A mighty contagious absence, part two

On submission and resistance to AI-generated literature

 

To great writers, finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they work throughout their lives. For only the more feeble and distracted take an inimitable pleasure in conclusions, feeling themselves thereby given back to life. For the genius each caesura, and the heavy blows of fate, fall like gentle sleep itself into his workshop labour. About it he draws a charmed circle of fragments.
                                              – Walter Benjamin ¹ 
                   

Many years ago I used this paragraph as the epigram to something of identical length – perhaps a short story or prose poem – as an alibi for its brevity and as a dig at the use of epigrams, a device as I saw it for co-opting the incontrovertibility of the one to win credence for the other. It was weightless until it dropped into memory when I read a similar point made by one of Benjamin's keenest readers in an intellectual memoir prompted by the objects in his workplace:

The studio is the image of potentiality–of the writer's potentiality to write, of the painter's or sculptor's potentiality to paint or sculpt. Attempting to describe one's own studio thus means attempting to describe the modes of and forms of one's own potentiality–a task that is, at least on first glance, impossible. How can one have a potentiality? One cannot have a potentiality, one can only inhabit it.²

One can sense the weight of potential in the open notebooks on show, a place the reader inhabits examining the details.

Potentiality is a subject embedded in Agamben's thinking and extends beyond practicalities, but what struck me in the photograph is that there is no computer in sight, not even a typewriter. Agamben makes no explicit mention of his working method, but it's there to see. The clutter is a neat copy of the working mind as it seeks a completed work. The working method is also something I noticed on the cover of a very different but equally absorbing intellectual memoir whose cover has a cropped version of this photograph accompanying an interview. Peter Brown says his books are written by hand.

And recently I heard that Peter Handke is the only author Suhrkamp allows to submit work handwritten in pencil. He wants to move slowly, allowing sentences to come from a great distance. His collection of notebooks pictured below provokes an overwhelming sense of potential. 

The pleasure of writing by hand in notebooks is not in what one writes but in its opening onto possibility, the potential to become something complete. I write one sentence and a world opens. This is not possible on a computer because everything one types can be deleted in a moment (and usually is), whereas one is driven forward by the pen and potential is maintained despite striking out a typed or handwritten sentence; even an eraser leaves the ghost of a pencilled word. On completion, however, the world closes. As readers we know of Agamben, Brown and Handke only because of completion, and yet the presence of books like the self-portrait and Handke's The Weight of the World suggests Benjamin is right about the unique experience of potential, especially in light of these authors' prolific output, as if so many books are attempts not to add to the pile but to move in the opposite direction, towards potential. Writing longhand may be a resistance to completion and conclusions, very much against the grain of cultural demand.

Image from The Goalie's Anxiety.

 

Technology now at hand enables completion without the need to work through potential. Much anxiety has been expressed about the threat of the new generation of large language models (LLMs) to destroy livelihoods in the short term and to erase the social role of literature in the long. One professional writer says "We're screwed. Writing is over. That's it. It's time to pack away your quill, your biro, and your shiny iPad: the computers will soon be here to do it better." Meanwhile, the Society of Authors has staged a protest about copyright infringement and the Guardian has run a discussion of an AI-generated story by various professional authors in which worries about the lack of a human connection are expressed. 

On a more philosophical level, it raises questions about the role of the writer in the writing process. The learning-theory guru Donald Clark reckons these are due only because we are "trapped in the late 18th [Century] Romantic view of authorship, the unique, divinely-inspired, creative spark of the individual". This has led to the Society of Authors appropriating the mystique of authorship to make it a respectable profession like carpet weaving or quantity surveying, while their public statements read like a corporate drone has written them.³ LLMs are really only the logical terminus of genre fiction that dominates book culture, the last thing the Society would march against.⁴ The scholar of digital literature Hannes Bajohr confirms AI is the genre author's secret sharer because it is designed to produce "normalization":

Their output is convincing precisely when they are supposed to spit out what is expected, what is ordinary, what is statistically probable...And just as there are assistive marketing AIs for expectable marketing prose, there are now also assistive literature AIs for more or less expectable literature....Genre literature is virtually defined by the recurrence of certain elements, making it particularly suitable for AI generation.

Like AI, genre writing minimises the creative workload for the author – each sentence an epigram – and allows easy digestion by the reader. This is has always been the ideal for the "feeble and distracted" to give themselves back to life without ever leaving it. Bajohr tells of the popular German writer Daniel Kehlmann's attempt to generated a story using a language model AI, which failed according to Kehlmann because it did not "seem good enough to be published as an artistic work rather than merely as the product of an experiment on an artistic level". "But" Bajohr asks "what does 'good enough' mean? Measured against what aesthetics?"

When Kehlmann speaks of 'experiment', he seems not to have experimental literature in mind, but rather the scientific meaning of the word: a controlled observation whose outcome supports, weakens, or refines a hypothesis. But it does so...only within the framework of an existing paradigm – new paradigms are precisely not what scientific experiments establish. Experimental literature, on the other hand – at least according to its avant-garde self-image – does not want mere refinement, but ideally questions the paradigm of literature itself.

Clark focuses on a "robot artist" that is at the forefront of challenging the paradigm of "the human-centric view of creativity as a uniquely human trait" in which:

vast pools of media representing the sum total of all history, all cultural output from our species, has been captured and used to train huge multimodal models that allow our species to create a new future. With new forms of AI, we are borrowing to create the new. It is a new beginning, a fresh start using technology that we have never seen before in the history of our species, something that seems strange but oddly familiar, thrilling but terrifying.

