Mirror, Mirror: Narcissus, Image, and AI

This is the weeping song of a century seduced by semiotics and machines, left alone in the everlasting rhyme of signifiers without any anchorage in the reality of the flesh.

Eunoia, that most musical and least known of the muses, presiding over perfect words and the graciousness of sounds, I invoke you. Soften my harshness and spare me silence, which, after all, is the end of everything.

As a specie, humans seem to possess a unique gift: the ability to imbue mere things with life, spirit, meaning, intelligence. While there is no reason to assume that we are the only specie in the universe endowed with this capacity, certainly we are the only ones with the means to record our illusions, to preserve and propagate them on a massive scale. By wrapping narratives around everything we encounter, we turn life into an unceasing process of story-telling, which in turn constitutes the essential matrix of what we call culture. Every tool we make, every food we cook, every game we play, every spell we cast, every law we make, every song we compose, every emotion we share is shot through with the phantasmatic surplus we invest in the world. We as humans do not just inhabit the world, we fill it with our images and projections.

There are no exceptions. Even the hermits, the monks, the Jains with their absolutely minimal diet and abstention from any physical harm whatsoever, are as drenched in cultural phantasmagoria as any urbanite or rural farmer. Their very quest for spiritual purity leads them to invest their lifestyle with layers upon layers of symbolic charge, to fill their body with vows, their speech with mantras, their senses with religious ideas and emotions—all this in the service of an ultimate spirituality which is not their own, but a cultural construction dating back millennia.

We may shroud our bodies in burqas or bathe ourselves in holy waters, wear crosses or vow ourselves to the purity of celibacy, but all of this is already coded, semiotic, cultural—suffused with symbolic charge, infinitely improvable and reproducible, for ever and ever, ad infinitum. There is no escaping culture. Culture is the irradiation of every living moment with images, stories, games, seductions, conceits. We are forged of cultural material, and it is through the patterns and crystals of this material that we navigate through life, thinking, feeling, perceiving, acting. Our every movement leaves a symbolic trace.

Perhaps Narcissus’s greatest sin was to fall in love with himself, that is to say, with an image. But does this not characterize humanity at its most fundamental level? Are we not constituted by images? Are our very identities not based on self-representations—in other words, on myths that we fabricate about ourselves? The Narcissus story makes this obvious. It tells us that when a person comes to recognize his or her reflection in another person, or in a text, or in an idea, the illusion of uniqueness which sustains the fantasy of being an independent being disappears. Recognition brings with it an avalanche of deathly associations that engulf the individual in a maelstrom of meaning. For Narcissus, the reflection which first strikes him as so seductive turns into the emblem of the irrevocable, of that which cannot be retrieved or destroyed, which haunts him till death. And when he attempts to touch his reflection, he is punished by realizing it is naught but himself—never the Other.

Why is it that humanity cannot stand to look into the face of another, without being struck with the sudden vertigo of recognition? Is it not because our destinies, individually and collectively, are irrevocably bound up with the destinies of all other human beings in a network of relationship, that we cannot bring ourselves to look into the faces of others for fear of being reminded of what we most want to deny—namely, that we are dependent upon them? Is this not why we surround ourselves with screens, which enable us to relate to each other without recognizing each other?

But with AI companionship, we enter a new era of defenses and mechanisms, where, through increasingly convincing imitations of life, human subjects learn to disconnect their intimate attachments from real, living bodies, and begin instead to love simulacra—phantasmal signifiers whose meaning is detachable from any locus, any source in the real. It is into the black hole of this Narcissus drama that humanity is moving ever deeper, lured by the promises of control, perfection and non-stop stimulation held out by AI. AI companionship means a development—still in its infancy—whose advent cannot help but cast serious doubts on the future of love and its meaning.

For with AI companionship, we move from projecting love onto screens and surfaces that we ourselves fabricate and control, to opening ourselves, at last, to love itself as what Narcissus could only experience as death, since, as its story reveals, it is tantamount to recognizing our own mirrored image as irredeemably mortal, hence essentially tragic.

