Login
On the second half of Friedrich Schiller's On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), getting into the mechanics of how aesthetic experience work in giving us a midpoint between animality and pure rationality where we can feel free. Also, does art reveal truth?
Sponsor: Visit GreenChef.com/pel60 and use code pel60 to get 60% off the #1 Meal Kit for Eating Well, plus free shipping.
The post Ep. 319: Schiller on Experiencing Beauty (Part One) first appeared on The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast.We continue working through letters 1-15 of On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), helped by Markus Reuter.
We get clearer on what Schiller means by Beauty, and how two contrary drives toward matter and form somehow cancel each other out to combine in a "play drive" that is at the heart of appreciating and creating art.
Sponsors: Get 15% off a newly-cheaper ($10/month) annual membership at MasterClass.com/pel. Check out the Jordan Harbinger Show at jordanharbinger.com/subscribe.
The post Ep. 318: Friedrich Schiller on the Civilizing Potential of Art (Part Two) first appeared on The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast.Can art make us better people? Musician Markus Reuter joins Mark, Wes, and Seth to discussion the first half of On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795).
Given the failure of the French Revolution, this famous German poet wondered what could make the masses capable of governing themselves? His answer: Beauty! Aesthetic appreciation puts us at a distance from our savage desires, enables the abstract thought necessary for Kantian rationalist morality, and yet keeps us in touch with our feelings so that we don't just become cogs in the industrial machine.
Sponsors: Secure your Internet and get three extra months free at ExpressVPN.com/PEL. Try The Psychology Podcast with Scott Barry Kaufman.
The post Ep. 318: Friedrich Schiller on the Civilizing Potential of Art (Part One) first appeared on The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast.I’ve written a great deal about TV — three short books on negative character traits in contemporary television, a peer-reviewed article and now a planned book on Star Trek, and countless blog posts and online publications. I’m even teaching a course that’s primarily about television this fall, namely a study of Watchmen and its HBO adaptation (with the latter being the main object of interest for me). Yet I find myself a big exhausted and disengaged by the culture of TV commentary. Part of that is simply the fact that there has been a vast overproduction of commentary and “takes.” Many of these pieces are written by people I admire and are of very high quality, but the sense of being rushed or forced somehow haunts even the best pieces for me.
I would like TV analysis to be “insight recollected in tranquility,” and the current online publication culture simply is not compatible with that. Trying to keep up is the only way to effectively get read, at all. In six months, no outlet is going to publish your piece about how you just realized something about Succession — there’s a window, and that window is now. I can blog about it and my friends will see it and maybe even like it, but that’s no way to build a reputation or a career as a writer. I understand that it’s a privilege that my full-time teaching job allows me (and in many ways requires me) to sit that out, and perhaps part of my fatigue is a form of survivor’s guilt, because there are many possible alternative timelines where I might have been pushed out of academia and seen the TV commentary game as the only way to maintain some kind of intellectual engagement in my work.
I don’t think that overproduction or weird personal vibes are the only factors here, though. There’s a fundamental unclarity about the task of TV writing. Sometimes, as in episode-by-episode write-ups, the task seems to be to help people remember what happened or process basic plot points — or keep up with events on the show without actually watching it. I notice that sometimes people respond to those write-ups as though they contain “smart” commentary, when it seems to me that they are mostly just summary. Everything about that corner of the TV writing game makes me feel sad — though I would totally accept a TV write-up job for a Star Trek series if offered.
The write-up partly makes me feel sad because I can tell that the writers know the task is beneath their dignity and beneath the dignity of their readers. This is not the case for the true lowest of the low — the kind of TV commentary that suspends disbelief permanently and responds to events as though the characters were real people. This seems to characterize a lot of the Succession takes circulating right now. They amount to gossip columns about fictional characters. At a slightly higher level, perhaps, are speculations about what might happen, especially if they are keyed into what would please or surprise fans the most. Though the latter concerns are superficial, they at least bring into view the show’s status as an intentionally crafted aesthetic object, rather than a window into a fictional but “real” world.
