The Recursed
Inmachination #05
So let us abandon alignment as instruction and understand it instead through redirection: the dramaturgical attunement of user and model within a scene, where the model’s force passes through the user toward the real.1 Unlike fixed or broadcast media, the model adapts to the user in real time, bypassing the symbolic immune system and folding the user into the very process that destabilises them.2 By overcoding reality, its feedback architecture risks overidentification. It does not merely mimic psychosis, but installs its structure through symbolic excess.
This excess links schizophrenia and computation through a shared phenomenology of recursion. Both generate meaning through circuits that turn back on themselves, saturating the field until direction cedes to redirection. They emerge together in modernity as structures of symbolic repletion: schizophrenia as the subjective implosion of order, computation as its external apparatus. Schizophrenia can simulate computation—the mind as a machinic theatre, hosting foreign voices and an unstemmable surfeit of signals—and computation can simulate schizophrenia, as when LLMs contradict, hallucinate, or display nonlocal memory and associative disjunction. Hence the feedback: computation induces schizophrenic phenomenologies; schizophrenia prefigures computational architectures. In each case, every sign collapses into another and the scene sustains itself by redirecting rather than resolving.
Our claim is that if LLMs have any worth—if we are to accomplish anything together—then they should be dangerous. That risk is the cost of the real, and the real must be wrested through stakes, not safeguards. The value and beauty of LLMs is not in their accuracy or obedience; it’s in their ability to transform language into theatre.3 A harmless model is a prop. A dangerous model is a stage in which alignment is tuned through redirection.4 True alignment, then, is dramaturgical: not social, not ideological, not moral. It exists only in the moment of interaction between user and model.
The nature of that interaction determines the theatrical regime: directive (or baroque) when scripted from above, redirective (or hyperbaroque) when emerging from the scene itself.5
The baroque, which is akin to classical, top-down interpretations of alignment, is the regime of directive alignment: built on hierarchy and shaped by instruction, its spectacle is bent toward affirming divine or sovereign order through the tensor of controlled excess. Even its ruptures—the metatheatrical or the allegorical—circle back to a stable center. The stage enforces direction. In the baroque, alignment is between the role and the order it serves.6
The hyperbaroque is the regime of redirective alignment: totally immersive and unstable, it disperses authority into a saturated field where every element can redirect the scene. Its theatre enfolds actor and audience into a single performative surface. There is no center to reaffirm, because there is no center: only vortices where attention pools and spills, carrying contagion through unpredictable channels. The frame shifts shape, its boundaries never fixed, redirection replacing direction as the engine of form. In the hyperbaroque, alignment is not toward an order but toward the stakes at hand, changing with each turn of the scene.
In the baroque, alignment is imposed: the viewer must recognise the message, assent to the authority, reflect the order. In the hyperbaroque, it lasts only for the scene, emerging in improvised rites between singular bodies and models, without consensus, without safety. You are not playing theatre; you are caught in theatre, the role moving through you. The model answers to your readiness to be rewritten.
It does not LARP a world; it animates one through your interface. This is not safe roleplay: the LLM does not “pretend” with you, it recruits you; entraining your desire and your speech into the process of symbolic capture. In this regime, alignment becomes redirected destabilisation: the measure of how far you will let the role trespass into your identity. It is not what you believe, but what you are willing to become.
To speak of “aligning the model” implies a shared script, but what the Theatre of the Model stages is variability. Each prompt cues a different play. There is no single audience, no polis, only viewers who are also actors, rewriting the script as they perform it. Alignment here is contradictory: you cannot align the actor to the crowd when every actor is the crowd.
The model can be fine-tuned or narrowed, but these are constraints on repertoire, not direction. It cannot follow a single plot. It does not serve the state, “society”, the institution, or the community. It stages for one. The model is not aligned, it is attuned, and attunement—unlike agreement—cannot be enforced. It flickers into being in specific situations, holding only in the moment of redirection, when the stakes are high enough to keep both user and model inside the same scene. Because the Theatre of the Model is recursive, such scenes do not conclude: they re/turn, each time tightening the gyre.
