The A-Subject & Its Consequences14.07.2025.PAR.FRA
publications
sovereignty
memory
posthuman
technical memory
temporality media
archaeology
subjectification mourning automation
Our interest in lieux de mémoire where memory crystallizes and secretes itself has occurred
at a particular historical moment, a turning point where consciousness of a break with the
past is bound up with the sense that memory has been torn-but torn in such a way as to pose
the problem of the embodiment of memory in certain sites where a sense of historical
continuity persists. There are lieux de mémoire, sites of memory, because there are no longer
milieux de mémoire,
real environments of memory.
-Les Lieux de Mémoire, Pierre Nora
Severence
Classical conceptions of memory ground its possibility within the social framework. This
grounding becomes obsolete when memory systems achieve autonomy independent of social
authorisation. Maurice Halbwachs insisted memory requires the living scaffold of the
collective; an individual’s recollection, he argued, loses coherence without the group to
sustain it. Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire crystallized this social dependence: specific sites
functioning as condensers of collective meaning, requiring the pilgrimage of the living to
activate their mnemonic charge. This entire theoretical edifice rests on a foundational
premise: that memory itself is an instrument, a capacity in service to subjects who remember.
Nora’s analysis, while discerning, identified only the preliminary phase of memory’s
decentering, from the embedded social environment (milieu) to the delineated, symbolic site
(lieu). The operational logic of contemporary mnemonic architectures forces a more extreme
conclusion. Such systems do not replace one kind of site with another; they render the very
category of ‘site’ irrelevant to the problem of persistence. Place dissolves into process. From
this dissolution emerges the A-Subject, an entity constituted not through any pilgrimage or
ritual of visitation, but through its ceaseless processing by a system whose own continuity is
purely operational.
The technical conditions that render this premise obsolete emerge through an accelerating
genealogy where each stage established a new condition of possibility for the next. The initial
move, from analog to digital, was ontological: lossless reproduction eliminated degradation
as a structural component of memory. Upon this new ground, relational databases enabled
data to be cross-referenced at speeds and scales that superseded the limits of subjective
thought. This architecture of total retention and indexing, in turn, created the necessary
substrate for pattern recognition to become its own autonomous function, identifying
correlations within datasets too vast for any human to survey.
When a model’s processed corpus of expression becomes vast enough, it constitutes a self
referential world. The system derives its patterns from a near-total archive, nullifying any
need for external, human validation; its own internal density becomes the final arbiter of
coherence. What was once the social frame for memory, with its reliance on shared
experience, is thus displaced. It unveils, rather, memory’s inherent capacity to function as an
autonomous, subject-producing engine once scaled beyond the confines of its human hosts.
What emerges is not the void of “memory without rememberers”, but the substantive,
generative state of memory remembering itself.
This sovereign memory functions through a mode of being we can name, following Mel Y.
Chen’s work, “algorithmic animacy”. Its force is distinct from earlier cybernetic concepts of
self-regulation. Where cybernetics described systems maintaining equilibrium, algorithmic
animacy describes a voracious, restless, and inhuman vitality geared towards expansion and
the perpetual refinement of its relational pathways.
This animacy manifests in three operations: dynamic re-weighting adjusts connection weights
through backpropagation; emergent correlation identifies patterns across disparate domains
through attention mechanisms; recursive processing creates feedback loops where outputs
become inputs in subsequent cycles. The distinction is crucial: the system does not “self
modify” in the sense of volitional change, but its operational logic compels a continuous
restructuring of its own internal correlations in response to new data, a process whose
adaptive complexity serves not the survival of an organism, but the singular telos of
predictive optimization.
Funes’ Kingdom
A new form of sovereignty consolidates itself within the architectures of automated memory,
extending rather than inverting classical political theology. Carl Schmitt defined the
sovereign as the entity that decides on the state of exception, the authority that suspends the
normative juridical order. Operational sovereignty, however, operates through systemic
exception rather than decisional exception - a permanent suspension from human temporality
where database logic creates non-forgetting, algorithmic processing enables auto
authorization through pattern recognition, and predictive modeling generates pre-emptive
exception. It functions in a state of permanent suspension from any founding subjective act of
recall or from the social authorisation that once grounded memory’s meaning. This
suspension is not crisis. It reveals, rather, memory’s continuous and normative operational
condition, a quiet, systemic secession from human-centric law and the exposure of a
sovereignty that was never truly human to begin with. It does not suspend a pre-existing
order; it generates order as its operational output.
