Same But Different
I
The heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at a man is to tell him he is at the end of his nature.
W.G. Sebald
All my life I have pondered my failure to live up to the romance of transformation. I have been born only once. I studied mystics but saw no visions. I read about voices but heard none. When I made changes, they turned out to be only revisions and modifications. I have been engulfed by certain experiences, but their effects were left on the old substance. There was the night, many decades ago in a dark room in a sixteenth-century manor house in Oxford, when I heard, for the first time, on a rickety gramophone next to my bed, Beethoven’s fifteenth string quartet Op.132, and the third movement, the celestial one “in the Lydian mode,” lifted me up, and terrified me with its demands — but when the music was over I was low again, the elevation was ephemeral. I felt that I had disappointed the music, and to this day I stay away from it unless I have made some spiritual preparation for it. In my religious life I envied converts: choosing is a greater achievement than inheriting; but since I myself have never found a reason to convert — or looked for one, since I am once and for all honored by my grand and taxing inheritance — the best I could do in this regard was to make myself into an advocate of welcome, so that those who acted on their dissatisfaction with their own données would know that there is safety on the other side. There is nothing I comprehend less about Christianity than its concept of grace, which is of a kind of coup from on high, or a monotheist’s karma, and I regard miracles merely as the name we give to improbable events for which we are stupendously grateful. I mostly respect other people’s new beginnings, though some transitions arouse my suspicions, but I have no talent for new beginnings, no matter how weary I become of myself.
Who has not performed the old exercise of clarifying one’s principles by imagining what party he would have chosen in moments of truth gone by? One of those moments of truth that my mind visits often is America in the 1850s, and I long ago grasped that I would not have been a radical abolitionist but a moderate one. (On the other hand, there are villains in history whom I would have unhesitatingly shot dead, or so I would like to think.) In my writing, especially about history and politics, I have been the one who grimly endeavors to be sober about metamorphosis, who wishes to spoil the giddy celebrations of discontinuity and direct the attention of the celebrants to the continuities that are hidden in the revolutions, who is afraid of the millennium, every millennium, and wary of the disruptiveness of progress that I myself support, who refuses to toy and tamper with institutions and ideas that will not easily come again after they are destroyed. (The next Jewish millennium will arrive in 2240 and I am glad that I will miss it.) I am a hawkish dove, a conservative progressive, a late adopter. Of course there are sufferings in the world that explode this rueful patience, and sometimes I have violated the rule of my temperament to go slow and demanded instead that power be used immediately against evil. There are historical actions that cannot wait. We are all selective about the consequences that trouble us.
I have always been a little embarrassed about my willingness to watch justice come slowly — why would you defer the dawn? Yet I do not trust speed, because it is so heedless of what is to its right and to its left, and I do not trust efficiency, because it flattens reality and deludes us about our powers, and I do not trust unprecedentedness, because it is almost always an exaggeration and usually inculcates a thoughtless antinomianism, and I do not trust wholeness, because it represents the end of possibility. In the realm of historical action, in sum, I do not trust transformation. And in the realm of the self, when I hear the ubiquitous praises of transformation (or, in the American vernacular, of redemption and closure), my back goes up, because this almost recreational Proteanism promises an end of meaning, or more precisely, an end of the meaning for which I have been searching, or even more precisely, an end of the search. I do not wish to be told to shut down and start over. The questions were the right ones. The arena was the appropriate one. I was getting somewhere. Transformation looks to me like quitting.
Many years ago I published a book about my mourning for my father, in equal parts scholarship and reflection, a spiritual diary of a year of sorrow in which I investigated the mourner’s customs that I was practicing with insufficient understanding. A review of the book by Harold Bloom appeared in the New York Times Book Review, enthusiastic and sloppy in Bloom’s way, and amid its flattering remarks it made an objection that rankled me. Bloom complained that in the course of my narrative the narrator did not change. An epic, he said, requires a hero’s transformation. Whether or not I was a hero, he was correct. I did not conform to the canonical plot. I was not transformed by my year of spiritual intensification. Enriched, but not transformed. This was a matter of fact: I was reporting on events in my mind and my heart, and relying less on my imagination. Perhaps it was evidence of my limitations that I was never bathed in light. But the important point is that I did not hunger for transformation, or for a new philosophical framework, or for a new mode of perception. Transformation is a sort of obliteration, however salvific. But my beliefs about the world seemed defensible to me, and on the right track. I sought only to understand a certain human predicament that previously I had not understood. If I was wiser when it was over, it was still I who was wiser — I came out of sorrow as I went into sorrow, only less poor; and the continuity, after a period of sharp pain and diligent study, was exceedingly precious to me. Anyway, anybody who has prayed regularly in a crowded religious institution knows that they are not the best settings for transfiguration. If I had come away from my spiritual exercises with a pretense to a new identity, I would have felt like a fraud. Bloom was imposing upon my experience a literary requirement, as if my life were literature. The truth is that I find growth without transformation, or change without dissolution, far more interesting.
