Tuesday 105: Untitled self portraits
I have way too many books on my shelf. About a week ago, already neck deep in Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs and a re-read of Eric Foner’s short history of Reconstruction,1 I decided to buy a handful of books by John Ashbery, moved to action by his poem “Rain Moving In,” part of which reads:
And if somewhere in this great planet
The truth is discovered, a patch of it, dried, glazed by the sun,
It will just hang on, in its own infamy, humility. No one
Will be better for it, but things can’t get any worse.
Part of the appeal of reading like this, for me, is the disorientation, the consistent reminder that every work exists in the web of contextual shadows of every other work. Grant’s memoirs, for instance, were favorites of Mark Twain and Gertrude Stein. Grant was a singular, arresting writer, and I understand him better as a writer when I experience his work alongside some other comparative text. These things are always in conversation, and that gives them more power than an understanding of what they might be independently saying.
Too often, reading is hijacked by the impulse to understand by way of explication or analysis that effectively translates a work into a common set of symbols. This isn’t a bad impulse, but it precludes a possibility of formal fluency that’s essential to being a faithful reader. Most of what you read (that’s worth reading, anyway) will have been produced under a set of circumstances different from those you are currently living under. A working knowledge of 19th and 20th century Irish political history, for example, is pretty important if you want to get the full experience of James Joyce’s Dubliners, but it’s equally important to experience the musicality of the work in order to feel it, which is really the point.
The poets most familiar to American students who grew up among modern and postmodern movements, and those who went on to study the New York School, will be familiar with the notion of a poem as an expression so private it speaks for all of us.2 To be moved by a poem under these circumstances is to sense a universal truth hovering somewhere within, beneath, above, whatever, the poem. The work’s inscrutability, whether superficial or deeply embedded, is essential to its force and purpose. Poems often work because they operate with a controlled inscrutability, daring or confounding or confronting the reader while maintaining a connective humanity that lets her know there’s a difference between understanding something and getting something.
Everywhere the burning footfalls of time are advancing one after the other,
Erasing images in some places, creating new images to erase in others
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the power of AI-generated art—visual, textual, or musical—and I’ve come to this conclusion that no matter how refined or sophisticated the result may be, it’s this difference between “understanding” and “getting” that seems to be a primary differentiating factor in a work’s ability to communicate. Of course, it’s silly to debate whether these creations are or are not art; it’s easy to cherry pick a definition or set of criteria that confirms your own personal feelings on the subject. You can think of the generative machine as a tool, a sophisticated paintbrush that still requires the direction of some human author to produce a work (from this perspective, of art) or as a sterile, artless reflector, incapable of imbuing work with intention or the expressive human quality essential to all artistic pursuit.3
In a recent New York Times podcast on the subject of AI-generated text, host Ezra Klein noted that after reading a number of generated texts, and generating a few himself, he “was left feeling surprisingly hollow,” as if this is surprising. I can’t think of any concept more hollow-feeling than a text generated by a machine. His guest, NYU neural science and psychology professor Gary Marcus, responded that this hollowness is really the result of a framing, an expectation we have for a text. What the AI is doing, after all, is trying to seem human; it’s trying to convince you that its output is the product of a human process. It has absolutely no relationship to the truth, which, however pursued, is at the core of all human forms of communication. Even at its most mathematical, in the analysis of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, language is a public tool for the understanding of private existence, a means of seeing, and thereby knowing, what is in the mind of another person.
The absence of this essence is lurking at the heart of all generated works, but it’s a haunting absence that’s not without comparable human exploration. Like a dream, a generated work cannot imagine; it can only reflect, juxtapose, and compare. When I ask an algorithm to write a poem about a dog in the style of John Ashbery, it may read all the works of Ashbery and all the criticism and critique of Ashbery and every poem about a dog ever written and compose a work that perfectly mimics the style of John Ashbery if he were to write a poem about a dog,4 but what it's not doing, and what it can't ever do, is write a poem about a dog. It's can't write about anything.
Should the gusts of wind come this way then tell them
The scorching illumination of the story of life has also been erased,
Overlooked here is the reality that whatever these things are, exactly (algorithms, machines, amalgamators, ideas), and however empty and incapable they are of expressive pursuit, they’re conceived of, designed, and built by human beings. In this sense, they’re an expressive mode for a new human subject; a reflective medium that may yet prove to better interrogate, examine, and express human subjectivity in an impossibly alienating digital age. While I don’t see the same depth of confrontation in generative art that I see in, for example, David Wojnarowicz’s “Arthur Rimbaud in New York,” I think it’s fair to consider conceptual parallels. Wojnarowicz’s immediacy and urgency simmers beneath the photographs, in which a modern subject (understood to be the artist, but not always) adopts the identity of the radical 19th century poet Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud as a mask, and as a subject, is at once eternal and invisible, cheap, haunting, and idealized—a self identity realized and doubly reflected.
This mirror stage is fundamentally alienating, and is expressed through the anonymity of the subject in the portraits as well as their occasionally shocking compositions: Rimbaud overdosing, Rimbaud shooting himself, &c. In externally locating the self, Wojnarowicz seems to be saying, we identify such personhood with a still, idealized image, forever separating ourselves from the true self, if it ever existed.
But in erasure it has not become darkness,
That in this place there’s no darkness, no illumination, there’s nothing here.
There’s a part of me that doesn’t buy all this. The notion of some new digital epoch seems to me distinctly at odds with humanity’s inability to grow beyond the obvious eschatological impulses of market capitalism, which remains the real “well yeah, but…” trump card when it comes to human subjectivity. That we persist even though our planet is burning right in front of us should be evidence enough of our inability to conceive of an existence beyond a hegemonic capitalist system. How long would it take, I wonder, for the mirrors to reflect this truth? Maybe we’ll stop making mirrors. Maybe that’s what’s next.
Plus a fucking podcast about the 30 Years’ War that actually has me taking notes like some kind of sicko.
The CIA infiltrated establishment graduate programs in the arts in the mid 20th c. and effectively de-politicized radical creative movements in favor of confessional forms, but that’s a whole other thing.
And for what it’s worth I think there’s something to this. I simply feel more when I look at Warhol’s automations or Duchamp’s... whatever. They’re saying something, at least. But again, selective confirmation.
Assuming of course that he should ever pursue the subject, which seems debatable.