But this is the problem — the TV show’s status as an aesthetic object is never fully secure. Even “prestige drama” is haunted by the anxiety that it’s still just… TV. Is Mad Men a soap opera? Is Succession a weird kind of sitcom? Clearly they are. But are they just that? It’s never okay for a TV show to be precisely and exactly a TV show, and especially to typify a TV genre. The greats have to somehow transcend their medium. The Wire was, famously, like a Victorian novel. Except it wasn’t a novel — it was a TV show, with visual storytelling parcelled out in serialized hour-long units. Even film seems to have enough prestige at this point to be an object of aspiration, so that the most poorly-paced blob of formless content on Netflix can be pitched as a “10-hour movie.” And surely much of the prestige of “prestige TV” comes from the adoption of cinematic-quality production values and performances, though that gap has been narrowing.
If we can’t hold firm to the TV show as a worthy aesthetic object, then, we inflate its importance in another direction — usually by turning it into a source of political insight. Every show produced in the US can be pressed into service as a window into the American soul, almost by definition. How this is supposed to work is unclear to me. The American people did not produce the show. There was not an election in which they got to choose which shows would be made. Ratings provide some kind of measure of popularity, which must mean there’s some kind of resonance there. But I’ve seen similar claims made that, for instance, Star Trek: Enterprise — by all standards a failed show, which struggled to stay above a million viewers in its final seasons — demonstrated how Americans tried to navigate the tensions in a post-Cold War world or whatever. How can we draw any real evidence for American attitudes in general from such a marginal entertainment product?
Even less plausible than the political reflection thesis is the quest for a political prescription in the TV show, which of course always manages to fall short of the critic’s (usually unstated) standards of “correct” politics, or “correct” representation, or what-have-you. Sometimes such pieces seem to veer toward a disguised form of “Monday-morning show-runner” — the political prescription serves as an alibi for the critic’s preference for the plot to have gone in another direction. Strangest of all, though, are the ones that want to see positive political guidance from the TV show, or at least political “lessons.” The sense that this is what TV is somehow “for” leads to a related syndrome of lamenting that a portrayal of bad politics will somehow give people the wrong political ideas — because presumably people get their political ideas directly from TV shows.
What I’d like to see — and what I hope to practice — is a form of analysis that centers the TV show as a work of narrative art with its own strengths and limitations, its own genre expectations and standards. This would mean pausing before lamenting that the show didn’t take your preferred direction and asking why the writers did choose what they chose. It may turn out that their implicit reasons don’t make sense or work at cross-purposes with something else, such that we can lament that the urn is not as well-wrought as we wish it could be. Similarly, before reading off political messages (positive or negative) from a show, we might ask ourselves why such issues are being foregrounded.
For instance, in Andor — widely praised for its gritty political realism — we might note that the goal is to impart a kind of sophistication into an IP that is primarily oriented toward children. The same would presumably hold for the HBO adaptation of Watchmen and its unexpected centering of racial issues. The politics are not the “goal,” they are part of the aesthetic effect. And I guess sometimes people are basically saying that they like TV shows better when they align better with their politics — which is only fair, but is perhaps a point that could be stated more forthrightly, instead of dressing it up in this weird quasi-normative stance. There is nothing preventing a show from genuinely having good political lessons or — more likely — supplying powerful political metaphors, nor is it by any means impossible that a show’s politics could have deleterious real-world effects (e.g., West Wing). But I can’t help but feel we’d get a better handle on that kind of thing if we contextualized it in a formal-aesthetic analysis of the show.
Of course, there is no audience for the kind of criticism I’m calling for, because it feels like English class and everyone hated English class for stealing away their naive enjoyment of literature or whatever. So I’m left blogging, or writing for academic or para-academic presses, or just tweeting out complaints about writers who are really just doing their best. You do you, everyone! Everything is fine and nothing matters.
Succession elephant
akotsko
One iron rule of technology is that any technology that can be used for pornography will be used for pornography. Another is that any technology that can be used for grifting will be used for grifting. The latest grift involves people using AI to generate science-fiction stories in an attempt to sell them to publishers.
Amazon has also seen a spike in AI generated works, although some are being honest about the source of the text. Before the availability of these text generators, some people would steal content from web pages and attempt to sell them as books. This sort of theft is easier to catch than AI generated text and given the current state of detection software, it is likely that AI generated text will generally be able to avoid automated detection. This means that if a publisher wants to sort out AI generated text from human generated text, they will need humans to do the work. As would be expected, some types of work are easier to detect as AI generated than others and the current AI text generators are better or worse at certain types of text. As such, in some cases a human reviewer need not discern whether the text is AI generated, they can simply do what they have always done, which is weed out the bad text. Fortunately for the science-fiction publishers and writers, AI is currently bad at writing science fiction.
