Dear Friends,
I’m sharing my ‘Curator’ post for the week. These are riffs on the best/most interesting articles I’ve recently come across from the ‘artistic/intellectual web.’ At the partner site Inner Life , Substack stalwart Terry Freedman asks what the point of book reviews is.
Best,
Sam
CAN LITERATURE BE ETHICAL?
There’s a really lovely piece in Compact Magazine on Emmanuel Carrère and the ethics of writing. Compact, by the way, has been amazingly good. Together with publications like The Free Press, it’s been part of a really welcome renaissance in center-right thought. I guess the recent history of the center-right in America would run something like this. In a few pivotal elections, center-right candidates (George Romney, Gerald Ford, Nelson Rockefeller, maybe George H.W. Bush) failed to win, and the GOP as a result tilted gradually rightwards. With George W. Bush — running as a center-right candidate but veering hard towards his base once elected — the center-right lost its credibility for a generation. By the time Jeb Bush 2016 rolled around, it was a dead letter. That’s been a terrible gap in our politics — just as the woke tilt of the Democratic Party has its own issues. Biden helps to keep in place a viable center-left position, and, sure enough, some of the liberal pillars, most notably The New York Times, return back to their moorings after an experiment in progressivism. The right has a long way to go before finding any sort of balance again, but it’s nice to at least fantasize that the intellectual peregrinations of a publication like Compact can help to usher in a sort of Ross Douthat conservatism, rightly skeptical of government overreach and of leftist rhetoric but not, you know, bonkers. Here’s to hoping.
Anyway. The Carrère piece has nothing to do with politics. It’s about Carrère as a kind of penitent hero of autofiction. Carrère, early on, noticed the inherent lie in “journalism” — that the writer could be a detached observer. “The presence of the observer invariably modifies the observed,” he wrote, and, under that formulation, came up really with his own genre — a sort of meditation-in-motion, in which he takes on various far-out subject matter, the fake doctor and murderer Jean-Claude Romand; the Russian far-rightist Eduard Limonov, and uses his journalistic investigations to write mostly about….himself. It’s really wonderful writing, lyrical, honest, at once passionately curious about the world and humble about the limits of one’s possible knowledge.
But Carrère, ever subtle and ever observant, noticed as well the ethical tripwire in his own genre. “What’s difficult,” he said, “is that when one writes about oneself, one is obligated to write about other people.” And that tripwire detonated both Carrère’s personal and professional life. During a divorce settlement, his ex-wife Hélène Devynck insisted as part of the arrangement that he not write about her or their daughter in any subsequent work. Carrère, in her view, violated that arrangement by writing in his book Yoga that he credited his life’s success to Devynck and called the ten years of their marriage the “best of [his] life.” Devynck — divorces do get messy — claimed that that tenderness was an infringement of the divorce terms and consisted a sort of deranged sexual fantasy. “Did I not have the right to separation, or would I be until death the fantasized object of my ex-husband?” Devynck wrote in Vanity Fair. That ‘sabotage littéraire’ of Devynck apparently ruined Yoga’s chances for a place on the Goncourt and Medici shortlists.
It would appear to be easy to dismiss Devynck’s objections — Devynck depriving a professional writer of his emotional truth and at the same time evincing a curious naïveté about the realities of having been involved with a writer (it’s like how there’s no such thing as an ex-spy; once you’ve dated a writer, your’e always subject to the writer’s reimaginings of the relationship) — but Carrère takes them very seriously. In an interview, he discussed being very affected by the story of a torturer who claimed that he had tried his electric prods on himself and found that they weren’t all that painful — and who had missed, Carrère argues, the essential point of torture, that “someone else is afflicting you, and you don’t know when he will stop.”
For Carrère, that’s a perfect analogy for the writing process. Carrère was willing to use the electric prods on himself. Devynck at some point decided that she wanted no part of the prods — which was a very reasonable desire to have — but Carrère, as a veteran torturer, just couldn’t stop himself. Yoga was, as Devynck acutely observed, a kind of vast legal loophole to circumvent the terms of the divorce settlement, to regain control of the torture instruments. Carrère obtained the agreement of his sister to serve as a (thinly-veiled) fictional stand-in for Devynck in a critical scene in Yoga. And much of Yoga is a discussion of the restrictions of the divorce settlement and his frenetic attempts to work around them.
