Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

     Back when I was an idealistic young soul, I enrolled in a PhD program in French and Comparative Literature, intent on making a career in academia. Those were the days when New Criticism and Semiotics held sway, and texts were to be read without interference from outside influences. The approach we were taught, boiled down, was that all a reader needed to know about a poem or a work of prose could be found on the page, without reference to historical context, authorial biography, or any other distractions. In class after class, we dissected poems by Ronsard and Rimbaud, the Symbolists and the Surrealists, peeling back layer upon layer of manifest and latent meaning. It was intoxicating stuff, but I couldn’t escape a nagging question: What was the point of it? Wasn’t it all a bit too removed from life? Wasn’t literature supposed to tell us about more than just its own internal machinery? Unable to resolve these questions, I handed in my Master’s thesis and said goodbye to all that.      One effect of having left academia prematurely is that I spent the following decades still grappling with the appropriate balance between art and life, and the role that literature, literary studies, and the humanities in general have to play in our dealings with this fraught and confusing world — a world that, increasingly, seems resistant to the kinds of challenges and provocations that art and literature are best suited to pose. Is literature meant to reinforce our convictions, or to destabilize them? Should art be a safe space or a dangerous space, and what does that mean? What is the role of the off-putting, the upsetting, the offensive, and the shocking in our study and consumption of the humanities? Can art still be shocking in this day and age? And who, exactly, is being shocked?      The answers used to be fairly straightforward, or so it seemed. The progressive avant-garde duly épaté’d the bourgeois, who duly responded with howls of outrage as their cherished shibboleths — God, king, country, the army, the Establishment, what have you — were dragged through the slime — often in language and aesthetic forms that were themselves a provocation. Provocation was even a kind of social role, an expected feature of the societal landscape. But things are no longer so simple.      These days we find ourselves in a situation in which supposedly contradictory viewpoints circle each other, ouroboros-like — and become virtually impossible to distinguish. Conservatives vent their offense by banning an increasing number of books in schools and libraries, while college professors are actively discouraged from teaching material that might ruffle student sensibilities and provost’s offices disinvite speakers deemed too hot to handle. Yet what better time than in college to have sensibilities ruffled? When will students ever have a more free and insulated space in which to rub shoulders with controversial ideas, and to develop the skills needed to confront those ideas in the world — that is, to view them with greater insight and deeper understanding, if only to then refute them? College is, or should be, an instruction in controversy and its skills. For this reason, the curricular exclusions on current-day campuses not only curtail what the educational experience has to offer, but, particularly in a study of the humanities, the establishment of these guardrails undermines what is most valuable about the discipline: its challenge to comfort and certainty, its impetus to make us think harder and more independently.      We are all familiar with the Golden Age of Bourgeois Indignation, in incidents ranging from theatergoers howling at the premiere of Victor Hugo’s Hernani in 1830, to attendees at the Paris Salon in 1863 trying to slash Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe, to audiences throwing tomatoes and raw steaks at Dada performers in the 1920s. Flash forward a century and the dynamic has reversed: as Laura Kipnis has observed in these pages, it’s not the rubes and the philistines who get rattled now, but rather the progressives and the illuminati who find it hard to stomach the provocations. “At some point,” she writes, “offendability moved its offices to the hip side of town.” Nor, even, is outrage the exclusive privilege of the avant-garde: in the current climate, mainstream art and literature can just as likely get dinged as the cutting-edge stuff, in a free-for-all of offense.      The question is, what do we sacrifice by avoiding such offense? It’s not always pleasant to be rattled out of one’s complacencies — the entire history of the avant-garde banked on it — but in losing the displeasure of injury, are we also losing the pleasures of discovery, and of self-discovery, that can accompany it? The price of comfort is often stagnation.      And there’s a more immediate concern as well: in this time of anonymous reputation-bashing and swift retaliation against unwelcome opinion — the so-called “cancel culture” — the danger is not so much that people’s ratings will suffer and their speaking engagements will be revoked, but that they will stop saying anything at all for fear of being boycotted or “shamed.” We have too many crises to confront, none of which can be meaningfully addressed in 280-character soundbites, for those who can see beyond partisanship to refrain from making valid contributions. Trying to avoid offense in every instance is a fool’s errand — you can’t please all of the people all of the time — and holding back consequential and constructive insights, even if unpopular, impedes the free exchange of ideas and accomplishes nothing.      From its tumultuous start, the Surrealist movement was out to shock. The flurry of activity that accompanied its debut in late 1924 and early 1925, including the broadside A Corpse (which spat on the much beloved and recently deceased novelist Anatole France, an act of cultural blasphemy), the aggressive prose and propositions of Andre Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism (“Beloved imagination, what I most like in you