Weekly Readings #135 (09/02/24-09/08/24)

where the human touches the inhuman

A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.

This week, in my series of literature course for paid subscribers, The Invisible College, I posted “Stop the Machine.” There I explain why Henry David Thoreau is a harshly reactionary thinker in the lineage running from Schopenhauer through Bronze Age Pervert rather than the gentle hippie of stereotype or mere Emersonian protégé; I further explain how Margaret Fuller’s early intellectual feminism demonstrates that some controversial phenomena of today, from widespread celibacy to gender nonconformity and the rise of the queer “avunculate” in a zero-birthrate environment, were always on the cards for revolutionary America.¹ This is an episode for those who enjoy some of the more daring political speculations I sometimes venture behind the paywall. Next week, like a store that puts out Halloween decorations too early or a girl guzzling hot pumpkin spice lattes even though it’s still in the early-September 80s, we will assay Edgar Allan Poe and the invention of modern literary culture from pulp to avant-garde. In only two weeks, we board the Pequod. Please offer a paid subscription today so you don’t miss a moment of the voyage—and thanks to those who are already in the crew!

I would be remiss not to remind you to pre-order my forthcoming novel, Major Arcana; the beautiful Belt Publishing edition arrives the day before Shakespeare’s birthday in 2025. Paid subscribers to this Substack can also access the original serial of the novel, complete with my audio rendition, if you can’t wait to read it until next year. A reader posted a thoughtful review on Goodreads this week, which I gratefully excerpt here:

It has a very traditional novel feel - a big, long, panoply of colorful characters, like Dickens or Bellow. And the characters are great, really great, I particularly loved the aesthete Simon Magnus and his lover/artistic partner Ellen Chandler. But it’s also alive to the concerns of the present in a way that feels, for the most part, natural, not forced. And (speaking of nostalgia) it brought me back to being a library kid reading The Invisibles and Watchmen and eventually moving on to Blake and Pynchon. Anyone who’s read Pistelli’s critical work knows that his love for and engagement with literature is basically without peer and in addition to a lot of little shoutouts that English majors will enjoy there is a general richness to Major Arcana that speaks to how being deeply versed in the texts can give your novel that little extra cube of butter in the sauce. This is a book about loving art but not in a twee way, about a life of serious engagement with literature and art as a means to better be in the actual world. It’s also, speaking of the actual world, not afraid to depart from the realms of the real and is all the stronger for its more, ahem, metaphysical aspects.

For today’s post, I resurrect an old rumination on AI art since the NaNoWriMo controversy has kicked up this recurring controversy yet again. (Because readers sometimes lament that they can’t keep up with or find everything I’ve written all over the place, I have no qualm about reposting the occasional old piece when relevant with footnoted additions, but feel free to complain if it displeases you.) Please see the long notes on NaNoWriMo, progressive conservatism, and more—and please enjoy!²

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Art in a Cage: Why AI Art Is Art and Why It Doesn’t Matter

R. Crumb, Introducing Kafka (1993)

The contretemps over NaNoWriMo³ and AI this week—see here⁴—inspires me to repost something I wrote two years ago on my super-secret Tumblr when I had many, many fewer readers than now and almost none on Substack. I have no reason to update the thesis below. It was originally written in response to an essay called “AI-art Isn’t Art” by Substack’s own Erik Hoel. I was replying in particular to this passage of Hoel’s piece, which I will screenshot to preserve formatting:

In response, I wrote: AI art confronts us with a truth we might prefer to deny: human-made commercial art has long been “inhuman,” because it was tailored by and for the ever-more-specified demands of the market. The artist was just a set of hands operated from on high by what was almost already an algorithm of the if-you-liked-this-then-you’ll-like-more-of-the-same variety. I think of one of the pulp writers who would bang out a novel a week by consulting the plot chart tacked above his typewriter, itself presumably based on what had already worked; for an updated reference, think Save the Cat! And a lot of the pleasure serious audiences—fellow artists, critics—have always taken in mass art comes from detecting signs of the artist’s irrepressible spirit in the otherwise automated production, i.e., the human touch, what the famous auteur theory was developed to describe in the case of commercial cinema. 

But then look at modern high art, its more and more desperate, strenuous, and indeed absurdist evasion of the “word coined by commerce”: eliminate depth, eliminate sense, eliminate human interest, eliminate humans, or so says the avant-garde, and then implement one or another formal protocol—Impressionist, Cubist, Fauvist, Imagist, Suprematist, Abstract Expressionist, Serialist, et al.—to make art in the absence of either organic mimesis or organic self-expression, lest you be suspected of a commercial appeal. So the work the avant-garde produced was inhuman too, less human than some of the mass culture they fled so fearfully. 

