Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

During Black History Month earlier this year, the New York City streetwear boutique Alife brought to market a limited set of six heather grey hooded sweatshirts made of heavyweight, pre-shrunk  fourteen-ounce cotton fleece, with ribbed cuffs and waist. The garments, whose sole decorative flourish were the names of black cultural icons — from Harriet Tubman to Marcus Garvey — screen-printed in sans-serif across the chest, retailed for $138 a pop and sold out promptly. Of the six men and women featured in the campaign, there was only one writer: James Baldwin. On Instagram, to promote its product, the brand deployed a short clip of Baldwin’s extraordinary debate against William F. Buckley, Jr., on the theme “Is the American Dream at the Price of the Negro?” at the Cambridge Union in 1965 — a grainy YouTube gem beloved by aficionados that was recently brought to mainstream attention in Raoul Peck’s documentary I Am Not Your Negro. A friend messaged the post to me accompanied by the Thinking Face emoji, finger and thumb against the chin, a look of skepticism. I responded differently. I wasn’t incredulous about this cultural commoditization: Baldwin’s name had long since become a kind of shorthand, an emblem of a position — a way, increasingly fashionable in its own right, to signal which side of any number of contested issues of the day one wishes to come down on. Jean-Paul Sartre once described the young Albert Camus as “the  admirable conjunction of a man, of an action, and of a work,” by which he meant, simply, that there was no daylight between his life and his ideas, and it was impossible to think of one without conjuring the other. In an essay for the New York Review of Books in 1963, in which she contrasted morally virtuous if artistically second-tier writers (“husbands”) with perverse and reckless but exciting geniuses (“lovers”), Susan Sontag took Sartre’s observation as a springboard for a merciless review of Camus’ posthumously published Notebooks. “Today only the work remains,” she asserted. “And whatever the conjunction of man, action, and work inspired in the minds and hearts of his thousands of readers and admirers cannot be wholly reconstituted by experience of the work alone.” Elsewhere she expanded the critique: Whenever Camus is spoken of there is a mingling of personal, moral, and literary judgment. No discussion of Camus fails to include, or at least suggest, a tribute to his goodness and attractiveness as a man. To write about Camus is thus to consider what occurs between the image of a writer and his work, which is tantamount to the relation between morality and literature. For it is not only that Camus himself is always thrusting the moral problem upon his readers. … It is because his work, solely as a literary accomplishment, is not major enough to bear the weight of admiration that readers want to give it. One wants Camus to be a truly great writer, not just a very good one. But he is not. It might be useful here to compare Camus with George Orwell and James Baldwin, two other husbandly writers who essay to combine the role of artist with civic conscience. What occurs between the image of a writer and her work: the same problem afflicts the reception of Sontag herself. Still, she has a point. She writes elsewhere that Camus, as a novelist, attained a different altitude than either Orwell or Baldwin, but I have never been able to unsee that dressing down of all three “husbandly” men, Baldwin in particular, or to entirely dislodge him from her framework. As the years accumulate and Baldwin’s image and moral authority become ever more flattened, ever more frequently appropriated for the preoccupations of the present moment — with the most casual assumption of self-evidence — something in Sontag’s refusal to play along nags at me. In any event, and even though Baldwin, later in his career, wrote that he had “never esteemed [Camus] as highly as do so many others,” I have always found it useful to think of him as a kind of Harlem companion to the scholarship student from Algeria who became — and then failed to remain — his nation’s moral