The Political Daydream: Freud, Aesthetics, and the Limits of “AI”

Abstract

This essay argues that the contemporary panic around AI and creative labor is not driven by autonomous technological development but by the imperatives of capital and its contradictory relation to labor. The panic surrounding AI has already proven destructive to the broader sector of mental labor; yet at its core, the specter of an AI “takeover” raises fundamental questions about the origins of creativity, artistic originality, and genius—questions to which psychoanalytic theory offers powerful answers. Drawing on Freud, Hanns Sachs, Theodor Adorno, and Ernst Bloch, I develop a psychoanalytic theory of aesthetic creation grounded in the concept of the daydream as the mediating form between private fantasy and collective social life. Artistic creation is shown not as the production of content alone, but as the formation of a shared social space—a “mutual daydream”—through which private wishes are transformed into collective meaning. This social dimension of form, rather than technical production, is what constitutes creativity itself and what cannot be replicated by machine intelligence. Extending this framework politically, the essay links the daydream to Bloch’s Not-Yet-Conscious, showing how collective imagination becomes a historical force in moments of social transformation. Against techno-mystification, the essay insists that creativity is irreducibly social, historical, and libidinal—a structure of relation, not a computational capacity.

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