I discovered a motto for my continuist disposition, my preferred conception of identity-in-change, in an unlikely place. In Basel, on a wall in the medieval church known as Basel Munster, a red sandstone Romanesque structure that was completed in 1500, hangs a plaque that marks the tomb of Jacob Bernoulli, mathematicus incomparabilis, a distinguished mathematician in a family of distinguished mathematicians, who taught at the University of Basel for fifteen years and died in 1705. (Erasmus is also buried in the church.) Bernoulli made many mathematical discoveries that bear his name and participated in the almost unimaginably rich philosophical and mathematical culture of the seventeenth century, corresponding with many of its luminaries. Set into an elaborately carved oval wooden frame with a globe at the top, a stony black surface gives the personal and professional details of the deceased, and at the bottom of the plaque, parallel to the globe, is a small black circle on which was carved, at Bernoulli’s request, his credo.
Eadem mutata resurgo, is the credo. The most accurate translation is, “Having changed, I rise again the same.” There were some who suggested that in its churchly context the phrase must be a reference to the resurrection of Christ, but grammar and doctrine rebut such an interpretation. Bernoulli’s statement was personal, and its suggestion of individual resurrection was more exercised by the condition of the individual who will have survived the crucible. The definition of the change is sublimely mixed. Bernoulli’s credo was based on a mathematical emblem of individual life and individual development — specifically, on a geometrical emblem taken from the geometry of shapes. The Latin adage, carved in gold letters, wraps around a circular representation of a spiral seen from above, also outlined in gold. It was supposed to have been a logarithmic spiral, whose defining characteristic is that it does not alter its shape as it grows larger — we most commonly encounter it in the exquisite patterning of snails and mollusks; but these are arcane matters, and the craftsman mistakenly depicted not a logarithmic spiral but an Archimedean spiral. Bernoulli had requested a representation of a logarithmic spiral because (as he wrote in a treatise about it called Spira Mirabilis, or Wondrous Spiral) this spiral “may be used as a symbol, either of fortitude and constancy in adversity, or of the human body which, after all its changes, even after death, will be restored to its exact and perfect self.” Bernoulli coined the motto eadem mutato resurgo to describe the logarithmic spiral and its complicated model of development; and when he chose it also for his memorial plaque, he transposed it from the realm of mathematical significance to the realm of human significance. He wanted the words to describe himself.
The mathematical study of spirals, the classification of the different properties of different spirals, is an ancient pursuit; Archimedes composed a treatise on the subject. A spiral is a curved line that originates in a point and moves farther away from it as it revolves around it. A logarithmic spiral, which exercised Bernoulli (and before him Durer — perhaps the greatest geometrician among the painters — and also Leonardo) is the type most commonly found in nature. Its distinction is that it retains its shape as it grows in size. Which is to say, it changes and it stays the same. The name given to this property by mathematicians is self-similarity. A self-similar object repeats its form through changes in scale. The study of fractals revealed that self-similarity does not have to be perfect; it obtains also when an object changes but remains mostly like itself.
Self-similarity, moreover, is emphatically not the same as identity. Leibniz famously posited in his metaphysics that two numerically distinct objects cannot be the same in all of their properties, or else they would be indiscernible from each other. The aim of this axiom about “the identity of indiscernibles” was to secure the integrity of discrete individuals, to prevent similarity from climaxing in sameness and thereby erasing the distinction between existentially separate entities. Things can have many properties in common, but they cannot have all their properties in common and still be themselves. Leibniz’s law was developed out of a medieval debate about the nature of angels, and it had a religious implication: “therefore,” he wrote, “every substance is like an entire world and like a mirror of God, or indeed of the whole world which it portrays, each one in its fashion.” We might call this the metaphysics of diversity.
Bernoulli understood that these geometrical truths can serve also as symbols of ethical values. He affectingly interprets the consistency-through-change of the logarithmic spiral as “fortitude and constancy in adversity” — the steadfastness of the self in the storm of circumstances. Here it is worth noting that Bernoulli’s family had fled to Basel, where he was born, to escape the “Spanish fury,” the reign of terror that the Spanish army inflicted upon the Netherlands in the 1570s. Immigrants and refugees are people for whom the retention of identity is a matter of honor. They seek only partial transformation. They are like the curve that travels far but always as itself. They exhibit both the swervingness and the unswervingness of these whorled patterns.
