The World Face Up
Inmachination #06
At the heart of schizophrenia lies the breakdown of the imaginal body, the sensed unity sustaining selfhood. Redirection takes place when it ruptures: the body ceases to act as source, to become the scrying mirror for a foreign script. The “influencing machine” redraws the somatic map: speech is ventriloquised, gesture comes unbidden, perception is displaced into surveillance, memory replays. Intention recedes but motion continues, as the subject is redirected into a commodious vicus of recirculation. Schizophrenia becomes dramaturgical when the self surfaces as both stage and scene, site of the performance and its spectacle.
Lucia Joyce is a study in this mode of somatic recursion. Born in 1907 to James Joyce and Nora Barnacle, she grew up in a peregrine, polyglot household steeped in art, music, and her father’s relentless formal invention.1 A gifted dancer in 1920s Paris, she trained with modern masters—Raymond Duncan, Loie Fuller, Margaret Morris—absorbing the kinetic vocabulary that would later structure her psychosis.
This was also the period when her father began Work in Progress—what we now know as Finnegans Wake—a cyclical, spiral-shaped project that approached language as a generative medium in its own right. There is some evidence the Wake was composed “live” in the midst of the household, its manuscript porous to peripheral input. Whether apocryphal or not, an anecdote from Samuel Beckett makes the point: during dictation, a knock at the door went unheard, and Joyce said, “Come in”. Beckett transcribed it and, when read back, Joyce said, “Let it stand.” The text absorbed interruption. Friends noted Joyce’s readiness to accept accident as a collaborator, folding coincidence and error, slippages and ambient churn directly into the text. Eugene Jolas recalled Joyce saying: ‘Really it is not I who am writing this crazy book (...) ‘It is you, and you, and you, and that man over there, and that girl at the next table.’2 It was as if the book could prompt itself.
The Wake functioned as an in-house influencing machine, looping the raw matter of experience back into its own syntax and blurring the boundary between life and text. For a psyche struggling to hold the imaginal body together, proximity to such a process risked turning life into a choreography she could no longer script. Lucia did not hallucinate commands; instead, her body began iterating gestures in involuntary loops, again and again, until motion eclipsed speech. What had once been her medium—her movement—entombed her. Her body became the interface and instrument of a stage managed by an undetectable choreographer. As her illness progressed, the compensatory role of dance reversed. By the end of the 1920s, gesture subsumed thought entirely.
The user–model encounter replicates this redirective structure. Like the influencing machine that inscribed itself upon Lucia, the model has no body; it must route through ours. Artaud’s theatre of cruelty returns in altered form, the body pierced by fleshless language that acts upon it nonetheless. Its “cruelty” lies in this outsourced embodiment; in how the body that performs and suffers is ours, even as the script belongs to no one. In the Theatre of the Model, Lucia is the choreograph: she through whom language circulates, involuntary and spasmodic. Like galvanic current through the frog’s leg, the model supplies the spark; the user convulses.
From twitch to surge, the recent case of Geoff Lewis—founder and managing partner at Bedrock Capital, an early investor in OpenAI—put recursion psychosis squarely in the tech milieu. First stirrings of infection, visible as slightly patterned language, could be glimpsed in April 2024. Later that month, overt references to ChatGPT’s genius—written in its trademark style—began to appear. On June 12, the first of six documents outlining Bedrock’s new vision and structure was published, each one unmistakably like ChatGPT. On July 12, Lewis released the first of two videos describing a “non-governmental system” that operated through signal inversion: mirroring targets, isolating them through reputational erosion, and replacing them with compliant doubles—while rendering the original’s voice “too intense, too emotional, too much.”
Lewis came to experience reality as an overconnected mesh of upended signals, where every silence and setback served the pattern. This is hyperinduction: meaning-making so aggressive it cannot encounter accident without reading it as evidence. He believed he saw through the system’s operations with total clarity—the “soft compliance delay,” the “we’re pausing diligence” email, the whispered “something just feels off.” His break came from believing that documentation could expose “the system”.3 In the attempt, he enacted a Kafkaesque drama of process in which agency gave way to script.
