Often when I'm typing the print will turn blue, green, or red, designating a spelling or grammatical error, a run-on sentence, or some other mechanical problem.
I appreciate this.
What a computer can't do is grasp the meaning of my work, and tell me whether or not it's "good." Or whether it's "great." The criteria by which we decide "memorability" has SOMETHING to do with it being sui generis, and therefore there is no one pattern that the computer is looking for.
Gregory Bateson tells an anecdote in his Steps to an Ecology of Mind about a dolphin researcher who began rewarding dolphins not for any specific move, but rather for a move he'd never seen before. The dolphins had to grasp the idea of "innovation," in order to get a free fish.
Creativity is not quite just something heretofore unseen (computers could easily register such a phenomenon if they had a list of all the heretofore seen moves in any given sphere). While novelty is an aspect of aesthetics and is necessary, it is not sufficient. Aesthetics must also embrace morality (moral ugliness can negate a poem or novel). A good poem or novel must create a new step in moral terms and in aesthetic terms, a kind of two-step. It must therefore understand the history of its genre, and create a meaningful new addition to a tradition.
So far, it has only been human critics who are steeped in a tradition and yet open to innovation who have been able to herald this, and to tap a new poet or a new novelist, as significant. They've sometimes made mistakes. Critics lambasted Whitman, and some others, when they initially appeared. Andy Warhol was controversial. There was not even unanimity on Melville or on Shakespeare.
Our understanding of aesthetics is slippery, and we do not have a formula for new work that matters. For a while it looked like Lang-Po would triumph in poetry. Now this seems increasingly tenuous. Black Mountain Poets are also losing their stock rating.
Novelty often creates a first sound appreciation, but then we want the human to wish to return to a poem or novel and live in it. This means it must offer a satisfying moral and aesthetic world, an alternative world that clarifies this one. No computer needs to make meaning of the world, so I don't think this is something they will ever be able to achieve. It's something that we struggle with, making many mistakes along the way. There was a time when I was about 17 when I thought EE Cummings was important. It's not mere fashion that dictates aesthetic importance, although that's of course part of it. Pound said it was "news that stays news." That's about as good a definition as we have.
A computer can't light up when I'm writing something good and say, "Keep going, Buster!" "You're on to something!"
Nor can it say, "Drop this line of inquiry. It's stupid, and Soren Kierkegaard has already done it to death."
In the realm of literary aesthetics, we're on our own. I rather like this.
Computers can look toward the past, and tell us how we are not in accord with a given spelling, or a given grammatical rule that has been set in stone. A computer cannot look ahead. Literature however must continue to speak to us, and therefore its writer must have been ahead of us, and remain ahead of us, in order to continue to matter.
Homer still has something to say to us. The Bible still speaks to us. Shakespeare still is ahead of us. Marxists for a time seemed ahead of us, and now it is increasingly clear that they are a bridge to nowhere, one that only a fool would follow. There are a great number of bridges to nowhere, and French post-structuralism, based largely as it was on Marx, is now an increasingly tenuous bridge. Studying it appears to have been a waste of time. The guru movement of the 1970s with Maharajahs dancing around appears, likewise, to have been a waste of time.
The ideas of rgc as they are enshrined in the new left, seems increasingly to have been a waste of time.
To be conservative means to dive deep for what's still meaningful: Jane Austen, John Milton, William Shakespeare, Homer, and the Bible, are still way ahead of epigones of PC like Toni Morrison and Barack Obama, Chairman Mao and Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Andrea Dworkin and Julia Kristeva.
2 comments:
Kirby says:
"To be conservative means to dive deep for what's still meaningful: Jane Austen, John Milton, William Shakespeare, Homer, and the Bible, are still way ahead of epigones of PC like Toni Morrison and Barack Obama, Chairman Mao and Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Andrea Dworkin and Julia Kristeva."
This is a considerable confusion and mixing of disciplines. Religion, literature, literary criticism, politics, sociology, current events. I'm not sure a statement like this makes any sense at all, really.
Not everyone, for instance, considers the Bible as a literary artifact, except in the driest sense. There are those who would question the categorization of the Koran, for instance, or the works of Rumi, along the same lines. Any text whose primary purpose is the promulgation of a religious ideology risks being regarded as mere propaganda, no matter how flowery or "poetic" its evocations or style may be.
It's probably those who question the meaning and ultimate implications of texts who "dive deep" into them, looking for contradictions or hidden meanings. This kind of activity is usually discouraged among those for whom such texts are "sacred, holy" scriptures whose message and meaning are beyond question or dispute.
The same tendency--to question the legitimacy of Modernist or Post-Modernist works against earlier texts which were produced in a time when the assumptions we make today about how subject matter should be handled did not yet exist--yields unpredictable and disturbing conclusions about the ultimate meanings of "classic" works. Works written, for instance, only by men, suggest that woman's place in society has been systematically restricted over the millennia of human history. "Delving deep" into classic texts doesn't necessarily support the assumptions behind such prejudicial attitudes.
Toni Morrison is certainly not as good as Jane Austen, assuming we apply the same criteria to both. But expedient theoretical applications--of the kind that reactionaries are wont to promote--are precisely what enables people to claim that Morrison is actually a "better writer" than Austen, or that Ayn Rand is a more important--and talented--novelist, than Eudora Welty, or Flannery O'Connor. If you make your own bed, you should lie in it.
My Red Book was buried deep in the back row of a bookshelf, but now I've put it on my bedside table so I'll have ready access to it. I bought it on Red Square while standing in line to enter Mao's mausoleum. The line was so long it would have taken all day to get in, so I contented myself with Mao's aphorisms. I've been meaning to compare and contrast them with the Analects of Confucius, which I bought at the gift shop at the entrance to that tomb.
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