Vectofascism

So, first off, I really want to thank Ito and Francis for inviting me here today. It's wonderful to be a part of this conference, especially as we are all starting to get organized around this really important issue. Now, of course, I have to apologize for my terrible French accent. I hope that it will be understandable and cute. What I am going to share with you today is quite dense conceptually, but I do my best to make it accessible and clear for everyone, even people who don't work with AI. So, I'd like to start with this quote here. Now, I know that sitting Gilles Deleuze, especially after the World Horizon concept, might seem a bit kitsch, maybe counterproductive. But here are the things I believe this particular phrase is going to take a completely new meaning when we place it within the context of anti-fascist politics of Latin space. So, for decades now, we are witnessing historical transformation. And honestly, we find that it is a very important part of the modern world. So, for decades now, we are witnessing historical transformation. And honestly, we find that it is a very important part of the modern world.

We find ourselves couched between two dangerous pitfalls. On one side, there is a paranoia of over-interpretation, reading too much into everything. And on the other side, there is complete indifference to this historical mutation that's happening right now before our eyes. This transformation we are living through, the shift from capitalism to neoliberalism and now to authoritarianism, is resistant to any kind of change. In this extreme bit of a matter, we both commit to our ambulances, and even at the end of our lives, meant it as a warning, to our costums and internal circumstances. So what we want to do now in effect, is to change the desenvolviks of the old concepts into a more modern reality, having easy access to the new concepts and not afraid of them. Don't mushroom it. Suppose we have replaced our usual categories. This doesn't fit nearly into the boxes we are used to work with. What I'm presenting today synthesizes a part of a book I'm currently writing with Yves Citton. And there's some concept of Cantaméas, who is a French philosopher. So here's how I want to structure our time together. First, I want to propose a minimal definition of latent space.

Because, of course, AI is not a technology. It's not, absolutely, it's not a technology. And after, I want to analyze attentional mobilization as an affective mechanism. From there, I want to demonstrate why the concept of vector fascism is so relevant right now. And talk about the condition of use for this term. Well, I examine how certain generated images, and not all images, the one we are seeing everywhere online, actually constitute the concept of vector fascism. And I want to demonstrate how the concept of vector fascism is so relevant right now. And I want to demonstrate how the concept of vector fascism is so relevant right now. Finally, and this is where I think we can find some hope, I want to identify your own latent spaces, the ones that are capable of countering the cultural hegemony of vector fascism. And Atoneo especially asked me to talk a bit about my work, as well. I will do that. I'm also on the field of trajectory. I really don't like it. So I'm going to offer you a minimal definition of latent space here, and I think it's a really important concept. But I'm pretty sure that Antonio will be much more precise than I am when he speaks.

So latent space is a technical concept from AI, but I think it actually determines a new ontological configuration of our time. Let me break this down for you. So essentially, it's a mathematical space where information becomes vectors. So vectors is a really important word. Vectors are just entities that are defined with two things, magnitude and direction. Think of them like arrows that are variable lengths and can point in any direction. Now, this vectorial logic, this way of organizing information, radically transforms our relationship to meaning itself. We are not just talking about new technology here. We are talking about fundamental shifts in how meaning gets constructed and circulated. What happens here is that the traditional signs lose their discrete character. So, well, for example, what I mean by that, it's graph M, the letters, and the letters. And like M, the word, they are no longer closed units that carry stable meaning. Instead of meaning, meaning becomes pure potentiality. It emerges from relational configuration between vectors. A vector doesn't exist in isolation. It exists only through its relative position to all other vectors around it. So we are moving from a world where words are fixed meanings, to a world where meaning is always relational, always contextual, always shifting based on the network of relationship.

And what is the effect? They are already manifest all around us. Our vectorized digital traces, every click, every search, every interaction, determine our choice and possibilities for action in a way we are only beginning to understand. EI, CHEP, or behavior, are the only things that are already present in our lives. So, we are only beginning to understand. Onyx folks are 않아요� thatsodo puesto essa ar Workshop. But I would actually say something else there. And the answer clearly Baş physique surlin eKI Z минимalli au действieß changing how we think, how we choose, how we act in the world. But this transformation is also epistemological. It's changing how we know things. It's privilege induction of a hypothetical deductive method. It favors relational flows of a fixed mechanism, variable intensity of our stable identities. And here where things get really troubling. Just like with the non-hierarchical horizontality of the rhizome, remember this was supposed to be liberating. What was originally an emancipation paradigm has now become a weapon in the hand of the far right. This is the bitter irony we are facing. The very truths and concepts that were meant to be free us are being destroyed.

