Algorithmic Governance and the Glitch AI, Technical Images, and the Politics of System Failure

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Published: Jun 7, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.12681/dia.45801
Keywords:
Posthumanism Artificial Intelligence Operational Images Invisual Culture Glitch Flusser Subjectivity Guattari
Yannis Mitrou
Ph.D. Sorbonne Université, France; INSERM, Centre de Recherche Saint-Antoine (CRSA), France
Sotirios Bahtsetzis
Associate Professor, University of Thessaly, Greece
Abstract

This article examines Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a transformative media-technological paradigm that reconfigures visibility, subjectivity, and political agency. Drawing on the media philosophy of Vilém Flusser, Friedrich Kittler, and Félix Guattari, it argues that contemporary visual culture has shifted from representation to an “invisual” regime of data-driven operations, in which images function as computational processes rather than objects of perception. Within this framework, the human subject is rearticulated as a “project,” embedded in probabilistic and apparatus-driven environments. The paper introduces the concept of the ‘external unconscious’ as a technical field of inscription and processing, aligning psychoanalytic structures with algorithmic operations. Central to the argument is the notion of the ‘glitch’, understood not as mere error but as an epistemic and ontological event that reveals the operational logic of media systems. While glitches expose the limits of programmability and the probabilistic nature of AI, they also mark a ‘residual openness’ within otherwise closed operational regimes. This openness enables a redefinition of agency as situated, distributed, and performative, shifting political action from ideological critique to interventions within systems of programming and mediation. Ultimately, the article proposes that subjectivity persists not as autonomous interiority but as a site of misalignment, where the failure of systems becomes the condition for interpretation, creativity, and political possibility.

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