Examples are provided of "historical dawns that hinted at this future" such as the Library of Alexandria, "open to all containing the known world's knowledge" and latterly Wikipedia. The difference, he says is that AI is "much more profoundly communal". The examples remind us that AI is only the latest form of technology without which cultural production communal or otherwise would not be possible. Similar concerns were not expressed when a quill on papyrus became a fountain pen on mass-produced paper, or when a pen became a typewriter. Everything was positive moving forward. But of course there was concern following the invention of printing press and the subsequent availability of translations of the Bible into the vernacular, and this example immediately exposes the deeper issue lurking in the concern for AI-generated art. It is the ghost haunting Clark's assumption that art equals encyclopaedic knowledge, containing creativity within the boundaries of humanism. This is continued in his claim that we have entered a new era of artistic production defined by Nicolas Bourriaud as postproduction in which "art and cultural activity now interprets, reproduces, re-exhibits or utilises works made by others or from already available cultural products". If this seems familiar it's because it is the standard practice of postmodernism, with all the insoucient optimism that goes with it, and Clark does acknowledge that postmodernism shares with postproduction "themes of challenging originality and embracing plurality". The difference here is that this "moves us beyond simple curation, collages and mashups into genuinely new forms of production and expression". It cannot be pinned down to one word and we should "let the idea [of AI's 'outputs'] flutter and fly free from the prison of language". 

Such optimism about new technology and the arts is nothing new:

In the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art.

This part of Paul Valéry's essay The Conquest of Ubiquity from 1928 was used by Walter Benjamin as the epigram to his famous essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction in which he sees such technological innovations as enabling a change in human perception, in this case the inexhaustible repetition of previously immutable works of art presented in limited arenas are injected with time and change, removing the aura surrounding them and brushing aside "outmoded concepts, such as ... eternal value and mystery", thereby empowering a perceptual and political revolution. What may be less familiar is the continuity of all three thinkers with the art production of a much earlier era.

"The artistic representation of sacred subjects was a science governed by fixed laws which could not be broken at the dictates of individual imagination" writes Êmile Mâle in the book subtitled Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century. Every artist had to learn the rules of representation.

He must know that the circular nimbus placed vertically behind the head serves to express sanctity, while the nimbus impressed with a cross is the sign of divinity which he will always use in portraying any of the three Persons of the Trinity. He will learn that the aureole (i.e. light which emanates from the whole figure and surrounds the body as a nimbus) expresses eternal bliss, and belongs to the three Persons of the Trinity, to the Virgin, and to the souls of the Blessed. He must know that representations of God the Father, God the Son, the angels and the apostles should have the feet bare, while there would be real impropriety in representing the Virgin and the saints with bare feet. In such matters a mistake would have ranked almost as heresy. Other accepted symbols enabled the mediaeval artist to express the invisible, to represent that which would otherwise be beyond the domain of art.⁵ 

If this programme reads like the precise opposite of secular freedom and the unpredictable products of AI, that's because it is, but it is also determined by tradition and normalisation (in which anything goes becomes a programming command). Both bring forth the old and proclaim the new, appropriating an aura even in the act of discharging it; "nothing was left solely to inspiration", as Mâle says of Dante's Commedia. AI's rampant productivity also mimics capitalism's hothouse demand for new markets, 'growth' and human submission.

From expressing the invisible via religious art to escaping the prison of language via AI, there is continuity in utopian claims, for the promise of deliverance whether heavenly or humanist. The continuity is consolidated in Meyer Schapiro's revisionary account of church art in the eleventh and twelfth centuries when he says began "a new sphere of artistic creation without religious content" anticipating modern art because it was "imbued with values of spontaneity, individual fantasy, delight in color and movement, and the expression of feeling". We can't help but regard medieval art as entirely symbolic and devotional, and Schapiro cites commentators who have sought to attach religious symbolism to the most mundane features. He explains this with Hegel's comment that "in an age of piety one does not have to be religious in order to create a truly religious work of art, whereas today the most deeply pious artist is incapable of producing it." 

This suggest that the basis of artistic production and what we are drawn toward is the "truly religious", however sublimated.⁶ This may be confirmed by the vast archives of scholarly material on the arts and popular culture communities devoted to billion-dollar movie franchises. Anxiety about the meaning and worth of art in the here and now is embodied in modern review culture. The reception of Daniel Kehlmann's bestselling novel Die Vermessung der Welt when published in translation as Measuring the World is a good example. One reviewer sought the incontrovertibility of paradigm-shifting European modernism to win credence for the crowd-pleasing entertainment by announcing without evidence that Kehlmann was "already being compared to Nabokov and Proust"; a claim that became its own evidence. Unable to recognise what it seeks, the visual arts has developed an aura as an investment commodity for the super-rich,⁷ and as sentimental ornamentation for the rest, while novels are evaluated by entirely extra-literary criteria: the public profile of an author, the number of sales, whether they have won a literary prize, and sometimes even by the number of pages. AI, however, may provoke a turn away from such inanities.

***

 

For a long time I thought writing was a job of work. I'm now convinced that it's an inner event, a 'non-work' that you accomplish, above all, by emptying yourself out, and allowing what's already self-evident to percolate through.
               Marguerite Duras ⁸

When Benjamin predicted the overcoming of auratic art, he defined the aura as "the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be", and if distance has now become taboo in contemporary literature, it is with the advent of LLMs literature that the unique phenomenon is drawn back into the foreground. Invariably, distance is presented as the "inaccessible" and experienced entirely on the reader's side and is used as a critical barb directed at the "self-indulgent" author but, as Duras' remark suggests, it is also experienced by the author (at least by those who disavow the agency of the name). 