For Carrère, both routes are impossible. Writing only about oneself is the “literary equivalent of onanism” while writing about others is, intrinsically, unethical. “I have used the [electric prods] on people other than myself. And that bothers me,” Carrère says. Or, as Janet Malcolm put it, journalism is “a kind of soul murder.”
All of this may sound a bit hysterical — the kind of super-subtle scandal that is only even conceivable in French literary circles — but I believe that, actually, there is a deep truth to it. Writing involves all sorts of fraught ethical decisions — often only discernible to the writer; or, at most, to people the writer knows — but nonetheless excruciating. (I find myself dealing with a sometimes dizzying — and probably invisible — set of ethical questions when I write this Substack.) The tendency of writing in the era of autofiction is to pretend that these ethical quandaries do not exist. Writers (or performers of all kinds) are deemed to be “very brave” when they “tell their story.” The emphasis is on public confession — above all of traumas — and on an aesthetic of shamelessness.
I am certainly sympathetic to that perspective. On a sort of macro social level (this is much of what the history of 20th century art was all about) art serves as a means for obliterating various unneeded and atavistic social repressions. And, at a deeper, more religious level, art is, as Carrère wrote in Yoga, “the place where you don’t lie.” But then the question becomes how it is possible to be a practicing artist in any real sense of the word and to remain at the same time a good person — or if, as Malcolm suggests, art itself is inherently an immoral act.
Marcus Hijkoop, the writer of the Compact piece, claims that Malcolm herself offered a way out. The root of good writing, she contends, is empathy, a genuine “identification with and affection for the subject,” which transmutes life into art, which — in a religious sense — wipes away the sin of the soul-murder.
But, as Devynck’s experience demonstrates, even affection can serve as an infringement — and, in a super-subtle, French way, as a form of violence. Carrère, I think, would not dispute any of that. His approach to writing is, he claims, a kind of compulsion — a violence inflicted on the self. He is, actually, eager to transcend it — to write from a place of greater freedom and imagination. (The zigzagging struggle to get there is, it seems, the main plot of Yoga.) The difficulty in obtaining that place of freedom — of writing without violence — is not, actually, because of inherent limitations in the form. It’s because it just is difficult to transcend the “despotic ego,” to write both ethically and imaginatively. Carrère regards it as a worthwhile endeavor even if challenging to obtain. Where a person lands on these questions in their writing journey is largely up to them. But the example of Carrère — and the soul-searching he did on this subject — point towards, at the very least, taking these concerns seriously. Shamelessness is not a virtue. Confession is not “brave” all by itself — and does not come without harms. Just as much as truth, ethics — integrity — is a part of the fraught landscape of art.
THE END OF FILM?
The reflection on ethics in literature connects, in my mind, with a pair of recent pieces on the potential death of film from a combination fo AI and the Marvel universe.
The New Yorker’s handwringing piece on Marvel argues — without, I think, meaning it all that much — that Marvel “has swallowed the film industry whole” and “served to accelerate the squeezing out of the mid-range movie.” It’s the kind of piece, really, that could have been written at any time in the last century, with a different villain substituted. In the ‘30s and ’40s, the villain would have been the studio system; in the ‘80s and 90s, the blockbuster. The idea is that Marvel is so entertaining, such a smoothly-functioning creative factory, that “just as you can live your tech life within the frictionless confines of MacBooks and iPads, it’s possible to live your entire entertainment life in the Marvel universe.”
Which is true and is an issue; but it’s a low-rent variety of snobbery to decry pop culture as a phenomenon. What a true snob would tend to argue is that pop culture is just a fact of life. In film, the overwhelming majority of content — and of the revenue generated by that content — is always going to be shlock, whether that’s in the form of the assembly-line studio system, the blockbusters, or the superhero films, and it’s no real use wishing that it were any other way. What’s worth concentrating on are the miraculous moments — the rise of the New Wave in the ‘60s, the Golden Age of Television in the 2000s and 2010s — where brave and creative executives decide that it is worth investing in actual art; and, even more so, on the independent filmmakers who quietly make their work off in the margins of the culture with no real hope of ever getting rich from it.
