“You Can’t Automate Enlightenment”: On Humanism and Machinic Art

Cover of Roger Zelazny’s For a Breath I Tarry, art by Stephen E. Fabian. The story is about a robot attempting to experience the world like a human after the death of humanity.

Sunday morning, Edgar sent me an article entitled “Grimes Responds To Zola Jesus Calling Her 'The Voice Of Silicon Fascist Privilege'” from Stereogum (a website I’ve never read anything off of, to tell the truth.) They sent me this article, because they know that I can’t resist reading something that I know will make me angry, especially in the morning because coffee is losing its edge and sometimes you need a shot of fight-or-flight to feel like a real human.

This article concerned an interview done by Grimes recently on the Mindscape podcast by Sean M. Carroll – a caveat, I’ve never listened to Grimes and honestly don’t really intend to; she’s like what happens when the theater kid that meows at you grows up to try to be whatever it is that Björk is, right? – and the resulting argument with Zola Jesus – another artist that I’ve never listened to, but I do now.

The upshot of this discussion was that Grimes believed that (as reported by “Brooklyn Vegan”) “live music is going to be obsolete soon” and this led to an avalanche of responses – notably from singer-songwriters Zola Jesus, who argued that Grimes is out of touch and doesn’t understand art, and Devon Welsh, who labeled her outlook “silicon fascism.”

There is a lot to unpack here, but I think it’s important to examine. Let’s go back to the original quote, as reported by Amanda Hartfield for Brooklyn Vegan (I need to find a better source. This is the most hipster thing I’ve ever referenced,) Grimes said that “I feel like we’re in the end of art, human art,” she said to Carroll: “Once there’s actually AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), they’re gonna be so much better at making art than us…once AI can totally master science and art, which could happen in the next 10 years, probably more like 20 or 30 years.” This is a bad take for at least two reasons.

This dude has been making the same predictions since before I was born, it seems. I’m tired of it.

First, she’s essentially talking about the Singularity (previously mentioned by Edgar here). Vernor Vinge predicted in the article "The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era" that we would have the technology “within thirty years” to create a superhuman intelligence. Ray Kurzweil published a book called The Singularity is Near

This confusion between information (or data, specifically) and knowledge is partially founded on, and partially the foundation for, the trope of downloading knowledge into the human mind. I regret to inform you that you’re not a computer. That’s just a dumb metaphor.

I’m getting at this, and this is my second point, because this is the root of the disagreement between these artists: Grimes is maintaining that information and knowledge are the same thing. Zola Jesus and Devon Welsh, regardless of how they’re articulating it (I think she did so better than he did) are maintaining the opposite: that these are not the same thing.

This is important, because information can be quantified and commodified, but knowledge cannot be. If the two are the same, then a potent metaphor has been created, and knowledge can be bought and sold. Artistry can be bought and sold. And if it can be bought and sold, then it can be automated. But just like that ugly truck with the broken window that Grimes’s boyfriend presented, it’s obvious to anyone looking on that the answer isn’t as simple as she’s saying it is.

Grimes is saying that the point of art is to capture attention and make money – the business model of the arts. As someone who wishes, some day, to support myself by making art, I can understand where this misconception comes from – but it’s a misconception because it assumes that the generation of wealth is the point. I would argue that, for the true artist, the generation of wealth is a byproduct – a desired byproduct, a sought-after byproduct, but a byproduct nonetheless. The art is the point, and the useful byproduct allows the artist more time and energy to make art. Think about it this way: people still make art even if they aren’t getting paid for it – they may not be professionals, but they’re still artists

This is why we have a proliferation of different forms of art – as Zola Jesus wrote on Twitter “even though bringing up these hypotheticals is a good start, the only alternative you give us is to all become dj’s. and i didn’t train for 10 years to become an opera singer just so i could press fucking play. not everyone wants to be a dj.” [sic] For Jesus, the point is singing, the point is the deployment of operatic technique: financial security is the byproduct. This is the labor-theory view of value applied to art: it is valuable because the person took the time to make it.

When you view art solely as a commodity, something that has value because it is desirable by a significantly-sized slice of the population, then you end up at Grimes’s position: the only reasonable thing to do is to adopt the most effective value-extraction strategy and use all the technological means at your disposal to extract that value. This is the commodity theory of value applied to art: it is valuable because you can get money for it.

Sushi chef Masayoshi Kazato, image uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by user Geraldshields11. The figure of the sushi chef is probably the most analogous to the valuable, high-skill, high-labor culinary experience — but most cooking in high-dollar kitchens is done by people who aren’t compensated like a sushi chef.

But you’ll notice something if you look into any restaurant kitchen: the most valuable meals are those that take the most time and labor to make. Something that is sliced by a skilled hand by is always going to cost more than something you can press a button and get, regardless of the cost of the machine. That’s because the worker’s effort has value – and whether that’s because the customer wants it or because the effort is valuable in-and-of-itself is a pointless question: the customer only rarely sees the kitchen, and the worker’s labor has value whether the customer sees it or not. Just look at the prices on the menu. So, with this as my yardstick, I think we can discard Grimes’s opinion on this matter.