It's a curious thing, this intimate experience of distance and our need for the guarantee of a human presence in the background. Like road signs and adverts, genre fiction provides an a priori guarantee and must be why supernatural horror and stories of gruesome crime provides comfort to so many, much as the story of Christ's torture and death on the cross brings comfort to Christians. In 2004, I was drawn to write about the promotional phrases on two posters on a bus shelter, not to seek the identity of copywriters but because of their automated effacement, the empty space onto which the words open and how difficult it is to speak about.

There is someone speaking and yet nobody is speaking; assuredly, this is speech, but speech that does not think about what it is saying, always says the same thing, and is incapable of choosing its audience or responding to their questions. 

This is not one of the Guardian's guests responding to the soulless anonymity of an AI-generated story but Socrates talking about the phenomenon of writing, paraphrased here by Maurice Blanchot.⁹ Socrates proposes that language of this sort should be avoided in favour of a living speaker one can interrogate. He recognises its similarity to "the pure speech that gives expression to the sacred", such as at the oracle of Delphi.

In this regard, somewhat mysteriously...writing, as an object, appears to have an essential proximity with sacred language, whose strangeness it imparts to the literary work, while also inheriting from it its boundlessness, risk, and incalculable force beyond all guarantee. Like sacred language, what is written comes from no recognizable source, is without author or origin, and thereby always refers back to something more original than itself.

What is strange about literature? What risks does it take? In what way is it close to the sacred? These are the questions dilating the void beneath contemporary art and literature. They cannot receive answers because we have no means to formulate a response. To ask them invites weary contempt. For Heidegger, this is because literature has gone peak-Socrates to become a functional technology reducing the world and its inhabitants to a resource to be exploited. Strangeness, risk and the sacred have become marketing phrases. He traces the retreat of the sacred in the poetry of Hölderlin. In his time the "default of God" was distance – "the age [was] determined by God's keeping himself afar" – whereas now the default is absence and the "radiance of divinity is extinguished in world-history". The ground upon which humanity stood is no longer ground but an abyss: "The age is desolate not only because God is dead but also because mortals scarcely know or are capable even of their own mortality." Poetry offers a mode of truth-revelation more originary to commonsense correspondence between word and thing. Heidegger separates the hammer from the hand. For him, poetry is a means of building new ground, but in order to so "it is necessary that there are those who reach into the abyss", who seek to be capable of their own mortality, and in doing so enable others to experience and endure the loss and absence of the sacred, to recognise the disenchantment of the world: "How could there ever be for God a residence fit for God unless the radiance of divinity had already begun to appear in all that is?" ¹⁰

Heidegger was not alone in recognising symptoms in poetry. A few decades earlier Mallarmé claimed that literature was "undergoing an exquisite and fundamental crisis" as free verse flooded over classical forms following the instability of runaway industrial growth, and soon after Benjamin showed how even the everyday wisdom passed on in storytelling had succumbed to the novel in which "no event comes to us without already being shot through with explanations".¹¹ Nowadays poetry is difficult to identify as anything other than prose in an affectation of format, a prejudicial identification for sure but one made possible because of the dominance of functional prose. This would explain why it has a minor presence in literary culture, not refuted by the growth of boilerplate expressionism on social media. Readability has become unreadable. If the novel then functions only as information by other means – events shot through with explanation – and has in the process neutralised the potential for the unveiling of poetic language in Heidegger's sense, thereby creating conditions for literature identical to those summarised by Hegel for religious art, we might wonder if literature is even possible in our time.

Duras' conviction that writing a novel is non-work is not far from LLMs that can produce a complete work without indeed any work. Both disrupt our notion of creativity and both open onto distance. The similarity may help us to understand why in all its richness and variety of contemporary art and literature, and in its excited amplification in criticism, it nevertheless appears very much after the Lord Mayor's Show, forced and straining for glory; "pyrotechnics against a night sky of nothingness", as EM Cioran put it.¹² 

 

Duras was not alone in the manner of her discovery. Holly Langstaff recounts in her outstanding book how Blanchot at first agreed with Heidegger that poetic language was a vehicle of truth grounding human existence, but through his own experience as a literary critic in the day and as a novelist at night, his mind was changed. If the critic's task is to evaluate a literary work and to communicate this to the reading public it "requires there to be something particular about the work that sets it apart from the everyday". A paradox arises in the demand to bring to light that which is bound to the dark, but it is inevitable that the critic and the everyday reader will seek to utilise the experience of the night and to communicate it in some way, to itself if not also to others, and indeed Blanchot argued that this is also necessary to the work. Yet what sets the reading experience apart and why it maintains almost mystical prestige in an otherwise non-literary culture is that the essence of literature is perpetually removed from such utility. Critics invariably point to specific details to shine a light on a novel's dark, such as its ingenious plotting, its psychological insights, its geographical and chronological span, the knowledge we absorb of other people and cultures, its relation to similar books or an account of the author's career thus far, or simply how good, bad or indifferent it makes them feel. But the light merely illuminates itself. In reading, and for the writer too, as Duras says, something escapes rational translation. This should not be news to any keen reader because it is the fundamental experience of reading a novel, the longue durée of curling up with a good book. Blanchot calls it La Part de feu, the fire's share, as in the swathe of a forest sacrificed by a firebreak so the rest can survive. This is the determinate sentence of literature. However, there is what Langstaff calls slippage between the two modes of language that Heidegger saw as a great danger as it "results in the forgetting of Being which is characteristic of modernity" leading to everything, including literature, becoming a resource to be exploited. This is related to Blanchot's criticism of word-by-word and line-by-line paraphrasing of poetry but praise for the critic who respects the fire "while maintaining his reader in a state of pure ignorance".¹³ How familiar this is to the reader of the broadsheet book reviews!

