{"id":1293,"date":"2016-07-06T15:23:02","date_gmt":"2016-07-06T13:23:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/0x0a.li\/?p=1293"},"modified":"2023-04-04T12:39:05","modified_gmt":"2023-04-04T10:39:05","slug":"vom-geist-und-den-maschinen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/0x0a.li\/en\/vom-geist-und-den-maschinen\/","title":{"rendered":"Of Minds and Machines"},"content":{"rendered":"

[This essay first appeared<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>in\u00a0<\/em>Logbuch Suhrkamp<\/a>.]<\/em><\/p>\n

A year ago, Swantje Lichtenstein and Tom Lingnau asked a number of artists a simple question:\u00a0Is the artist necessary for making art today?<\/em><\/a>\u00a0What became a slim volume of answers began with their project\u00a0Covertext<\/a>, which investigates literary conceptualism and appropriation. It was in this\u00a0context that\u00a0they first questioned what connection\u00a0remains\u00a0between artist and artwork \u2013 for if conceptual literature takes the idea to be more important than its execution, and if the pure appropriation and copying of other people’s texts no longer constitutes “creation” in the classical sense, the idea of authorship has indeed reached an impasse, because\u00a0its relation to the work becomes fleeting and elusive: Who is the author of a book that was written written by someone else?\u00a0Think Borges’s\u00a0Pierre Menard<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

One contributor, Scott Myles, offered a laconic:\u00a0“Without the artist there\u2019s no art.” This approach, of course, settles the matter. Just as all bachelors are unmarried, all art is made by artists. What is the difference between bachelors and art? Maybe that art and artists do not exist in a tautological relation\u00a0to\u00a0each other but can easily be considered as\u00a0separate, because they are historically variable quantities. “Artist” was never an objective concept; the artist’s spheres of duty and influence have continually changed from the Renaissance to Romanticism, Naturalism, classical Modernism, and Postmodernism from artisan to genius to scientist to discursive hub;\u00a0likewise with\u00a0“art.” Appropriation and conceptual literature are only the latest turn of\u00a0the\u00a0screw.<\/p>\n

What is interesting about the responses collected in the volume is that most of them\u00a0ignore\u00a0this<\/em>\u00a0context. Instead, they focus, for better or worse, on a different but related literary genre: generative code literature, which creates text through scripted algorithms. On the one hand, this shows the proximity of\u00a0code and concept<\/a>,\u00a0that is, the fact that codes formalize concepts and make them executable; on the other hand, it indeed seemed to\u00a0indicate what Tobias Roth recently claimed in\u00a0Logbuch Suhrkamp<\/a>, namely a “strange freneticism” gripping authors at the idea “that the machines might take the work out of their hands.” At times, this\u00a0fear of the digital<\/a>\u00a0comes close to a new\u00a0Luddism, which\u00a0preferably wants to prohibit all technical interventions into the activities of the author.<\/p>\n

Roth, too, is skeptical: “Is the artist necessary for making art today?” appears to him as “implying a situation that is not the case.” But by withholding\u00a0what<\/em>\u00a0exactly is implied here (after all, it’s just a question), he, too, redirects the conversation without any comment toward the topic of technologically generated art. He begins, of course, with a certain nuance: It may be that the production of art can be decoupled almost completely from the author-subject \u2013 but only almost. Someone always has to make a start,\u00a0provide the first impetus, which sets in motion whatever it may be. And yet, Roth immediate goes on to say: “Medium, form, tool are placed in the middle and provide neither material nor initiative;\u00a0neither do they have a memory,\u00a0at best\u00a0a hard drive.” There are two arguments here: One that is causal and asks for the initial act, and one that focuses more on the extent in which the\u00a0mean, the “tool boxes” carry out their work when it already has begun \u2013 a work that might change from\u00a0quantity to quality. As it turns out, a whole human-aesthetic ontology is at play here,\u00a0because Roth is concerned with the very big picture: “Which faculty, which concept signifies this gap that separates man from machine?” The\u00a0answer follows promptly: “Mind\u00a0(Geist<\/em>) would be a name for this abyss.”<\/p>\n

What we have here is a conjunction of the concepts “machine,” “artist,” and “mind” (or, since\u00a0Geist\u00a0<\/em>is one of those almost untranslatable German words, spirit) \u2013 all of which\u00a0come down to another concept, that of creativity. Machines (and codes\u00a0are understood as machines here) cannot be ‘creative.’\u00a0As much is couched in the question of “whether machines can\u00a0make<\/em>\u00a0music and not only\u00a0play<\/em>\u00a0it. Or literature, or painting, it is an open-ended list.” Because machines lack mind, which is a prerequisite for creativity, and, in the end, ‘genius’, the machine will never be a producer of art; creative or ingenious is only the programmer that\u00a0sets it in motion. But does it have to be “mind,” does it have to be\u00a0this<\/em>\u00a0“mind”? Is that\u00a0a good description of “mind”? Or of “machine”?<\/p>\n

