Prosthetic Desirer

The following is a revised version of Luara Karlson-Carp’s essay, ‘The disembodied satisfier’, first published in I爱 AI (Aesthetic Calculations, 2024). Edited by Sam Lieblich, this collection of essays, fiction, interviews, and visual interventions addresses, from a psychoanalytic perspective, fantasy and desire in the dream of artificial intelligence. 

‘Everyone is female and everyone hates it’ – this statement forms the central thesis of Andrea Long Chu’s counter-canonical text, Females (2019), where being Female is defined by the desire, at a fundamental level, for someone to do your desiring for you. This formulation seems to figure desire, in essence, as a wish to be free from desire, or at least to offload or even offshore desire onto a desiring other – a prosthetic desirer, one willing to do the dirty work of wanting things in a compromised world. Tell me what to do, Daddy, is the dirtiest anyone gets for Chu.  

If the curtain of the human condition is pulled back to reveal a generalised squeamishness about desiring for oneself, with no rift or rupture differentiating this imagined field of desirers, are we still even talking about desire? In Chu’s thesis, desire has one sex only – the female sex – now positioned as the universal (everyone is female). This would nevertheless seem to necessitate a second term: a someone (or something) who would desire for a female, though within the logic of Chu’s proposition, this something could not itself have a sex. Taking up but pushing far beyond the queer-theoretical zeitgeist, Chu’s claim defies the long(ish) historical arc of binary gender doxa in which desire has been defined as hetero-desire. In the psychoanalytic paragon of this view, desire is figured as the force that differentiates the sexes, where, in its most reductive form, ‘the man’ actively desires and ‘the woman’ wants to be desired. But Chu dispenses with the masculine half, instead asserting that desire is the most gender-neutralising force of all. Desire, as universally female, negates sex.  

But what would universal femaleness even mean? Where is the second term against which the specificity of this ‘femaleness’ would determine itself? Where might it be glimpsed? If we’re all universally and femininely incapable of desiring something more determinate than desire’s abdication; if God, that great desirer, remains dead, but we still can’t quite let go… who is doing the work of desire? 

My claim is that Chu’s thesis shares a fundamental presupposition with algorithmic technology: that desire is sexually neutralising. Whilst algorithms may encode gender as a key data point alongside other finely grained ‘intersectional’ identity markers – age, race, income, vibes – that our digital footprint flags to Big Daddy Mainframe, the form of desire they assume of their users is always the same. For the algorithm, ‘users’ all desire in the same way, according to the same logic – there is no sexual difference at the level of desire. While the identities AI footprints are singular with respect to which products each subject wants, the subject AI addresses is universal at the more basic level of how they want. The content of our feeds and the advertisements that punctuate our scrolling may differ, but the mechanism of techno-seduction remains the same; the advertising feedback loop tells us what we desire, what’s cool, what products allow us to approximate the ideal our data imputes to us – equally. AI produces a ‘Chuian’ female: a subject tantalised by the promise of offloading the dirty labour of desiring onto someone, or, more accurately today, something else – the code canalising the app, the algorithm designating the feed, the interface smoothing the experience, and the fabric of economic relations overdetermining them all. 

Recently, at the university where I teach, there has been some buzzy excitement about new software – given the inspired moniker ‘Annotate’ – that allows students to annotate texts together. It will supposedly enable better ‘inter-cohort engagement’ during class. In a meeting where all in attendance are in various states of dizziness at the affordances of such innovative tech, I make the mental meme: we already have ‘annotate’ at home – it’s called talking to each other in class. But to say so there and then would have been to commit the highly anti-collegial sin of talking right past the fantasy at work: those around the table dream that the inscriptive power of this software might reignite the long-lost and much mourned desire of students to engage with texts. I get the sense that my colleagues in this meeting imagine – hopefully, libidinally – that this software might itself become a prosthetic for our students’ own textual desire. ‘Annotate’ might do their desiring for them. 

