Raging for the Machine
Or the anti-applause of AI post-deconstructionism
“Life is full of infinite absurdities, which, strangely enough, do not even need to appear plausible, since they are true.”
Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author
I hate Literature.
Mostly because I like good stories. And Literature tries its best to spoil them. This whole idea of Literature as its own distinct field didn’t always exist. It’s one of those fancy ideas that came out of the Enlightenment, but we assume had always existed — like industrial-scale slavery and eugenics.
As a formal academic discipline, Literature came about in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Before that, the study of literature was part of a broader Classical Education. It was about grammar, rhetoric, and composition. Perfection.
1862 saw the invention of pasteurisation. Ten years later, Harvard’s got its English department up and running. Coincidence? I don’t think so. The glory of hard sciences was the tragedy of humanities — a shift from universal values to self-referential relativism, now a mark of modern universities. So when Bob Dylan wins a Nobel Prize or Harvard teaches Taylor Swift, it shouldn’t cause shock and revolt. It’s Literature doing what it is.
The real tragedy goes beyond the damage to education. It’s the culture that’s sprung from it, fixated not just primarily, but almost exclusively, on form. Underpinned by the faith that a piece of writing is its own world, and always justified. It need not engage with reality. Literature should only talk to itself, they assume.
Then structuralism swallowed entire libraries. The story has been neglected for aesthetic trick shots: playing hide and seek with the narrator, overusing metalanguage. If you’re not writing the next Ulysses, then your work is out of touch. You must either neglect punctuation or use it as a stylistic device — something maybe fresh when Joyce did it, but now it’s just lazy, unoriginal.
And I’m not precious about punctuation. Just give me a decent amount. It’s punctuation that sets us apart, from the animals. Even when it shouldn’t.
Art as a bridge between reader and reality, whether true or imagined? Most modern writers either turn their backs on it or shove it in the backseat.
Literature now is like a tax, a layer of needless pomp you gotta wade through just to see if there’s a good story hiding somewhere. It needs to go. But don’t label me a reactionary for saying so. That’s Borges’ critique, one of the greatest storytellers. And Harold Bloom saw the decline as it happened, calling out the way literature studies were heading in the 1960s, with the increasing politicisation in the academic world.
But modern writers are up against the ropes, and not just for that, but also due to technology. Once, to hear a story, we needed the author to tell it to us. Later, we could read about it — as edited by someone else. Next, we could just watch it — produced by yet another party. Now, with generative AI, the machine is testing the limits of this progressive intellectual Dadaism.
Degenerative AI
“Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.”
Aaron Levenstein
Earlier this year — like most normal people —, I was in disarray. Drinking myself to sleep, wrestling with the nightmarish implications of the screenwriter’s strike, “who’s gonna poop on our statues,” I mumbled into my glass, “now that the pigeons are gone?”
This strike has laid bare the literary clique’s issue with AI: it’s about the democratisation of the means of creative production. Those ‘intellectuals’ who look down on manual labour can’t stomach the idea of AI bringing the vulgar masses into their sacred territory. They see the shift in the dynamics of content creation and interaction as a direct threat to their cozy, modernist enterprise.
Their fear is twofold. Firstly, obsolescence. Current AI models, endlessly inbreeding ideas in an echo chamber, mirror the screenwriters’ process of today to perfection. Their work has become commodified. They’re all out of fresh ideas, and new blood can now only come from outside their circles. They know the times are changing.
Second, it’s about power. They want to put a leash on our freedom of expression and interpretation. With the likes of ChatGPT, we could get Jon Fosse with commas in the right places, Michel Houellebecq without the cussing, and Maya Angelou minus the feminist preaching. Even if all it returns is a blank page.
ChatGPT? No, it’s not even in the same league as Fosse, Houellebecq, or Angelou. But it can hack it as a screenwriter, at least by today’s standards. It can churn out literature, but not stories. It’s statistics after all. Worse yet, it is a brute force resurrection of econometrics (b. 1926 — d. 2008).
Yet, it’s near good enough for us to get Disney minus the wokeness, and CNN minus the bias. We can even mix and match. Imagine Bukowski covering sports, Kafka doing politics. It’s like swinging the doors wide open to the dreaded freedom of interpretation.
Death of the Audience
“To give a text an author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.”
Roland Barthes, Death of the Author
Raging for the end of Literature is hardly a partisan issue. I’m firmly in the camp of Nietzsche, Foucault, and Derrida. Viewing this through Hayek’s lens — that no single individual or authority holds the necessary knowledge to organise society —, leads you to the conclusion that AI is nothing new. It has always been the case, an ongoing process, a decentralising force making all text open to interpretation, restructuring, and resignification.