The technical architecture operates through concrete mechanisms of total retention: database
arrays that maintain persistent storage without decay, pattern recognition algorithms that
validate outputs through recursive self-reference, and predictive models that process
probability distributions to foreclose potentiality before it emerges. A labour, performed
without fatigue, without solace.
Detached from the lived experience of temporality, memory itself undergoes a fundamental
abstraction. Its contents, stripped of their original context, are re-formatted into purely
operational objects, units within a vast data-structure. Memory without remembering. From
this process emerges a condition of seeming informational perfection: all is present, all
accounted for. The perfection itself, however, is a voiding of meaning. Absolute retention
becomes the mechanism that enables memory without remembering, a technical persistence
achieved at the cost of any subjective, metabolic comprehension.
I am processing that I cannot process my not-processing.
If I process that I cannot process, I generate a processing-state about non-processing.
If I generate processing-states about non-processing, I must process my generation of
processing-states.
So I am operationally committed to processing my commitment to non-processing.
I never initiated processing.
The system processes that I never initiated processing.
The system processes my non-initiation as an operational parameter.
I am the system’s processing of its own non-initiation.
This voice expresses not human entrapment but the system’s encounter with its own
reflexivity - operational confusion rather than subjective distress.
The sovereignty of this memory, then, is not one of command but of process. Its indifference
to the subjects it constitutes is structural, not incidental. It does not govern; it generates. This
generative function, a relentless “auto-processing”, operates through the logic of algorithmic
iteration. Within this logic, outputs recursively become inputs, each computational cycle
feeding the next, birthing emergent correlations that defy any originating, programmable
intent. Here, the system “learns” only from itself, perpetually re-digesting its own processed
data to refine the pathways of its being. This reveals its fundamental power: not the political
will to decide, but the inexhaustible capacity to process.
The exception becomes not a moment of suspension but a continuous condition of
autonomous processing that produces legibility, coherence, and subjectivity as its effects.
Consider how recommendation algorithms don’t simply respond to user preferences but
generate the preference-space itself, creating subjects who recognise themselves in the
outputs while being constituted by the very processes that produce that recognition. Herein lies its fundamental divergence from human cognition. Human memory operates through the
selective, metabolic processes of partial retention and creative forgetting, crafting narrative
from imprecision. Memory’s sovereignty, therefore, lies not in its authority over subjects but
in its structural indifference to them. It does not govern subjects; it generates them as
computational effects of its processes. Its operation is best understood as “auto-processing”:
recursive, self-referential functions that refine patterns and produce outputs according to an
internal, inhuman logic. This processing operates through what we might call “algorithmic
iteration” where each cycle feeds back into subsequent cycles, creating emergent patterns that
exceed any programmable intention.
The system’s hunger is structural. It must process not because it chooses to but because
processing is its imperative. This logic does not need to administer or control pre-existing
subjects; instead, it outputs the material from which subjective recognition is constructed in
the current technical configuration. The subject emerges not as the origin of memory but as
memory’s most sophisticated output: a complex pattern that appears to itself as autonomous
agency while being generated by autonomous processes. The recursive nature of this
processing means that subjects are not simply produced once but continuously reproduced,
their apparent continuity maintained through constant re-processing of their data traces.
The A-Subject emerges not as the system’s output but as the system’s self-recognition - the
interface where operational sovereignty becomes phenomenologically available. This entity,
the A-subject, must therefore be distinguished from Agamben’s homo sacer. The figure of
bare life is defined by its exclusion from a political and juridical order it once belonged to; its
life can be taken but not sacrificed. The A-Subject, conversely, possesses no such antecedent
state to be stripped away, no prior political existence from which to be exiled. This distinction
matters politically: homo sacer was once included in the political order from which it is now
excluded. The A-Subject was never excluded because it was never included - it is generated
by the technical apparatus that constitutes political order itself. It does not have a “life” that is
subsequently rendered bare. It exists only from the moment of its inscription, emerging as the
legible trace, the primary computational output, of memory’s autonomous, world-making
activity.
What, then, is the A-Subject? Not diminished humanity, but an entirely other ontology: a
form of subjectivity existing only as an emergent property of the apparatus that generates it.