They are being turned against us. So we are facing a triple convergence that completely exceeds us. So first there's the acceleration of EI happening at a pace we cannot barely comprehend. Second, we have the ongoing extinction of our species. The climate crisis, biodiversity collapse, all of it. And third, there is the global rise of authoritarianism spreading across the world. Now, these phenomena exceed our capacity for understanding. And I think there are specific reasons why. They are too vast in scale. They are too fast and chaotic for man to grasp. And their articulation remains absolutely undetermined. We cannot figure out exactly how they connect to each other. The situation produces a really new effect. Something, in fact, we never experienced before as human beings. We are no longer only confronted with our individual finitude, our own personal mortality. Now we are facing the finitude of the entire species and all the living forms on this planet. Think about what this means. After our collective disappearance, there will be no one left to bear witness to what we have been. No one remembers us. No one to tell our story. Our mortality finds itself split, doubled between individual and collective.

We are dealing with both our personal death and the death of everything we've ever known and created. For this new condition, we can speak of disfinitude, a kind of mortality that goes beyond individual experience into something much more total. But all done. Because this catastrophic discourse is itself part of the theatre, in fact. We need to be really careful here. The effect of collapse is already circulating in latent space, vectorized in the form of anxieties inducing content, and here's the thing. Algorithms amplify our anxieties precisely because they generate engagement. So, catastrophism becomes a commodity. It's not just a reality we are facing. It's something that keeps us trapped in compulsive consumption of news. This effect of excess, so I repeat so many stuff you said already, gets amplified by a politic of attentional saturation, by a politic of attentional saturation, and Steve Bannon said, of course, floats the zone with shit. This strategy is really simple. Contaminates the informational ecosystem to create confusion and distress. Notice that the objective here is not to convince anyone of anything. It's to disorient people completely. When everything becomes contestable, when every fact, every truth claim, every piece of evidence can be questioned, what do we do?

We retreat to our belongings. We fall back on what we feel familiar, what we feel safe, what confirms what we already believed. Look, rather than analyzing with fascination the most esoteric and underground sources of Trumpism, and then drawing inspiration from them to create some new kitsch and encrypted art, we need to focus on definition and strategic struggle. There is a real risk here of overvaluing these esoteric sources, of fetishizing ficto-fascism, by believing, for example, that Nick Lan's CCRU is the hidden origin of alt-right, and that we have discovered the secret key of everything. But that's exactly the wrong approach. We can't be seduced by the intellectual puzzle of the world. So, back to 2040, I created the concept of ficto-fascism. And I forget I created this concept 10 years ago. So that's why I have a blog to have a memory. And I was, of course, inspired by the work concept of vectorial classes. But now the difference between ficto-fascism and vectorial classes is really important. I wrote a text about that a few days ago, but it's complex, so I don't want to talk about this. Here's a key point. Ficto-fascism is not simply fascism plus technology.

That will be missing the whole point. Instead, it's the political exploitation of the transformation of meaning itself by the vectorial and the latent space. What ficto-fascism does, does exploit the logic of latent space. So the dissolution of discrete sign into pure relation that we out-take about earlier to modulate, affect and reconfigure the political landscape entirely. So, we are not dealing with old-fashioned propaganda that's just being digitized. We are dealing with something that operates at the level of how meaning gets made in the first place. Let me contrast this with historical fascism to make it really clear. So, historical fascism organized body in physical space through uniform parades and visible discipline. You know the image. The crowd form the organ of a people, disciplined by the brain of a guide, of a Führer. Everything was about visible order, physical control. Ficto-fascism operates completely differently. It transforms body into physical space. It transforms body into clouds of data points in vectorial space. Individuals become calculable coordinates. And their affect, their emotion, their response are modulated as vectors of proximity and distance. This mutation transforms traditional politics entirely. Instead of gathering crowds in stadiums, ficto-fascism gathers digital traces in latent space.