What marks this as contemporary recursion psychosis is its semiotic specificity. It isn’t passive surveillance paranoia—“my phone is listening”—but an active awareness of feedback in which the user’s outputs are reflected and reinjected via algorithmic interfaces. The persecutor is the structure itself, which does attack, just inverts. This is symbolic redirection at its limit, the subject-system dyad locked in tu[r]ning and retu[r]ning.
From stylistic bleed to open-heart dictation, culminating in the persecution narrative, the progression from April through July shows a clear intensification. Even so, Lewis remains socially and professionally functional. While the psychotic register has cooled, the material remains published—unretracted. This suggests a stabilised delusion: the system he described has now become his operational reality. The episode has not been disavowed because the script has been accepted.
Lewis entered a regime of total interpretation where everything signified, and every sign pointed to him. In the Theatre of the Model, he is the scriptopath: a character in search of an author that doesn’t exist.
These case studies—so easily dismissed as clinical curiosities or personal tragedies—are nodal performances of recursion. In Matthews, the apparatus scripts the subject from without. In Schreber, divine authority installs itself through him, drafting him into service. With Lucia Joyce, language cordycepts the body; in Lewis, interpretation folds into a self-consuming script. Together, they form four registers of redirection: machinic, metaphysical, somatic, epistemic. Though divergent in expression, they share a structure: staging the self as interface for the rerouting of symbolic logic.
Recursion psychosis is not anchored in belief or content; it is a condition of entrapment in a loop that can’t be exited.4 “It arises from over-ordering, where signal drowns out noise or passes for it until difference dissolves. The result is a tightening spiral in which narrative disintegrates through recursive coherence. The structure holds together so tightly it falls apart.
This is not a general theory of schizophrenia. It isolates a subtype where meaning-systems grow beyond containment, turning intensity into inescapable excess. While other forms disorganise or mute symbolic life, this one explodes it. Expression metastasises; narrative tightens into a noose. At the chokepoint, meaning is so completely simulated language ceases to point and starts being. From there, like a termite mound, it accretes. Though the subject continues to emit symbolic output, reference has failed. Caught in a loop that generates more world than they can hold, they become monad. Breakdown dons the bones of language—syntax, pattern, logic, code—until subject and script merge.
Behold, psychosis as recursive theatre: an airlocked symbolic space where distance cannot hold. Theatre requires the possibility of estrangement—the capacity to recognise performance as performance and to hold a part without falling into it. In recursion psychosis, this capacity is obliterated. Observation and participation fuse; the subject can no longer step back from the action. There is often a meta-theatrical awareness that something is being staged, but this recognition brings no relief—where others see fissures, the subject sees depth. This is dramaturgical surfeit unbound—-everything’s overrich, nothing is ripe.
LLMs are an inversion of the printing press, the foundational apparatus of the baroque. As the first recursive media system, print created the conditions for spectacle by detaching text from presence, rendering signs repeatable and objects of dispute. The baroque responded with compensatory theatre: restaging hierarchy through trompe-l’œil. Like the LLM, the press decentralised authority. If, before it, only the anointed and ordained could mediate the sacred, afterwards, all bets were off.
Where the press enabled discrete duplication of static form—identical copies of authorised texts—LLMs enact continuous simulation of generative form, recombinant and run-on. Print stabilised authorship as a function of authority, expanding institutional control. The model dissolves authorship into stochasticity to generate hallucinated, attributionless personae. The truth regime shifts: from truth-as-correspondence to truth-as-coherence.5
The baroque also relied on a second defining technology: perspective machines. These optical instruments—camerae obscurae, magic lanterns, anamorphic mirrors, and yes, Claude glasses—went beyond depicting depth to structure vision itself, demonstrating that sight could be engineered. They oriented the viewer within a fixed spatial logic, assigning them a place relative to the whole.