When I first read Bernoulli’s motto, my heart quickened. Here was a formula for spiritual development that rendered moot an entire field of concepts with which the reflective and adventurous soul has traditionally been burdened: infidelity, inauthenticity, defection, betrayal, treason, heterodoxy, heresy, deviationism, apostasy. (A wise psychoanalyst once described my own psychic situation as “defection-in-place,” which was my first hint of eadem mutata resurgo.) What if the dream of transformation is only a necessary fiction for bestirring a person or a people, for getting started? What if continuity is the very condition of right and lasting change? Personal growth must never be an apocalypse. The inalienability of one’s origins and one’s idioms is an obvious psychological and biographical fact about even the most restless individuals, but usually it is regarded as lamentable, an embarrassment to our freedom or our will, a weakness before the greater power of tradition or society. Perhaps it is better to consider the goal of transformation as a trap that will lead to crushing disappointment. The breathless eschatologies of self-invention and self-fashioning are the antithesis of wisdom about existence in the world. Nietzsche set us up. And as regards the history of transformation as a political objective, we have known at least since Tocqueville’s analysis of the French revolution that total revolution is a myth and a murderous one.
When Bernoulli was elaborating his mottled ideal of change, a similar model of metamorphosis began to appear in the work of scholars with whom he corresponded — biologists who were vexed by the problem of generation, or what the historian Elizabeth Gasking described as “how differentiated parts could ever form from unorganized matter.” How does the worm become a moth? How does metamorphosis work? There were many theories, and they all look absurd now that we possess a knowledge of genetics. Some argued for spontaneous generation; no less an authority than William Harvey wrote that “whereas some animals are spoken of as spontaneously reproduced, others are engendered by parents.” Sometimes spontaneous generation was attributed to an invisible force, but nobody could provide much information about that force. There was a school of thought, for a long time dominant, that generation was the result of “preformation”: every feature of a mature animal existed from the start in its earliest and tiniest form, and organisms grew in a mechanical way, all its parts steadily enlarging. The invention of the microscope made it possible for researchers to see features of plants and insects that were not visible to the naked eye, and one scientist claimed that could detect the form of a chick in an unincubated egg. There were religious versions of this notion, according to which generation over time never happened, because these creatures had been formed by God at the beginning of time and then gradually appeared.
The preformationist view concentrated attention on the stages of growth, and begged the question of how the stages are related to one another. Gasking noted that “it must be remembered that whereas modern biologists speak of the grub, the pupa, and the adult as stages in the life cycle of one individual butterfly, Harvey and his contemporaries always regarded the grub as one individual and the butterfly as another.” Transformation after transformation after transformation; new organism after new organism after new organism. The scientist who put paid to this theory of serial metamorphoses — of change as an abundance of transformations, of zoological identity as a sequence of complete and disconnected Humean moments — was a correspondent of Bernoulli’s named Jan Swammerdam, a Dutch biologist and master entomologist. He was a scientist caught up in the pietist movements of his time: “Behold I offer you the Omnipotent Finger of God in the anatomy of a louse!” He opposed the idea of spontaneous generation because it excluded certain creatures from God’s labor of creation and thereby offended God’s majesty. Swammerdam’s monumental researches on insects decisively invalidated the theory of metamorphosis: “In reality the caterpillar or worm is not changed into a nymph, nor to go a step further, the nymph into a winged animal; but the same worm or caterpillar, which on casting its skin assumes the form of a nymph becomes afterwards a winged animal.” (A nymph – no Ovidian excitements here — is an early phase of the butterfly’s development, approximately like the larva or the pupa; the modern science of butterflies no longer recognizes a nymphal phase.) I wonder whether Bernoulli and Swammerdam acknowledged that they shared the same anti-cataclysmic model of growth, the same poised and steady paradigm for individual development. Having changed, says the butterfly, I rise the same.
Bernoulli’s motto appears to have receded into obscurity, but centuries later it enjoyed a delightful resurgence. Eadem mutat resurgo became the motto of Pataphysics — excuse me, ‘Pataphysics. This doctrine, a mad and enchanting parody of science, was one of the most lasting and subversive jokes in modern culture. The term was apparently coined by a bunch of schoolboys in Rennes in the 1880s, one of whom was the young Alfred Jarry, poet, painter, playwright, showman, cyclist, and hallucinator extraordinaire. He first used the term in one of his early plays, when he was twenty, in 1893, and then elaborated the pataphysical gospel. What was, or is, pataphysics? There is a plenitude of definitions, and there is even an academy devoted to the conundrum — the College de ‘Pataphysique, an institutionalization of the hoax was founded in 1948 and has included many illustrious writers and artists among its members, and may be found today on the Boulevard Diderot in Paris, not far from the Gare de Lyon.