If we mean by “mind” what is meant by the now classic branch of the philosophy of mind, that is, the emergence of consciousness, the question would be: How can machines without consciousness produce art? Understood this way, machines\u00a0that\u00a0have no consciousness have no mind and are incapable of creation. If\u00a0Geist<\/em>\u00a0\u2013\u00a0which, again, includes the meaning “spirit” \u2013 signifies even something like\u00a0anima<\/em>\u00a0or\u00a0spiritus<\/em>, the divine breath, then all questions have to end anyway; and even the\u00a0Romantics’ idea of “spirit” as genius is, at its core, theological. But what if we understood “Geist” differently? What\u00a0if we conceived of\u00a0“mind” in a way that blurs the difference between\u00a0humans\u00a0and machines?<\/p>\n

Here, Andy Clark and David Chalmers’s idea of the\u00a0extended mind<\/em><\/a>\u00a0<\/em>might be helpful. It is a conception of “mind” that cannot be located neuronally, physiologically in the brain but which, in order to\u00a0function, has to access the world, so that, in the end, genius is not a matter of “skin and skull” but takes places in the space between head, hand and, for all I care, goose quill. After all, unless you are a savant, you do not write a text in one go but produce it in a constant feedback operation between material world and consciousness.\u00a0And if I am unable to write a text without seeing it on the screen or on paper, then, according to this “active externalism,”\u00a0we must\u00a0also locate “mind” in the paper, in the keyboard, the pen or the screen.<\/p>\n

Nor is the word\u00a0“machine” understood properly here. The metaphor of the “writing-machine” an author builds surfaces frequently\u00a0in discussions about code literature.\u00a0This often leads to suspicions about authorial\u00a0fantasies of omnipotence and a fear that there is some\u00a0will to power in the\u00a0machines and the oft-invoked “algorithms.” This could be called the\u00a0authoritarian fallacy<\/em>. The authoritarian fallacy consists of\u00a0confusing the\u00a0determination\u00a0of rules for the generation of text\u00a0with the determination of the text itself. What this assumption omits is that such rule determination \u2013 upon which every “machine,” every “algorithm”\u00a0is based on\u00a0\u2013 often happens without a clear idea of its result.\u00a0When it comes to literature, rules are often the opposite of authorial power and rather constitute a type of surrendering.\u00a0Compared to this, classical authorship is founded much more\u00a0on control.<\/p>\n

For example, I built a program that wrote the novel\u00a0Durchschnitt<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(Average<\/em>)\u00a0for me. The script, written in Python, consists of a handful of lines and operates according to an almost laughably simple recipe \u2013 it calculates the average sentence length of all the novels in critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki’s collection\u00a0Der Kanon<\/em>\u00a0(think Harold Bloom’s\u00a0Western Canon<\/em>,\u00a0only in German), takes these sentences and\u00a0sorts them alphabetically \u2013 but the outcome is one I would never have been able to imagine, nor realistically produce by hand. My mind has jumped into the machine.<\/p>\n

Taken together, the extended mind and the machine that knows more than me make it harder to identify tool and maker.\u00a0At the very least, it becomes questionable whether we can see the machine as just another extension of human beings as “prosthetic Gods,\u201d as Freud had it. From my primitive program, this relation can be extended ever further, so that with the\u00a0increase in complexity the dependence of the program on the programmer decreases; it would be appealing to test the limit of this development. Christian B\u00f6k<\/a>\u00a0has noted that networked communication produces more and more language that is only exchanged between computers without ever finding a human reader.\u00a0Is a text disqualified from being art if no one reads it? Dave Jhave Johnston even speaks of an “aesthetic animism<\/a>” \u2013 human-machine communication is “spirited,” one could say, full of\u00a0“mind.”<\/p>\n

But maybe it would be better to do away altogether with such concepts as\u00a0mind and creativity when it comes to art and literature; the mind\/spirit Roth is talking about is still closest to the concept of genius, the great, autonomous, creative and powerful. It seems that romantic assumptions are at work here, which still rule the notion of author and artists, even if they could be reduced to the operational commands of calling \u201cstart\u201d and \u201cstop.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ultimately, my invitation to the writers of today\u00a0is not to rest on a single, heroic-romantic concept of authorship, but rather to produce\u00a0without control, to “let it write<\/a>” \u2013 and by that I mean: to learn how to program. First, as coder and poet\u00a0J\u00f6rg Piringer<\/a>\u00a0has written, to offer a practical alternative to the perpetually unsuccessful Luddism: “the poets of coming years will not sit back and leave control over the language of algorithms to companies.” And secondly, to extend the mind, which already rests within our machines, even further \u2013 and with it, the limits of literature.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sorry, this entry is only available in German. For the sake of viewer convenience, the content is shown below in the alternative language. You may click the link to switch the active language.[Dieser Text erschien zuerst auf dem Suhrkamp-Blog Logbuch Suhrkamp.] Im letzten Jahr stellten Swantje Lichtenstein und Tom Lingnau einer Reihe von Autoren die […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/0x0a.li\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1293"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/0x0a.li\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/0x0a.li\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/0x0a.li\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/0x0a.li\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1293"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/0x0a.li\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1293\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1679,"href":"https:\/\/0x0a.li\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1293\/revisions\/1679"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/0x0a.li\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/0x0a.li\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/0x0a.li\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}