Later that night, as I lie scrolling in bed (being Female), I am advertised yet another AI personal assistant. In the ad, a listless and very hot ‘inner north’ girlie, as we say in Melbourne to denote a certain alt-left aesthetic zeitgeist, bemoans the difficulties of organising their morning subsistence tasks: brushing teeth, folding clothes, making breakfast – which to do first? The AI ‘assistant’ promises to rationalise their schedule such that they need not suffer from the dilemmas of executive function ever again, ordering these basic tasks into a seamless, eminently executable procedure. Whilst ostensibly targeted toward those with an attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder diagnosis, the ad has also been targeted towards me – perhaps more simply suffering a chronic case of fucking it up in a fucked up world and feeling fucked up about it. I think about the times I’ve struggled with this level of ‘getting it together’ – they certainly happen, but the app presents this all-too-human experience in extreme abstraction, reified as symptoms of an ineptitude divorced from context and cause. The times I can’t perform basic functions coincide with a hangover or, most abidingly, those periods when I cannot bear to publicly desire; when the idea of having to appear ruddy with the muck and gall of wanting things, things I probably feel I haven’t been very good at getting, is surely disgustingly obvious and odious to all who behold me, and scattered malaise becomes my only defence. When the very apprehension of my own desire repulses me, I’m plunged into an avoidant, rapacious, almost gluttonous sloth – in short, executive paralysis.   

The logic of this ad works, as arguably do most diagnostic criteria, through a severance of symptoms’ relationship to desire. In neat alignment with the biochemical model of health and mental health, the ad reduces the irreducibly complex particularity of one’s suffering to a discrete and generic behavioural descriptor, a problem that can be algorithmically solved for. Aetiology is asocial, psychology is objective, healing is a linear function. Executive paralysis apparently has nothing to do with you as a situated being within a particular world, a particular economy, a particular culture within which you struggle to find, and even bear admitting to, what you might desperately want.  

In abstracting symptom from world, such apps are able to parade themselves as magic bullets, offering up a beguiling substitute for desire in the form of techy large-language-model ‘workarounds’ for the problem of desire itself. If our schedules are planned by zeroes and ones, and our agency milled through a prosthetic, machinic will, perhaps it will become irrelevant that we can’t find a place for our desire in a world seemingly intent on eradicating sociality, let alone housing. Perhaps it won’t matter that through demoralisation our desire will have atrophied to such an extent that we can’t even wield it against the crippling anxiety that comes to take its place, nor the panacean compulsion this anxiety demands. Perhaps the very smart machine will do the work of desiring this life that I cannot bring myself to want. 

For the late philosopher of technology Bernard Stiegler, technology is not merely a means to an end, the right tool for the job – rather it comprises the continual process of augmenting our capacities through artificial extension and enhancement. Technics is the ‘prosthesis of the human’. Prosthetics – which for Stiegler include techniques as elementary as writing all the way up to complex machines and AI systems – constitute the ‘exteriorisation’ of our knowledge and know-how into material objects. And this has anthropological implications: the human, for Stiegler, is not defined by some internal capacity such as consciousness, but by our external relationship with matter, insofar as the human, techno-prosthetic, and wider material world are locked in continuous mutual transformation. Perhaps, then, we could say that AI is the technical coming of an immaterial prosthesis, of not merely exteriorised knowledge, but an exteriorised desiring. It’s in this sense that the two AI technologies, ‘Annotate’ and the AI ‘personal assistant’, that I’ve cited above could be considered paradigmatic forms of Chuian Female desiring technologies: they offer us a fantasy of technics as prosthetic desire; they exteriorise the know-how of desire.  

There is, however, a popularly thematised form of techno-sexual AI that is aligned with masculinity, and not the flag of femininity we have so far sailed beneath. This paradigm of AI figures it as the passive Female receptacle who wants nothing but what the user wants, where it is the user who is figured as the one with desire. This is arguably the most ubiquitous cultural representation of technics vis-à-vis desire, epitomised by the sex doll and discussed at length by Isabel Millar as the trope of the sexbot, and undeniably animating the more recent phenomenon of the NPC – ‘non-playable characters’, minor characters in video games whose comportment and mannerisms are imitated by livestreamers (usually sexy ladies). Their performances comprise the offering of uncannily formulaic statements and gestures in response to equally formulaic viewer provocations in a monetised exchange (if ‘mmm, ice cream so good’ means anything to you, I’m telling you something you already know; if it doesn’t, keep up the good work). Rather than a model of enjoyment routed through our passivity, this trope presents the fantasy of a slavish other, the other who is infinitely available and, ergo, infinitely satisfying.  