The particular nature of film — its dependence on technology and on teamwork, its ability to be mass-disseminated — creates an in-built drive to be very simple, to appeal to the most childish possible emotions. It was a consumer product immediately — almost before it occurred to anybody to try to make use of its artistic resources — and the inherent impulses towards franchising, towards dissemination in international markets, towards the least-common-denominator mean that something like Marvel is such an arresting formula that a variant of it will always be with us. No amount of handwringing from any number of New Yorker articles will ever change that. It’s just part of the very individual process of growing-up that people learn to move on from plots that, as Michael Schulman puts in The New Yorker piece, boil down to “keep glowy thing away from bad guy” and mature in their tastes.
But what is true in Schulman’s critique is that a phenomenon like Marvel — with its gutting of the film industry — serves as a mirror for where we are as a society and signifies what is likely to happen when AI starts to really work its ravages in creative industries. As all psychedelic trippers know, the state of mind one is in at the start of a trip is the state of mind that will be magnified and crystallized through the trip’s duration — with the substance itself serving more not so much a means of transformation as a prism. I have some idea that the tidal wave of AI is a similar sort of trip; and it’s important now, just before it hits, to get the “set and setting” right, to figure out our underlying values, to set our “intention,” before things really start to get wild. And, judging by the shlocky, least-common-denominator tendencies of entertainment-in-our-era, it’s not looking good.
Just how bad it might get is indicated in a MIT Tech Review tease of a film entirely made by DALL-E 2 prompts. The film is called The Frost and it really is a very bad movie, but that shouldn’t detract from what’s actually been accomplished with it. It’s using still images and then a brand-new technology that adds movements to still images. If motion doesn’t look right, and voices aren’t synced up with faces, that’s because the filmmakers are bootstrapping video technology onto a technology intended for still imagery — problems that will disappear once some new data set entirely of video becomes commercially available.
The filmmakers — or programmers, or whatever — have a nice spirit of reverence for the whole endeavor. “I had a moment of vertigo when I was like, ‘This is going to change everything,’” said a startup founder quoted in the piece. Another — the maker of Frost — said of working on the film: “We’d be like, ‘Oh my God, this is magic happening before our eyes.’”
There really should be no doubt about what this does to employment in the film industry. The short-form video companies have been using AI tools in post-production for a few years. Recently, I came across the power of these tools to clean up audio recordings, and in my life as a documentary producer they really instantly affected my business calculus — sound recordists have long been the bane of my existence, they are cumbersome, expensive, and always have these surly personalities; for me, it really now is a no-brainer to just not hire a sound recorder for a shoot, get a mediocre recording, and then have the AI tools “fix it in post.” We’re probably years, if not months, away from those sorts of decisions happening on an industry-wide scale. At the moment it would mostly be technicians who get cut out. But, as Frost demonstrates, we’re really not so far off from the point where a film can be made by a single person sitting in front of their DALL-E.
Is that a means of expression? Definitely. Is it art? I guess so. But, at the same time, it obviates what always had been the organizing idea of film, that it was a team effort, would bring people together, and so on. For me, what a reflection like this does is to make me just far more interested in low-tech expression than in anything that comes under the range of AI. I’ve always loved doing theater. Theater is basically AI-resistant — its whole purpose is to have live people in an intimate space reacting to one another’s energies — and it’s basically impossible to make any kind of a living in theater because, as a culture, we’ve been so enthralled with the technological and distributive capacities of film. If the “magic of film” starts to become so routine as to be boring — dazzling films made by programmers on their apps — then the whole exercise loses its purpose. And we might as well put our energy into things like theater that have no technology and, really, no financial structure built into them, but that absolutely do come from us, that nurture the spirit.