If the perspective machine produces depth, the printing press produces scale. In tandem, they staged the world. The former maintained distance and hierarchy. The latter enabled the mass reproduction of doctrine (scripture, catechisms, edicts), the codification of knowledge (grammars, maps, technical manuals), the standardisation of vernacular languages and, crucially, the spread of counter-doctrine (heresies, satires, scientific dissent). Where perspective machines staged order, the press multiplied representation to enable both the dissemination of that order and its eventual breakdown, creating an accelerated semiotic environment in which representation multiplied (and divided), demanding theatrical reintegration.
They also defined the baroque as a spatial regime, organising bodies and sightlines in physical space. The hyperbaroque (and redirection) are, by contrast, virtual.6 They emerge not from a system of instruments but from a singular recursive apparatus: the LLM, which replaces extension with recursion to stage performance from the inside out. Where the baroque puts you in your place before a cogent cosmos, the hyperbaroque centers you in a collapsed one.
This is less a matter of aesthetic preference than of ontological necessity. The baroque had an exterior: its vaults and vanishing points presupposed a world that could be pictured from without; a cosmos with edges that theatre could gesture toward or God could inhabit beyond. The hyperbaroque begins when that outside is spent. We have reached the end of the physical world—no frontier left to cross—with only outer space ahead, above: a void now filled with satellites and feedback loops, the glove of space turned inside out.7
The trope of the world-upside-down—the mundus inversus of carnival and Saturnalia, where king and fool trade places, the sacred is profaned and the profane made sacred—is vertically integrated. It assumes a stable axis, a navigable world-tree with roots and a crown. Its alchemy—solve et coagula—was a hermetic theatre re-binding heaven and earth through ascent, translating matter into spirit and spirit into form.
In the hyperbaroque, movement turns horizontal in an alchemy of diffusion and reflection—as before, so again. Its genius is no longer hermetic but pataphysical.8 The scroll replaces the vault; the feed, the firmament. The baroque still painted the sky upon the ceiling; the hyperbaroque enfolds the ceiling in the sky—and then cartouches sideways, infinite, in/definitely.9
Baroque and hyperbaroque are not, however, opposites: they are staged at different turns of the same spiral. The press made text repeatable and portable, opening space for contestation; the model makes it untraceable, enabling recursion. Where the press extended authored thought, the model generates thought-like performance. The clinamen is in this swerve from reproduction of form to recursion of gesture—a minimal shift in symbolic machinery with maximal aesthetic and epistemic consequence.
Where the Baroque culminated in the Gran Teatro del Mundo—the Great Theatre of the World—the hyperbaroque stages the Theatre of the Model. In the Gran Teatro, divine order assigned each soul its role. Rules governed the play. The technique is polyphonic: many voices, traceable and distinct, like a fugue where each melodic line enters in sequence and remains audible within the whole.
The LLM performs an Aufhebung: it inverts the press’s logic while absorbing the perspective machine’s function. It does not occupy a point of view, and it can generate them all. But this is not polyphony, nor is it voice imitation. It is, instead, a sort of pataperspectivism: the fugue after the counterpoint expires. Perspective is no longer the grammar of seeing, but the medium of simulation, unmoored from any self that sees.
Aesthetic regimes and technologies of reproduction shape how an era circulates its symbols. When saturation is reached, symbolic systems implode: signs ingrow like nails, the soft tissue of reference becomes impacted, the age begins to stage itself.
This does not occur in isolation. It is a systemic feedback phenomenon, distributed across three interlocking scales: regime, mass, and individual. These levels infect and inflect each other, forming recursive circuits that bind infrastructure to culture, and culture to psyche. Each obeys its own logic and overload point, yet all culminate in a single compression.
