Resistance Isn't Futile
A Paranormal Investigation
To make a virtue out of mediocrity seems to me a most horrific kind of daring, like a beggar showing his sores for pity and profit.
– Grace Hartigan
People look for ghosts to haunt them so they feel less alone. The first exhibit I have is from the May 11 issue of the New York Review. Writing about two recent shows—“Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952–1982” at LACMA and “Signals: How Video Transformed the World” at MoMA—Jed Perl speculates how easily one “can be left with the impression that the onslaught of technology has rendered artfulness and artifice beside the point. What need is there for art in the age of artificial intelligence? That may be the question that haunts these shows.”
Lincoln Michel has already critiqued what companies have branded “artificial intelligence”: that it’s merely software built from the same algorithms we’ve tolerated in daily life for many years—primarily as individualized marketing campaigns. “AI” is the same weapon aimed at a different industry. Its intent is to launder the intellectual property of others and sell it with almost zero labor cost, creating a sort of flash-commodity. Intelligence has nothing to do with it; and that so many in the tech industry have advocated for the “rights” of “machine-minds” is a clear admission of this, not to mention an argument for their own immunity: my algorithm has a soul, and neither I nor my company is liable for what it says or does. This defense of copyright violation and “auto-generated” hate speech, wearing the neoliberal armor of “rights,” is just more marketing.
Back at LACMA, Perl is unimpressed. Considering the famous composer's intentionally de-personalized pieces, he notes that John Cage
could hardly have gotten very far with his sometimes computer-assisted music if he hadn’t found inspiration in sounds and sensations produced before the appearance of computers, in works including Erik Satie’s Parade (1917) and any number of compositions by Edgar Varèse… As for the literary arts, ‘Coded’ includes some examples of the computer-generated concrete poetry of the time. Looking at Brion Gysin’s I Am That I Am (1959)… I found myself wondering if anybody would have thought this way if Gertrude Stein, in Tender Buttons (1914) and other early works, hadn’t already achieved something similar without any computer assistance—and with far more convincing poetic results.
Perl then offers a more direct conclusion: “I’m not saying that the computer doesn’t have its creative uses. But a lesson to be learned from ‘Coded’ is that you can’t get out more than you put in.”
Algorithms, then, are technological cul-de-sacs with nothing to offer their users and everything to offer their owners—that is, corporations. In all instances of “artificial intelligence” as we see it today, a corporation is directing its actions, benefiting from the results, and—not only through de-skilling labor but through the sheer volume of xeroxed images and texts—rapidly expanding its influence. All this while hiding behind its dazzle, its futurism1, its “inevitability.”
In other words, “AI” is nothing new. But it is, perhaps, something final. To tolerate the corporate aspiration to sole authorship of art– or media-making is a dead end. Not of “art,” per se, but of art-making: the human activity of directing the will back out at a willful world. Despite Cage’s calculative approach to music, Perl goes on, “it’s impossible not to admire the Victorian sobriety of his declaration that hard work ought to be the artist’s lot. After his own fashion Cage was still homo faber.” In a culture driven by algorithms, the only will is corporate will, effortlessly executed; and its autocrat is money.
The second exhibit is from Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. Despite her disgust with Woody Allen’s relationship with Soon-Yi Previn, Dederer can’t let go of Annie Hall, one of her favorite films. Watching it makes her feel more tethered to the world than experiencing the world itself: “You feel almost mugged by the sense of belonging… A simulacrum that becomes more real than the thing it represents. And that’s how I define great art.”
Not only confronting the many misunderstandings surrounding “cancelation,” but in a sense dismissing them, Monsters is an enormous relief of a book. To cancel, she implies, is to evaluate a product. “We tell ourselves we’re having ethical thoughts when really what we’re having are moral feelings… When you’re having a moral feeling, self-congratulation is never far behind.” In this insincere dynamic, permission becomes of outsized importance. Watching young people engage with a beloved musician’s sexual history, she realizes that “This is the very, very specific thing that students want to know: Can they listen to David Bowie?” This need for permission—to “take responsibility” for so-called monstrous artists and have others validate those decisions—invites (or coerces) audiences “to boycott the art,” which is, Dederer says, “the liberal solution of simply removing one’s money and one’s attention.” To respond this way is to “[put] ourselves into a static role—the role of the consumer.” As consumers, it’s unsurprising that algorithmic approaches to media-making would seem to us so inevitable—and so threatening. A consumer has already ceded their will to money and its importance, and art is just an exchanged currency.
Unmistakably, both Perl and Dederer bring a presence to their investigations. Why does this matter? Because presence is a willingness not only to be haunted, but to embrace being haunted. You place yourself there with the ghost, agreeing to be with it, to observe it, to listen to it. Something has happened and it’s important, if not to understand it, to know about it—to feel not what happened, but that it happened.