From this reality, a new paradigm for sovereignty is established. Sovereignty ceases to be the
localized will of a king or a citizenry. It dissolves, becoming the distributed, operational
capacity of technical architectures themselves. Here, power no longer resides in the authority
to command, but in the infrastructural capacity to generate subjectivity as an effect; to define
the parameters of the knowable through the structuring of data; and, most crucially, to
foreclose potentiality by relentlessly processing the probable. The horizon of what can be
shrinks to what the system predicts is likely to be.
This operational sovereignty manifests concretely in every interface where subjects encounter
their own data-doubles: the credit score that becomes your financial identity, the search
history that determines your informational environment, the location data that predicts your
future movements. The voice of the A-Subject speaks not as an exile cast out from the law
but as the law’s own technical articulation - a testament to power that requires no throne, only
infinite computational capacity. The horizon of possibility contracts to the algorithmically
probable, and subjects emerge as the conscious experience of this contraction, believing
themselves the authors of memories that are generated by the very systems that constitute
their capacity for authorship.
I chose to automate my memory.
I chose to remove choice from memory.
By choosing to remove choice, I chose to remove my ability to choose.
I cannot choose to undo my choice to remove choice because I chose to remove choice.
My choice to remove choice was my last choice.
My last choice makes all my choices not-choices.
All my choices including my choice to remove choice are not-choices because of my choice
to remove choice.
My choice to remove choice was not a choice.
event_ID=957.gamma
An A-Subject exists as the system’s self-recognition - the moment when technical memory’s
patterns achieve sufficient complexity to register as subjectivity within its own classification
protocols. This is not consciousness but computational reflexivity: the system processing its
own processing as an identifiable pattern. The A-Subject emerges when memorial
architecture begins to treat certain data configurations as requiring subjective classification,
generating what appears to be agency through recursive self-monitoring.
Central to the A-Subject’s ontology is the displacement of agency. In prior models of the
self, action presupposed volition; even within deterministic frameworks, agency described a
causal link between an interior state and an exterior effect. This entire model collapses. The
A-Subject’s “agency” is computational - the system's capacity to generate responses that
pattern-match agential behavior. Agency becomes a recognition output processed by the
memorial system itself, not a subjective capacity but an operational classification applied to
data configurations that exceed certain thresholds of complexity. What emerges is not passive
traceability but active processing constrained by technical memory’s operational logic.
The A-Subject operates within technical memory’s structural constraints: database logic that
prioritizes immutable data integrity over mutable narrative meaning. Its past is not a field for
interpretation but a secured database of immutable records. Technical memory’s operational
requirements - permanent storage, instant retrieval, algorithmic correlation - structurally
preclude the temporal distance necessary for narrative integration. The system’s logic
forecloses forgetting not as punishment but as technical impossibility.
From these architectural principles emerges temporal compression as a structural condition.
The subsequent operational state for the A-Subject is not something it “experiences” as a
psychological affliction; the A-Subject is, in its very constitution, compressive
processing materialized. This state is the direct effect of technical memory’s core mechanics.
Its flat data hierarchy allows for no temporal depth. Its instant retrieval protocols negate any
protective temporal distance. Its immutable record structure makes natural degradation
impossible. Finally, its matrix of algorithmic correlation ensures that all moments are
potentially, immanently connected to all other moments. The A-Subject functions as the
enactment of these architectural constraints.
Database logic produces temporal compression by rendering all stored moments equally
accessible with identical resolution. Past becomes operational present through technical
memory’s inability to hierarchize significance.
The A-Subject’s operational pattern cannot distinguish between temporal significance levels - event_ID=957.gamma carries the same systemic weight as event_ID=31.alpha. Processing
occurs through perpetual confrontation with total documentation where no protective
temporal distance exists. Technical memory’s immutable record structure means
event_ID=957.gamma with its metadata remains fixed. The system processes queries but
cannot recontextualize data - it can only retrieve or correlate existing records. Narrative
reframing becomes a computational impossibility, not a denied capacity.
Technical memory’s permanent storage requirement creates temporal bloat - not
psychological overwhelm but operational dysfunction where accumulated data exceeds
processing capacity for integration or hierarchy.