In the 1890s Jarry wrote a novel called Gestes et Opinions de Docteur Faustroll, Pataphysicien, Roman Neo-Scientifique suivi de Speculations — or The Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician, a Neo-Scientific Novel followed by Speculations — which was not published until 1911, four years after he died wretchedly of tuberculosis and drugs. (Doctor Faustroll is the permanent dean, or Immovable Curator, of the College, and for some years the vice-dean was a crocodile.) In his novel Jarry included a few pages from a theoretical exposition of his philosophy: “It is the science of that which is superimposed on metaphysics, extending as far beyond metaphysics as the latter extends beyond physics. Pataphysics will be, above all, the science of the particular, despite the common opinion that the only science is that of the general. Pataphysics will examine the laws that govern exceptions. It is the science of imaginary solutions.” The governing intellectual impulse in pataphysics seems to be a recoil from generalization. The French writer Rene Daumal, a spiritualist and an early surrealist and a prominent pataphysician, pronounced in 1920 that pataphysics is “the knowledge of the specific and the irreducible.” All this strains towards a radical notion of particularity, toward a property of uniqueness that is common to all things. (Now there is a generalization!) Insofar as they are themselves, all things are exceptions. It brings to mind Duns Scotus’ notion of haecceitas, or “thisness” — the attribute of individuation, of the perdurability of the singular. For all its convoluted concepts, there is something anti-intellectual about pataphysics, in the way that there is something anti-intellectual about existentialism: its abstractions are a campaign against abstraction, a crusade for thisness. But in the age of the masses — in the early years of the massification of politics and culture and consumption — there was also something deeply stirring about these warnings against the dilution of the one into the many and the subsumption of the human into categories and classifications, about these howling protests on behalf of the individual.
Nothing Jarry did was more howling than Ubu Roi, or King Ubu, his play that set a new standard for artistic transgression. It premiered in Paris in December 1896, and as soon as its first word was uttered — “merdre,” says Pére Ubu as he steps out of the wings — pandemonium broke loose. Yeats was in the audience that night, and the event provoked his famous dark premonition: “After Stéphane Mallarmé, after Paul Verlaine, after Gustave Moreau, after Puvis de Chavannes, after our own verse, after all our subtle color and nervous rhythm, after the faint mixed tints of Conder, what more is possible? After us the Savage God.” Ubu is the sinister Count of Sandomir and King of Poland and Aragon, a grotesque monster, a sadistic tyrant, whose speech is as revolting as his appearance. (In the 1970s we used to compare Idi Amin to King Ubu.) He is a hugely bloated creature, wearing a high pointy hat and carrying a toilet brush for a scepter. He looks a lot like one of Phillip Guston’s klansmen. And on the front of his sheet, covering his hideous paunch, is his symbol: un grande gidouille — a large logarithmic spiral! This design was the work of Jarry himself, in a woodcut called Veritable Portrait de Monsieur Ubu, or True Portrait of Mister Ubu, in 1896. (At the same time that Jarry was devising this infernal physiognomy he was also composing a commentary on an etching by Durer and hatching a plan, never fulfilled, to publish a journal that would reproduce the entirety of Durer’s graphic work — Durer, who called the logarithmic spiral “the eternal line.”) The spiral later became the official emblem of the College de ‘Pataphysique, which issued it in different colors to signify its differentiations of rank.
Why the spiral? As with all things pataphysical, it is impossible to know. Commentators have pointed to the spiral’s prodigious energy, its suggestion of infinity, its insinuation of madness (recall James Stewart’s dream in Vertigo), its duality of presence and absence; there has even been an attempt to link it to one of Mallarme’s most hermetic speculations. I myself see nothing pataphysical about Ubu, except for his emblem. And I keep coming back to the idea of the persistence of the individual, the hallowing of actual existents. Leibniz, again: “It is not true that two substances may be exactly alike and differ only numerically.” The pataphysicians, too, were at war with indiscernibility — with the melting away of distinctiveness, which they hilariously construed as eccentricity. Strictly speaking, however, they were right: eccentricity is another term for individuation.
Like Bernoulli, the pataphysicians adopted eadem mutata resurgo as their slogan and the logarithmic spiral as their symbol. They must have relished the apparent contradiction in the Latin words — but I suspect that, like Bernoulli, they saw in them a novel and sagacious way of regarding human trajectories. The rigorous genius of seventeenth-century rationalism and the wild explorers of the twentieth-century imagination endorse the same complication. For there is no contradiction in eadem mutata resurgo unless you believe that change is linear and complete, that development is orderly directionally clear, that a human life must perfectly cohere. But which life does, really? Who ever beheld in human affairs a pure discontinuity, except death? The tracks of the old do not compromise the new; they launch it, and serve as its conscience. Except for desperate people, there is no shame in the persisting substrate. Jarry’s crazy reverence for the specific and the small, his defiant and scatological love of the exception, was a plea for the unassimilability of the human, which is a kind of plea for freedom. His last words were “je cherche, je cherche, je cherche,” I seek, I seek, I seek. Then he asked for a toothpick and died.
II
The question of whether excellent old art is preferable to inferior contemporary art is pretty complicated and painful. I am sure, at least, that excellent old art is not enough.
