AI-Generated Art and the Vestiges of Romanticism Concluded

AKA "Some observations and Predictions on AI-Generated Art (Part 2/2)"

Carl Gustav Carus, “Dreisteine im Riesengeburge”

Before we move onto discussing the main contention of romanticism that AI-generated art will preserve and even expand, I think it ought to be necessary to explain why the romantics matter so much.

I. Why Do The Romantics Matter So Much?

We need to appreciate the extent to which our era is still shot through with romanticism. As I said back in part one of this series, mankind doesn’t pass through eras as a train does tunnels, but rather he accumulates them and keeps them locked within. They don’t ever truly leave. And romanticism is particularly special because the nineteenth century was the last time in which the entirety of the west was able to be swept up with a new way of thinking.

There are material reasons for this. Electronic media had not yet been invented, and thus Europe was still steeped in the conditions that allowed for all-encompassing shifts in mass consciousness at the ideological level. Nationalism was one clear expression of these technological conditions, and it’s probably the largest form of collectivism we’ll ever reach. And romanticism was absolutely on the side of nationalism, as any western music fan or appreciator of folk art will realize. But European man continued to create new ways of communicating (with the typewriter, the steam-powered rotary printing press, the telegram, the phonograph, radio, and so on), and so the nature of how European culture understood itself shifted, too.

We aren’t typically conscious of how hard it was to really appreciate art before the revolution of electronic media, and it’s frankly hard to understand, because this would force us to reckon with just how flooded we currently are with stimulation — from the moment we wake up to the time we fall asleep. When Kant wrote his aesthetic ideas down in the Critique of Judgment, by comparison, he had never seen a great painting or sculpture before, he didn’t have any great appreciation for music because he didn’t hear it much, and he thus only knew literature well. Writing was how chiefly ideas were transmitted, and while it could travel very far, it couldn’t be generated in copious quantities. Essentially, “tribalism via media consumption” was an impossibility. Even the various art movements of the nineteenth century (the Pre-Raphaelites, impressionism, pointillism, etc.) were operating under the assumptions of the romantics. But as the nineteenth century came to an end, and especially when the twentieth century came along, high culture began to fragment. This fragmentation is why the modernists, with their anti-romantic ideas, could never quite take a firm hold on public consciousness. Even within elite circles, there were tons of new ideas, new kinds of literature, new kinds of art, new kinds of music, and so on – way too much to fit neatly under the sensibilities expressed by modernism’s main thinkers and aestheticians. From the dawn of cubism onward, high culture was characterized by heterogeneity, and no single art or literary movement thence could adequately convey the spirit of an entire time.

But the ideas of the romantics held firm, and indeed they held firmer than those of their greatest critics. They remained intact by way of commercialism, which rose concomitantly with something called the mass media, which prior to the twentieth century did not exist. While everyone in the universities was going goo-goo-ga-ga over serialist composers like Schoenberg and Varese, film scores that caught the attention of far more people were drawing upon Richard Wagner and the Russian Nationalist Mighty Five. While creative writing courses were telling their students to reject genre literature and instead opt for poignant and somber portrayals of day-to-day life, the market was favoring crudely escapist sci-fi and fantasy. When the common man still thinks of “poetry,” he typically thinks of something written during a moment of emotional duress – exactly the opposite of what T.S. Eliot wanted. “Writing is easy,” the saying goes, “You just sit at a typewriter and open a vein.” Some have said this quote originates with Hemingway, but the truth is, we have absolutely no idea who first said it. We all know it, however, because it comes straight from a romantic mentality.

II. The Deceptive Multidimensionality of Simple Art

Now, the notion of the imagination as the most vital of man’s mental faculties has been fading for quite some time, but I suspect the innovations of artificial intelligence will end it once and for all, at least in all but a few doggedly insistent social circles of little influence. As I discussed last week, we cannot quite tell the difference between the traces of genuine imagination and computerized imitation, unless of course we understand a given work of art as part of an oeuvre belonging to an individual. I discussed this subject with a friend several weeks ago, and he told me, “But I think there is still a spark of life that one can perceive in a man-made work of art that a machine cannot imitate!” and I felt almost guilty telling him that I no longer share this view.