My own theory of art is what I think of as the Complex Pleasures Theory of Art. I articulate it by saying that art is “any artifact intentionally created more to lead to complex pleasures than for utilitarian purposes is art” and I define complex pleasures as “something that leads to a (potentially weakly) compulsive engagement that doesn't feature a biological or chemical dependency.” I would argue that the most effective way to do this is for the art to be a record of sorts: the artist transcribing, in words or images or food or space or time or however they do it, their own experience of a Complex Pleasure. I need to read more Walter Benjamin, because in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” he discusses the issue of “aura” and I think that this may be the missing link in my own theory, but I need to do more research.

But I’m ignoring the other participant in the discussion: Devon Welsh labeled Grimes’s position as “Silicon Fascism”, and while there is some connection between what Grimes is saying and what Josephine Armistead called “The Silicon Ideology”, I’m not sure that it is more than proto-fascist in its positioning. While I definitely want to reference the Silicon Ideology, and want to discuss it at some point in the future, it isn’t exactly the text that I want to use at the moment. For that, I’m going to instead turn to Umberto Eco’s essay “Ur Fascism”, which traces the ideological roots of fascist and authoritarian movements in a very comprehensive and accessible way. He notes that, while not all of these roots are shared by all movements – and, indeed, some of these movements can share no roots, there tends to be a genetic resemblance between them. He begins to outline the traits on page 5, and some of them certainly seem to be present in Silicon Valley as a whole. Notably:

3. Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action's sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering's alleged statement ("When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun") to the frequent use of such expressions as "degenerate intellectuals," "eggheads," "effete snobs," "universities are a nest of reds." The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.

Thanks for breaking everything, asshole.

This, in my mind, expresses itself in the broader Silicon Valley ethos of “move fast and break things”, as well as in the particular reduction of art to a commodity seen here, as well as the implicit distrust for artistic criticism. Another one present in Silicon Valley as a whole, I see as:

10. Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology, insofar as it is fundamentally aristocratic, and aristocratic and militaristic elitism cruelly implies contempt for the weak. Ur-Fascism can only advocate a popular elitism. Every citizen belongs to the best people of the world, the members of the party are the best among the citizens, every citizen can (or ought to) become a member of the party. But there cannot be patricians without plebeians. In fact, the Leader, knowing that his power was not delegated to him democratically but was conquered by force, also knows that his force is based upon the weakness of the masses; they are so weak as to need and deserve a ruler. Since the group is hierarchically organized (according to a military model), every subordinate leader despises his own underlings, and each of them despises his inferiors. This reinforces the sense of mass elitism.

If you read weak as “financially weak”, then you have a simple analogy for the expression of capitalism in America (see my piece on Really Existing Capitalism, posted last week.) and if you analogize “entrepreneurs” to “the party” something becomes clear: first, you can easily see solidarity among the entrepreneurial class (and the wealthy in general,) and you can see it in the advocacy for common people to become entrepreneurs.

I’m not going to do a point-by-point connection of “Ur-Fascism” to the culture of Silicon Valley – that’s beyond this piece, though in addition to points 3 and 10, you should consider 11, 12, 13, and 14 before you look at the earlier ones, I would say – but I think that Welsh’s read of the statement that the automation of the arts is a sign of “silicon fascism” is a bit premature. It isn’t there yet, but it still needs to be confronted as a shitty take.

Part of why I say this is that the approach to confronting proto-fascism and fascism needs to be different: I think that the former can be dismantled through dialogue and deplatforming and empathetic attempts at correction. I do not think that holds true for the latter.

I wanted to find the video of Richard Spencer getting punched in the face repeatedly, in time with the drum from “born in the USA” but I couldn’t figure out how to make it work (you can see it here!), so have this old propaganda poster instead. (from Office for Emergency Management. War Production Board, c. 1942-3)

As part of the dialogue, I think that Zola Jesus has the right approach: pointing out that this take, and the ideas behind it, are fundamentally anti-humanist, which is an...odd take to have in the arts. If you don’t see value in the human experience, I’m not sure that there’s a point in making art; it becomes a cynical exercise in the extraction of value.

And, honestly, you can tell the artist’s outlook from their music: in the deluge of music that surrounds us, I hadn’t had time to listen to any of the artists mentioned here an oversight I corrected while writing this piece, (and I’m definitely going to listen to more Zola Jesus, at the very least,) but Grimes is the one I find least enjoyable, even setting her opinions aside. It’s very much art as value-extraction-byproduct, and I’m not here for it.

Perhaps it’s magical thinking to believe that one has to believe in art for it to work; perhaps it’s idealistic of me to hold this position. Perhaps it’s a hole in my otherwise fairly materialistic understanding of the world. On the other hand, I think it’s a cynical and anti-humanist perspective to say that machines can think when we haven’t even figured out what “thinking” is.

As cynical as I can be sometimes, and as schmaltzy as it is to say, I choose to believe in humanity, and I choose to believe in the arts.

※

If you enjoyed reading this, consider following our writing staff on Twitter, where you can find Cameron and Edgar. Just in case you didn’t know, we also have a Facebook fan page, which you can follow if you’d like regular updates and a bookshop where you can buy the books we review and reference.