On production of meaning for Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

This article aims to understand the discursive materialities that are constituted transversally to the denomination Artificial Intelligence (AI). From the theoretical and methodological perspective of Materialist Discourse Analysis, we seek to comprehend its inscription within the functioning of legal formalism and within the cynical play of social networks. Between the technicism of the juridical form and the technocracy of the subject individuated by the bourgeois State lies the ideological orientation point for the production of technical instruments: utilitarianism and automatism as effects of the capitalist mode of production on technical practices and their objects. Our corpus, therefore, is composed of statements about the use of AI — in the case of Bill 2338/2013 — and statements by AI, in the gesture of use of tools that are being naturalized in digitalized life. Theoretically, we work with a concept of AI that escapes the notions of tool or instrument and allows for a materialist understanding of technology, from the perspective of a subject decentered from the process of production (class struggle in history). The machine of meta-knowledges is, therefore, a continuation of the desire for total knowledge from the encyclopedic dream and the circular engendering of the hylomorphic scheme of return to form, which silences all gestures of material operation until its effectively finished production. From use to its determining conditions, we seek to update the analytical gesture undertaken by Pêcheux (1975) in highlighting that metaphysical realism and logical empiricism are — not merely conveniently — the complementary forms of bourgeois ideology within the Ideological State Apparatuses