I especially feel this way because of my time with literature derived from the oral tradition (like medieval chivalric romance). As a general rule of thumb, the older a work of literature is, the more monoglossic it is. That is, the more it only implies one voice throughout the text belonging to one individual, and there won’t even be much stylistic variation between one author’s text and another from the same time period. When two characters in such a story talk to each other, their voices read as stylistically identical. And the writer of a story won’t feel the need to be stylistically distinct from other writers, because he’ll often be copying a story he heard somewhere or translating one from another language. And he’ll typically be anonymous anyway. AI might not be able to produce a literary masterpiece, but it will be able to imitate this sort of thing easily. As Mikhail Bakhtin pointed out, polyglossia didn’t really come along until the advent of the novel, in which writers really started imitating distinct voices belonging to well-defined, psychologically complex individuals.

You might conclude, based on Bakhtin’s observation, that the novel is more advanced than orally-derived literature, but this would be short-sighted for one simple reason: the importance of a text’s extrinsic circumstances. Orally-derived literature may not have been polyglossic in one sense, but we only have evidence of the text in physical form, not the minstrels and bards who would actually read these texts aloud to a group of people, and who were thus physically able to produce different voices of their own, or change the content of the text on the fly, doing so as needed based on the reactions of their living, breathing audience. When we look at ancient poetry, we can easily forget that the real artistry was always meant to be in the moment of its actual performance in acoustic space. And in such a realization, one might start to question just how important a work of art is if we cannot give it some sort of backstory, something that anchors it in space and time.

Critics for centuries have tried to come up with an aesthetic theory that treats the work of art as the sole object of consideration, removing all outside circumstances from the equation. But the physical artist is the primary source of his art, and when he places his work within its carnal surroundings, even the simplest or crudest art in the world can attain multidimensionality and depth that it wouldn’t have outside of such a context. Even while AI is becoming a reality, we also live in a world in which even our once-stalwart mass media is fragmenting just like high culture before it, and art is more interactive than ever, regaining various lost conditions of the oral world.

III. The Artist As The Art

While true that the romantics overrated the imagination, they also innovated an idea that has not died and will indeed persist for the foreseeable future, namely, the idea that the artist’s most important work of art is his life. Coleridge and Wordsworth didn’t always agree, but they did acknowledge of the importance of a poem capturing the poet’s raw state of being, giving the reader some inkling as to his authentic, spontaneous self, captured from an isolated moment in time. In other words, it must be some sort of lyric whose chief aim is to convey the poet as a living subject. Over in the world of music, Hector Berlioz composed the Symphonie Fantastique in 1830, making himself the subject of his own dramatic piece of music, which (much like an opera) included program notes so that the audience would understand everything. Thomas Carlyle reinterpreted the poet as a kind of hero for the first time in 1841. In 1855, Walt Whitman published “Song of Myself.” Even people not nominally associated with romanticism were now in the business of constructing literary selves who could stand on their own two feet, so to speak.

One good example of this tendency toward the construction of a fictive self is in The Education of Henry Adams (1907), which a few literary historians consider the first true autobiography. Of course, plenty of people had written memoirs before, like St. Augustine, J.J. Rousseau, and Benjamin Franklin, but Henry Adams really created a three-dimensional, psychologically complex, dynamic figure out of his own life. Barry Sanders and Ivan Illich put it well in their ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind:

The Education of Henry Adams involves a dialogue between the failed Adams, who hopes to learn from his mistakes, and some other Adams. To make this clear, Adams adopts a curious literary stance: The Education is the life of Henry Adams told by Henry Adams, but narrated in the third person. We are thus made to experience two Adamses: the previous one—actually Adams as a young man—and the new Adams—the writer as an older man. Not only are there two Adamses, however, but more curiously, the young Adams, the literary creation being remembered, or recollected, takes on its own life and begins to educate the new Adams. Here is a truly extraordinary development: The literary creation of the self has assumed enough life of its own to instruct and educate its creator. This third-person golem must be disposed of, dealt with, or, ideally, incorporated back into the first person. The young Adams in fact controls the situation so strongly that he turns the old Adams, the writer, into a ghostly fictional character.