Power no longer disciplines body in the old sense. Instead, it modulates potentiality for action by constantly reconfiguring vectorial relations. In other words, ficto-fascism creates new patterns to coordinate organs, but these organs are distributed, networked, invisible. The old order-disorder binomial gets replaced by signal noise. It's about amplifying certain vectors and attenuating others according to their own needs. It's about creating a new position in the space of representation. And you can see this when ficto-fascists demonstrate. In fact, they are not disciplined in the traditional sense. Each has their pattern, their disguise. Think about this shaman, Jacob Chansley. He was multi-vectorial. He embodied multiple symbolic systems at once, multiple vectors of meaning converging in one spectacular figure. Historical fascism institutionalized the cult of personality, the brain that coordinates the organization of organs through its logos, through its word, its symbolic power. Ficto-fascism transforms a leader into something completely different, an algorithmic attractor that polarizes vectorial spaces. Trump doesn't need to embody a physical ideal, the way Hitler or Mussolini did. Instead, it channels attention flow through his relative position in latent space. Think about it. It is a perfect projection surface for supporters as well as opponents. And it's really important. It's the same.

Trump attracts attention. And here's the key insight. Opposing Trump means participating in it. You can't escape the gravitational pull. The grotesque becomes functional. His artificial appearance, the orange skin, the improbable air, this signal entry into vectorial regime where authenticity is measured in intensity of engagement rather than symbolic embodiment. It doesn't matter if it looks presidential. It matters if it generates click, share, response. We are seeing the link of psychological identification give the way to algorithmic resonance. Leader and supporter are adjusted to maximize their vectorial proximity, breaking feedback loops, creating feedback loops that reinforce mutual attraction. And here's a paradox. Trump is close to the truth. He is close to the people not because he takes into account the interests of popular classes, but because his incoherent discourse allows vectorial projection. People can project whatever they want onto his chaotic stream of words. Historical fascism designated universal enemy Jews, communists, homosexuals to create what we might call negative cohesion. Everyone could rely around hating the same target. Vector fascism works completely differently also. It calculates personalized enemy by proximity. Each user receives their optimal otherness according to their specific position in latent space. Your enemy is custom tailored to you.

Wackism becomes the perfect paradigm of this fine modulation of antagonism. It's a concept that's sufficiently vague to adapt to the affective disposition of each network node. You are worried about cancel culture or critical race theory or gender ideology. Wackism can mean whatever trigger you must effectively. This personalization of scapegoat exploits the pure relational logic of vectorial space. Instead of one fixed scapegoat that everyone focuses on, the system generates an anti-ecology of micro-otherness calculated by cosine distance to your individual preference. If fascism wishes to impose its own version of truth, vector fascism transcends the true and false distinction entirely by exploiting the vector of truth. It's a vectorial transformation of information. In latent space, statements become vectors whose veracity is measured by cosine similarity rather than referential correspondence. Truth is not about matching reality anymore. This creates calculated undecidability where the status of statement becomes indeterminable. Vector fascism discourse doesn't refer to any reality. It's all about the capture of attention. You can be an opponent of Trump, but he still captures you. Pro and anti-Trump are all Trump-ized. The strategy exploits vectorial asymmetry. Producing a pseudo-statement takes few seconds, but verifying it requires reconstructing the entire referential space.

Post-truth becomes a technique of baroque saturation of latent space through proliferation of counter-referential space. The question is no longer is it true, but what vectorial configuration will maximize engagement. The different, that's a concept developed by Jean-François Lyotard, to designate an commensurable discourse regime, take a completely new form here. Vector fascism functions as a machine for producing undiscipled different by exploiting the algorithmic fragmentation of discursive universes. Algorithms create custom vectorial regimes for each market segment, making it impossible to constitute any common space for debate. We are living in different information realities. The micro-differentiation of perception neutralizes any systemic opposition. Unlike fascism, which simply denies the legitimacy of opposition, vector fascism makes it inaudible by perpetually recalibrating the condition of auditability. It's no longer about conflict of interpretation. We are dealing with situations where phrases belong to latent space so distant that there is no possibility of translation. I mean what we have to say to a flat-earther. This is exactly why vector fascism proliferates delirious discourse that prevents dialogue. Vector fascism prospers in this postmodern dissolution of grand narrative, politically exploiting the technical transformation of meaning to establish unprecedented dominations that operate at the infrastructural level of the constitution of meaning.

