The Man, The Artist, The Machine

The emergence of generative artificial intelligence has provoked a cultural crisis whose contours remain poorly understood. Public discourse oscillates between treating AI as a force of salvation and a harbinger of destruction, a split that this dissertation argues is symptomatic of deeper historical contradictions in how modern subjects relate to technology. Drawing on the Frankfurt School tradition —particularly Adorno and Horkheimer's dialectical critique, Lukács's theory of reification, and Walter Benjamin's concept of the mimetic faculty— this dissertation argues that contemporary anxiety surrounding artificial intelligence is not a response to the technology itself, but to the reification of human social relations crystallized within it. We encounter AI as alien precisely because we fail to recognize ourselves in what we have made. To develop this argument, the dissertation stages a trialectic between three historical concepts in flux: the Man, the Artist, and the Machine. Drawing on Gilbert Simondon's genetic account of technicity and religiosity as phases of a primitive magical unity, the thesis traces how Capitalism's industrialization of consciousness has rendered this unity asymptotic. Artificial intelligence emerges at this asymptote, appearing simultaneously as technical system, object of quasi-religious fascination, and generator of aesthetic form. The dissertation further demystifies the technical substrate of contemporary AI by examining deep learning architectures, neural networks, and latent space. Through this interrogation, it is revealed how its apparent intelligence reflects the projection of human meaning onto mathematically structured processes that remain fundamentally opaque. What we call artificial intelligence does not constitute a new form of consciousness. Rather, It constitutes a mimicry of the conditions under which consciousness appears legible. Formally, the dissertation is informed by Adorno's essay as form: each section is deliberately incomplete and its contradictions unresolved, which demands that the reader synthesize across sections rather than receive a conclusion. This structure is itself an argument: that the task of understanding artificial intelligence cannot be discharged by theory alone, but must be lived through the encounter with its irreducible complexity.