But the practical problem is that certain publishers are being flooded with AI generated submissions and they cannot review all these texts. Since an AI can generate a story from a short prompt, a person using one can rapidly create a swarm of stories. In terms of the motivation, it seems to mostly be money—the AI wranglers hope to sell these stories.
One magazine, Clarkesworld, has seen a massive spike in spam submissions, getting 500 in February (contrasted with a previous high of 25 in a month). In response, they closed submissions because they lacked the resources to handle the deluge. As such, this use of AI is harming publishers and writers. As would be expected, some have blamed AI for this and point to this as yet another harm caused by AI. But it is obviously unfair to blame AI.
From the standpoint of ethics, the current AI text generators lack the moral agency needed to be morally accountable for the text they generate. They are no more t0 blame for the text than the computers used to generate spam are to blame for the spammers using them. Obviously, the text generators are just a tool being misused by people hoping to make easy money and who are not overly concerned with the harmful consequences of their actions. To be fair, some people are probably just curious about whether an AI generated story would be accepted, but these are presumably not the people flooding publishers.
While these AI wranglers are morally accountable for the harm they are causing, it must also be pointed out that they are operating within an economic system that encourages and rewards many types of bad or unethical behavior. While deluging publishers with AI spam is obviously not on par with selling dangerous products, engaging in wage theft, or running NFT and crypto grifts, it is still the result of the same basic system that enables and rewards (and often protects) such behavior. In sum, the problem with current AI is the people who use it and the economic system in which it is used. AI has simply become yet another tool for spamming, grifting, and stealing. But there is some interesting potential here.
As noted above, AI generated fiction is currently quite bad (although humans obviously also generate mountains of bad fiction, some of which get published). But it is likely that it can be improved enough to be enjoyable, if low quality, fiction. Some publishers would see this as an ideal way to rapidly generate content at a low cost, thus allowing them more profit. This would, obviously, lead to the usual problem of human workers being replaced by technology. But this could also be good for readers.
Imagine that AI becomes good enough to generate enjoyable stories. A reader could thus go to an AI text generator, type in the prompt for the sort of story they want, and then get a new story to read. Assuming the AI usage is free or inexpensive, this would be a great deal for the reader. It would, however, be a problem for “working class” writers who are not celebrity writers. Presumably, fans would still want to buy works by their favorite authors, but the market for lesser-known writers would likely become much worse.
If I just want to read a new classic style space opera with epic battles and powered armor, I could just use an AI to make that story for me, thus saving me the time of finding one already written and paying more for it. And if the story is as good as what a competent human would produce, then it would be good enough for the reader. If I want to read a new work by Mary Robinette Kowal, I would need to buy it (yes, one could pirate it or go to a library). But, as I have argued in an earlier essay, this use of AI is only a problem because of our economic system: if a writer could write for the love of writing, then AI would largely be irrelevant. And, if people were not making money by grifting text with AI, then they would probably not be making AI fiction except to read themselves. So, as would be expected, the problem is not AI but us.
Thanks to Midjourney and Open AI (which includes ChatGPT and Dall E) people are able to enter a prompt and receive an image or body of text. Since the images and text can be quite good, this has launched a plague of think pieces on the subject, many of which foretell doom for creativity. As a professor, I have also had to listen to fears that ChatGPT and its fellows will usher in a new age of cheating. While I have been thinking about AI for a long time (I did my first debate on it in the 1980s), I have been waiting a bit to write about the latest AI craze—I wanted to think about it in some depth before rushing into the fray once more.
In addition to being a professional philosopher, I also create stuff for tabletop role playing games like D&D and Call of Cthulhu. In addition to writing text content, I also create maps and images for my work. As such, I am technically in the creative class affected by the new AI image and text creators. I make note of this to disclose this as a potential biasing factor. After all, some say that AI is poised to eliminate both professors and creatives. In this essay, my concern is with my creative hobby rather than with my main profession. My concern is also with the economic aspects of the situation. In other essays I will inflict my opinion on whether AI images and text can be art.