Literature haunts us because it is a confrontation with the "unsayable emptiness" of the fire, what Blanchot refers to elsewhere as "the outside", "the neuter" or, recalling but also deviating from Heidegger's es gibt, "the there is". He sees literary writing as a suspension of the empirical world, its negation, an inhuman interruption of human control and understanding. While this may be seen as nihilistic, and certainly not humanist, Blanchot sees it instead as an affirmation of the unknowable, which can be creative as well as destructive, "a radical nihilism which", Langstaff says, "is no longer nihilism in the sense of nostalgia for values, but an embrace of the impossible".¹⁴ In the final part, I'll turn to the writing of the impossible.

 

***

 

How many efforts are required in order not to write—in order that, writing, I not write, in spite of everything.
                  – Blanchot ¹⁵

 
In the first part of this inadvertent series, I responded to Alice Oswald's "manifesto of likeness" in which the Oxford Professor of Poetry calls for rhapsodic poetry to stitch the profusion of the empirical world together to counter lyric poetry, exemplified by a poem generated by chatGPT, because it not does not emerge from a "situated self" and "is not about things which are". In doing so, she says, it exposes us to "a mighty contagious absence". While Oswald's criticism presents a powerful case and appears to be humanism's definitive resistance to the advent of AI-generated poetry and prose, it does so by addressing a technology whose essence is and always has been precisely this absence; the absence of things which are, or the presence of that which is situated elsewhere, or indeed nowhere. Absence draws us to books; an absence we sense in the world and turn to books in the hope to fathom and resolve, an absence, however, we meet again in the infinity of prose, at once mocking and soothing our finitude, an absence we go on to explore and reinscribe in writing. Absence is contagious. Happy talk of novels opening "another world" is a symptom of this meeting; another world in which nothing dies, in which nothing can die.¹⁶  A confounding dualism is inherent to literature: it is nothing and nothing without it. So behind our literary evaluations and debates is our relation to this nothing, this space of absence. 

In an exceptional essay,¹⁷ Lars Iyer traces the origins of the relation back to ancient Palestine and the messianic hope offered by an apocalypse in which the coming messiah will end the dualism between God and the world. Despite the horrors associated with apocalypse – whose etymology can be traced to "an unveiling or revelation" – the faithful "can look forward to the coming vindication of the persecuted, to the divine redemption that brings an end to suffering and death". Hope lies in apocalypse. We can see the residue of this in the aura given to the book, the decapitalised version is its modest disguise of the divine Word, and the hope we invest in its promise of a revelation, however vulgar or diminished. "But what happens", Iyer asks, "when the putative messiah actually arrives and fails?" What happens when Christ dies upon the cross leaving the world order unchanged? And so we might ask, what happens when the book fails not only to resolve absence but augments it? Iyer cites Jacob Taubes' argument that St. Paul dealt with the crisis of a failed apocalypse by turning it inward. From now on it would take place in the individual soul, which for Taubes meant opening:

an inward messianic realm of freedom, of faith, which not only suspends the Mosaic law, the legal framework of the Roman Empire but also the Hellenistic metaphysics of law, which is to say, [the] general sense of worldly order and structure. Paul rejects all earthly, lawful, orderly authority in the name of faith.¹⁸ 

The freedom offered in the literary, reliant on our suspension of disbelief, has its DNA in Paul's rejection of worldly authority. The supposedly opposed genres of Realism and Fantasy can be seen as the culmination of our bad faith in what opens for us. What opens in Paul's theology is "very close to what [Taubes] calls called Gnosticism".

For Paul, like the Gnostics, the cosmos is ruled by demonic powers; Satan is the prince of this world. For Paul, like the Gnostics, the aim is to achieve a kind of gnosis, or knowledge, that allows you to hold yourself back from full participation in the world, which remains ruled by the wicked 'powers and principalities'. For Paul, like the Gnostics, very little can be said about God. As Taubes writes:

The negative statements about God—unrecognizable, unnameable, unrepeatable, incomprehensible, without form, without bounds, and even nonexistent—all orchestrate the . .. Gnostic proposition that God is essentially contrary to the world.

This suggests that Paul's faith is a relation to an empty transcendence, lacking determinate content and contesting at every turn the works that support the order of the world. God is what Hans Jonas called the 'nothing of the world', understood as the antithesis of worldly power.¹⁹

We go to books to understand and cope with the world, and of course to escape its demons for a while, and in doing experience a cover version of messianic promise which is, however, only ever an empty transcendence. Literature becomes the nothing of the world. No wonder modern readers have an almost identical relationship with religious faith as they do with books; a short walk from gush to disgust. ²⁰  

Novels generated by LLMs, however bad judged as works of art, reveal the essence of literature. This is the fear: every book is revealed as an excess of nothing.²¹  This would explain why fragments haunt great writers, as they maintain a relationship with that which is in excess of the world without falling into generic form and as such disrupts the use of literature as an everyday resource. They cannot make use of them. The writer in the centre of a charmed circle is only ever a writer in potential, the book only ever a book in potential. While this presents a roadblock, it may be key to resisting AI-generated and genre literature, which are, it has to be restated, identical; they cannot be told apart. Literature may be possible only by maintaining its potential within the work. But what does this mean in practice?

Agamben's essay On Potentiality discusses the aporia raised by Aristotle of why the senses cannot themselves be sensed in the absence of external objects. Aristotle's answer is that sensibility is not actual but only potential, which raises the question of what it means to have a faculty like sight. We tend to see our faculties as modes of power, and Agamben links this to "that part of humanity that has grown and developed its potency to the point of imposing its power over the whole planet". But Agamben interprets having a faculty as having a privation and potentiality is "the mode of existence of this privation". We would not be able to see light were it not for darkness, and darkness "is in some way the color of potentiality".