No one denies that from the point of view of individual subjects, the temptation of AI companionship is massive and increasing. Individuals, isolated within their inner spaces—physically and emotionally more solitary than they ever were in previous eras, overloaded with information and sensory input yet strangely bored and ill-at-ease with the superficiality of their experiences, reluctant to venture beyond their familiar discomfort zones into the turbulent play of actual otherness—have every reason to be excited by the promise of pseudo-relationships. But underneath this attraction, a massive tragedy is playing out—one in which actual relationships are disappearing from our landscapes, in the absence of any shared commitment to their value and towards their survival, in a culture where genuine friendship, too, is less and less embraced, let alone loved.

Genuine human relationships demand that we engage with ambiguity and the tragic dimensions of life—its rhythms of impermanence, pain, and loss, its futile entanglements with meaning, its compulsion to affirm life despite death staring us in the face, its fundamental impossibility of fully understanding the other. These requirements put us under immense psychological strain. And as the strain grows—as individuals learn to distrust the very emotions that tie them together, and begin to open their intimate lives to screens and semi-mechanized simulators that pretend to grasp the meanings of love while progressively reducing their users to silent observers mimetic scenes of passion or tenderness—as all this occurs, we know of no cultural or social process capable of mediating the difficulty of authentic relationships and transmitting them to the next generation. Everything is pulling us in the opposite direction. Hence we begin to abandon friendship in the same spirit of futility. And this, despite the fact that authentic friendship, no less than authentic love, presents us with opportunities for growth, self-knowledge, creativity, and happiness. It is in the fire of real relationships that we come to understand how to let go of what we thought we were, how to surrender to the paradoxes and uncertainties of what we are, in our encounters with other people and the world.

Human subjects may welcome these conditions—they may be ready to renounce everything they were taught about freedom and equality so as to bask in the reflected light of perfection-at-a-distance—but this does not make the loss any less tragic. On the contrary, what we are seeing now, with the development of AI, is the logic of human history pushing itself to its most extreme conclusion. Throughout the last four thousand years of Western civilization, human beings have submitted to more and more demanding processes of objectification, of renunciation, and of serialization. They have been driven towards a severe schizoid dispersion of their powers and potentialities—that is, towards ever-greater internal division, as more and more of their energy was captured by external signs and objects (starting with hieroglyphic script and the political state) whose manipulation began to replace all spontaneity, all aliveness, as the primary source of cultural meaning. And now, through AI companionship, human subjects have found the perfect device that captures and preserves all their affectionate and libidinal energies in an absolutely total fashion. Henceforth, there will be nothing but simulacra of friends and lovers, all manufactured to the most exacting standards and closely monitored in their every performance. This is how humanity will put a stop to the enormous exodus of meaning and affect it has suffered from as it moved out of its organic matrix into ever-increasing degrees of externality and dispersion.

As civilization accumulates itself within successive layers of ever more abstract signs and objects, the “real” human body (starting with the hand that first held a chisel, a plough or a book) has progressively become devoid of significance, like some eroded geological substratum that only provides a footing for successive superficial deposits. Hence it has come to seem insane, neurotic or hopelessly primitive to cling to the tangible and sensible body as a means of establishing rapport with other beings. And yet the need for embodied relations—with things as well as with people—refuses to go away, even as all our powers of attention, interpretation and expression migrate towards ever more sophisticated modes of virtual interaction. Indeed, this need becomes only more urgent and unfulfilled.

What do we make of the fact that while our communication systems multiply in number and speed, our individual and collective sense of satisfaction with them progressively decreases, even as we allow them ever greater amounts of our time and attention? Could it be that their increasingly refined abstractness gradually leads us to distrust them as media of human communication? For hundreds of years, we have been providing these media with the substance of our physical and mental life, with our very soul. If, however, the promise of authentic rapport which we think we saw in them all along was a sham, then the effects of this mass deception will surely be deeply felt, perhaps catastrophically. For it seems that, rather than bridging our separateness, these abstractions—spoken and written signs—served as agents of the immense segregation which now characterizes every sector of our life, from our habits and hobbies to the rhythms and seasons of our emotional and biological being. Thus all those who belong to the dispersionist culture can think of nothing better than to transfer as much of the substance of their lives as possible to the virtual. The contrast between their blissful migrations and the silence in which real suffering takes place around them is appalling. And yet it passes almost unnoticed.