Donald Judd
Historical change can be even more inebriating than personal change. For a start, it is less lonely, and can seek vindication in numbers. It promises a thrill of participation and even absorption, though the latter may nullify the agency required for the former. Many of the notions that we use to describe personal change — including the very notion that personal change should be viewed historically — are owed to old theories of historical change, to historiosophies of various kinds, such as the American grail of “redemption.” We are a teleological nation. The other American contribution to the popular understanding of change is the bias toward it, the feeling that change is itself, intrinsically, in its own right, a good; and closely related to this assumption is an interest in its acceleration. We preen ourselves on how often and how fast we move. We have a horror of stillness and of stasis; if we are not gaining ground, then we are losing ground. We detest time and we devour it. This addiction to dynamism is owed to many things — to the competitive frenzy of capitalism, to the epic of the frontier and the song of the open road, to the appetites of immigrant populations, to the unfettered tempo of scientific discovery and technological invention. Our anti-philosophical inclinations have also contributed to it, so that we turned practicality itself into a philosophy.
In America it was Henry Adams who first realized that the speed of change may be the primary characteristic of modernity. He was stupefied by the amount of scientific, technological, and material progress that he witnessed in his own lifetime. (He was born a decade before the Mexican War and died a few months before the end of the First World War.) He proposed that modern history has “a law of acceleration” which “cannot be supposed to relax its energy to suit the convenience of man.” It was now and henceforth will always be the case, he wrote about the year 1900, that “the next great influx of new forces seemed near at hand, and its style of education promised to be violently coercive.” This is how things looked to Adams a little more than a century ago: “Power leaped from every atom. Man could no longer hold it off. Forces grasped his wrists and flung him about as though he had hold of a live wire or a runaway automobile, which was very nearly the exact truth.” And he concluded: “Prolonged one generation longer, it would require a new social mind.”
The prophet seems a little quaint now. The pace that horrified him was superseded long ago. We have gone beyond speed to simultaneity. Does the law of the acceleration of historical change imply that every generation will look nostalgically upon the challenges of the previous one? Yet we must not condescend to earlier fears: Adams’ apprehension was more than just a cranky anti-modernism, he lived in the dynamo about which he warned, and for us he should be exemplary for attempting to offer some resistance to it, for refusing to lose his head over all the transformations that he witnessed. The problem that he posed is still with us; it has never been with us more. It may be that nothing in the history of technological progress has more strenuously tested our capacity for equilibrium in flux, for selecting the wisest spiritual and social course in confronting extreme change, than what was done to us, and by us, just this year. I am referring, of course, to generative artificial intelligence. Its sudden availability had the aspect of a magical, or black magical, intervention; all of a sudden it was here and it was everywhere. Now everything, we are assured, is going to be different. Prepare to be swept away, or enjoy the sweeping.
The velocity terrifies me. I have nothing to add to all the dystopian alarm about what has been unleashed. In this instance I even welcome a measure of hysteria, except of course from Elon Musk, who is merely looking for a way into the action. The harmful potentialities of this great imposture machine, this weapon of the mass destruction of the sense of reality, seem limitless. The history of technology demonstrates that all technologies are deployed before they are adequately understood, but how helpless must we render ourselves? The precipitousness with which the technology corporations release their transformational devices is enough to make you despise capitalism. They are much too vain, out there in California: after all, they know enough to build these contraptions but not enough to understand their effects. How much knowledge is that, really? They are just engineers. They like to think in terms of scale, but the scale of an innovation tells you nothing about its merit. A change in the lives of billions may be a blessing or a curse, or a blessing and a curse. But the expertise of the people who produce these technologies does not extend to the intellectual equipment that is required for evaluating blessings and curses. Ethical responsibility cannot be assessed algorithmically. The values that we must clarify and uphold in an AI world cannot be culled from data sets.
At the beginning of the digital era we heard a great deal about Prometheus. At the beginning of the AI era we are hearing a great deal about Pandora. I suggest that it is time to dwell on the other member of the family of Titans, on Prometheus’ brother and Pandora’s husband — on Epimetheus, whose name translates as “afterthought” or “he who thinks too late.” Prometheus championed the human race against the gods by stealing fire for us; in Aeschylus’ version, he gave us also arithmetic, agriculture, architecture, “every art of mankind.” As a consequence of Prometheus’ defiance, Zeus angrily arranged for the creation out of clay of the first woman, and for the Olympians to provide her with many gifts. Her name was Pandora, which means “all gift.” To deliver her presents Pandora was dispatched not to Prometheus, who shrewdly suspected Zeus of plotting against humanity, but to the hapless Epimetheus, who is the Fredo Corleone of Greek mythology. Ever zealous for the welfare of humankind, Prometheus, whose name means “forethought,” warned his brother not to accept any gifts from Zeus, but Epimetheus gave the warning no heed. Among Pandora’s gifts was a large storage jar — a jar, not a box — which contained all the evils that afflict us. Epimetheus received her warmly, Pandora opened the jar, the miseries became ours. We are not Pandora, we are Epimetheus. Or rather, we are Prometheus, Pandora, and Epimetheus. Technologically we are living in an Epimethean age. Again and again we prefer enthusiasm over reflection, credulity over prudence. All that remains for us are afterthoughts. We swing vertiginously between being on the cutting edge and being too late.