Not to mention academia: whether formalist or historicist, whether regarding the text as an impersonal freestanding structure whose origin is of no concern or as an impersonal social site where ideologemes converge, the scholars of art and literature professionalized their disciplines by refusing to consider the objects of their study as anything so unscientific as the products of individual consciousness.

Two of Hoel’s sources, Benjamin and Tolstoy, are unreliable witnesses for the humanistic defense of art; their own theories lead to art’s automation. The Marxist Benjamin was not lamenting the loss of aura; he was hopeful about the democratization and politicization of art it portended. Similarly, Tolstoy is a forerunner of socialist realism when he claims, in lines Hoel quotes, that the artist “should stand on the level of the highest life-conception of his time,” i.e., should transmit the wisdom of the collective, not the individual consciousness, wisdom that might as well be automated and programmed. Only John Berger among Hoel’s authorities makes the strict case that art, to be art, must be the product of the individual, though here his modernist sentimentality is somewhat at odds with his Marxist sentimentality (and so much the worse for his Marxism). 

And I’m not assigning blame for all of the above, for the modern inhumanism: art really is the place where the human touches the inhuman, where individual consciousness must mix itself with recalcitrant matter and with the calcified social to produce new configurations and totalities. To value this transaction most for what it tells us about individual consciousness is a choice, one I agree with Hoel that we ought to be making, and ought to have made sooner, but one that can’t be reclassified as other than a choice by playing with the definition of art. I would go further and say that in the age of AI we will simply have to know whether a given work of art is or is not human-made, how and to what extent, and to decide to value it more if it is. 

We should return to the possibility of being moved by inhuman art when we know it was made by human minds and human hands, even if the artists toiled in a commercial cage or reacted so violently against this imprisonment that they caged themselves some other way. This cage or that, we’re capable of being moved all the same before a Jackson Pollock or a Jack Kirby, before a Samuel Beckett or a Lana Del Rey. But that’s because we know someone’s in there, in the one cage or the other, a live soul beating wings against the bars. 

If we don’t know, will we respond the same way? And can we tell just from the surface of the work? Just by looking? If you’d never read Tender Buttons before and I showed it to you and said an AI wrote it, wouldn’t you believe me? And yet when you know an AI didn’t write it, when you find out what a fascinating character composed those lines, aren’t you—not me, I never finished that book, but you—capable of being moved? So knowledge matters first: a human being made this. After that, belief: a human being isn’t just any kind of being. The soul is never a question of evidence but always a leap of faith.

1. I also insisted in the episode that we need a movie of Fuller’s operatic and too-short life. I hereby volunteer to write it. I envision something that transcends, as it were, the historical biopic, that explodes it from the inside. It begins in a still-rudimentary and half-roadless, half-bookless America, a land not as far from The VVitch as we might imagine; then it moves to the mud-spattered streets, the smoky wooden newspaper offices and damp stone prisons, of early New York, an superannuated petticoat dragged through the Gangs of New York dirt; then it indulges breathless, sweaty amours in the crumbling palazzos of revolutionary Italy as a cannonade blasts down old the Roman walls and smoke drifts across a vista glimpsed through tear-stung eyes from the Villa Borghese, Pasolini or Pontecorvo meets Merchant Ivory; and finally our heroine’s consciousness streams as she drifts down amid the falling sculptor’s marble to her watery grave, which pulsates in her eyes with the light of the Transcendental One, the way down being the way out, her infant in her arms, the transfigured madonna of modernity who birthed our radical world. This last scene reminds me of The Piano, so I destine Jane Campion to direct. Hollywood: call me, baby!

2. My title refers anagrammatically to the old song lyric, “Despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage,” in tribute to a strange run of musical questions I received over on Tumblr this week, one of which requested that I make my case for The Smashing Pumpkins as the best American band of the ’90s. This seems obvious to me, but I know others will find it controversial. (That I think The Smashing Pumpkins is the best American band of the ’90s is possibly the key that unlocks my whole aesthetic.)