We still today are embedded in this business of creating a fictive version of ourselves, one whose legacy will outstrip that of our “real” selves. In fact, we’re more involved with it than ever. This act of self-creation is no longer exclusively reserved for the arts or literature, though, because it’s instead the way we present ourselves each day. Everyone has a second version of himself who resides within electronic media and whose independent personhood will endure longer than he. Some sociological theorists have called this situation “profilicity,” but I would argue that it’s really just a strengthening of what the romantic concern for authenticity was always moving towards. The complex and multi-directional individual becomes an abstract, corporate entity, and this entity is often an assemblage of clichés and stereotypes that resonate with people more than the jumbled mess of scattershot characteristics and qualities that truly make us who we are as flesh-and-blood individuals.

But don’t lose sight of the point here. As his fictive self is constructed in the digital world, the artist also creates his art in light of this fictive self, creating reciprocity between both. And his art’s success or its failure won’t just hinge upon his persona, but also the contextual exigencies under which it was produced. Even a simple, crude artwork can attains multidimensionality and depth under these new conditions.

IV. The Arrival of Vital Energy

Now, why would AI diminish the importance of the imagination while strengthening concern for the artist qua the artist even more? I think it’s simply because art connoisseurs will start assigning the highest value to traits that AI can’t replicate. Again, AI will be able to imitate a single image, poem, or even song reasonably well, but I don’t think it will ever be able to create an entire person with a distinct backstory. It would be fascinating, of course, if AI somehow invented a Socrates or Christ figure out of thin air and got everyone to believe it’s real, but I just don’t see this happening. Even though we learn about people’s lives in digital space, humans generally are interested in physical origins for things provided there’s the possibility for evidence, and they’re inclined to seek out at least one article of proof that a person or condition hasn’t been totally fabricated. Mankind’s instinctive tellurism is one of our better qualities, and thankfully we’re not in danger of losing it.

All the same, there have been major, sweeping attempts to make us forget about the psychology and material conditions of the artist, the poet, the composer, and so on. First there were the Russian formalists, then the American New Critics, and then finally the French Post-Structuralists. All three of these movements, two of which were heavily promoted in the American university system, were insisting upon the “death of the author,” in one way or another. Why did they need to argue their case so strongly? Probably because people are inherently inclined to care deeply about the author and what was going on in his head, and the academy needed to really bash those thoughts out of them. There is probably a universal desire to know about the person who created a text, provided he claims authorship and doesn’t just present himself as a translator or compiler. This is why forgeries were so common in the ancient world. Did Dionysius the Aeropagite from the Book of Acts really write all that smart neoplatonic philosophy? Nope. But some guy wanted you to think so.

So with the advent of AI-generated art, a truly motivated reason now emerges to understand every artwork in light of its creator’s intentions, possible psychological state, individual development and maturity, politics or ideology, and so on. And again, it isn’t a rapid and chaotic shift. For so long, we’ve had a common understanding of “the artist” as a tortured individual whose personality is deeply important and special yet misunderstood. And indeed: so, so many people have tried to live up to that image in the twentieth century, sometimes without producing any art at all! But now, even a poorly executed or unimportant work will be perhaps more regularly viewed as worthy by dint of it belonging to an individual’s greater vision.

Poor guy!

So if my thinking is correct, then it’s worth pondering what might replace the imagination as the main prized faculty. In an artist, people will look for traces of action, dynamism, intensity, self-propulsion, and perhaps even a bit of insolence or bombast. Given all that, one might be led to say that “will” is the right answer. Like, you know, Nietzsche’s “will to power,” or something. And indeed, that may be the thing tomorrow’s critics, both amateur and pro, all claim to prize. But despite being all-too-familiar with the fickle nature of words, I would still disagree because of my understanding of what “will” essentially is. I’m inclined to side with Ludwig Klages’s recasting of the “will” as the part of our mind that inhibits action rather than spurs it on, and which acts as an opposing force to our vital processes, “steering” us perhaps but not propelling us. Acting, perhaps, as a sort of acid wash in screen printing. If I can get away with it, here’s a quick summary, quoted in Paul Bishop’s Ludwig Klages and the Philosophy of Life:

We have seen that the distinctive function of willing is to aim at something predetermined, and with the example of the marksman who takes aim we have shown that each act of taking- aim does not at all command, for instance, movements, but commands rather that they are not completely avoided. Anyone who judges the aim at the goal the most exactly, shoots with the weapon the most accurately; and if, to do this, he or she needs to make an extremely perceptible effort, it also means that he or she must constantly master anew a gentle but constant trembling of the limbs! How one takes aim with the body is exactly analogous to how one takes aim with the mind in the experience of willing. Just as the act of judgement adjusts our vital intuition, so the act of willing adjusts a vital action to a specific object; and herein lies the exertion of the will, that we contain the ceaselessly onflowing vital wave in the purposive aim as if between the sides of a canal, by preventing it from dissipating away into adjunct channels through the constant application of ever renewed barriers! It is one of the oldest heresies of humankind that the will sets into motion, that the will even creates, whereas in reality it does precisely the opposite, retarding the unbroken vibration of vital movement. We are willing beings precisely insofar as we repress impulsive stimuli.

To put it simply without belaboring the point, I believe people will place value on the abundance of vital energy in the artist; that, and the wisdom to know when to ventilate it. Inherent vitality will replace the imagination, and the will might be understood as its technical counterpart, the faculty that molds it and applies it to an object via skill and mastery. The words critics use might be different, but these will be the mental functions that people prize, replacing the imagination as the chief consideration. The artist will thus be able to use AI all he wants, but the deciding criterion as to his worth will be if even his lazier, less ambitious artwork is done in the service of his boundless energy, expressed in an array of ways that might at times seem dizzying; kaleidoscopic.

V. Conclusion: Two Qualifications

There are a couple quick points I want to make in lieu of a proper conclusion. The first is that this notion ought to be somewhat terrifying. As Kierkegaard has noted, the man inclined toward the aesthetic mode of life is ultimately shallow, lacks ethics, and gets bored pretty easily. Once something has ceased to become interesting, the aesthetic man needs a novel stimulus. Life itself becomes something to manipulate with aesthetic intrigue as its endgame (Kierkegaard was talking about this stuff around 1843, so he had been himself observing some romantic excess). Eventually, at some point, when life replaces the medium of one’s artistry, anything becomes possible. Horrific things become aesthetic gestures. The battlefield can become a canvas, and men’s blood, its paint.

But I also might introduce my second point here. If there’s any solace to this vision of the future, it is that the most respected artists of our day – the ones who have created a life of legend and intrigue – have not been histrionic attention whores or obsessive self-promoters with nothing to promote. They have mostly set out to master some kind of skill. The comedian Norm MacDonald is a good example, since he has more fans than people who have actually seen him perform stand-up comedy in a live venue. He never wanted to exploit his own life story for attention (in fact, his autobiography deliberately distorts the facts), and he never wanted to be prized as an interesting person. He didn’t even like the idea of being an “anti-comedian” like Andy Kaufman despite often being received that way. He simply worked on his craft, approaching it more like an objective discipline than a subjective think-piece, and tried tirelessly to figure out what would be the funniest thing to say given whichever circumstances.

And yet, it is impossible to evaluate his genius without considering (for instance) that he had cancer for quite a long time without telling anyone, not even his closest friends, making joke after joke about his own mortality, and having all of them land successfully with the audience none the wiser. Of course, he’s but one example of an artist in possession of this kind of vital energy I’m describing, but he’s a clear indication that there’s a difference between earning respect and earning attention. Our culture has become one in which the surest way to earn attention is by flapping one’s hands and acting like a jackass. Often, it works, and some fools will even reward the display with their respect and money. Plenty of money. But ours is also a culture in which memory doesn’t tend to last too long, and thus no one can predict a man’s ultimate legacy.

In the future, it might be common for a Joe Schmoe to come back to his apartment from his white collar desk job, sit down in his easy chair, crack open an irresponsibly sugary beer, put on some headphones, and watch an anime series on his computer entirely created through AI according to his own unique specifications. But he will also need something artistic to talk to his friends about. He will need memories upon which he might form a nostalgia. He will need something to anchor to his memories. His appetite for artistry will persist alongside his enjoyment of hyper-immersive narcissistic pablum. And I think it will persist along the conceptual lines I’ve delineated here.