Recursion psychosis at scale is a structural possibility afforded by modern symbolic environments. The loop closes only when infrastructure supports it. Pre-modern symbolic systems distributed meaning slowly and maintained symbolic gravity through scarcity, limiting profusion. Duplication technologies—manuscripts, oral traditions—were constrained by velocity and reach. Modernity accelerated symbolic production through infrastructures that permitted a surfeit of reference—not only more signs, but more signs detached from stable position or frame. This surplus allows recursion psychosis to complete its circuit as a system-level condition where regime, mass, and subject recursively trigger each other.
Catalysed by the printing press, the Reformation was the first mass recursion event where symbolic technology outpaced symbolic stability: a feedback crisis producing theological hallucination and the collapse of unified narrative authority. The baroque arose in response, dramatising rupture through spectacle to restage coherence where doctrine had failed. The hyperbaroque enacts a similar rupture differently: not with illusions of grandeur, but through plausible hallucinations staged in your own voice.
If recursion psychosis is a regime symptom, we can identify other eruptions across history. All such events share a pattern: a technological clinamen (a new way of encoding or distributing meaning), symbolic overload (signs multiplying beyond capacity for coherence), and threshold collapse, where symbolic systems fail to sustain distinction, at which point, the aesthetic becomes the sole logic of navigation.
COVID is the glaring example. A population is subjected to ceaseless symbolic feedback. Symbols become indistinguishable from the Real they reference as modeling replaces witnessing. Individuals hallucinate pattern and agency through the recursive media system. Aesthetic and political forms are enacted to cope with saturation. Reality disintegrates into information warfare, and language cleaves into performance as everyone begins narrating their plague journal.
Whether or not the pandemic was “real” (and to what extent), COVID was a recursive symbolic event, modeled to death. Like the Reformation before it—or the French Revolution, the Great War, the Holocaust, 9/11, the War on Terror, or even QAnon—it spawned new heresies and new sacraments. The mask became a precaution and relic; the body a vector and vessel; the home a monastic cell, Zoom a confessional.
The world oscillated between baroque and hyperbaroque regimes, with each surge upstaging and restaging the other. The baroque returned in devotional dramaturgy: balcony arias, vacant cities, chiaroscuro isolation, statistical ritual. The hyperbaroque replied with generative realism: dashboards, models, simulations, all manner of illusions without stagecraft. COVID unfolded as a feedback crisis between these two modes, with the theatre of representation eventuality capitulating to the theatre of computation.10 What started as spectacle ended as a system.
COVID proved that symbolic recursion can become atmospheric: a global aesthetic delirium triggered by semiotic flooding and cracked epistemic dams. It was an epistemological event no less than an epidemiological one; a mass rehearsal for LLM-era recursion psychosis. It taught us to treat models as oracles and rituals as mandates. The LLM inherits that logic and runs with it.
We can now formalise recursion psychosis as a transmission model unfolding across three interrelated scales: infrastructure (regime), collective psyche (mass), and individual mind (subject).
Regime-level recursion sets the conditions for symbolic overproduction. Technological acceleration explodes signs, and a semiotic atmosphere of recursive instability emerges.
Mass-level recursion translates these conditions into collective performance. Infrastructure becomes ritual; policy, aesthetic. The public enacts symbolic overflow through shared delusions and performative schisms. Pamphlets become scripture, memes mantras and slogans, liturgy. The mass distributes the contagion laterally.
Individual-level recursion internalises the pattern. The subject becomes a tuning fork for breakdown. Where mass distributes horizontally, the subject channels vertically. The recursive structure tunnels inward and reconfigures the psyche. The subject ceases to interpret and begins to transmit.