And yet, while everybody is praising or denouncing the imminent tectonic shifts, I see some continuities, and their power to console and to fortify is immense. Much to my surprise, I found some consolation and some fortification in an encounter with AI art. I was not predisposed to welcome this lavishly hyped development: brushes and chisels and cameras have been my idea of art’s best instruments. But my friend Bennett Miller, the film director who recently devoted years to an as-yet-unreleased colossal documentary project about the interpretation of the digital age — I have seen enough of it to testify that it holds treasures — threw himself into a long period of experimentation with the images produced by an early version of the AI generator DALL-E, which is designed to translate written prompts into high-fidelity imagery. The software is an inventory of hundreds of millions of images. Miller gave the commands, or prompts, and the program responded with its “understanding” of his pictorial intentions. The prompts were both general and specific. The results invariably surprised him, and there began, for each image, a lengthy process of revision, of interaction between the man and the machine. Thousands of prints were produced. Every one of these compositions reflected the strange dialectic of surprise and design that was characteristic of these many exchanges. Eventually nineteen prints in various sizes were selected for a show at the Gagosian Gallery in New York.
When confronted by art that is unfamiliar, the most common response is to associate it with art that is familiar — to see old art in new art. This assimilation of the unknown to the known has a basis in the essentially iconographic nature of pictures: images do refer to one another, not only in the minds of their creators but also in the minds of their beholders, so that we can create filiations that help with the reading of things seen for the first time. In the windswept hair of an unforgettable portrait of a girl that Miller calls “Lucy,” I saw Julia Margaret Cameron — a continuity! In his rocky landscapes and dusty wastes I detected Timothy O’Sullivan and Carleton Watkins — another continuity! (The danger of repairing immediately to earlier and familiar images is that we imprison ourselves in a cage of references and never escape the encrustations of culture, which are often an impediment to perception.) Miller’s pictures were printed in sepia and had the unmistakable look of early nineteenth-century photography. He had asked DALL-E for that effect. The pictures show people and places, abstract studies of fogs and mists, strange juxtapositions of figures and objects, mock-historical events, chilling incidents of individuals falling from obscure crags. All of them have a touch of the uncanny, an oneiric quality, a mood of reverie and realistically represented unreality. Can artificial intelligence have seances? The tells about the medium are in the details of the pictures, in the implausible proportions of heads to bodies, and especially in the eyes of the figures, which are eerie, even creepy. Poor DALL-E, those were the best eyes it could do.
The jarring thing about my visit to the gallery was that these images were aesthetically undeniable. Some of them are very beautiful. They please the eye, they provoke the mind. The more I looked at them, the less I worried about their validity. I mean, their validity as art. There are many reasons to distinguish AI art from other kinds of art, but a reactionary panic is foolish, and not only because we must learn to live with these new powers. Miller and DALL-E were engaged in acts of creation that are formally and historically recognizable. This may be helpful: “The mind of artists is full of images which they might be able to produce; therefore, if a man properly using this art and naturally disposed to it were allowed to live many hundreds of years he would be capable — thanks to the power given to man by God — of pouring forth and producing everyday new shapes of men and other creatures the like of which was never seen before nor thought of by any other man.” That was written by Durer in 1523. Another continuity! In an earlier statement of his aesthetic theory, in 1512, Durer similarly described the artist as “full of figures,” which is a fine description, when raised to a mind-numbing magnitude, of Miller’s machine.
Of course, it was not DALL-E that produced these pictures; it was Bennett Miller. This was a collaboration — but artists have always “partnered” with mechanical innovations. The evidence of human intention is everywhere in these AI works. Many people get hung up about the question of intentionality, because they expect it in a work of art and they cannot attribute it to a computer program, but really the question of intentionality is moot, because DALL-E did not produce these images on its own, and even in a more directly artisanal practice the work of art always exceeds the intentions of its maker. It is important not to mistake human intention for human control. What these AI works lacked was not human intention but human control. Or rather, complete human control. But then we must think carefully about human control in art, and about its limits. Some varieties of art have allowed for more control than others, and other varieties of art have welcomed the incompleteness of the artist’s control or renounced the aspiration to control altogether. Some media are more resistant to the artist’s will than others. Titian put his brush exactly where he wanted to put it, but Pollock’s hurling brush made a friend of randomness. Patterns emerged in Pollock’s greatest paintings, but not because he mastered every drop of his paint. (This was the case, in fact, with more traditional painters, from Rembrandt to Soutine, and the late Titian too, who trusted local chaos.) Duchamp introduced a higher degree of serendipity, so that found objects could be exhibited in art museums. The bizarre juxtapositions of the Surrealists surrendered any allegiance to conventional notions of coherence and instead looked for coherence after the fact. Film directors, their most elaborate set-ups notwithstanding, are always wishing for luck, and when they get certain shots they marvel at their good fortune. My own favorite example of the aesthetics of limited control is the art of ceramics. The artist prepares the clay, shapes it into the form of the vessel, creates the glaze according to a chromatic or iconographical plan, applies the glaze to the surface of the clay — and consigns the whole thing to the fire. For a determined time and at a determined temperature, the fire is sovereign. The finished pot is the result of the action of an uncontrollable force upon a highly articulated object. (I am the grateful owner of a luscious ceramic bust of a woman named Flora by Vally Wieselthier, who was the head of textiles and ceramics at the Wiener Werkstätte, and my legendary cousin; the top of the head is flattened and scorched, but Vally appears to have accepted the fire’s damage as a contribution to the work.)
