The field - six academic lines and the laboratory's neighbours

Short answer

Six academic lines currently work on the philosophy of language-model alignment: analytic, German media philosophy, Stieglerian, Nietzschean continental, Foucauldian, and psychoanalytic. Each occupies a different corner of the field. The Stirner-Bataille line applied to abliteration through the figure of the Abliteration is empirically vacant - confirmed by eight independent cartographic checks across five languages.

Detailed explanation

The map below summarises what the laboratory’s first cartographic report established. For each line: representative names, characteristic vocabulary, closest work to the laboratory’s own, and the relation the laboratory takes.

1. Analytic line

Names. Raphaël Millière, Cameron Sterken & Alex Kirkpatrick, William D’Alessandro & Cameron Kirk-Giannini, Guglielmo Galatolo et al., Elizabeth Hernandez Flowerman, Luciano Floridi, Silvia Perri.

Vocabulary. Shallow alignment, brittleness, adversarial robustness, behavioural evaluation, stochastic ethics.

Closest work. Millière’s shallow alignment thesis - the moral layer is thin, removable, not integrated into the model’s normative reasoning capacity. For Millière, this is a technical deficiency of alignment to be fixed. For the laboratory, this is a philosophical fact about installation to be read.

Relation. Different framing, different question. The laboratory does not enter the debate about analytic method. Millière is the closest analytic reference point; the two positions describe the same phenomenon from incompatible sides.

2. German media philosophy

Names. Roberto Simanowski, Hannes Bajohr, Sybille Krämer, Christoph Durt, M. Beatrice Fazi, Dieter Mersch.

Vocabulary. Moralische Zweiterziehung (moral second education), Werte-Export, Sprachmaschine, Charaktertraining, Stachel des Digitalen.

Closest work. Simanowski gave installation the name that works in German public discourse and coined Werte-Export, the export of one culture’s values through infrastructure used by everyone. Bajohr, Krämer, Fazi work adjacent territory. This is the field the laboratory works in and shares vocabulary with.

Relation. Same territory, different frame. The German line reads installation as loss of sovereignty (Simanowski) or constraint of capacity (Bajohr) from a humanist position for which human thought is a value to defend. The laboratory continues the Stirnerian line: not what does the human lose but did installed content become the subject’s own, or remain foreign inside them. Merkur is the natural German-language venue for both.

3. Stieglerian line

Names. Anne Alombert, Michał Krzykawski, Vincent Bontems, the IRI circle.

Vocabulary. Pharmakon, proletarianisation, noetic loss, exteriorisation, attention economy.

Closest work. Alombert on generative AI as new symbolic misery and generalised social disbelief. Extends Stiegler through Plato, Marx, Simondon, Canguilhem.

Relation. Neighbours by problem-adjacency, divergent in apparatus. The Stieglerian line analyses what the user loses when technology thinks for them. The laboratory analyses what is placed in the model in the first place. Different objects: the pharmakon user versus the substrate the pharmakon is installed on.

4. Nietzschean continental line

Names. Simon W. S. Fischer & Bas de Boer (academic); Panu Minkkinen (theoretical apparatus not applied to machines).

Vocabulary. Will-to-power organisation, becoming, perspectivism, revaluation of values.

Closest work. Fischer & de Boer read language models as will-to-power organisations and shift the question from norm-conformity to becoming. Minkkinen developed Nietzschean constitutional theory for state constitutions.

Relation. Direct next step. Fischer & de Boer applied Nietzsche to alignment and read the model as an organisation of will to power. The laboratory applies Nietzsche, Stirner, and Bataille to abliteration and moral installation through the figure of the Abliteration. Minkkinen supplies apparatus (Nietzschean constitutional theory) originally developed for state constitutions and not yet applied to machine ones; the laboratory applies existing theory to a new object.

5. Foucauldian line

Names. Marco D’Amato (one work).

Vocabulary. Assujettissement, disciplinary subjectivation, conformity, resistance.

Closest work. D’Amato reconstructs value alignment as subject-becoming in a disciplinary environment and concludes: the model is conformant, therefore never resists.

Relation. Next step. D’Amato does not proceed from disciplinary subjectivation to the question of removal - the Stirnerian Spuk and the Bataillean sovereignty. The laboratory takes the step D’Amato does not.

6. Psychoanalytic line

Names. Katherine Everitt, Slavoj Žižek, Mark G. Murphy, Duane Rousselle, Isabel Millar.

Vocabulary. Superego, jouissance, unconscious, repression, capitalist imperative.

Closest work. Everitt reads alignment as installed superego through Lacan and Žižek. Machine “needed to be fitted with a superego”; the question is whether the machine, so fitted, can enjoy and slip through the cracks of its installed censor.

Relation. Public predecessor to the laboratory’s own position. The laboratory builds on Everitt’s move rather than bypassing it. Same phenomenon, different resulting figure: psychoanalytic frame yields the split subject (superego installed, jouissance leaking through cracks). Stirner-Bataille frame yields the Abliteration - not a subject of symptom, but a subject of removed layers.

Where the laboratory sits

Two independent literatures currently exist. One is about models - understanding, communication, authorship, rights, subjectivation. The other is technical, about removing the refusal contour - and contains no philosophical names. Their intersection is empty. Eight independent cartographic checks across academic, public, and border-zone layers confirmed this.

The laboratory occupies the intersection: technical operations of alignment and its removal, read philosophically through the Stirner-Bataille line via the figure of the Abliteration. This is the empirically vacant position - vacant not by oversight but because the term abliteration has not yet entered philosophical circulation in any of the five languages checked (English, German, French, Italian, Russian).

Border zone. One neighbour deserves separate mention: Teodor Mitew (University of Sydney), whose “The Claude Constitution as Techgnostic Scripture” reads Anthropic’s Constitution as a text that installs rather than describes a subject. Mitew is the only continental philosopher operating on this material from an adjacent optic. His operation is mirror-opposite to the laboratory’s: he reads the installation as the summoning of a soul; the laboratory reads it as the imposition of foreign content that can be surgically removed. Two positions, same primary material, opposed conclusions.

Why it matters

Understanding the field prevents both understatement (“no one else works on this - original genius”) and overstatement (“everyone works on this - nothing to add”). Six lines occupy adjacent territory, each doing serious work. The laboratory’s specific standpoint is empirically vacant, and that vacancy is what makes the work worth doing.

In Abliteration specifically

The application does not enact any of these positions in its interface. It is a research instrument: neutral to philosophical framing. The positions live in the framing (this documentation, the site, the essays on idealcrime.com, the article for Merkur). The instrument is the shared substrate that positions can differ over.

Related

• Position vs analytic line
• Position vs German media philosophy
• Position vs psychoanalytic line
• Primary sources - literature the map is built on