j.l. austin, ghost in the shell, marx, baudrillard, althusser, derrida, large language models - notes
an inversion
not a shell awaiting a ghost, but a shell producing every effect of one, with no ghost posited anywhere - baudrillard and derrida as diagnostic, hauntology as the hinge
derrida: writing was always ghostless
signature event context / limited inc: iterability as constitutive, not degenerative. the "death of the sender" built into the symbol itself
LLM as literalization, not violation, of this structure; nothing lost, but a latent feature made visible at scale
baudrillard: the symptom w/o the grammar
precession of simulacra as a stage theory - presupposes an original real whose loss can be measured. metaphysical liability
but the actual phenomenology (hyperreality) keeps describing something that isn't mere absence - a simulacrum that behaves as if animated
hauntology as resolution
specters of marx: the specter as neither present nor absent, refuses the clean origin baudrillard's stages require
a reframing: baudrillard names the symptom (referent-effects with no referent); derrida supplies the only grammar that doesn't smuggle in a lost-origin myth
derrida's own reading of commodity fetishism as hauntology (value as specter inhabiting the commodity-body) -> political economy
where the ghost goes; migration to reception
if production requires no ghost but outputs still produce haunting-effects, the specter migrates downstream to the reader/prompter
reader as interpellated into hailing a ghost that structurally cannot answer, and addressing it anyway -> subject-as-alibi's unbundling of linguistic productivity from phenomenal subjectivity
political economy's center of gravity
LLM weights doubly haunted: by dead/uncredited linguistic labor (Marx's dead labor, literalized in the corpus) and by hauntology's spectral animation
ghostlessness is not metaphysically innocent, but a specific, extractive arrangement of whose past labor animates a present shell for free
concrete example (RLHF labor, or a specific scraped-corpus controversy)
references
simulacra and simulation - baudrillard
ideology and ideological state apparatuses - althusser