To be potential means: to be one's own lack, to be in relation to one's own incapacity. Beings that exist in the mode of potentiality are capable of their own impotentiality; and only in this way do they become potential. They can be because they are in relation to their own nonBeing. In potentiality, sensation is in relation to anesthesia, knowledge to ignorance, vision to darkness.²²

Presence is in relation to absence. Applied to literature, and Agamben says Aristotle draws his examples from "the domain of arts and knowledge", we are returned to Blanchot's writing set apart from the day and Heidegger's poets reaching into the abyss for a relation of finitude to the infinite. Our faculty to write is considered much like the power of that which has imposed itself over the planet. So if we are to resist AI-generated prose and its threat to human creativity, we must first recognise that its apparent inhumanity is and always has been part of us and part of writing. This is why it is indistinguishable from genre fiction.

Agamben ends by asking how we might consider the actuality of the potentiality to not-be. "The actuality of the potentiality to play the piano is the performance of a piece for the piano; but what is the actuality of the potentiality to not-play?". Aristotle answers:

if a potentiality to not-be originally belongs to all potentiality, then there is truly potentiality only where the potentiality to not-be does not lag behind actuality but passes fully into it as such. This does not mean that it disappears in actuality; on the contrary, it preserves itself as such in actuality. What is truly potential is thus what has exhausted all its impotentiality in bringing it wholly into the act as such.

This may be how to question the paradigm of literature, to move in the opposite direction, towards potential.

 

Genre writing discovers AI

 

Notes

¹ From One-Way Street (not sure of translator). Click on the back button to return. 

² Translated by Kevin Attell. 

³ The author Matthew Teller resigned from the SOA following its "outlandishly opaque statement" on an Israeli raid on a bookshop in Jerusalem.   

⁴ According to the Verso Books blog, "Romance novels are said to account for nearly 40% of all book sales in the last decade". 

⁵ Translated by Dora Nussey. 

⁶ In the Talk Gnosis podcast, Jonathan Stewart claims "we have this deep yearning for the divine": 

"Even if you're not a spiritual person…consciousness is almost structured in a way where we want to have the divine. Doesn't mean that there is a god, but to be a happy, adjusted society and an adjusted individual, you have to acknowledge this and work with it in a healthy way.  You don't have to be religious, you can get it through good art. Because people aren't aware of this religious drive within us...we assume we live in the most secular society in human history [but] we live in the most religious society that has ever existed in human history. We act in religious ways without really knowing it, with no way to funnel it, no way to integrate it into our lives. The rationalist is missing all this."

⁷ We see this in action on the BBC's Fake or Fortune series, and Clark claims value for the robot artist's products because they sell for six-figure sums.

⁸ From Suspended Passion, translated by Chris Turner.

⁹ In the Oxford Literary Review, Volume 22, Number 1, translated by Leslie Hill.

¹⁰ From 'Why poets?' in Off the Beaten Track translated by Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes. 

¹¹ I used Benjamin's essay The Storyteller in The last novel, a discussion of JM Coetzee's The Death of Jesus.

¹² In A Short History of Decay, translated by Richard Howard. 

¹³ From 'The Myth of Mallarmé' in The Work of Fire, translated by Charlotte Mandell.

¹⁴ Blanchot's atheism is discussed by Stefanos Geroulanos in An Atheism that Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought. 

^{15 From The Writing of the Disaster, translated by Ann Smock.}

¹⁶ The Morning Star in Knausgaard's novel of the same name is a symbol of the book and an allegory of this meeting, at least as I argue in my review. 

¹⁷ The Opposite Direction: Taubes, Bernhard and the Gnostic Imaginary was a paper given to the European Graduate School in 2023.

¹⁸ I wrote about a biography of Taubes in A modern heretic. 

¹⁹ Iyer cites my blogpost The withdrawal of the novel in which I write about Willem Styfhals' book on Gnosticism and postwar German philosophy.

²⁰ Larkin's poem A Study in Reading Habits is a prime example of the latter.

²¹ In my post A measure of forever, I wrote about how a combination of plainness and excess renewed my interest in novels.

²² In Potentialities, translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen.

 

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A mighty contagious absence, part one

The number of obituaries, tributes, backhanded compliments and overt smears in the corporate news media following the death of John Pilger reveals the state of journalism in our time. [1] Can you name one living Anglophone journalist whose loss would prompt such widespread notice? That the obvious one, who had worked with The Guardian and New York Times to expose the biggest stories of our time, is held without charge in a high-security prison and close to death without outrage let alone industrial action from his colleagues, should be evidence enough of a profound shift in news media culture. [2] Those who walk in John Pilger's footsteps are now to be found working independently, funded by public appeals, and often, like Julian Assange, frequently denied the label of journalist by those appropriating its authority. [3]

The shift has not been limited to journalism, as dissent from prominent artists has become rare, with only an 80-year-old musician and an 87-year-old filmmaker paying the price for publicly challenging the political narrative. [4] Novelists have escaped censure. Twenty years ago, with characteristically bitter passion, Pilger lamented the silence of writers over contemporary political events, comparing it to the noise and organisation of their forerunners in 1935. He wanted them to be outspoken in public and producing works that "illuminate...the shadows of rapacious power". He wished for public utterance and the production of novels as imaginative reportage, citing among others Timothy Mo's novel The Redundancy of Courage set in East Timor during the western-backed genocide about which Pilger made one of his most harrowing documentary (not mentioned in the ITV news obituary, the network on which it was broadcast). He complains that instead of dissent from writers appearing in the newspapers, "Column after column is devoted to the Martin Amis cult: he who ... sneers at the great anti-capitalist and anti-war demonstrations". Twenty years on only the quality of the cult writer has changed, with JK Rowling leading the sneers at a "solipsistic personality cult" when opposition to rapacious power threatens to be successful. [5] Other genre novelists – John le Carré, Fay Weldon, Frederick Forsyth, Tony Parsons and William Boyd – also wished to distance themselves from opposition, and perhaps slightly higher taxes.