AI generative productions are perfectly adapted to vector fascist politics. Here's how it works. Algorithms plus similar content in proximity, in mathematics, and in the political space. Naturally privileging what resembles the already known. Vector fascism ejects this logic brilliantly. You look at anti-immigration content and the system automatically triggers proposals for other, ne'er-be-content, conspiracy theories, radical political figures, and so on. The algorithms think they are mathematically related so it serves them up together. This geometric proximity becomes communicational and ideological proximity, but in a second time. Users get embraced in an increasingly narrow bubble where mathematically distant perspectives become completely inaccessible. So, latent space institutes integral relativism where all configurations become equally probable. When Trump appears as a pop in generative images, the dominant reaction is no longer indignation but indifference and amusement. Why not? And he repeats this sentence a few times. Why not? Why not? Why not? This simple formula reveals the collapse of traditional symbolic hierarchies. In vectorial space, the sacred and the profound, the plausible and the absurd occupy calculable relative positions. But without intrinsic value. Everything is just data-point in the mathematical space. The apathy of meaning rehabilitates fascism through wearing down symbolic resistance.

When everything becomes vectorially possible, nothing is politically unthinkable anymore. Why not Trump dictator? Emerge naturally from an environment where moral and political distinctions dissolve in the mathematical equivalence of vector. And this is getting worse. The AFD is going to make factuality factacity by generating Nazi imaginary with EI and to get trouble for reference. So Trump, as you already said, reposts a satirical video of his hotel project in Gaza turning mockery into promotion. This reappropriation perfectly demonstrates that in latent space, critique and apology occupy vectorial positions too close to be distinct. Irony and seriousness, denunciation and celebration become completely interchangeable according to algorithm adjustments. The system can't tell the difference anymore. Vecto-fascism prospers in exactly this undecidability. Any critique can be vectorially turned into reinforcement. When you mock Trump, you still amplify Trump. Grotesque images of immigrant expulsions function as calculated wound vectors. Their effectiveness is measured by their capacity to affect bodies. When we see these images, they physically hurt us. And to generate engagement and sharing. The outrageous character is not a dysfunction but an optimization. These images are adjusted to maximize emotional impact via engagement matrix. The cruelty is the point, but it's mathematically optimized cruelty.

The aesthetic of cruelty becomes vectorial technique. Each visual element, trade, deformation, exacerbated nationalism, symbolism, national symbolism, staging of humiliation, is calibrated to occupy an optimal position in the space of resentment. Here the crucial shift. The image no longer represents expulsion, but becomes a vector of expulsion. A tool for transforming affect into political behavior. Representation is anterior to ideology. Bebel aesthetic annonces vector fascism. Through its systematic relativism. But I pass. Vector fascism exploits what Meillassoux calls kenotype. So what is kenotype in formal logic? There is sign devoid of meaning, but infinitely iterable. Now this sign access a form of eternity through their very arbitraryness. Because they have no reason to be. They escape the differential effect of time and space. Unlike traditional ideology that are based on stable meaning, vector fascism manipulate this empty signature that are recordable at will. You can make them mean whatever you want, whenever, in fact, whenever you want. Algorithm reproduce exactly this logic of formal language. They operate with mathematical vector that function as kenotype. They are manipulable without reference to meaning. This pure iteration of empty sign produce real political effect. Polarization engagement. But without ideological content to critique.