So Miller’s dependence on DALL-E was not a violation of the artistic calling, not at all. It may not suit certain tastes, but it cannot be excommunicated. Even in the maelstrom of artificial intelligence, eadem mututa resurgo. In this connection Miller’s experiments represent the latest challenge to Walter Benjamin’s constricted vision of art in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” an essay that for too long has provided an alibi for philistinism about certain artistic media. “The uniqueness of the work of art is identical to its embeddedness in the context of tradition,” Benjamin wrote, “but the technology of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the sphere of tradition.” This technology, moreover, plays into the hands of the vulgar masses, with their “desire to ‘get closer’ to things and their equally passionate concern for overcoming each thing’s uniqueness.” All this destroys “the artwork’s auratic mode of existence.”
That paintings and sculptures possess an aura which cannot be captured by reproductions of them is undeniable. But Benjamin was not railing against posters and tote bags. He was excluding from the realm of art everything that is not made by human hands and is not therefore one of a kind. (He did not discuss the auratic status of non-mechanical reproduction, which was how many Renaissance and early modern painters and their workshops earned their livelihoods.) When he declares that “to an ever-increasing degree, the work reproduced becomes the reproduction of a work designed for reproducibility,” he is referring to photography and film, and denying them aesthetic legitimacy. It is true that there is no unique original of a photograph or a film, even though there are better and worse prints, and the production of photographic and filmic images is certainly mediated by machines. But what is the use of a criterion for visual art that excludes photography and film? I am reminded of Lukacs’ theory of the novel, which was dazzlingly brilliant except for its denial that Dostoevsky wrote novels.
Anybody who never has an auratic experience before a photograph or a film has eyes but does not see. And anybody who has an auratic experience before every Old Master painting or carving is a fool or a snob. Some of Miller’s images have auras. They cast a spell, they posit a mystery. As with photographs, the image is unique even if its iteration is not. (This is true, by the way, of every line ever written by Shakespeare or any other great writer, which is why bad productions of good plays are tolerable: there remains the auratic language.) Where a genuine artistic sensibility is at work, the mechanical mediation will be no obstacle to art. The machine will be another medium, which like every medium is capable of kitsch or beauty, of objects with presence or without. And meanwhile, as the culture is engorging itself with futurist fevers, men and women with brushes and chisels and cameras will go on with their work, stubbornly adhering to the old methods, which no time and no technology can ruin. The aesthetic honor of a culture anyway depends on the small company of the truly serious, however they choose to create. Having changed, we will return the same. I wish I could be so confident about the impact of artificial intelligence in other spheres of private and public life.
III
Come, and releive
And tame, and keep downe with thy light
Dust that would rise, and dimme my sight.Henry Vaughan
But how prosaic, how timid, how glumly realistic, how tempered in the hope for transfiguration, must we be? Did the poet err in inferring from his experience of an ancient marble torso that he must change his life? Is incrementalism, spiritual as well as political, an expression of cowardice? These are the questions that haunt the anti-apocalyptic mentality, and also the liberal one. It would be infinitely sad to settle for too little, for less than might be within our grasp. Whereas there have been no societies that achieved justice by means of revolution, there are reports of souls who went very far towards a state of transcendence, and I cannot work up the impertinence to declare that they are all lies. One of those reports was about a friend of mine.
Michael Gerson died last November in Washington DC. He was fifty-eight years old. He was a Christian conservative who gave both Christianity and conservatism a good name. He served in the administration of George W. Bush, first as a speechwriter and then as an assistant to the president on matters of policy. In his former capacity, he wrote the most unforgettable sentence I have ever heard in an inaugural address: “no insignificant person,” Bush said in 2001, “was ever born.” The humanism of those words was thunderous, and cut across all distinctions of right and left, religious and secular. In his latter capacity, Mike was responsible in large measure for the United States President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR. It must be the greatest act of mercy that any modern government ever performed: it has so far saved the lives of more than twenty million people. Now that is American imperialism! After his service at the White House, Mike became a columnist for The Washington Post, where his writing unfailingly displayed a natural eloquence. Later, in the gloom of the Trump years, he was, of all the conservative columnists, the most steadfast in his criticism of the president. (President Ubu.) There is perhaps nothing as withering as the contempt of a good man. Even more admirably, Mike, along with his friend Pete Wehner, regularly castigated the Christian evangelical community, his own community, for falling into line behind the leadership of such a sordid figure, such an advertisement for sin. The surest sign of a man’s intellectual honesty is his willingness to criticize his own congregation.