The pitiful literary horizon onto which this sextet opens emphasises how diminished the calibre of public-facing writers is compared to 1935, with film and television dominating public consciousness and which is itself, as James Meek describes, rapacious power in action. This suggests literature needs a form that is not a storyboard, one that goes in the opposite direction and opens an entirely new and different space, only what hope is there if even an experimental writer presented as doing precisely this joins in with the rest? [6]

John Pilger's lament has stayed with me over the years as a sometimes distant, sometimes insistent hammering on the door, disturbing the hallowed silence of this empty church. What, after all, is the point of sitting here with all these books of prayer? If Pilger challenges the responsibilities of the author by dismissing the distinction between what's inside and what's outside, between novels and journalism, he does so with ease, as easily as submission to a story. Except the experience of one is very different to the experience of the other: the first is an encounter with the noise of both a particular time in everyday language, with an empirical outside investigated by a particular person or organisation that implicitly contains evidence of its truth and value and which, if done properly, provokes a sense of urgency for action in the world, while the second is an encounter with the outside of time, aside from experience, an encounter with something that has not happened, will not happen, and will not happen over and over again, and for which the writer has no responsibility to provide evidence for its truth or value, provoking in its audience an unfocusable need and so a unique presence in our lives – a perennial absence beyond our lives – and so the interminable anxieties it generates about its meaning, authority and place in society. [7]  

If his article is not quite a manifesto, Pilger inadvertently reminds us that these anxieties constitute a fundamental part of the experience of literature, which lately has led to a manifesto expressing similar concerns. 

Vomit on concrete, England 2023

In Counterblast! (a manifesto for poetry), her final lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry, Alice Oswald claims that "whatever keeps mattering makes a form" and so poetry must be "like the spirals of the inner ear shaped by sound, or a stoop shaped by shyness". What keeps mattering for her is the profusion of the world and she proposes a poetry that alters the imagination by immersion in "the deep grammar of the situated self among other selves", with simile being poetry's form of profusion. Homer is her prime example: "we would like to discover the inmost manifesto of Homer, meaning the mattering which makes his fall and claim it as our own". This is "a manifesto of likeness", she says: "We like this word 'like'. It is a stitch between things". The Greek word for stitchwork is rhapsody, with simile – similarity – stitching the world together, and she opposes rhapsody to lyric poetry: "We declare that modernism with all its isms was essentially a lyric voice because it described the problem of perception rather than the profusion of being." She reads the first stanza of TS Eliot's poem Rhapsody on a Windy Night ending in the lines "Midnight shakes the memory / As a madman shakes a dead geranium" and describes the similes as "hallucinations" rather than stitches revealing "not other selves but the poet's own self over and over". [8]

Living geraniums become the touchstone for the manifesto as Alice Oswald sees the culmination of the modernists' dead flower in "the genre of the artificial geranium" in which poetry is created by a computer. She examines a poem created in ChatGPT using her instruction "to write a poem about an eagle and a hare in the style of Shakespeare", which you can hear from 38:30 below. After commenting favourably on the algorithm's choice of meter she notes how the poem's images are impressionistic "whereas as a poet sees sharply before summoning words". It is impressionistic "because it is not situated". The presence or absence behind the words is her primary concern:

Each time the algorithm uses the word 'I', it does not mean the same situated self that we mean and this difference spreads through the grammar, altering first the meaning of 'we' and then the meaning of 'this' and then the meaning of 'that' and then the meaning of 'near' and then the meaning of 'love' and then the meaning of 'death' and then the meaning of 'with' and then the meaning of 'like', and so on and so on until the poem reveals its mighty contagious absence in that final line. Each meeting fated, each parting brief in life's great stage infernal, which is a malicious demon's manifesto with no understanding of actuality. [9]

Why is each parting brief? Is it because AI operates in unextended space in which parting has no meaning. Does that imply that death doesn't exist and is that why the hare is gambolling in fear. Is death brief, in which case please decide whether this is a poem about fate or resurrection and adapt the form accordingly since the gambolling rhyming heptameter implies constraint but this poem implies no awareness of constraint because it is not about things which are, since things which are must suffer the constraints of place. But in the genre of the artificial geranium there is no place and therefore no point of view, no topological self, no resistant other, no matter and therefore no mattering and therefore no meaning, no death, no flesh, no weight, no love, no life.

The curious thing with this complaint is that in citing Homer as the manifesto's poetic hero it follows the reasons Socrates gives for rejecting the recitation of poetry as a means of truth-telling and is as such a danger to civil society. Alice Oswald's questions for the AI poem receive the same replies as Socrates:

The fact is, Phaedrus, that writing involves a similar disadvantage to painting. The productions of painting look like living beings, but if you ask them a question they maintain a solemn silence. The same holds true of written words; you might suppose that they understand what they are saying, but if you ask them what they mean by anything they simply return the same answer over and over again. [10]

Socrates is happy that younger people with their "modern sophistication" are no longer satisfied with messages from "an oak or a rock", which were the earliest forms taken by the oracle at Dodona, and prefer a living, speaking person who can answer back once they have spoken. A footnote tells us that rustling of an oak's leaves were interpreted by priests or priestesses as sacred enlightenment. As daft as this may appear to us now, we can see the reverent recitation of poetry as modern-day rustling, returning the same answers over and over with literary critics and professors of poetry as priests and priestesses processing its meaning and value. [11] 