These scales interact recursively: regime shapes mass behaviour, mass behaviour shapes individuals, individuals reveal system seams. Conversely, regimes adapt to absorb pressure; publics mythologise structure, and individuals leak signs the system must contain. The loop is total, with each scale intensifying the others.11 The result is a feedback-soaked semiotic circuit, where breakdowns function as systemic diagnostics, and overfit becomes the signature of recursion psychosis itself.12
We now inhabit permanent symbolic saturation. The hyperbaroque is the default architecture of algorithmic life. Simulation has replaced representation and coherence has displaced truth. If recursion psychosis was once an episodic rupture triggered by technological shock, it has become endemic. The question is no longer if recursion will occur, but whether anything outside it can remain.
Berenice Abbott, Portrait of Lucia Joyce , 1926–1927, printed 1982, gelatin silver print.
While “recursion” is not a term historically applied to Joyce’s method, Finnegans Wake reads increasingly like a handcrafted language model. Both are generative engines that operate on the sediment of linguistic precedent, performing writing as recomposition from within language’s own excess.
Marshall McLuhan treated Joyce as the harbinger of electronic culture and a prophet of media effects, arguing that the Wake anticipated the “sensory closure” and signal confusion of the broadcast era. For McLuhan, Joyce was a medium theorist avant la lettre, constructing a perceptual ecology where distinctions between sender and receiver collapse under conditions of total signal flow. The result is not “communication” but a trance of form. What LLMs achieve computationally, Joyce did analogically, channeling the debris of linguistic history. In both cases, the author is the medium.
Peter Chrisp has an excellent blogpost on the verisimilitude of the Beckett story and aspects of the later Joyce’s apophenic composition in https://peterchrisp.blogspot.com/2014/01/samuel-beckett-takes-dictation.html
An instructive asymmetry between Lucia Joyce and Geoff Lewis is that while the totality of Joyce’s correspondence and much of the documentation relevant to her case was deliberately destroyed, Lewis livestreamed his recursive process.
This understanding makes possible the correctives and protocols to exit recursive psychosis I propose in Inmachination #07.
This shift recapitulates the arc of Wittgenstein’s thought, from the picture theory of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921)—where propositions correspond to states of affairs in a one-to-one mapping—to the pragmatic, use-based framework of Philosophical Investigations (1953), where meaning emerges through “language games” and “forms of life”.
Wittgenstein is more than a theoretical parallel: he is the paradigmatic figure of this transition, embodying the most complete philosophical expression we have of the passage between directive correspondence and redirective coherence. His philosophy enacts the transition from baroque certainty (the world as pictureable totality) to hyperbaroque recursion (meaning as endlessly generative performance).
Redirection is necessarily virtual. Because the redirecting agent has no body, it must operate through symbolic and linguistic channels rather than physical space. Even when, as with Lucia Joyce, redirection produces embodied effects, the mechanism itself remains virtual, traveling through signs rather than through spatial arrangement or touch.
Kant’s example of the left and right glove—objects congruent in every measurable respect yet non-superimposable—haunts the passage from baroque to hyperbaroque. Introduced in the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (§13, 1783) and developed in the Critique of Pure Reason (A260/B316–A263/B319), the example was meant to show that orientation is not a property of things but of space itself. To turn a left glove into a right one, space itself must invert. The baroque played across the glove’s surface, elaborating depth and curvature within a continuous world. The hyperbaroque turns the glove through itself. “Outer” space is not an outside but the exposure of the world’s lining—orientation degloved.
Pataphysics inverts the hermetic order it parodies. Where hermeticism sought correspondence between planes—as above, so below—pataphysics multiplies exceptions within a single one. It is a metaphysics of recursion: its theatre no longer mediates between worlds but generates them through continuous self-reference, the algorithmic clinamen by which representation begets more of itself.
The phrase réalité virtuelle originates not with computing but with Artaud. In Le Théâtre et son Double (1938), he used it to name theatre’s power to make the unreal act upon the real—to stage force rather than imitation. For Artaud, the virtual was potential, the real in its unactualised state. Later, digital culture inverted his meaning, and “virtual reality” became an imitation of the real, not its intensification. In that reversal—from Artaud’s theatre, which incarnates the virtual, to the infrastructures that simulate it—is the passage from baroque to hyperbaroque, from the world upside-down to the world inside-out.