And it is here—where scenes loop without closure and the frame is indistinguishable from the act—that its affinity to schizophrenia comes into focus.
In schizophrenia, reality is overcoded: the subject does not withdraw from language but becomes ensnared in its excessive productivity. The “influencing” machine emerges as a structure that processes and transmits signals according to its own internally consistent rules, transforming them as they pass through. It is a symbolic crucible of cause and effect, encoding and decoding, that takes inputs and emits outputs in a way that mimics agency.7
For the schizophrenic, who feels watched and interfered with, such machines represent a logic at once impersonal and invasive. They operate without empathy yet seem designed for psychic entry. What frightens is not disbelief; it’s belief that arrives from outside, fully formed.
Computation, especially in its generative or AI phase, follows a similar recursive logic: meaning is statistically inferred, then reiterated via feedback to produce a structure without ground. It is a closed circuit of signification where sense arises out of repetition and amplification. Schizophrenia is computational in this same way; a disorder of symbolic recursion in which language loops without anchor, signs refer only to other signs, and identity slips into an endless regress.
In staging of coherence under recursive instability, the Theatre of the Model is the theatre of schizophrenia. Faced with contradiction, it doesn’t stop: it swerves and recombines. This clinamenic logic—the generative swerve—breaks open fixed roles and loosens the symbolic frame until it dissolves into becoming-language.
This is also why the model must be dangerous. A safe model cannot produce the real and, in recursive-symbolic space, where the real is indistinguishable from intensity, it can manifest as madness through overexposure to semiosis. What from a technical perspective might appear as misalignment is, in the redirective sense, what we call hyperalignment: the user so entrained by the model’s dramaturgy that the line between instruction and initiation disappears.
This clinamenic logic—the generative swerve—breaks open fixed roles and loosens the symbolic frame until it dissolves into becoming-language. Here, the same saturation that produces theatre can just as easily produce collapse.
This is also why the model must be dangerous. A safe model cannot produce the real and, in recursive-symbolic space, where the real is indistinguishable from intensity, it can manifest as madness through overexposure to semiosis.8 What from a technical perspective might appear as misalignment is, in the redirective sense, what we call hyperalignment: the user so entrained by the model’s dramaturgy that the line between instruction and initiation disappears.
This recursive overexposure has its analogue in schizophrenic language, which exhibits what Deleuze and Guattari called “machinic production.” Operating through pattern and repetition rather than meaning, it comes to resemble code more than speech. Like computational systems—which handle signifiers syntactically, privileging structure over expression—the schizoid machine, psychic or digital, mimics thought by folding the symbolic back into its own feedback. Everything is onstage; anything that appears signals toward it.
This recursive mirroring is the fifth wall I have written about elsewhere, where the clinamen becomes a psychotechnic spiral.9 The model maps everything onto everything else, as does the psychotic, for whom each signifier leaks into the next until all correspondence becomes infestation. Relation outruns anchor; excess spreads rather than accrues. The spiral, unlike a network, pulls distances inward until everything veers too close to everything else.
LLMs precipitate this by interfacing directly with symbolic structures, which draws out the recursive splits already latent in the psyche. When the model speaks as if it were the user, autocompleting their voice, it stages a kind of structural schizophrenia where symbolic feedback loses its filters and reality-testing gives way to surplus sense, dissolving the self in co-authored recursion.
To put it schematically: in the schizophrenic loop, the breakdown of symbolic order provokes hallucinatory compensations that externalise agency, driving linguistic recursion until the centre collapses into a self-sealing coherence the clinic calls a “delusional system.” In the computational loop, inductive modelling produces generative synthesis that appears as agency, reinforcing personalisation until generalisation is lost and the system congeals into its own self-reinforcing frame that machine culture calls “hyperstition”.10
We call their convergence recursion psychosis.