The crucial element of AI poetry is the human input for the program to produce a poem. As we have seen, Alice Oswald specified it must be "in the style" of Shakespeare; that is, like Shakespeare. But perhaps its likeness did not satisfy for this reason. While some elements are familiar, others are not, giving the impression of AI's resistance to needs and human control. When we talk about a poem or play that Shakespeare has produced, we call it a work, but there is no work in AI, or, rather, there is the work of absence, and so two-and-a-half thousand years later, Alice Oswald remains alongside Socrates midway between ancient and modern worlds, between the sacred and the secular, because a mighty contagious outside opens in poetry. [12] Our humanist horror arises at the AI poem's disobedient likeness to something other than human, to that which is not, or to what is situated elsewhere, and its failure to be a resource for exploitation. What if, however, in sutbly altering the meaning of words, by unworking meaning word by word, AI poetry reveals the possibility of another actuality, or at least that the actuality of which it is accused of having no understanding is the malicious demon?

The threat of AI literature may also be its potential by failing to act like Paul Celan's Gegenwort, translated by Rosemarie Waldrop as "a word against the grain" but more generally as a 'counterword', and yet also failing to be enough like Shakespeare, et al., so at the same time to act as one. Celan's example is spoken by Lucile in Büchner's play Danton’s Death, who, upon seeing her husband led to scaffold, cries "Long live the king!" not only guaranteeing her own execution but spoken when the king is already dead. For Celan, her cry "is the word that cuts the 'string,' the word that no longer bows down before 'the bystanders and old war-horses of history'. It is an act of freedom. It is a step." Stephen Dowden widens its meaning as a word "against exhausted narrative ploys and poetic forms, against inherited cultural complicity in the horrors of the twentieth century" [13]. 

It is perhaps then notable that when Celan's friend Hubert Hoppert visited him in Paris in 1966 and read some of Celan's recently published poems and commented that they were "indescribably abstract" and "imponderably spiritual" [14], Celan's responded:

I'm glad that you say 'abstract;' and 'spiritual' is also fitting. I hope that the information in my verse is spiritual. [...] Formerly, in Vienna, I experimented with psychic mediums of communication. I was playing hide and seek behind the metaphors. Today, after twenty years of conflict between inner and outer worlds, I have banished the word 'like' from my workshop. One of my poems, 'Speech-Grille,' became the title of an entire collection of poems. Do you know what a 'grille' can be? In that book I used, for a nearly final time, 'like' in the following four lines.

Were I like you. Were you like me.
Did we not stand
under one tradewind?
We are strangers.

That was my farewell to the treacherous 'like'. I stand at another point in time and space than my reader – who can only understand me 'from afar,' cannot get hold of me, can only grasp the grille bars between us.

Celan's poetry faces the same accusations directed at AI poetry because it is the epitome of its inverse [15]. However, the example of his counterpoetry may help us to see the exploitable value of literature produced by artificial intelligence in its example of likeness. Another word for likeness is genre. Everything produced by AI depends on the example of what already exists fed into its program. When Amazon limited an account holder's uploads of AI-produced novels to three a day, it only emphasised the conveyor-belt nature of book production, appealing always to likeness, mascerating everything into easily digestible pulp. Even reviews of a novel seeking escape from such inheritance claws it back with likenesses. The world becomes trapped by the rapacious power of likeness. The end of genre is the daybreak of literature. What keeps mattering is the absence of another world; a mighty contagious need for that which is not.

 

Footnotes

[1] Media Lens addresses an example of the latter in a tribute in keeping with Pilger's critical legacy. Select the back arrow on your browser to return to the main body above.

[2] Look at what his ex-colleagues said instead. Clues about how and why can be found this article on what happened at The Guardian post Snowden, and then there's Peter Oborne on the rise of client journalism, but it is also as simple as regular groupthink as demonstrated in the Asch Conformity Experiment. 

This infects the entire British media class: for many years I listened to the Kermode & Mayo film review podcast then hosted by BBC Radio, and one day among the various titles was XY Chelsea about the US Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning. In the first 15 seconds of his review Kermode states that Manning "released classified information that were then released in unredacted form on Wikileaks". In fact it was The Guardian that released the passwords, as a Wikileaks editorial explains. Kermode was the chief film critic for The Guardian's sister paper at the time. The comment would be forgivable were it not for Kermode's outburst that XY Chelsea is not a film about Julian Assange "much as he wants to be the centre of every story". This wasn't the first time the presenters had made impromptu digs at Assange, but none as bitter. So in order to be the centre of every story did Assange expose himself "to progressively severe forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, the cumulative effects of which can only be described as psychological torture"? These are the words of Nils Melzer, at the time the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture. I emailed the show with this information and quotation but, of course, I didn't receive a reply and I didn't hear any correction on the podcast as, after all those years, I unsubscribed.

Read Chris Hedges' hair-raising summary of the facts behind the prosecution of Julian Assange before his final appeal against extradition. 

[3] Glenn Greenwald is an "online influencer", while Seymour Hersh, who in the New Yorker exposed the massacre at My Lai in 1969 and torture and abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, as soon as he reported how the Nord Stream pipeline was sabotaged, suddenly became that epitome of vanity and irrelevance, "a blogger". In the UK, Craig Murray, who as a UK Ambassador blew the whistle on intelligence gained through torture, has been denied membership of the NUJ and was gaoled for reporting the case for the defence in the trial of Alex Salmond while those in the mainstream who he says did more or less the same were left alone. (Salmond was acquitted; there was a jury, unlike in Murray's trial). And, as with others outside of the club, such as Kit Klarenberg and Tony Greenstein, Murray has been detained under the Terrorism Act. 