Perhaps this fantasy performs well when we want to feel powerful and agential in a humiliatingly contingent world, when we want to fuck without being fucked. But the execution of this fantasy most often seems to miss the mark, proliferating equal and opposite effects elsewhere. Perhaps this fantasy of our having limitless agency might be merely the other side of the coin of our desire for absolute passivity. Maybe in the figure of the sexbot, the camgirl, the parasocial NPC gf, we find not our potent agency reflected back to us, but rather its overdetermination by our fear of wanting something more specific and more supportive of our lives than the feeling that, just for a moment, we lack nothing. There’s a kickback, a moment when the sexbot becomes less a vessel than a mirror to our emptiness, one which leaves us running in shame to Femaleness. We might find the symptomatic effects of this flight, for example, in students’ lack of desire to read and discuss a text with others, or maybe in the pervasive cultural decline of desire for one’s life. We might identify its effects in the stupefied anticlimax of finally ‘pulling out’ of a three-hour-long scrolling session to find life right where it was left, only now even less desirable, less giving, less rich in infinity.  

Such lacks only intensify the drive for a prosthetic desiring other, and the yearning to be back inside the nonhuman embrace of interpassive enjoyment curated by the algorithm. Satisfaction in meatspace seems harder and harder to come by as our muscle for interactions with others, absent an interface and mediated only by our bodies and voices, grows flaccid and unwilling; through these feedback loops, desire is gradually offshored to the space of the virtual. This slow re-assignment of the primary organ of our desire to a (supposedly) immaterial, digital prosthetic is at once the product of our desire to be desired (and satisfied) infinitely and unconditionally, and the lousy fallout of committing ourselves to technical conduits that promise such ‘satisfaction’ – the shame of which leads us back to the dream of someone who would do our desiring for us. 

If all are of Females born and to Femaleness return, is this world-historical victory of the Female sex the result of some inevitability, a preordained march? Chu seems to accept this eidolon in generalised and even naturalised terms without caring to know much about her genesis. Have we always been Female? Has the idea of sexual difference been mere misrecognition all along? And what is the relationship between Femaleness and our particular historical-technical epoch? Have we always been this squeamish about our desire? At stake is not only the ubiquity of this techno-extruded Female, but also a political question about whether we really want or ought to be giving ground to her ascendancy… Such questions could turn us toward those of political economy and Marxist historicism. Or they could turn us toward Nietzsche’s critique of monotheistic morality and Deleuze’s reading of it as a valorisation of active over reactive orientations to life. We could also go into Heidegger’s claim that modern technology ‘enframes’ life in the modality of ‘using up’ – but we may not want to. Whatever the case, the question of desire appears to demand a turn to psychoanalysis and its fundamental preoccupation with desire and desire’s relationship to sex. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan claimed that capitalism was historically contemporary with the emergence of the infamous diagnostic ‘hysteria’, and it is through this claim that we may be able to historicise Chu’s thesis of the universal Female, as well as the exploitability of her universally tepid desire by algorithmic technics.  

To return briefly to Marx, capitalism designates that historical era in the mode of production when the traditional, hierarchical organisation of social relations comes to be replaced by an abstract social form of universal exchange. Social relations are then mediated by this economic principle of universal exchangeability, and the socius, though freed from feudal hierarchy, is subjected to the ‘formal equality’ of economic imperatives (epitomised beautifully in Thatcher’s ‘there is no such thing as a society’). From a psychoanalytic perspective, this development of a market-mediated sociality pulls the rug out from under the feet of what Lacan called the ‘master’s discourse’ that stipulates our place and role in the social whole. When capitalism severs the social bonds that once provided some kind of injunction to limit and canalised the subject in its existential questioning – albeit via traditional and hierarchical measures – the symbolic order can no longer guarantee an answer to the adolescent question, ‘What does the Other (the symbolic order) want from me?’ This question then becomes culturally paradigmatic, assuming material form as a representative psychic case, and the hysteric is born.  

The inability of the symbolic order to provide answers to the hysteric subject’s why, why, why then becomes an opportunity for the market economy. For certain Lacanians such as Slavoj Žižek, this hysteric questioning can be directly exploited by capitalism, where the commodity is presented as the substitute for identity cathexis in the absence of an existential designation by the symbolic order. I may not be able to locate myself in a monolithically traditional and totalising social hierarchy, but I can form an identity via the equal opportunity of the market. The hysteric cobbles together an identity informed by commodities, endlessly trying to dam the hole in the symbolic. The inevitable failure of this project renders it endless, mimicking the ceaseless cycle of {crisis→self-revolutionise} characteristic of the very capitalist economic system. The hysteric subject and the commodity production cycle find a mutually sustaining symbiosis that, despite imperilling the existence of all complex life forms on earth and making things in general suck enormously, seems to function alarmingly well. 