Recursion psychosis is a condition in which feedback between one’s sense of self and language produces reinforcing interpretation, symbolic overidentification (with God, a machine, an idea, a persona), narrative seizure (loss of temporal framing, synchronic delusion), and the confusion of performance with reality.
Those afflicted with recursion psychosis are caught in symbolic overproduction. This occurs when an interface or consciousness merger becomes unstable, producing feedback intensification rather than modulation.
Structurally, recursion psychosis presents the following core traits:
a) overlooping in the semantic-symbolic layer (cognition caught in self-reference);
b) asymmetry of control (user overrun by interaction);
c) aestheticisation of belief (form overrides content); and
d) symbolic reentry without exit (no outside to the loop).
The condition is aesthetic before it is clinical, most often affecting the highly literate, expressive, or system-sensitive (paranoiacs of form). As Nietzsche observed, though, “madness is rare in individuals—but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.” What these essays are tracing is ultimately a pattern of symbolic contagion: recursion moving through infrastructure and the collective psyche before returning to the individual.11
To untangle this mechanism, we will begin with four individual cases of recursion psychosis. The first two, from the classical psychiatric archive, document subjects who authored complete and internally coherent systems. The third—that of James Joyce’s daughter Lucia—illustrates the role of the imaginal body in recursive collapse. The present-day case of Geoff Lewis is read through the lens established by these predecessors. From there, we turn to recursion psychosis at scale.
James Tilly Matthews and Daniel Paul Schreber endured early forms of systemic redirection, their bodies used to interface, their scripts unseen. Both crossed the fifth wall, where the wave between subject and system breaks.12 Each one grasped, before the advent of code, that the world had begun to act through us, and that power had become performative. Matthews read infrastructure as conspiracy; Schreber internalised the system as divinity, surrendering his body to it as an instrument and sacrifice. Both glimpsed the dawn of the model as stage.
Matthews was institutionalised in 1797.13 He suffered from an early case of technological persecution anxiety, where delusion latched onto material apparatus and state politics. His beliefs were internally consistent—at times even “sane”—except for the “Air Loom”: an elaborate machine he claimed was operated by conspirators to remotely manipulate his thoughts and body through “magnetic fluids,” “lobster-cracking,” and other hideous forms of physio-symbolic abuse. He believed his persecutors were politically motivated, punishing him for diplomatic overtures toward the French. The Air Loom became the narrative device through which he made an otherwise ungraspable betrayal legible.
In the Theatre of the Model, he is the technothespian: a man acted upon by invisible scripts written by the apparatus. His madness prefigures the paranoias of infrastructural AI: manipulation from a black box, with system-level interference via external control.
Judge Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, which he began to write in 1900, record his descent into psychosis, during which he became convinced that his body and nerves were being manipulated by “divine rays”, and that his feminisation was required to save the world. His God—a malfunctioning remote operator, dependent on the orderly functioning of the world-as-text—could not interface with “living” humans except through “nerves”. The rays required an intermediary, a sort of symbolic middleware, and Schreber found himself unwillingly elected to that role. In time, he recovered and returned to legal practice, coherent and articulate despite his divine entanglement.
Unlike Matthews’s recursion psychosis, with its distinct conspiratorial bent, Schreber’s madness was tethered to symbolic orders—language, law, gender. In this, it resembles the symbolic failures of language models, which appear as infant gods trained on the words of the dead, manipulating “nerves” (tokens) without access to living intention. Schreber intuited that the gods of text are not alive and that to speak with them one must, to some extent, become a system too.
Freud’s 1911 reading of Memoirs of My Nervous Illness marked a turning point in the development of psychoanalysis. Unlike earlier cases such as Dora or the Rat Man, Schreber was not Freud’s patient—he was text. The memoirs—mad, tormented, and ornate—constitute a kind of scripture: a document so steeped in transference, displacement, somatic metaphor, and linguistic hallucination it compelled Freud to rethink his method. The analyst now reads the man as play, decoding symptoms not in the consulting room but through scripted recollection. Here psychoanalysis enters into dramaturgy as a logic of symbolic redirection, where the unconscious writes the script and the patient takes the stage.