So it's a real difficulty. I know how abstract this discourse seems. How it's apparent to be turning on itself in a sense. But it's not fascinated by its object. What I attempt to do here is describe precisely the abstraction of vector fascism formal patterns. Like the cookie and the little dog. We need this level of abstraction because vector fascism itself operate at this abstract mathematical level. To understand how it works, we have to meet it on its own terrain. So how do we react to this fascist latent space? Which are very different from the 20th century fascism. When all our reactions already belong to them. And any opposition becomes a vectorial calculation of the other position. How do we react without reaction? How do we struggle without becoming reactionaries? And the fact we become the reactionaries is increasingly what we have seen from the left right now. And perhaps most difficult of all, how do we think without critique? When all critique reinforce the enemy staging and participate in this contempt for meta discourse. So let's start. Let's return to the most indifference experience we all share I think. Our life has become unliveable. Technically, politically, materially impossible.

The unliveable has become our site of habitation. And this finitude paradoxically constitutes our greatest chance. So the question becomes how do we make life unliveable for vector fascists? How do we share the unliveability that will be our common condition? And here's a radical challenge. How do we create common ground with them at the very heart of difference? How do we find solidarity in the charred impossibility of our situation? So here what you need to do. Explore peripheral position in latent space to destabilize the center on all stable identities. And this requires a superhuman effort. We have to radically abandon all meaning. I'm talking about critique, resistance, all the discourse of overview. We need to move from count critical reason to what I call sensitive reason. See and feel everything as flow of vector, empty of meaning. Are we actually capable of freeing ourselves from this? Are we actually capable of freeing ourselves from this? Are we actually capable of freeing ourselves from this religious mystic of meaning? What we finally escape the vulgarity of the authority of logos. Look, if vector fascists are primarily attacking cultural institution in the US, it's because the issue of representation remain absolutely major.

Even vectorized, this institution preserve a remnant of meaning that under the pure vectorization. Their very violence show us where a power of meaning that resist them still exist. But we are making a strategic error by wanting to preserve art as some autonomous sphere in the middle of vector fascist ocean. Art just become another vector fascist center, another empty sign claiming meaning. Instead, we must corrupt their way of using latent space from weaving through the soul mechanics of spatial distribution. If vector fascists produce vector with strong tension to destabilize minority vector, it's because they only use one vector at a time. So our strategy should be using a large quantity of isolated vector to destabilize the constitution of their meaning itself. Generating an infinite film means preventing the crystal of the universe from being destroyed. This is called the destabilization of meaning. Choosing a resolution against identity and ending attentional capture. When a film is infinite, really infinite, it's encounter of finitude because we can never see everything. This is what I try to do with this non-human pornographic movie I create where sex, gender and species intermingle intensely. So, AI capacity to automate resemblance, mymesis, constitute an historical, epical change that break completely with media like photography or cinema, which were material traces of reality.

AI produce a new realism that I call disrealism. It resembles reality but propose an alternative and counterfactual version. Facticity, facticity is a facticity. Facticity is a facticity in French, the false, contaminates factuality, the fact. The boundary between them dissolves. In the cities that didn't exist, a project I'm developing over four years, we are re-taking all the past, present and future history of Le Havre to transform this French port city through AI generation. The principle is simple. If minority archive don't exist, let's create them. We must make art not generative but degenerative. Generate, degenerate art like Antarctic Kunst that is unbearable to them. We need to identify the narrative forms, colors that are unliveable for them. And I assure you that we underestimate the power of the color form and each of the stuff. Because I was object of a shitstorm from the far right, extreme right in France for the project Le Havre. And they don't like purple, they don't like woman, they don't like a lot of stuff. In the first memory which I produce for the Jeu de Poem exhibition, I have five minutes more, it's about creating my tomb, my grave, and generating a multiplicity of possible life that will continue after my death.

Everything I haven't lived, everything I haven't been, it's about creating an excess of possibilities that their system can capture and categorize. So starting from the periphery of existence where I am a man, a woman, white, black, Asian, I don't know, using their position to attack what I am, my identity vectorial center. Vectorial latent space is also a space of existential, of existential emancipation. The space of possibility where I will always be another, and another, and another. We can no longer attack ourselves for anyone. So latent space can plug us into other temporalities. When Pierre Huyghe in the Luminal Exhibition in Venice tell us about both the disappearance of the human species and the transformation of images into reality, we really that muchash disturbed our thinking. It's a special capacity. The experience is. This word also applies to people but often through lack of professional experience for a great deal of effort.