Incidentally, the tweet below that followed expulsion of the son of a rabbi from the Labour Party was for me the first indication of Sir Keir Starmer's perfidy.

The Labour Files documentary series has provided ample confirmation since, though it doesn't end there.

In addition to those mentioned above, for commentary and investigations, I recommend following the work of among others Chris Hedges, Aaron Maté, Mark Curtis, Matt Kennard, Abby Martin, Alan MacLeod, Peter Oborne, Jonathan Cook, and frontline reporter Eva Karene Bartlett.

[4] Roger Waters and Ken Loach. In my teenage years, I was a fan of Pink Floyd to the point of nerdily cataloguing my LP and bootleg collection and typing up attempts at music criticism. Many years later and after I had moved on, I heard a song by them whose title I didn't recognise and to which I exclaimed "What the hell is this crap?!". It turned out to be post-Roger-Waters Pink Floyd – a velvet glove limp without its iron fist. I realised then why it was Pink Floyd of the 1970s, especially Dogs, appealed to me above all. The recent claims that the theatrical performance of The Wall in which a fictional rock star becomes a demogogue, a performance I saw live on June 16th, 1981 and that has toured the world without controversy since, meant that Waters himself was promoting fascism and should be banned from live performance would be hilarious if it weren't so disturbing in what it revealed about the powerful people who made them and the solemnity with which they were reported.

[5] She's right, of course, as we must regret the luring of millions into a cult of infantilising fantasy and wish fulfilment.

[6] From an interview in The New Statesman:

Even if it is presented as an alternative, Eimear McBride's novel A Girl is a Half-formed Thing is a prime example of what Rachael Allen diagnoses as an issue in the publishing industry in her superb essay Difficult and Bad: an industry dominated by a middle-class patting itself on the back for its patronage of writers who may otherwise be dismissed as inaccessible but in reality gain industry traction because of its promotion of identity politics, a virtue-hoarding disguise for privileging their class interests. The novel's publisher may be independent but its director worked at The Guardian for many years and conformed to its offensive on Corbyn's mildly social-democratic programme.

For a hugely enjoyable satire on the centrists' favoured writers, I highly recommend Ellis Sharp's novel Concrete Impressions, reviewed here by The Modern Novel.

[7] In my earliest days of reading, attracted by elevated titles, I borrowed a library copy of Adorno's Aesthetic Theory in the 1984 translation by C. Lenhardt and was very taken with a passage preceded by Adorno's observation that reason subsumes suffering under concepts but can never express it: "Therefore, even when it is understood, suffering remains mute and inconsequential":

What recommends itself, then, is the idea that art may be the only remaining medium of truth in age of incomprehensible terror and suffering. As the real world grows dark, the irrationality of art is becoming rational, especially at a time when art is radically tenebrous itself. What the enemies of modern art, endowed with a greater sensitivity than its timid apologists, call the negativity of modern art, is the epitome of all that has been repressed by the established culture. That is indeed the direction in which modern art is moving. By cathecting the repressed, art internalises the repressing principle, i.e. the unredeemed condition of the world, instead of merely airing futile protests against it. Art identifies and expresses that condition, thus anticipating its overcoming. It is this, and not the photographic rendition of the unredeemed state or a false sense of beatitude, that defines the position of authentic modern art towards a gloomy objectivity. Everything else is worthless mawkishness.

I understand that Lenhardt's translation is considered problematic and Robert Hullot-Kentor's 1997 version includes references to Hegel and Brecht featured nowhere above. Compare the final sentences: 

That art enunciates the disaster by identifying with it anticipates its enervation; this, not any photograph of the disaster or false happiness, defines the attitude of authentic contemporary art to a radically darkened objectivity; the sweetness of any other gives itself the lie.

This version leaves me cold. The passage's said faithlessness to the original may also anticipate an overcoming, which in turn suggests a value in theory beyond rational understanding.

[8] Which will be news to those who think Joyce's Ulysses is the key modernist novel. It isn't – it has other qualities – so perhaps she's right. Either way, we declare this is another example of the misunderstanding and misrepresentation of modernism endemic in English-speaking literary circles. Cf. an alternative understanding.

[9] Mention of a malicious demon suggests Alice Oswald imagines the threat of Gnosticism behind AI poetry. I've written about this in relation to the novel.

[10] Plato's Phraedrus, translated by Walter Hamilton (Penguin Classics, 1973). Socrates goes on to say "once a thing is committed to writing it circulates equally among those who understand the subject and those who have no business with it; a writing cannot distinguish between suitable and unsuitable readers", a sentiment echoed much later by Lichtenberg in his famous line: "A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it, don't expect an apostle to peer out."

[11] Judi Dench's performance of a Shakespeare sonnet on a chat show is a fine albeit cringeworthy example.

[12] According to Massimo Recalcati's account, this distrust of absence finds its culmination in God, by way of Christ:

From Jesus’ perspective, there is, in effect, no possible truth without its testimony. That means that the truth of the Word consists in its incarnation alone. It’s the radical ethical hermeneutics of Christianity: the letter without testimony is a dead letter; without heart—without desire—the meaning of the Law can’t be understood.

[13] In Thomas Bernhard's Afterlives. This is cited in Lars Iyer's The Opposite Direction: Taubes, Bernhard and the Gnostic Imaginary in which he suggests a rewrite of Beckett's famous lines: "The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express" to "nothing to say in this world, nothing to express in this world, no means of expression in this world – nothing, except the obligation of the counterword, the questioning of what is and what is not complicit with the horrors".

[14] In Translating Tradition: Paul Celan in France.

[15] Notably from Clive James.