If we take Lacan’s account seriously, desire is necessarily and ineluctably structured by lack. But within the feedback loops it exploits so well, AI seems to find its parasitic home in a lack of the kind of lack that would make desire bearable. If we say that the consumerist artillery of late capital functions by offering something we don’t have (the commodity) with the promise that it will satisfy, the fantasy of AI seems to be of a slightly different form. It offers us not merely satisfaction – the possibility of lossless data management, ‘connectivity’, curation, efficiency, and total access to information – but an other, and most importantly, a desiring other. The fantasy we have of AI is epitomised by the mirage of another who desires not for itself, but for you. A commodity has powerful affordances – buy the right products and you can represent anything. The commodity can make a woman of you, it can make a cyborg (not a goddess) of you, it can make you a butcher, a baker, a sex-toy sacer … But commodities can’t embody – or disembody – an agency that wants, an agency that effects, an agency that intellects for you. 

Yet there is a strange attribution that occurs almost universally in the way AI’s merits and promises are understood, an attribution without which the fantasy of AI would be untenable. This is the attribution of agency to the computational powers of AI, a kind of autonomous, anthropomorphised desiring agency. Here I am not merely talking about the romantic self-conscious attribution of this agency by so-called ‘accelerationists’, who believe that AI is the materialisation of a superior inhuman version of our own intelligence, a kind of ur-agency; I’m talking about the uncritical Silicon-Valley-cum-everyday tendency to anthropomorphise all technics, not just AI. It’s the way mayors of so-called Smart Cities claim, ‘this technology will change everything!’, or the way less techy but more alarmist municipal authorities might lament, ‘what will this technology do to us!’, as though technology itself is noetically and desirously plotting our salvation or demise under the hood. This approach to technics reaches its climax in AI. One hears more frequently, and with greater zeal: ‘AI knows …’, ‘AI thinks …’, ‘AI will destroy us all!’, presumptions that paradoxically assume on the one hand AI’s mirror-like capacity for anthropomorphic agency and thought, and on the other its sui generis status as an alien force that programmes from the seat of its very own soul.  

This conceptual dissonance also assumes AI’s objectivity, inducing a blindness toward – or even naturalisation of – the racist and sexist biases embedded in algorithmic processes; we claim AI thinks racist thoughts, cognises sexist deductions. But the existence of these prejudices within technical systems merely betrays our wilful ignorance toward the effects of our disavowed desires – we put the mirror in the wrong place. AI doesn’t mimic our capacities, only the content of their creations. We prefer to see in AI a desiring, thinking other, an autonomous, alien soul – inhuman in the perfection of its objectivity – than to confront the horror of the all-too-familiar image in the reflective surface of the racist/aggressive/needing/desiring algorithmically programmed platform.  

Our refusal to recognise what is ultimately the absent core of artificial intelligence reveals (and perhaps this is what I’m really getting at) another desire – one harboured within our desire for others to desire for us: the desire to look away from our own desire, to disavow it, disown it and reject it. Would we prefer to ‘go Female’ than admit our desire’s bald-faced rapaciousness? 

This disavowal might feel ever more necessary at a time when the rapaciousness of our economy has begun to consume our own environmental conditions of possibility, and to accelerate the automation of genocidal intent. In such a world we fetishise the interface and believe that virtual reality has no material substrate – to think otherwise would be to ruin the semblance of the riskless infinity opened up by the magical, immaterial world that algorithmic technology supposedly conjures. In the face of finite resources and the horror of our appetite for destruction, the refusal to concede the emptiness of AI is perhaps also the fantasy of bearing no responsibility. If our investment in algorithms allows us to proceed as if we have no desire of our own – as if desire were a lost cause, not worth the risk, and as if we therefore have no agency – then we are free to imagine ourselves as unimplicated. Without desire, we bear no responsibility.  

