The following is an excerpt from an ongoing treatise on liminality, postmodernity and artificial intelligence, called “Anti-liminality: The transcendence of “the limit” in the Postmodern Age”. The work tries to understand how AI can meaningfully impact postmodern life, adressing questions of belonging, transition, community and disciplinary fields. More details coming soon!
Artificial Intelligence and the Possibility of Anti-Liminality
Artificial Intelligence accelerates the dissolution of boundaries, yes. But can it perhaps also be used to construct a world beyond them? The author argues that it can.
The essence of Anti-Liminality lies in the use of will within reality, so that the individual may find meaning in a world which is increasingly incapable of providing it. Artificial Intelligence can serve this attitude, since, through its potentially transcendent characteristics, it can put this will to productive use. Because it is artificial, however, it remains ultimately subject to the limitations of reality. It can therefore never itself become a utopia, nor can it become a utopian instrument. What we have instead is a machine – immaterial and multifaceted – which, if used properly, may help produce things capable of filling, or at least addressing, that existential vacuum.
Given the global scale and influence of this machine, its proper use cannot simply be approached through moralism. Its individualized character and the seemingly inexhaustible amount of knowledge it offers almost demand a different approach from that applied to ordinary inventions and discoveries. The primary question should therefore not be merely “Does it cause harm?”, but rather “How can it be capable of causing harm?”
If Artificial Intelligence is not to become an obstacle, or even a threat, to everyday life, a sensible approach would therefore be one that is both consequentialist and voluntaristic, in other words, explicitly anti-liminal. Our guiding principle cannot become fixed at either extreme, because doing so creates the possibility of tragedy.
A blind fixation upon consequences – that is, upon reality – may indeed produce remarkable things. Yet it may also construct a Machiavellian white dwarf, a simulacrum of wild nature, containing more negative than positive consequences. This is almost predetermined: however closely related we may be to other forms of life, we are rational beings, while they are not. We built the zoos. We domesticated animals. We created animal welfare organizations. Are we now to retreat?
On the other hand, surrendering entirely to voluntarism leaves Artificial Intelligence at the mercy of the most unpredictable passions and desires. Once reality and its limitations are reduced to a temporary inconvenience, the margin for error – if not outright hubris – increases. A tool possessing extraordinary capabilities becomes a companion on blind and incessant journeys, a builder of castles in the sand, immediately exposed to whatever wave appears next, reminding us of an existence that remains bounded and limited.
The balance, the measure, required to make full use of Artificial Intelligence is therefore, as usual, our own choice.
It is not an easy road. It is perhaps better understood as a narrow path, since this balance is fragile and easily disturbed. We already inhabit a world in which boundaries are continually dissolving, a condition which hardly makes stability any easier.
Can stability exist at all?
If postmodernity fragmented and dissolved inherited boundaries, and interdisciplinarity demonstrated that the practical abolition of scientific borders is possible and achievable, then how does one stabilize a collapse? Particularly when Artificial Intelligence represents the technological mechanism through which this dissolution, the implosion, is accelerated within the boundaries of human identity itself.
Stabilization is therefore relatively difficult.
What remains is the possibility of resistance: of saving what can still be saved before it is too late.
Artificial Intelligence may contribute to this implosion and perhaps extend it into more personal territories that were previously inaccessible. But this does not mean that it cannot also serve as an instrument for recovering those things which still had, still have, and may continue to have value.
The countless “communities” of contemporary life, however contradictory and often absurd they may appear, conceal behind themselves a deeply human need: belonging.
Through this plausible, and often excessively serious, performance of belonging, the social subject attempts to feel like a member, a part, of a whole composed of people who resemble them. Thus, however imperfectly, satisfying the need to belong leads toward satisfying the need to be.
Within this theater of production, Artificial Intelligence may assist in deepening, and perhaps even substantiating, that belonging. Since it accelerates the dissolution of boundaries even in questions of identity, it may use that very dissolution to produce, according to the needs and demands of its user, simulacra of identities (probably of the second order as per Baudrillard, since they transcend utopias without becoming imprisoned by the self-purpose of control), which possess the characteristics and particularities desired by their users, without necessarily carrying the historical burden or social circumstances from which communities originally emerged.
Artificial Intelligence therefore dissolves boundaries, but it may simultaneously establish new ones.
The difference is that the boundaries being dissolved were, to a considerable extent, beyond immediate human control, whereas their emerging representations can possess an explicitly anthropocentric and human-made character.
Van Gennep writes in the first chapter of The Rites of Passage, “Classification of Rites”:
“In certain ritual arrangements in which the transitional period is sufficiently complex to constitute an independent state, the arrangement is doubled.”
Artificial Intelligence may double this arrangement of liminality.
On the one hand, it can accelerate the collapse of already unstable boundaries. On the other, it can accelerate the construction of novel representations of those boundaries, through the knowledge incorporated into it by its programming and through the personalization that characterizes it.
And here another question emerges:
Can Artificial Intelligence, artificially, as artificial itself, produce a simulacrum of a threshold?
Can we use it to construct a hyperreality almost indistinguishable from the ordinary one, yet capable of escaping the established and endless transience of liminality?
This question, like Anti-Liminality itself, can be approached from the double perspective of will and reality.
Not merely whether it can be done.
More importantly, whether we ourselves want it to be done.
Can we unlock our cells and confront the unpredictable, yet achievable, world beyond the bars of comfort and justification?
Or are we simply talking in order to talk, rather than speaking in order to say something?
[Excerpt from Part 3: Artificial Intelligence as the Accelerant]