3. What to say about NaNoWriMo? I’ve written with some fascination about it over the years. I’ve never participated, even though I do write fast enough to do so, having completed the initial draft of Portraits and Ashes in five months and Major Arcana in seven. I even finished that Portraits and Ashes draft, ironically, on October 31 of 2013, as if I were deliberately spiting NaNoWriMo. I remember the very first NaNoWriMo, which I think took place in my senior year of college; one of the first successful practitioners was in English major at my school and had been in my James Joyce seminar. He enjoyed the memorable name (more Pynchonian than Joycean) of John Fail and had completed, in November of 2004 or so, a novel called The Shark’s Ombudsman. (It got a write-up in the college newspaper or something, which is how I found out, though the only google hit for “shark’s ombudsman” goes to a Tumblr post I once wrote about this.) At worst, its gimmicky encouragement of speed in composition makes NaNoWriMo deeply complicit with the diminution of literary language the mysterious Tyson Duffy mourned in a RealClearBooks article this week, with reference to Leonard Michaels, whom I’ve never read, and to the precious but meaningless stylization of contemporary literary fiction, a complaint going back at least to B. R. Myers’s infamous Reader’s Manifesto of 2001:

Here I would like to make a fourth claim, one that apparently doesn't get around as much. It’s that since the advent of the MFA, the average quality of literary writing has become illiterate. Literary writers exiting these programs tend to write in a uniquely poor way, making extensive use of cliché and, worse, egregious misuse of English.

In conjunction with our increasingly non-reading population, our literary culture is busily producing writers with no literary sensibility whatsoever. This has brought us to a place where the average writing by a mid-list English-language writer today is considerably worse off than it was a century ago.

NaNoWriMo also encourages productivity for its own sake, an ideology that has always bedeviled the novel as the artform most indigenous to the bourgeoisie. It’s better to write five good novels in your life than 30 middling ones. Then again, the very speed enjoined by NaNoWriMo—the 19th-century speed of an entranced Charlotte Brontë writing Jane Eyre in five months or an indebted Fyodor Dostoevsky dictating Crime and Punishment in the same time—promises to rid us of contemporary litfic’s overworked preciosity. Here I come to another literary essay of the week, Sam Kahn on “How Everything That Is Taught about Writing Is Wrong,” which I most enjoyed for its polemic against the cult of revision:

The overriding kind of ur-belief in contemporary writing world is that successful writing is the product of endless editing. I’ve seen people be wildly creative in how they rip apart their first drafts. The premise is that a first draft is a kind of festering turd on a page, that you’re just supposed to get it out of your system and then once you’ve done that the real work can begin. As Anne Lamott writes in ‘Shitty First Drafts,’ “The first draft is the child’s draft where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the page….No one is going to see it…But there may be something in the very last paragraph on page six that you just love, that is so beautiful or wild that you now know what direction you’re supposed to be writing about.” It’s always been perplexing to me what writers think is going to happen to them between this first abominable draft and the fifth or sixth draft, but Lamott supplies the key metaphor: you’re supposed to grow up in that time. The expectation seems to be of a dramatic transformation in yourself from the time you wrote your story to the time, several days or weeks later, when you sit down, sadder but wiser, with a red pen in your hand and begin drawing arrows all over the place. What it means in practice is second-guessing, worrying your story to death.

The cult of revision encourages the very self-impressed slackness the writer then painstakingly processes into the glossy but vapid stylization of today’s fiction. For all Lamott’s patronizingly overfamiliar scatology, she seems to have forgotten the proverb about what you can’t polish. Duffy for his part quotes and then dismantles an independent clause from Anthony Doerr, “A mass of curls haloes her head,” which, upon inspection, collapses into a mixed metaphor impossible truly to visualize. In bad writing, writers forget what Emerson and Thoreau taught, that every word was once a metaphor, and then they blend these metaphors haphazardly because the combination superficially “sounds good,” i.e., sounds unusual enough to mark the writer as original even though it doesn’t signify. And yet, the underlying aesthetic here predates the MFA and can be blamed, as James Wood long ago observed, on Flaubert’s fetishization of detail, also the origin of Duffy’s own investment in linguistic virtuosity. The cult of revision leads logically to the cult of rereading Oscar Schwartz polemicized against this week in the Paris Review as a conservative gesture of cultural consolidation and an ineffectual hedge against the fear of death:

Vladimir Nabokov, in his Lectures on Literature, said “a good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.” On the first reading, you form vague impressions of the action based on broad and subjective intuitions. You skip sentences, miss details, and stumble forward through the plot in passive expectation. When rereading, you have time, according to Nabokov, to “notice and fondle” the particularities of the world that an author has rendered in words, like the texture of Gregor Samsa’s shell or the hue of Emma Bovary’s eyes.