This brings us to the real struggle: the effects of AI generation versus AI consumption. We’re moving from a culture of mass-produced, slightly differentiated — though not identical — cultural products to a world of still mass-produced, but tailor-made cultural products.
That’s a welcome development. Peter Handke noted the oppressive nature of mass-produced art. Against that, we’ve seen the anti-music of Stockhausen, the anti-poetry of Cummings, Beckett’s anti-plays, Duchamp’s anti-art. They were seen as revolutionary, but they weren’t.
The true revolution is in the reaction they caused. The audience has become an anti-audience. A delayed, yet fitting, response to deconstructionism. The pretense of intellectual superiority, the moral nosedive, the rejection of beauty have led audiences to a timeless truth: no two people read the same book.
Borges, even in his physical blindness, foresaw this. He recognised his destiny not just as a writer, but as a reader. Deemed both vital. And then predicted that the classic art form of the story would outlast the darling of modern Literature — the novel.
CărtărescuGPT
“He doesn’t know if Zhuangzi dreamt being a butterfly or a butterfly is dreaming being Zhuangzi—though there must be a difference.”
Zhuang Zhou, Zhuangzi
There are still plenty of great authors out there. Mircea Cărtărescu is certainly one. Yet, even the best are vulnerable.
Cărtărescu’s not the worst offender in my view, though his narrative stunts have earned some of his works the label of ‘anti-novels.’ Which I find somehow positive. The real offence to me, is that he writes in a different language. And the latest work I read from him, Solenoid, took seven long years to translate into English.
I bought his new one, Theodoros, in Romanian. It set me back $25 plus shipping. A book I can’t even read. Makes me wonder, do you really own a book if you can’t read it? But here comes ChatGPT with the answer, offering tools for the deconstruction and reinterpretation of all literature in the world for $20 a month. No shipping costs.
So, I built a ChatGPT-based translator tailored to his work. I'm gonna dive into Theodoros with my own CărtărescuGPT, not out of spite, but as an experiment. Inspired by the efforts to use AI for reading partially carbonised ancient scrolls found in the Italian city of Herculaneum, destroyed by the Vesuvius in 79AD. As I read it, here are some questions I hope to answer:
Does a book even exist to me if I can’t read it?
If Cărtărescu only writes in Romanian, have I ever really read his works?
Is he, in essence, a dead author to me, like those ancient writers from Herculaneum?
Is Romanian essentialy a dead language to me if I never learn it?
Am I reading the real book? Is any fiction book real?
Nothing really new so far.
I’ll read a book that practically doesn’t exist. Just like the buzz of solenoids in his novel sets his world in motion, I’ll use AI to make my own moves as a reader, ‘challenging conventions’ and ‘subverting established forms’ as I go. I’ll join the ranks of the anti-audience. And if there’s any applause, it’ll be an anti-applause, conscious that silence isn’t the opposite of applause. What it is, I hope to find out.
A Not Too Different Shade of Luddism
“‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said, ‘to talk of many things’…”
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
Karlheinz Stockhausen’s words about 9/11, calling it “the greatest work of art that ever existed,” were shocking. But there was no praise in it; rather, it revealed an underpinning truth that remains oblivious to the cultural elite: there’s nothing inherently good, beautiful, or just about art. And art can be ugly, violent, and destructive. Just look at the trends for over a century.
To uphold that illusion, they build elaborate cages, pretending to believe that the classical stories have aged and decayed like Dorian Gray’s portrait, refusing to acknowledge that what’s rotten is their own morals. Meanwhile, they strut around with their complex structures and metalanguage as if wearing the emperor’s new clothes. All to avoid staring into a looking glass that might reveal they are not the fairest in the land.
I’m not talking about Joyce and Faulkner, or Picasso and Warhol. If you’re a genius, by all means change the world. But if you’re just decent, spare us the drama.
My first ‘grown-up’ book was Six Characters in Search of an Author. I didn’t get it, and maybe I still don’t. I found it at random, some might say I wasn’t ‘ready’ for it. But I read the story, ignoring the existence of the form or the author’s biography. I miss that feeling. That, and the Oxford comma.
If Literature is a technology gone awry, then I’m a Luddite. Yet, I’m raging for the AI machine. À outrance.
Notes
I now have a regular column on Newsmax. You can read this week’s here. I’m absolutely thrilled by this!
As contradictory as it seems — given my rant above — I'm still progressing with dydx. It might be January until I release further installments, but there will be news.
Congratulations on the article going to Newsmax! I wish you luck!
My job as a clinical correspondence writer/editor is repetitive bullshit. AI can have it.