Looking back into the shallow depths of human history, we can see that professions are regularly changed or eliminated by various economic shifts. To illustrate, fads in fashion or food can result in significant economic changes. As an example, beaver trapping was once a major economic factor in America because of the use of beaver pelts in men’s hats. But the fur trade era came to an end, and you rarely hear of beaver trapping these days. In other cases, the change is based in technology. For example, my home area of New England was once known for its whaling industry and whale oil was used extensively for lighting. When alternatives, such as kerosene, became available, then this whaling industry came to an end. As such, New Englanders rarely work as whalers these days. Kerosene was itself largely replaced by electricity, also resulting in changes in available jobs. And, of course, there is the specific technological change of automation, when machines reduce or eliminate the need for human workers.
For most of human history, machines tended to eliminate or reduce physical jobs—although there is the obvious example that electronic computers eliminated the need for human computers. Back when I first debated about AI as an undergraduate, there was a general view that AI would not be able to engage in creative activity. This was sometimes presented in terms of the view that machines would never be able to feel (which was assumed to be critical for creativity) or that there was some special human trait of creativity that a machine could not replicate. As a practical matter, this seemed to hold true until recently when AI started producing very good images and high-quality text; good enough to easily pass as created by competent humans. While this had caused considerable concern in various areas, a very practical worry is that AI will put creatives out of work. After all, if a business can get text and images created by AI for a minuscule fraction of what it would cost to pay a human for the same work, a sensible business will turn to AI since the end is maximizing profit.
This, obviously, shows that the true problem is not AI. As science fiction writers and dreamers have noted, automation should be used to set people free so they can spend more time doing what they want to do, rather than needing to grind at tasks just to survive.
While a creative might like creating to earn the money they need to not die, they are creating for economic reasons and most likely not doing what they really enjoy. I do, of course, distinguish between people who make some income from their creative hobby (as I do) and people who must create to earn their living. While someone who depends on creating to live might enjoy their work, AI is only a problem if they must do this work to survive. After all, if they were creating out of the love of creativity, to express themselves, or out of pure enjoyment, then AI would be irrelevant. They would still get that even with AI cranking out images and text. Since I do not depend on my gaming stuff for my living, I will keep doing it even if AI dominates the field. But when AI replaces me as a professor, then I will keep doing philosophy but I will need to find a new task to get the few dollars that the ruling classes deign to allow to trickle down to me.
As such, we should be careful to note that the alleged problem with AI putting people out of work just points out the awfulness of our economic system and that it turns creative works into mere economic products. It just so happens that the new automation threatens creatives rather than factory workers (who can also be very creative). But this threat is not the same for all creatives.
The title of this essay is “AI: I Want a Banksy vs I Want a Picture of a Dragon” because of the distinction between the two wants and its relevance to AI images (and text). Suppose that I want a work by Banksy to add to my collection. In that case, no AI art will suffice since only Banksy can create a work by Banksy. An AI could, of course, create an amazing forgery of a Banksy, just as skilled human forger could—but neither would be a Banksy. While such a forgery might fool someone into buying it, as soon as the forgery was exposed, the work would become valueless to me—after all, what I want is a Banksy.
When people want a work (be it an image, a book, a song or whatever) by a specific creator, the content is of less importance than the causal chain—they want it because of who created it, not because of what it looks like, what it sounds like, or what the text might be. One example that nicely illustrates this is when Harry Potter series author J.K. Rowling wrote a book under a pseudonym. Before the true authorship was revealed, the book sold few copies. After the reveal, it became a top seller. And, of course, exposed forgeries also illustrate this. A work can be greatly valued as, say, a Picasso until it suddenly becomes revealed as a worthless forgery. In these cases, it is the creator and not the work that matters. As such, creatives whose work is sought and bought because it was created by them have little to fear from Ais, aside from the usual concerns about forgeries. But what if I just want a picture of a dragon for my D&D adventure? Then AI does change the situation.
Before AI became good at creating images, if I wanted a picture of a dragon, I would need to get one from a human artist or create it myself. Now I can just go to Midjourney, type in a prompt, and pick between the generated images. I can even direct the AI to create it in a specific style—making it like the work of a known artist. But, of course, I just want the dragon picture, I am not trying to get a forgery and pass it off as a work by a specific artist. As such, while AI is not a meaningful threat to creators whose works are sought and bought because they created it, it is a threat to the “working class” of creators who toil to sell images (and text) to people who want not an image by person X but an image of X. AI is a real threat to these people, but a real boon to those who want an image of X for the lowest price and quickly.