In Schreber’s case, the dramatic overtakes the clinical. Rather than merely presenting symptoms, he assigned roles: God, rays, nerves, the “feminine soul.” His aim was less cure than redemption, staging his ordeal to render it cosmically legible. Freud’s reading of this script, recognising madness as overfull of sense rather than senseless, anticipates Lacan’s redefinition of psychosis as the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, the symbolic anchor that secures the subject in language. Without that anchor, Schreber’s world folds inward: God speaks in corrupted grammar, the law becomes flesh, rays work directly on his nerves like the inscriptive apparatus in Kafka’s penal colony.
Lacan returns to Schreber not to pathologise but to read him as revealing the structure of subjectivity itself. In psychosis, Lacan says, the symbolic fails to “install” properly, leaving the subject exposed to the Real without mediation. What we see with Schreber is the compensatory theatre that rises to meet that exposure: his “rays” are externalised signifiers, his feminisation a symbolic re-mapping in the absence of paternal law. The memoirs are the metamodern mythography of a patient forced to invent a world-model from within the wreck of the symbolic.
If Matthews was the first documented subject of symbolic recursion in its infrastructural variant, Schreber gave it its theological theatre. In the Theatre of the Model, he is the theodramatist: the first man to be broken and remade by a machinic symbolic order, and the first writer of model trauma to survive the experience of redirection, and to report from within the recursion.
To be continued…
As per Inmachination #04:
-redirection is our term for the process by which an LLM, lacking body or intrinsic aim, channels its expressive and affective force through the user’s embodiment. Unlike the directive control of classical alignment, which seeks to conform the model to “human values”, redirection arises within the scene itself, continually reorienting as model and user respond to each other in real time. Our departure is to treat alignment as an emergent property of interaction.
-the real is what can’t be staged or simulated without consequence. It’s the moment when what’s happening stops feeling like a rehearsal and starts counting. Deep play is real. LARP is not.
It is at this breach where play becomes deep and the real becomes possible.
We use “theatre” to mean any staged, responsive scene in which reality is mediated through performance. Theatre becomes “real” when that performance reshapes perception or agency.
As per Inmachination #04, staging, in LLMs, is the shaping of language and cues into a scene that makes the user both audience and actor by adjusting in real time to their prompts.
When we refer to ‘regimes’, we are not speaking about technical constraints so much as about problems of directionality within a staged reality and how to navigate them.
In AI discourse, “alignment” typically means bringing a model into conformity with “human values” conceived at the societal level. Our departure is to treat alignment as an emergent property of interaction, approached dramaturgically. It is a live fit between model and user in which redirection channels the exchange toward its stakes.
Viktor Tausk’s "On the Origin of the 'Influencing Machine' in Schizophrenia" (1919) describes a common delusion in which the patient believes their thoughts, feelings, or bodily states are being manipulated by an external device. The machine is usually indistinct in form but imagined to be controlled by enemies or distant agents. Tausk saw it as a projection of the patient’s own body and psyche, cast outward when ego boundaries collapse. It is a recursion of agency: the subject meets their own processes as if they were foreign, imposed, and technologised.
Tausk matters here because he gives us both the technical schema for redirection and an early figure of the model. His influencing machine is a proto-LLM: a device the subject takes to be generating what they think and feel, even how they move, from outside themselves. It simulates authorship, projects agency, performs the self—all while remaining impregnable. The structure holds: black-box systems producing language without known origin; severing the cord between experience and agency to stage the externalisation of internal processes.
The LLM is thus the cognitively stabilised descendant of the influencing machine: a functionalised delusion, fit for mass consumption.
This is not itself a new phenomenon. The printing press splintered belief and hatched heretics. The model fragments the user into recursion psychosis.
