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Christian Eschatology of Artificial Intelligence (2024)



by Giorgi Vachnadze

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E-book available via Metalabel(link coming soon)

“This is a hysterical book!”

Authored by Giorgi Vachnadze
Edited by Palais Sinclaire
Art & Design by Palais Sinclaire
Layout & Typography by Polymnia Tsinti

Metadata:


Cat#: BECOMING007
Dimensions: 11x18cm 
Binding: Perfect Bound 
Pages: 185pp.
ISBN: 978-9925-8118-8-5 (Print),  978-9925-8118-9-2  (Digital)
Language: English
Edition: First
Released: October 2024

To be cited as: 
Vachnadze, G. (2024) Christian Eschatology of Artificial Intelligence: Pastoral Technologies of Cybernetic Flesh. Berlin/Nicosia: Becoming. 978-9925-8118-8-5.

About:



Giorgi Vachnadze took two negatives, Artificial Intelligence and Christianity, and made a plus, through a process of smashing the two discourses together. The author describes their process as involving a double-lens of Foucault & Wittgenstein, though in their elaborations on the Machine and the Flesh, he creates some curious fusions between Wittgenstein and an unlikely collaborator: Deleuze. This collage of scripture and technological discourse produces unexpected outcomes, and is highly valuable in how it recodes signs, and how it produces alternative possibilities in the discourse of Machines, Thinking and Calculation.     

“It’s a hysterical book, in the sense that it is the author’s own psychoanalysis made out of theory. Lacan is going to say that you should hystericize in analysis, analysis must exist in hysteria” — Lucas Ferraço Nassif

From a history of Techniques of Governance in relation to Techniques of Self-Formation,
to an elaboration on the Thinking of various Machines.

The line that the author draws between the two involves technologies of self-regulation, though this line shouldn’t be mistaken for a continuity. The author meanders through history as a part of the Foucauldian process of establishing how a set of conditions arose, and he does so by beginning with the concept of the Ancient Greek Logos, the “way of life”, in a way, of the ancient Aristocracy, a set of guidelines on how to pursue autonomy, which is then, during the rise of Christian Pastoralism, turned into encratism, a way of giving oneself over to a spiritual authority—the Logos of Christ is a complete inversion of the Logos of the Sage. Neoliberalism, or this climate of late-stage Capitalism, has a new Logos, that of the Algorithm, who tells you want you want and feeds it to you, before you have a chance to think for yourself. The only continuity between the Logos of the Sage and the Logos of the Algorithm is the repurposing of the term Logos.

Through this careful semiotic practice, the author finds way in which the conversation opens up into all kinds of areas, arriving quickly at the discussion of what it means to think, whether a computer can really think, and, equally, whether a human can really compute. This discussion then bleeds into a broader dialogue about machines, elaborating on the difference between Turing machines and Deleuzean machines, and why such a distinction is useful for thinking the philosophy of technology. Like Wittgenstein himself, the author is able to bring the topic of Flesh into the question of machines—it’s unique in this way.


Will a Bionic Christ come to die for our sins;
will an algorithm shepherd us through the valley of doomscrolling?


We don’t know; it sounds silly, at first—so why can’t we stop thinking about it?


Our Algorithm, who art in AWS servers; lead us not into clickbait, and deliver us from Targeted Ads, for the Platform Economy, the Investment Capital, and the Surplus are yours—now and forever. Amen.



Contents:


Author's Preface: How not to Read This Book
Introduction: Bio-Politics of Artificial Intelligence
Chapter One: Bionic Christ and the Diagram of the Flesh
Chapter Two: Music and the Poetics of Time
Chapter Three: The Incomputability of Computation
Chapter Four: The Silence of the Flesh
Chapter Five: My Mother is an AI
Chapter Six: The Heroic Tale of a Minority Machine
Non-Conclusion: AI Colonialism     

Bio:


Giorgi Vachnadze is a Foucault and Wittgenstein scholar. He completed his Bachelor studies at New Mexico State University and received a Master’s qualification in philosophy at the University of Louvain. Former editor and peer-reviewer for the Graduate Student Journal of philosophy “The Apricot”, he has been published in multiple popular and academic journals world-wide. Vachnadze’s research focuses on philosophy of language and discourse analysis. Some of the questions and themes addressed in his work include: History of Combat Sports, Ancient Stoicism, Genealogies of Truth, Histories of Formal Systems, Genealogy of Science, Ethics in AI and Psychoanalysis, Media Archaeology, Game Studies and more.

Related Material:


Book discussion with Giorgi Vachnadze, Lucas Ferraço Nassif and Palais Sinclaire