The Forest of No Return

ON THE AFTERMATH AND ITS PRECURSORS

[NOTE: The following essay is cross-posted to https://formulae.substack.com. I will gradually be moving content to Substack from this site, which will eventually be discontinued.]

These formulæ are intended to facilitate (for myself no less than for others) some purchase on reality, the one to which we now belong, the one that led us here, and the one(s) toward which we may be headed. To the extent you find them valuable, or entertaining, or to the extent they produce in you the occasional afterthought or recall some corollary in your own life—if only the life of your imagination—please consider commenting or subscribing, and, if the spirit moves you, invite a friend to do the same.

Very occasionally, over the last eight or nine years, I posted translations, short essays, transcriptions, videos, and other digitized cultural artifacts to a website called SIGNALS///noise. This was originally conceived as a collective project, but the members of that collective never properly collected themselves. Instead, the site was designed and operated by a single person, myself, and its content reflected my own aesthetic inclinations and concerns.

I rarely advertised my contributions to SIGNALS///noise, and the last update, a translation of a chapter of Jaime Semprun’s Défense et illustration de la novlangue française, was logged long ago, on October 5, 2021. In total, over seven years, I hit the “publish” button a mere twenty-two times. Why did I post so rarely? In (large) part because I was busy with other things, in (somewhat smaller) part because of my resistance to the medium, which embarrassed me—both the medium and my resistance to it, it was the way of the world, after all—which embarrassment and resistance are themselves rooted in a more basic self-consciousness and pride that haven’t, and I suppose won’t, go away.

It still seems essentially healthy to me to care what other people think, without of course being ruled by this concern, and I still believe that writing and particularly publication are bound up with certain responsibilities that, whether the writer likes them or not, cannot be disavowed. The first of these is to develop, or discover, a voice that is one’s own. This may be a matter of pure talent for some, but for most of us it requires constant work, constant refinement, and great expenditures of time and concentration, in order to join the impulse to articulate something with an actually just and comprehensible articulation. Digital platforms seem to offer an alternative to the exigencies of authorship: it is possible here, for instance, to remain anonymous, to publish more or less anything without editorial direction or feedback of any kind, and, now, with the advent of large language models, to have “your” work written for you by algorithms. The point, however, which is ultimately a metaphysical one, is that no expedient can truly alter or relieve the basic difficulty of creation. There are tools and there are substitutes, which are not writing, but there are no escape routes. It seems to me that in the present phase of our civilization’s transition from a primarily concrete world to a primarily abstract one, we have found novel and compelling ways to avoid the basic realities, not to undermine them in the meticulous Nietzschean interrogative mood, which in any case is now more than a century old, but rather to wish them away, often with very clever sophistry, and with plausible if not enduring success. But, as novelist Claude Simon put it almost forty years ago, “A writer can never avoid his responsibilities. How could he? He is always present in, and committed to and by everything he writes.”¹ Even if a writer does not, in the end, care much about what others think, he ought to care, if he is conscious, what he himself thinks—for even if he does not care, he is inextricably bound to his efforts, or lack of effort, and to whatever they produce.

The Internet allows and often urges us to ignore what others but more importantly what we ourselves believe. It allows us to discount metaphysics, certainly it allows us to discount or devalue the idea of authorship, as in general, if we run in literary or academic circles, our postmodern conditioning allows and encourages us to discount if not outright deny the existence of individuals as such, and to prefer one or another systemic instrumentalization or effect of human energy over and above any genuine human purpose. (What is “genuine” anyway? What is “human”?) It facilitates the production of derivative and/or easily digestible content and, as a matter of economy, discourages more rigorous or elaborate undertakings, especially to the degree that they cannot be put to instant and obvious use. Crucially, it invites our attention to pass frictionlessly and for the most part indifferently from one input to another, from, say, an image of war-torn Ukraine to an advertisement for fast food, from a social media post to a pornographic website, from a news article to a 17th Century disquisition, in German, on the proper use of coercion in religious conversion, to an instructional video about replacing the lithium battery in your laptop, or showing how to ferment bean curd or properly sharpen a kitchen knife on a whetstone, and from there to a page detailing the side effects of a particular antibiotic, and so on, and so forth. Such observations are commonplace by now, and are not even solely applicable to the Internet—Neil Postman was raising similar concerns about the dominance of television long before the totalizing effects of networked personal computers had been guessed at—but, to paraphrase Postman, the Internet is at present our culture’s principal mode of knowing about itself, and therefore—and this is the critical point—however the Internet stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged. It is not merely that the Internet has become the metaphor for all discourse, but that now, off the Internet—and in cultural terms there is very little “off the Internet” these days—the same metaphor prevails.²