AI AND THE SOFT POWER TRAP
There’s a sense, from a couple of articles I’m reading this week, of how the power structure is planning to respond to AI.
That idea is expressed cogently in a born-to-be-viral New York Times piece about a lawyer who employed ChatGPT in a case and nearly got himself cited for contempt of court when it turned out that the highly-persuasive cases cited by ChatGPT didn’t actually exist. In a New Republic article discussing the case, there’s a throwaway line that “warnings appear if you try to use ChatGPT for medical advice or most other things that are better left to licensed human beings.”
In other words, AI gets consigned to the great unwashed masses. It becomes a form of entertainment, a new way for gibberish to spread — and, incidentally, to cut out a whole swathe of relatively low-paying jobs (sound recordists, graphic designers, translators, paradigmatic among these). Meanwhile, for high-end work, the trigger warnings appear — letting a user know that they really need to seek out a “licensed professional,” like a highly-paid doctor or lawyer.
It’s perfectly possible that those professionals will, increasingly, be using AI tools for a wide variety of their tasks. It was more-than-reasonable for the lawyer in the Times story to ask for ChatGPT’s help in drafting his brief; he just, um, maybe should have double-checked it before submitting it to the court. But the line of the guilds will be that certain kinds of work can only be done by the highly-skilled who will retain their jobs; all other work might as well be replaced by a machine.
This, I suspect, will be the faultlines of the AI debates as they start to play out. The populist position, which I am partial to, has been articulated by FTC Chair Lina Khan in a New York Times piece. It would advocate for an anti-monopolistic take on AI, so that the underlying “data” of the AI programs gets treated as the intellectual property of the content creators. If that principle is aggressively, litigiously enforced, it basically cripples the AI tools as they head to market. That’s a sort of asymmetrical form of warfare — some cogent federal moratorium on AI products may be better — but that may be the best available tool to save creative and white-collar labor. On the other side, there is the perspective of the institutions — the argument that AI has so many potential benefits that it needs to be allowed to run its course but that there must be carve-outs for the “licensed,” who retain their authority.
The background for this way of thinking is laid out in an article on the medical establishment, also in Compact. That article, by a sort of apostate physician, Akshay Pendyal, contends that the medical industry as a whole has gotten suffused with elitist, “nudge” thinking. The idea is that the public doesn’t know what is best for itself. The experts know, and it’s their responsibility to gently, through a sort of soft power, guide their charges past the miasma of their opinions and to the right course. As Pendyal puts it, “The underlying assumption seemed to be that patients can’t be trusted to recognize their own failings; it is therefore the responsibility of the enlightened medical-research-industrial complex to forestall their undesirable decisions and optimize their health outcomes.”
“Nudge” theory is framed through a series of innocuous-sounding choices. In classic examples cited by Pendyal, restaurants compel patrons to ask for plastic utensils instead of simply providing them and supermarkets place healthier food close to the checkout counter. It sounds like the kind of thing nobody could possibly object to — it’s baked deep in basic premises of liberal amelioration — but underneath that, as Pendyal notes, it’s highly elitist and condescending and its implications spread beyond the highly-professionalized settings envisioned within the theory and into society as a whole. Pendyal quotes Rudolf Virchow as saying that “medicine is a social science, and politics nothing but medicine at a larger scale.” For Pendyal, that is a terrifying proposition. Within medicine, the nudge perspective leads to an elitist sensibility and to a vast overestimation of the capacities of professionals (as Pendyal puts it, “Most health gains in recent centuries haven’t been due to pills and devices dispensed by medical professionals, but things like improved living conditions and worker protections.). Apply that to the society-at-large and what Pendyal calls “biodeterministic casuistry” simply gets diffused more widely.
Pendyal‘s article is not about AI, but the relevance of this guild thinking for the AI era strikes me as obvious. The professions have reached a state of absolute certitude — and of conformity within their certitude. They are highly suspicious of public discourse and convinced that maintaining the authority of the technocratic system is vital for society’s continued functioning. In that mindset, the advent of AI fits into an agreed-upon trope. It further fractionalizes public discourse and it threatens to weaken authority. The solution is readily understood to be to batten down the hatches and to bolster that authority — to perceive AI as a tool that can be used by credible professionals while insisting that AI can never possibly replace those high-end professionals.