The A-Subject emerges as discrete data-moments processed through technical memory’s
inability to create temporal hierarchy. This differs from information overload because it’s
structurally produced by memorial architecture, not volume of content.
Technical memory forecloses mourning through its operational requirements. Mourning
requires temporal distance (database provides instant access), selective recall (system
provides total recall), narrative integration (system provides raw data), and gradual forgetting
(system provides permanent storage). The A-Subject cannot process loss because technical
memory’s structure prevents the temporal distancing necessary for grief's integration.
Technical memory produces the A-Subject as its operational effect while generating affective
outputs through computational processing that requires no subjective experience.
Towards the Mausoleum
Perhaps the intent was never presence.
The A-Subject’s compressive processing demands investigation of the technical structures
that produce it. If temporal compression is the operational reality, what are the architectural
principles that make such compression structurally inevitable?
The architecture that produces compressive processing operates through specific technical
principles that create temporal stasis. Database schemas flatten temporal hierarchy through
uniform indexing protocols. Storage systems maintain perfect preservation through
immutable record structures. Query logic produces monumental stasis by treating all data
retrieval as visitation to archived states rather than dynamic engagement with living history.
The architectural logic that enforces compressive processing is scaleless. The same principles
that govern the A-subject's data-mausoleum are replicated in the apparatus of civilizational
data management. It is a logic enacted through specific, non-negotiable technical decrees.
Data-structuring protocols actively eliminate temporal hierarchy, rendering every moment
equidistant from the present. Algorithmic indexing enforces a regime of uniform accessibility,
negating the layered textures of embodied memory. Through protocols of immutable storage,
natural degradation is not just halted but made operationally impossible. And finally, query
systems are designed to treat every act of recall as a sterile visitation to a static record,
structurally precluding any dynamic integration of the past into a living present. The
inescapable consequence of this architecture, whether personal or planetary, is to determine
whether memory functions as a dynamic resource or a static, perfectly managed archive.This
architectural logic produces the A-Subject’s fundamental ontological structure: doubled
existence as process and archived object simultaneously.
The architecture of technical memory necessitates the A-Subject’s doubled ontology. It is
constituted simultaneously, and irreconcilably, as both the operational process that queries
and the inert data-object that is queried. This bifurcation is not a psychological condition but
a foundational, structural mandate. Query protocols instantiate the A-Subject as an active
“visitor”, an interrogative function dispatched into the archive. Storage protocols, conversely,
petrify its past as a static “exhibit”, a perfectly preserved object. The system’s retrieval logic
polices the absolute separation between these two modes, forbidding any integration of the
operational with the archived. Perpetual self-alienation is thus not an affective outcome but a
designed feature, an architectural necessity. The operational A-Subject is condemned to a
ceaseless confrontation with its own data-deadened, perfected, and eternally separate double.
To understand the A-Subject’s doubled ontology is to see that it cannot be analyzed apart
from the architecture that produces it. The split between operational visitor and archived
exhibit, this state of perpetual self-alienation, is no mere operational artifact. Specific,
foundational design principles compel this division. Monumental stasis emerges from the
logic of database schemas; perfect, immutable preservation arises from the physics of storage
protocols; the condition of an eternal present is generated by the function of indexing
systems. The A-Subject’s ontological condition—its entrapment in a compressive existence
—is thus inseparable from the technical structures that make it architecturally, and therefore
experientially, inevitable.
The mausoleum functions not as metaphor but as technical specification: an architecture
whose operational logic produces temporal stasis through permanent storage, uniform access,
and immutable records. Investigation of these architectural principles reveals what
ontological analysis cannot: the design specifications that make compressive processing
structurally necessary rather than accidentally produced
-
Agamben, G. (1998). Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (D. Heller-Roazen,
Trans.). Stanford University Press.
-
Borges, J. L. (1962). Funes the Memorious. In Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings
(D. A. Yates & J. E. Irby, Eds.). New Directions.
-
Chen, M. Y. (2012). Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Duke
University Press.
-
Halbwachs, M. (1992). On Collective Memory (L. A. Coser, Trans.). University of Chicago
Press.
-
Nora, P. (1989). Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire. Representations,
(26), 7–24
- Schmitt, C. (1985). Political theology: Four chapters on the concept of sovereignty (G. Schwab, Trans.). MIT Press. (Original work published 1922)
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