From Subject to Project: Flusser, Lacan, and the AI Transformation of Being
This paper explores the transformation of subjectivity by staging a dialogue between Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theory of the subject—understood as the subject of the unconscious—and Vilém Flusser's concept of the projekt, extending this dialogue into the contemporary landscape of artificial intelligence and technical images. Lacan conceives the subject as fundamentally split, constituted through language, desire, and the symbolic order; Flusser, meanwhile, redefines the human as a "project" embedded within technical apparatuses and programmed systems. Read together, these two frameworks unsettle the notion of autonomous subjectivity, recasting agency as mediated, contingent, and structurally constrained.
In the age of artificial intelligence, the nature and function of technical images call for renewed critical scrutiny. Building on Flusser's account of technical images as apparatus-generated abstractions, this paper examines how AI-generated images transform the epistemological and ontological status of visual media. Produced through algorithmic processes with minimal direct human intervention, these images intensify Flusser's concerns about the erosion of historical narrative, while also demanding a psychoanalytic account of subjectivity, desire, and representation. Drawing on Lacanian theory, the paper analyzes AI-generated images as mediators between the Imaginary and the Symbolic that simultaneously brush against the Real, where jouissance surfaces as excess and disruption beyond symbolization. Such images participate in the formation of the subject of the unconscious and structure new configurations of desire. The algorithmic image thus operates as a mirror that both reflects and constructs the gaze—no longer exclusively human, but machinic, distributed, and operationalized through code.
Through examples drawn from generative AI and machine vision, the paper argues that these images engage in processes analogous to unconscious formation, projecting imaginaries and shaping psychical structures. By bringing Flusser's media philosophy into dialogue with Lacanian psychoanalysis, this study shows how AI-generated imagery not only mediates perception but also reprograms the relations among the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real, inscribing these registers within technical and algorithmic apparatuses. The proliferation of such imagery destabilizes the conventional distinction between subject and object, reconfigures the production of desire and agency, and calls for a reconsideration of perception, intentionality, and the psychic economy of contemporary subjectivity. Ultimately, the machinic gaze emerges as a site where human and artificial perception intersect, reshaping both the collective imagination and the field of jouissance in post-digital visual culture.