My own perspective on AI is, as I’ve said, a bit different. I like Lina Khan’s populist, anti-monopolistic position, and I like a stance laid out by Adrienne LaFrance in The Atlantic. LaFrance takes inspiration from the 19th century transcendentalists and calls for a return to their fundamental values. “Just as the Industrial Revolution sparked transcendentalism in the U.S. and romanticism in Europe — both movements that challenged conformity and prioritized truth, nature, and individualism — today we need a cultural and philosophical revolution of our own,” she writes.
What marks transcendentalism is that it’s not, primarily, a social philosophy. Social and political thought are understood to be in a different domain. In transcendentalism all emphasis is placed on the self, on expressing one’s truth, on honing one’s sense of integrity. It’s a good philosophy, as LaFrance notes, for periods of whirlwind social change — no one in the 1850s could possibly figure out everything that the Industrial Revolution entailed, just as, now, we can’t really wrap our minds around AI. The right approach to periods like that — in keeping with the principle of “set and setting” — is to really look inward, get one’s energy and one’s values in the right place, and then try to adapt to whatever’s about to happen.
LaFrance writes:
What defines this next phase of human history must begin with the individual…..We should trust human ingenuity and creative intuition, and resist overreliance on tools that dull the wisdom of our own aesthetics and intellect…..The danger lies in outsourcing our humanity to this technology without discipline, especially as it eclipses us in apperception. We need a human renaissance in the age of intelligent machines.
That’s a very different sensibility from the “call your doctor” labeling on ChatGPT. It’s not about carve-outs for credentialed professionals — and a mindset of letting functionality and the market rule apart from that. It’s a deep search for value that can be undertaken by any member of the society. An acceptance that some things are going to be outsourced to the machines but at the same time looking inward and making decisions about what we cannot give up — the kinds of things that, if we lost them, would leave us no longer human.
THE TRANS MOMENT AND THE RESPECTABILITY TRAP
There are two articles out on trans models — one in The New Yorker, one in The New York Times. Both say pretty much the same thing; neither is all that novel. But they do provide an opportunity to reflect on “the trans moment.”
I’ve really been amazed in the last few years at how much collective agita is directed, on the one hand, to college campuses; and, on the other, to trans issues. There’s a sense in which the society just can’t take it; doesn’t know how to deal with anything that’s not the gender binary (as in our knock-down, drag-out, really ugly fights over…..unisex bathrooms).
Much of the issue, I’ve come to feel, is that trans issues tend to be framed in the language of social progress. The premise is that, as gay rights marked a movement forward, so trans rights would be a step behind that — towards the shining new future beyond patriarchy, beyond heteronormativity.
But that narrative contravenes what was so effective and compelling in the struggle for gay rights — the argument that it wasn’t about changing society into something different, that it was about acknowledging what had always been there and gone simply unseen. As Andrew Sullivan writes in a powerful article on his Substack:
It was the most speedily successful civil rights story in memory. ‘Live and let live’ in equality and dignity was the idea. America discovered that [gay people] were not some strange, alien tribe. They were just like every other human, part of our families and communities; and we cared about each other.
Trans issues are really no different. People have always been trans. Gender fluidity has always been a part of human societies. It’s sort of a quirk, more than anything, that Anglo-Saxon society has relatively so little expression beyond a sexual binary. In India, hijra is a trans community that has been recognized in the culture for thousands of years. In Edo Japan, wakashu was effectively a “third gender.” Trans identities run through “two-spirit” traditions in Native American society, through diffuse gender identities in Africa, through the archetype of Ganymede in Greek mythology, etc, etc.
We are in many ways still living with the legacy of the colonial missionaries and their repression of “deviant sexuality” around the world. The repression is what is ‘unnatural’; not the gender fluidity. Ironically, in the West, a certain amount of gender fluidity took its protection from hyper-‘macho’ environments — USO shows, the long history of drag shows on military bases that the right is currently cracking down on at the moment.