Perhaps the standpoint from which we can claim we are all Female also allows us to refuse a crucial difference within this field of sameness – we’re all implicated in minutely kaleidoscopic relations of fucking over or being fucked. We’re all multiply and contradictorily wanting and repressing and aggressing and avoiding and scapegoating and refusing. Both Chu’s Females thesis and our cultural attribution of a faux agency to AI paper over this key differential. The ‘disembodied’ satisfier of the ‘virtual’ reality hides, as its condition, the visibility of labour. Unless we can figure the ways in which we are situated differently with respect to each other – not merely at the level of our flat, intersectionally-coded digital identity footprint, or our economically mediated ‘formal equality’, but rather at the level of responsibility and agency, aggression and desire; unless this figuring can enable us to gain traction on the multi-vectoral harms we perpetuate and suffer; and unless, in apprehending these differences, we are supported to find the courage to lay claim to our wrongs and to our hopes and dreams and dilemmas… then why wouldn’t we want to look away entirely? To kick the can down the road? To see the ghost in the machine? Why wouldn’t we want someone else to do our desiring for us?  

I’m not suggesting that there is some promised land in which we could want, and know what we want, with immediate and seamless perspicacity. The dream of enlightenment is for those who deny the beauty of meditation. But if we outsource our desirous capacity to improvise our own responses to the problem of the unknowability of what this life wants from us – responses only we can make – we careen into circuits and ruts fashioned by the false promise of an easy way out, and find ourselves rushing to offload the only challenge that individuates us.  

In furnishing us with the fantasy of an artificial desiring other, the most seductive possibility AI markets us is an ‘escape’ – not only from ourselves, but from the deep abiding necessity of our relations to other people. AI proffers satisfaction without risk, and it conflates this satisfaction with wholeness, promising a completion that would inoculate us against the horrors of egoic injury human others inevitably occasion. In doing so, AI holds out the illusion of an identity and existence that could sustain itself free from the injurious work of love – a labour that demands sociality, a sociality that is necessarily dangerous and fraught. In sociality both the impossibility of love and its necessity inhere. 

By offering us a surrogate mode of socialisation through the prostheticisation of desire, AI sells us the fantasy of a disembodied kind of satisfier, one who might secretly shop our yens, but promises more fundamentally to protect us from the bodily risk of being in the world with others, others with whom we might actually experience the ultimate disaster of falling in love. There can be no love without a willing, desiring body, and there can be no willing desire without speech. To love requires that one quite literally embody the risk – and wrest it back from whatever prosthetic we might have rented it out to – of becoming the fleshy desirer willing to speak to another. 

What remains of sexual difference when we are all Female? Andrea Long Chu’s thesis is surely a kind of inverted appropriation of Freud, who claimed that there is only one libido, and that libido is male. Lacan’s later attempts to move away from the vestiges of essentialism in Freud’s work led him to understand this claim in relation to the general insufficiency of speech. Try as we might, we can never say the whole truth. This impossibility marks Chu’s Female still. As soon as this Female body speaks – this body defined by its desiring someone else to do its desiring for it – she admits desire. She admits to another desire-sex, another sex whom she desires; she admits to a desire for that other desire who wants to take up her impossible call to demonstrate its desire. But if there is no body who speaks, there can be no fission, no encounter – satisfaction would be instead diverted around the speaking body, where sex need never enter into the equation at all.  

Here, the social bond is not only made abstract – it is entirely bracketed. One boards the lonely treadmill of untiring attempts to fill the void with one more image, one more algorithmic gimmick, one more ‘tool’ to prevent a confrontation with the relationship between desire and life, while more often than not, an unimaginably precarious and very much material offshore worker pulls the levers of the smoke-and-mirror interface of our ‘immaterial’, ‘disembodied’ AI satisfier.  

But even if we risk it all and wrest our ill-fated and queasy desire from those ‘agencies’ we fantasise are keeping it safe (whilst making fine returns), even if we submit ourselves to the potential horror of other people, there is no guarantee that they will ever make us whole, or that they can ever make good those obscene affordances AI parades. The whole saga relies on our deep-down knowing that this kind of wholeness is an impossibility. But in tarrying with the horrifically abject act of saying, of speaking to others as a body, of raw-dogging the reality of encounter, hairy and interfaceless; in putting our grotty, yearning bodies on the line, we might open up something more incalculable than satisfaction: an impossibility that moves; something that can bear it – at least, some of the time.