[…]

In the end, maybe the crucial difference between those who read once and those who reread is an attitude toward time, or more precisely, death. The most obvious argument against rereading is, of course, that there just isn’t enough time. It makes no sense to luxuriate in Flaubert’s physiognomic details over and over again, unless you think you’re going to live forever. For those who do not reread, a book is like a little life. When it ends, it dies—or it lives on, imperfectly and embellished, in your memories. There is a sense of loss in this death, but also pleasure. Or as the French might put it, la petite mort.

I dissent from the general thesis here. Why not defend ourselves, individually and collectively, against death? And why does the analogy with religious ritual not arise? All the same, just as a matter of aesthetics, consider here how much more wan in the memory—how much more in need of rereading—is the detail-laden Madame Bovary than are Jane Eyre or Crime and Punishment, whose tempestuous moods and myths, once experienced, are never forgotten. Perhaps we might hold ourselves to the standard of having good ideas in the first place—and even of valuing an ability to express them with clarity, beauty, and swiftness. These are more life-giving than a neurotic investment in detail for its own sake. The cult of revision combines the perennially awful life-advice of the institutional-therapeutic—just let it out, give your inner child permission to be bad, there’s nothing worse than repression!—with an emptily effortful makework defensiveness against the charge that writing isn’t a real job. (It isn’t. Trust me: if it were, I wouldn’t do it.) I eliminate every outright error or infelicity I can find in my own writing, but more important is to preserve the initial radiance and intensity of the inspiration, a gift not of the traumatized consciousness but of the oversoul.

4. It’s frivolous to invoke classism and ableism and the like to talk about using AI tools for literary work, but it’s equally frivolous to dismiss the possibility of using such tools for serious artistic purposes, like someone saying in 1895 that there will be no legitimate artistic use for photography. A serious artist will consider all tools. There is a bizarre and curmudgeonly conservatism (pejorative)—a prematurely senescent fear of the future—overtaking the supposedly progressive intelligentsia. (No surprise considering that they literally belong to the party of Dick Cheney now. That makes three Dicks for the Dems: Cheney, Spencer, and Hanania. Enjoy the moral high ground!) One “Reality Spammer” sought to define this mood in a “memetico-political analysis” earlier this year:

One new affective register I see everywhere is what I call “millennial haterism”. This is characterized by

• Leftist orientation

• Media hermeneutics

• Posting in all lowercase

• A desire to show off the speaker’s sophistication, both in an academic and intellectual way but also with cosmopolitan taste in regards to going to the right restaurants and so on

• Consumerist tendencies

• An insistent sense that everything under the sun today is horrible, getting worse, that culture is incapable of producing anything valuable, and seething contempt for anyone who is attempting to break from this status quo by producing new culture

Millennial haterism is maybe the replacement for the old “Chapo left” or “irony left” on X. However the Chapo left was a populist discourse which would falsely affect working-class jargon in a minstrel-like fashion and defined itself via vulgarity. On the other hand, the new millennial hater discourse has an elitist tenor due to its insistence on sophistication. However, it lacks any kind of self-assured possession which may characterize a confident elite speaker but instead is saturated with impotence and resentfulness. The class-analysis here is potentially that if the Thielite-Yarvinites can be said to represent the interests of an ascendant elite associated with tech and industry, the millennial haters represent the interest of a class associated with obsolescing forms of media and bureaucracy which are perhaps soon to be displaced.

The “media hermeneutics” is actually the worst item on the list, a deeply degraded pop-Jamesonianism according to which the emotional transports and rhetorical appeals of any text can be dismissed as too dangerous (fascist!) while its secret rational meaning is the progressive one: Romeo and Juliet cautions against immoderate love, Rorschach in Watchmen has no heroic integrity, Fight Club assails masculinity, etc.—as if anybody would care about these works if they did not indulge the very desires the hermeneut claims them solely to dispel. Irony adds the pleasure of thought to delectation; its purpose is not to scald the palate; even Don Quixote is a hero in the end, and, as Harold Bloom has argued, the God of Genesis just is irony, which doesn’t make him any less God. While I understand what motivates such hatred in my downwardly-mobile generation of intellectuals, its rote hostility is no better than a bland faith in the ascendant elites would be. The time when a left-conservatism might have accomplished anything ended in 2016. This isn’t to endorse a right-accelerationatism but to remind us to keep our options open. An allegiance to art and thought supersedes an allegiance to classes, parties, and bureaucracies. To quote a cyberpunk graphic novel from the ’80s, “It’s the 21st century…try to have an open mind.”