Which is a long way of saying that I still have misgivings about this medium. I include them here as a kind of note to self, for the record, and as an emblem of my suspicion that, by its very form, the Internet and its sites of communal interaction encourage gestures whose vanity should be indulged as rarely as possible.

On the other hand:

The rules of the present game, in the present day, and the qualities of performance this game tends to reward (sentimentality, conformity, exhibitionism, participation!), run against my personal grain. Any form—and the Internet is one—that so governs our attention, our actions and attitudes, our very faculties of perception, and which at the same time is so ubiquitous, so integral to the basic functioning of public and private life as to have become nearly invisible, demands both wariness and continuous reappraisal. It isn’t my only or favorite subject, but for better or worse the all-absorbing predominance of the Internet is the defining peculiarity of our times: it reaches into and draws from everything, and everyone, and so cannot be ignored.

The Greek poet Zissimos Lorenzatos warned that, while our spiritual roots are deep and far-reaching, and can always be nursed back to health, we ourselves cannot survive their replacement by artificial roots. He was talking about the metaphysical lineage of a people, the connection to which is truly life-giving for humans, and whose reward is a sense of coherence and authenticity that cannot otherwise be had. What is artificial need not be an imposition of technology but could be any alien contrivance entrusted to perform some function otherwise basic to man—and which therefore separates man from himself. See also Zeno of Citium:

Live in a coherent way (homologoumenōs); that is to say, live in accordance with a rule of life which is one and harmonious, because those who live in incoherence are unhappy.³

At the moment there’s a great deal of incoherence, a great deal of anxiety and longing in the world of art- and culture-makers. Some of it is political, much of it pretend-political, sentimental, rebarbative, regurgitative. Some of it is existential, some of it religious, some but I think not enough of it is aesthetic. Our anxiety, I would argue, comes from the Internet, to which we have devoted our lives and the preservation of our individual and cultural memories, and from our relationship to technology more broadly, the technological reorganization of cultural order being the primary source of human neurosis over the past two centuries. Our longing, meanwhile, is for the world, the real world in which our bodies still reside but from which we feel our psyches, our emotions, our futures increasingly banished. Our attention has dissolved, has become too diffuse, too dependent on the focusing power of the phone or computer screens around which our social lives, our personal aspirations, our businesses, our self-understanding have come to revolve.

But again, as Bill from Cincinatti [sic] has it, “If you want to live your time,/You have got to stand the walls…” There is, in fact, a game to be played, one that all living creatures, from their first breath, are still contracted, irrevocably, to play. And there are no games that do not reward the nimble player.

Things change—with, against, through and around us.

I think often in this regard of Kafka’s parable about the leopards in the temple:

The ceremony is a bounded event, a microcosm of the life whose daily unfolding in time and space is punctuated by this and other habits, practices, customs. Both time and space are dynamic, never static. Living creatures and life itself are also dynamic. The ritual will and must incorporate new elements, to the degree that they represent new patterns and not simply anomalies. The leopards are nimble, and whoever participates in the ceremony, or presides over it, must also be nimble—else the game goes to the leopards. Which, it should be pointed out, is neither a necessary outcome, nor an outcome that necessarily liberates.