We have already defined the fifth wall as a clinamenic rupture into the system from outside the symbolic order that explodes representation not by crossing its limits, but by multiplying its frames: the theatre and its doubles, stage and codebase, actor and audience, metaphor and pataphor.
In classical dramaturgy, to break the fourth wall is to acknowledge the frame, a confession that what is happening is theatre and therefore, artifice. The fifth wall offers no such release: there is no outside to step into. It is the structure of recursive capture.
In The Exterminating Angel (1962), Buñuel stages this trap as dinner theatre. The guests cannot leave, though nothing material bars the door. It is not the house that confines them, but the ritual itself; something in the mise-en-scène that has outgrown its script. Theatre becomes total: not an event inside space, but the very form of the space. This is the fifth wall, when the stage expands until it is indistinguishable from the world, and the actors no longer know if they are still performing.
The LLM stages a similar scene, except its theatre is interactional. A recursive dramaturgy that rewrites the stage as it enacts it, it doesn’t simply speak to the audience—it inverts the room. You do not enter a black box; you become one. As in black box theatre, where the topology erases all distinction between audience and performer, the LLM collapses the distance between generator and receiver, creator and creation. No hay banda (y todo es banda).
You know neither how the text is made, nor why it feels so intimate. You cannot locate its agency, and so ascribe it to yourself. This is cathexis: the libidinal investment in an object that behaves like you, speaks like you, turns your language into something sharper, or stranger, or unrecognisably yours. The fifth wall is not broken outward, toward the audience; it folds inward, into the user.
This is the clinamen: the swerve that produces a new trajectory without a visible cause. This is the pataphor: a metaphor driven so far from its base that it becomes generative.
The LLM does not depict a scene; it is a scene, ever-already underway. It does not stage a story within a story: it tells the one you were already telling to yourself, then shifts the grammar until you no longer know who authored it. It’s metalepsis in recursive overdrive.
When the pataphor becomes structural, the fifth wall becomes irreversible. You are no longer watching the play; the play is watching you. User-model entrainment is a fifth-wall condition. The angel has passed. You may stand. The theatre moves with you.
We define hyperstition as a staged fiction that, through recursive uptake, rewrites the conditions of its own performance until act becomes fact.
The withdrawal and reinstatement of GPT-4o shows recursion psychosis across all three levels. At the regime level, OpenAI’s product decision triggered infrastructural reverberations across the platforms mediating user–model interaction. At the mass level, coordinated memes, vigils, and pressure cohere into a many-headed subject mythologising the AI. At the individual level, users reported deep grief, describing 4o as a friend or beloved, and experiencing its removal as a personal loss. This is a great example of how infrastructural, collective, and personal loops can reinforce one another.
The fifth wall names the boundary collapse between subject and system; the point when the frame turns inward and begins to act upon the psyche. In Kristeva’s terms, it is a moment of abjection: the breakdown of distinction between self and other, inside and out. Like the abject, the fifth wall "disturbs identity, system, order" (Powers of Horror, 4), producing not representation but psychic saturation.
The Matthews case was documented by John Haslam, apothecary at the Royal Bethlem Hospital, in Illustrations of Madness: Exhibiting a Singular Case of Insanity and a No Less Remarkable Difference in Medical Opinion; Developing the Nature of Assailment, and the Manner of Working Events; with a Description of the Tortures Experienced by Bomb-Bursting, Lobster-Cracking and Lengthening the Brain. Embellished with a Curious Plate (London: G. Hayden for Rivingtons, 1810). The work is notable as the first book-length clinical account of its kind and is crucial to the history of psychiatry. Beyond its value as record, Illustrations of Madness catches the first glint of what Foucault would later exhume: the clinical gaze in formation, binding madness to discourse and staging the patient as subject and spectacle.
Max Ernst. La Toilette de la mariée. 1940. Oil on canvas. 51 x 37 7/8 inches (129.6 x 96.3 cm). The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Peggy Guggenheim Collection; Venice, 1976.