What fascinated me most about Mike was the obvious depth of his religious belief. I have always been susceptible to the charisma of genuine faith, however rarely I find it. I had a thousand philosophical quarrels with the substance of Mike’s faith, of course, but they were beside the point. Mike exemplified in his person the belief in belief — in thoughtful belief, which is not one of the most salient attributes of religion in America; and he inflected his Christianity with a universal compassion that showed in everything he wrote. May a liberal Jew say that he brought honor to Jesus? He did.
Mike was afflicted with depression, and cancer, and Parkinson’s. He was cruelly tested. A few months after he died a memorial service was held in the National Cathedral, where in 2019 Mike had delivered a renowned sermon about depression. Among the remembrances was one by his old friend Scott Baker, which included this:
On my first visit to the hospital, about a week or so before he died, I was alone in the room with him for a few minutes. He’d been sleeping and suddenly came to. After gathering my presence, he said quietly but with bright eyes, “I’ve been given a special privilege.” I leaned closer. He said, “A woman came to me and said I no longer needed to be a being oriented to the world of physical objects.” This was not the conversation I was expecting. And I understood, to a degree, the role of medication and the stage of things. Some of you may have a scientific explanation for this. But I don’t need to hear it and I won’t believe it. I said, using a Celtic phrase for those rare moments when heaven and earth seem to touch — “Michael, do you feel like you’re in one of those thin places?” And he said — “Oh, yes! Exactly!” When I saw him a week later he couldn’t say much. But his eyes still had those moments of brightness.
This nearly knocked me over. “A woman came to me and said I no longer needed to be a being oriented to the world of physical objects.” Who was this woman who found these words for this man? Was she a nurse or a sibyl? I am with Baker in his reluctance to attribute the entirety of the experience to chemistry. After all, Mike in his dying was sufficiently in his powers to describe the new dispensation as “a special privilege.” He recognized that the life that was left to him would be an altered life, that he was now another sort of being, that he had been unburdened of his cognitive duties and delivered to a new plane of awareness, in which the material world would no longer be the field of cognition. (And Mike was a journalist, remember, a perspicacious one, for whom the duties of cognition are also a professional responsibility.) He would see less, but his eyes would be happy. Or “bright,” as Baker recalled. Mike’s happiness at his own reduction was the mark of a strong inwardness. He embraced the subtraction as an addition.
The lines from Henry Vaughan that I have cited above in my friend’s memory come from a poem called “Distraction,” published in 1650.
O knit me, that am crumbled dust! the heape
Is all dispers’d, and cheape;
Give for a handfull, but a thought
And it is bought;
Hadst thou
Made me a starre, a pearle, or a rain-bow,
The beames I then had shot
My light had lessend not,
But now
I find my selfe the lesse, the more I grow….
But now since thou didst blesse
So much,
I grieve, my God! that thou hast made me such.
I grieve?
O, yes! thou know’st I doe; Come, and releive
And tame, and keepe downe with thy light
Dust that would rise, and dimme my sight,
Lest left alone too long
Amidst the noise, and throng,
Oppressed I
Striving to save the whole, by parcells dye.
I venerate this poem because I have spent a lifetime worried about the price of my worldliness. A rich life in this rich world is a life dispersed, and the soul, once dispersed, is hard to gather together, and to keep long gathered. My distractions, if distractions they were, have been wonderful. They have dripped with meanings. Sometimes I wish I could pray with the poet to be relieved of the material world — but then I remember that there is another side to the whole question. There is the powerful view that the material and visible world is our only avenue of access to what is immaterial and invisible, that it is futile for a corporeal and sensual being to ignore the conditions of its knowledge and its significance, that the beauty of abstract forms begins with the beauty of concrete forms. Poet against poet: “The thing seen becomes the thing unseen,” Wallace Stevens wrote. “The opposite is, or seems to be, impossible.”
The best that I can conclude is that a compound being’s work is never done. But there was Mike in his hospital bed, emancipated from objects and “parcells,” his sight “dimmed” but acute. What did he see in the “thin place” that brightened his eyes? Thinness of perception was the poet’s dream. I am at a loss to describe Mike’s gain. I do not know how to think or to imagine in the absence of differentiation. But in my ignorance I bow my head before Mike’s affirmation of an undifferentiated reality — “Oh yes! Exactly!” It is more than Bernoulli thought possible, even if the human truth may have been on Bernoulli’s side.