If “ghost” isn’t clear, how about conscience? Something is wrong, and art—or god, or drugs, or nature, or meditation, or sex—is calling you away from it. I don’t mean this in a strictly moral sense, but it seems to me that this is what most good art does: it redirects our gaze, normally focused on the world, inward at ourselves. To solicit the conscience by putting yourself in art’s path is to will yourself toward self-re-evaluation, to reconsider your way of being in the world or how you orient yourself toward the world.
What’s significant about Dederer’s and Perl’s respective presences, then, is that they attempt to articulate how it feels to be haunted, to listen to the conscience. Criticism is the record of being asked to re-evaluate the self, as well as the testament to the importance of engaging with art or with parallel experiences in our lives. This is the critic’s style: talking back to the ghost, a will that resists the intensity of the conscience—not because the conscience has nothing to say, but because dialing down that intensity is a way to study its language. This is how art and criticism coexist—and teach each other how to keep going.
Neutralizing criticism (as the majority of the publishing industry seems happy to do) is a way of neutralizing art. Of corporatizing art. “We now exist in a structure,” Dederer says, “where we are defined, in the context of capital, by our status as consumers. This is the power that is afforded us… We act like our preferences matter, because that is the job late capitalism has given us.” The further art falls under the domain of corporate will—as, in many ways, gods have fallen (politics), and drugs (pharmaceuticals), and even nature and meditation and sex (all reduced to consumer identities)—the more corporate sensibilities shape the art and media we encounter on a daily basis, and the more art itself is reduced to another product in the vast neoliberal marketplace.
Unfortunately, the way not only art but artists themselves are consumed, celebrated, and boycotted carries every indication that art as an activity is already deeply assimilated by marketplace “values.” To put it another way, art hasn’t escaped the claim of totalitarianism, which is all neoliberalism is—a totalitarianism of money. To relegate art to algorithmic production and dissemination and proliferation is not only to strengthen that claim, but to finalize it. Removing the human will from artistic creation is to cede art-making entirely to a conscience-less market where nothing exists beyond economics.
This is why, when encountering or reading about “AI,” I’ve felt nothing but revulsion. It’s despicable, yes, that they undercut the value of labor. It’s disheartening that they flood (pollute isn’t too strong a word) our commercialized “town squares” with even more mediocre garbage, lowering the already-too-low standard for what a picture looks like, for how a text should read. But—parallel with what’s happened to spirituality—it’s out of the worst pages of history to wish to erase artists from the creation of images, texts, and music, to transform another of our most meaningful activities into one more account in a corporate ledger. I don’t find this interesting, entertaining, fascinating, or worthy of experimentation, and this is why I’ve largely ignored reckoning with it; but that’s a rather consumerist attitude, isn’t it? So here’s my argument:
The stakes haven’t changed. We still know that millions and millions of people will die in the coming years; this is the extent to which a global totalitarianism of money has already been established. Art, of course, isn’t going to save us. God—whatever that is—won’t save us. The most reliable resistance to corporate climate genocide is large-scale coordinated disruption, both through public protest and labor organizing. But these noncommercial experiences—art and god and so forth—are perhaps the only private forms of resistance to corporate ideology that don’t capitulate to or participate in the totalizing and banal language of neoliberalism; and it’s of existential importance to get the corporation out of your head. This is why criticism matters so much to me, why reading it and writing it gives me a sense of agency that abstention—or “boycotts”—cannot. (Funny how many people loudly boycott what they’ve never considered purchasing.) It’s liberating to articulate why art is not a product, or why an author is not a commodity. It’s invigorating to learn art’s language. But most importantly, it can be grace itself to have a conscience, to allow a ghost to blow into your life now and then and ask you how you’re living it. And it’s worth reminding artists—those responsible for giving voice to this conscience, for provoking its call—that technology is here to be used, to be assimilated into art, not the other way around; and unfortunately, as I write this, too many artists seem happy to be used.
Thank you for reading Entertainment, Weakly. I know it’s been a while (novel edits, work, sadness). Since social media seems less and less reliable, I’m working toward making this a “weekly letter against feeling absolutely hopeless about entertainment, culture, and politics, and the way art touches all of them.” Please tell your friends if it seems like something they’d like to read. And, as ever, if you enjoyed reading this, you may be interested in my books, Image Control and Some Hell, as well as the forthcoming The Future Was Color. Talk to you again soon <3
“War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metalization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages… Poets and artists of Futurism!… remember these principles of an aesthetics of war so that your struggle for a new literature and a new graphic art… may be illumined by them!” F. T. Marinetti, The Futurist Manifesto (as quoted in Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”)
Thanks so much, Patrick, this is great.