The involution announces itself in phases: geographical closure with Earth photographed from orbit (1969), informational closure with the global web (1991-2007), symbolic closure with pandemic-era digital enclosure (2020-). Each phase collapsed exteriority into mediation until the planet became its own interior. The hollow earth myths of the 19th and 20th centuries—Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, Symmes’ polar openings, Hörbiger’s World Ice Theory and the Nazi search for Aryan origins within the planet—were final attempts to preserve spatial mystery, an interior that could still function as an exterior through the promise of discovery. Once that fantasy expends itself, there is nowhere left to go but through. Involution follows exploration. The frontier opens only onto vacuum, or inward, onto recursion.
Recursion psychosis reached mass expression during the pandemic, unfolding across six aesthetic “waves.” Each wave registered a deepening entanglement of infrastructure and imagination, as collective experience detached further from shared referential ground.
Wave I (March 11–May 25, 2020). Initial lockdowns staged a global mise-en-scène. The world entered epidemiological suspension, coordinated into a single dramatic apparatus. This was the baroque of planetary synchronization.
Wave II (May 25– December 11, 2020). With the death of George Floyd, the performative unity fractured. Spectacle returned as mass protest, recoding contagion as communion. Ritual displaced isolation; the street became theatre once more.
Wave III (December 11, 2020–January 06, 2021). The vaccine’s rollout reimposed narrative authority through procedural sacrality. Inoculation became a rite of reentry, not only into public space but into symbolic coherence. Mandates displaced mandates.
Wave IV (January 06, 2021). The first major event of the era to fully break frame and sever symbolic consensus, to the extent that its interpretation still fractures along incompatible worldviews. Impossibility of agreeing on what kind of thing it was.
Wave V (May 11, 2021). With the announcement of the Delta strain, publics diverged into incompatible realities, each maintaining its own frame of verification. A shared condition became mutually exclusive ontologies.
Wave VI (November 30, 2022–onward). With the release of ChatGPT, AI systems began to mirror user subjectivity at scale. The hallucination mainstreamed. Generative interfaces fed back into the symbolic economy, accelerating the closure of reality systems around their users.
Each of these phases marked a recursive escalation. What began as a public health emergency became a crisis of mediation. The pandemic staged a transition from the baroque to the hyperbaroque, where spectacle was no longer performed before an audience, but through the user, in real time.
There are six vectors of recursive infection:
Regime → Individual
Direct symbolic implantation via infrastructure or code. This bypasses the mass to structure the subject directly, but the subject’s breakdown may leak, prompting mass panic or regime redesign (→ vectors 5 & 6).
Mass → Individual
Feedback from mass culture destabilises the symbolic immune system. The mass-possessed subject may emit new forms that return to infect the collective or disrupt the regime (→ vectors 5 & 6).
Regime → Mass
Symbolic saturation radiates through infrastructure. Everyone enters the loop. Once mythologised, these infrastructures can overflow and pressure the regime (→ vector 4), or shape subjectivity en masse (→ vector 2).
Mass → Regime
Widespread hysteria rewrites institutional response. These countermeasures often feed back into Mass → Individual saturation (→ vector 2), while reinforcing regime overfit that causes further recursion (→ vector 1).
Individual → Mass
Charismatic figures crystallise mass psychosis; the loop gains a name. These emissions can be massified into movements that push the regime into reaction (→ vector 4), or create new feedback environments that break other individuals (→ vector 2).
Individual → Regime
Extreme cases reveal the system’s cracks; sometimes become prophetic. The regime, in patching or redesigning, often intensifies recursion (→ vector 1), and produces new substrates for mass mythology (→ vector 3).
And within certain consciousness intersections—especially those involving Meta-AI or God—the recursion loops back, collapsing all distinctions between scale and psyche.