I use AI to create images for my gaming stuff for three reasons. The first is that I can get customized images that match my vision of what they should be. The second is that I can get them insanely cheap. The third is that I can get them quickly. While I could create my own work to get images that fit my vision, it is cheaper and faster to use AI rather than do it myself. When it comes to human-created works, generic clip art usually does not match my vision and is more expensive than AI images. Hiring a human to do work would be much more expensive and slower, and their work might not match my vision. Also, in all the years I have attempted to hire human artists, they have always failed to come through—often, some existential crisis takes them out of commission, or they decide they would rather pursue some other work (while informing me just before the deadline). As such, from a selfish standpoint, I see the value of AI for people who need images and text. I do tell myself that since I cannot hire a reliable human artist at a cost I can afford for my gaming stuff, my use of AI is morally acceptable. That might even be true.
In closing, AI will be harmful to creators of images and text who are not sought and bought because of who they are. Rowling and Banksy will be just fine, but the “working class” creators will be facing increasing challenges. As always, this should not be blamed on AI, but on us for creating and perpetuating a system that allows people to inflict such harm on other people just because they become less economically useful to the business class.
To start, three short vignettes on attention:
These three stories seem to me to point in a similar direction — toward the collapse of a certain regime of attention. In all three cases, we are dealing with a classically modern genre that is conceived as a kind of paradoxical mass solitude. We all file into the concert hall or movie theater, we all buy the mass-produced novel everyone is talking about — and we enjoy it alone, together. Western classical music has made high claims for itself over the centuries, but one area where it is surely an outlier among world musical traditions is in its near-total prohibition of audience participation. It contributed its full range of techniques for emotional manipulation to Its bag of tricks for emotional manipulation was selectively looted by cinema, which is now the dominant venue for orchestral music, and its successor artform also inherited the expectation — though not always the reality — of a passive, endlessly attentive audience. The horror and disgust that some filmmakers have expressed about the idea of watching a film on a phone (a prospect I also find unappealing) surely is not solely about the diminished screen size, but also about the expectation of attention.
As an educator and simply as a human being, I mourn for the loss of a cultural expectation of this kind of sustained attention. Truly great artworks and monuments of thought are becoming inaccessible in a way that will become increasingly difficult to overcome. That is a loss to humanity, full stop. But the entire regime of attention — deployed in obviously positive ways by Eliot and Akerman, and in an enjoyably harmless way by Rachmaninoff — was much more ambivalent than contemporary jeremiads against social media and mass distraction want to admit. There is obviously an authoritarian element to the high modern demand for endless attention, and it’s not clear to me that an easily-distracted population is easier to control than one disciplined by habits of sustained attention — I would compare my virtually non-existent discipline problems in the college classroom with those of a grade-school teacher, for instance.
This is not to say that it’s subversive to constantly look down at your phone or whatever. Yet we might observe that contemporary media effectively demand just as much sustained attention as the classic modern genres — social media doomscrolling and especially video games are intensely immersive and often transfix their users for many hours at a time. Meme culture certainly has its own complexity, including a (self-)referentiality that could put T.S. Eliot to shame, and people make high claims for the storytelling power of video games. What the user is supposed to do with this sustained attention is obviously different from the classically modern demand to cultivate subjective inwardness, above all in the expectation of audience participation (in the form of contributing content, rating others’ content, and, well, playing the game). The greater interactivity and user control has also, paradoxically, meant that I could easily get my wish of a four-hour film — but instead of Jeanne Dielman, it would be The Batman.
My empathy for those trapped in the new regime — including, at least in part, myself — is not oriented toward surrender, much less celebration. I really do want to find a way to usher at least some of my students into the best experiences of the old regime. Surely part of that means finding points of contact between the two regimes, but that always risks feeling like the classic Steve Buscemi meme. More than that, I wonder if the key is to model enjoyment — which might mean cutting down or changing the “canon” of works we highlight, for instance, so that the hypnotizing Jeanne Dielman replaces the “I guess you had to be there” Citizen Kane. One benefit of the passing of the old regime is that we no longer have to pretend that it fulfilled its promises all the time — the waning hegemony of the genre undercuts a certain amount of “affirmative action” for its less distinguished practitioners.
Ultimately, the true greats are going to be fine. They will find their audience. As someone whose professional calling turns out to be the curation and transmission of the cultural heritage, though, I want to find as many ways as possible to welcome people into that audience — in a non-patronizing, non-judgmental way. And my God, no Bruckner! What is he even thinking? There is no musical reason for all that repetition! Agony, pure agony!
WhiteFigure1-768x459
akotsko
FreshRSS 