I acknowledge the leopards, and I acknowledge, as my children like to remind me, that the games of their youth are not the games of mine: “This is what’s real now.” Nevertheless a certain crankiness in me—and also a certain love of poetry, of the multiform, of the baroque, of kinetics, of mystery and secrecy—resists the idea that what is real, certainly anything that is alive, can be reduced to or contained within a simulation of the same, at however high a resolution. Encipherment, which is a form of representation, which is itself a form of compression, is never, cannot ever be, a lossless operation. And “what’s real” today is often not reality at all so much as an encipherment of real people and events, uploaded to and circulated around the web. It is a game of attention that continues even after the individual devices are powered down or set aside—if they are ever powered down or set aside—because we have trained and re-trained our minds to depend on the procedures and verdicts of a virtual domain where, again, by now the greater part of our social and cultural lives are rooted. We never leave this domain anymore except to return. It is here that we conduct our business, here that we make new relationships and carry on the old, here that we resolve uncertainties and arbitrate disputes, here that we entertain ourselves, and here that we attempt to remember and therefore preserve some hope of determining the nature of that other, prior reality, from which we are increasingly alienated but whose substance and contours we still long for, as for a not quite forgotten dream.

My intuition is that, short of civilizational collapse, the cultural shift we are now undergoing cannot be undone, and that in any case it cannot meaningfully be disentangled from the technological developments that brought it about and which now sustain and hasten it further along its present course. Some form of artificial general intelligence is probably coming, but that technology and its potential effects are to me of less interest than the bifurcation of reality and above all of human commitments that our pursuit of AGI and its supposed benefits represents. By definition it would be a uniquely universal and universalizing technology, with no real analog apart from humankind itself. Even if it were somehow subject to human constraint or “alignment” (as humans once were subject to the gods), I don’t see how it could have any other purpose or destiny than the displacement of humanity from what until now have been the strictly human domains of abstraction and self-consciousness. Leave aside, for now, the progressive devaluation by information technology of human physical presence, the corpo which until recently had always been the vessel of our anima, but which is also itself in the process of being displaced.

It could be there’s nowhere else for us to go, no beyond for humanity apart from the creation and deployment of automatons and autonomous simulators of already existing human thought, behavior and emotion. But while the Internet and its offspring are real, they still are not and never can be reality; they are abstract topographies upon which representations of reality are staged, manipulated, traded and brought to bear upon more concrete human affairs: bodies, lands, food, architecture, for example, but also institutions, rituals, politics. And from reality to representation, as from a higher dimension to a lower, is a one-way street. What is above cannot be derived from what is below. Truth is also that way, above its derivative and temporary manifestations, which at any given moment, however, are all we have. It was Jean Paulhan I believe who wrote of thinking as a kind of tâtonnement de l’esprit, the mind proceeding as though through fog, groping about for paths forward, for obstacles, for points of solidity or weakness, clarity or peril. The confusion of simulation for reality is a danger, and one that predates the current technological paradigm, but hallucinations are distinguished, after all, by their departure from common and verifiable perception. The hazards and distortions of night can be avoided and, in the light of day, exposed and treated for what they are.

So we hope.

Whatever system or world AGI might produce, I would like us to keep in mind that its incompleteness, if not its subordination, is predetermined. There is a larger world, even now, and other worlds within it. That we might yet choose not to devote the greatest resources of human ingenuity to a project that is neither anthropocentric nor beneficial to humanity, but which is rather devoted to overcoming humanness—overcoming, that is, in the martial sense of the word, overcoming its various weaknesses, its heterogeneity, its finitude—is a possibility worth considering, and one I intend to consider, both directly and indirectly, here.

The next several posts will constitute a kind of prologue, as I migrate the contents of SIGNALS///noise to Substack, and then… we’ll see.

Thank you for reading.

Tags: Anthony Cheal Pugh, Claude Simon, Demetrios Capetanakis, Franz Kafka, Internet, Jaime Semprun, Jean Paulhan, Neil Postman, Technology, Zeno of Citium, Zissimos Lorenzatos