance with the norms set by the market.
“As creatures of ‘pure mediality’, contemporary spectral subjects hence personify ‘absolute instrumentality’ in strict alignment with the key principles of liturgical power, their humanity ‘has been indexed to a kind of performance’ whereat all that defines them is their efficiency. In this sense, then, just like angels and divine ministers, spectral subjects are ciphers of ‘the essential insubstantiality of being.’ All their actions are characterized by ‘constitutive vicariousness’ and ‘necessary industriousness.’ Perpetually messaging and messengering, spectral subjects turn into both adverts for, and instruments of, the economic command. The pastoral ‘bounty’ is precisely this substitution of subjectivity with pure functionality” (Stypinska, 2024).
At the absolute centre of the symbolic order of digital sociality and the making of subjects into platforms, we encounter the divinity and the holy father: “A.I.” as the master-signifier orchestrating the discourse on the self.
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