Seminar 10: Rhetoric/AI: Destructive Pleasures, Cruel Optimisms, Reorienting Problematics

Leaders: Attila Hallsby (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities) and Gavin Johnson (Texas Christian University)

Why do people opt into technologies they recognize as dangerous? How can we simultaneously name
AI’s destruction—environmental damage, hypersurveillance, data extraction, epistemic degradation—and
still justify the pleasures of using it? Existing scholarship in rhetoric and AI has converged on a set of
commonplaces about disruption, harm, and utility, but these accounts remain reactive, stranded in a
synchronic present too thin to support durable critique. This seminar argues that understanding AI’s
affective-rhetorical realities requires a vocabulary for destruction-as-pleasure that doesn’t rely on
mystification—the assumption that people acquiesce to harmful conditions only because they’ve been
deceived. Drawing on the death drive (Edelman) and cruel optimism (Berlant) as well as necropolitics
(Mbembe) and rhetorical critiques of AI (Hallsby; Wang), we develop realist, sympathetic, and strategic
accounts of AI’s proliferation, treating self-destructive attachment as intelligible rather than simply false
consciousness.

These accounts anchor five interlocking problematics: the death drive––pleasure principle continuum
structuring AI adoption; AI as an “undead” technology that revives older logics of racialized and
extractive violence; the kakoethos, or pathological (bad) character, of the AI founder class; a
hypercapitalist antihumanism that renders human judgment and labor increasingly worthless; and a shift
in surveillance from panoptic observation to anticipatory foreclosure. Together, these threads work toward
a shared rhetorical vocabulary capable of naming destruction and pleasure at once while being durable
enough to outlast the boosterism/doomerism cycle that continually resets public debate.
Through participant-driven discussion, short writing tasks, and collaborative exchange, this seminar
invites scholars in rhetoric, communication, and writing studies to build new critical and pedagogical
responses to AI’s affective hold.

There will be no A/V equipment available in this seminar. The seminar leaders encourage participants to bring charged devices with their preferred hardware and software pre-loaded, especially for any participants who have accessibility needs. You should indicate any accessibility needs on your registration form.