What comes through in the profile of the trans models — Geena Rocero and Hari Nef — is the sense of moving from a more complicated to, in some ways, a simpler way of being. Rocero describes working “stealth” for years in the fashion industry — feigning neck injuries to hide her Adam’s apple; carrying tampons in her purse. At some point, she just got tired of it and came out publicly. The irony of it is that Rocero had already been “out” — as a teenager she had worked the transgender pageant circuit in the Philippines. But, on moving from the Philippines (a “conservative, Catholic country”) to the U.S., she found herself going into “stealth” mode, trying to fit into the U.S.’ starker gender binary.
Both the profiles on Rocero and Nef are triumphalist — celebrations of a moment in which it is possible not only to be openly trans but to have really wonderful careers while being out. The sense is of acceptance, of the society simply opening the aperture wider, taking in more types of gender fluidity, and taking in aesthetics that accompany them. “It’s just a presence where there was an absence,” said Nef. “[Pleasure] is something that we were not allowed to access for so long and to be able to share that and to speak about that — ” said Rocero, before breaking down in tears and explaining, “I’m crying out of happiness. These are happy tears.”
In my daily life, I can see the change. Friends who have publicly come out as trans. Large numbers of people in New York City who aren’t passing as the other sex — who are presenting in a highly-androgynous, undefined space. It’s just cool. It’s amazing that it’s happening. And it adds to everybody’s life — it really is fascinating to come across the accounts of people who have lived, at different times, as men and women and to hear from them the profound ways in which they are perceived differently because of gender.
At the same time, in both the profiles, there is a quiet note of something being misunderstood about the experience. “I was in a trap being stealth. And then I felt like I entered a new trap, which is respectability politics,” said Rocero. Michael Schulman, in The New Yorker profile, writes that Nef “finds it exhausting to talk about identity all the time.” The ‘trans moment’ seems to be intertwined with the idea that it is a step forward. But the premise of the ‘step forward,’ of ‘social progress,’ is that there will always be a next, a new moment, that the trans models, for instance, are expected to be a symbol of something beyond themselves. As Sullivan puts it acerbically in the subheading of his Substack piece, “We are in a new era. And the erasure of gay men and lesbians is terrifying.”
In the logic of ‘progress,’ out gay people, like ‘cis white feminists,’ become yesterday’s news — become the new regressives. What emerges from the profiles of Rocero and Nef is the idea that the experience and the individuality needs to be affirmed and celebrated but without that being shoehorned into “the trap of respectability politics.” A person’s experience is what it is. The job of society is to be as accepting as possible of as many different expressions of individuality. That’s a very different way of thinking from believing that society must move in one particular direction or another; and with individuals evaluated by their contribution to (or detraction from) that triumphal march.
I admit to being plagued by the questionable ethics of writing -- and I address that in the memoir I'm now posting here on Substack. Woe is me, as I recount the good, the bad, and mostly the foolish that is me.
The one incident that threw me a bit was Bellow's terrific novel Ravelstein when Bellow was attacked or, one could say, criticized for "outing" Allen Bloom -- but what a book Bellow wrote with its ending that is so lyrical and unforgettable.
The questions of ethics is complex, indeed. But Bellow's brilliance overcomes. And then there's the critic Joseph Epstein in _Essays in Biography_ who even attacks Bellow's ability to construct a plot, He damns _Seize the Day_ that I think is brilliant and comments that Bellow's many wives should have written a book about him--a highly unfavorable one at best.
So where is the line? Good question, indeed. As always, Sam, you fascinate and intrigue.
Artists wringing their hands about the effect of their betrayal of their subjects - Graham Greene used to go in for a lot of it - becomes even less attractive when you realise that the issue isn't really their need to write, or to create art in some other form, at all. It's their desire to publish. The problem with Carrere, as with all of the others, isn't that he has an obsessive need to create art. It's that, having created it, he'd quite like to exchange it for money. "I feel terribly bad about it all, but on the other hand, I'd rather not have to get a proper job".