Talking heads: Inadvertently (but perhaps inevitably), The Harper Review’s fall issue has much to say about artificial intelligence. Two essays have examined its encroachments into romance and consumerism; the third, out this week, turns to politics. Synthesizing Kant, Mills, Wittgenstein, and Habermas, Jake Glasgow traces two centuries of debate over the secular grounds for egalitarianism. For a while, the answer rested stably in humans’ unique capacity to make meaning through language. But, Glasgow argues, the advent of large language models have raised a disturbing complication: if machines can participate in meaningful speech too, where does that leave our equality?
Emily Sun, senior editor
Cuffing season: I recently found myself browsing library shelves for any Milan Kundera I could get my hands on. I had just finished Ignorance, my third of his, and it felt like the right moment to indulge in his complete works. This was a writer, after all, whose death two years ago had brought me to tears. I had texted my mother then, asking, “Have you read Kundera’s Ignorance?” Her reply was, “I’ve read all of Kundera, but I wouldn’t be honest if I told you I remember that one specifically.”
The French writer Amélie Nothomb said in an interview that anyone who claims to love literature should be willing to spend a whole year reading Proust’s monumental work In Search of Lost Time. Beyond the obvious snobbery of the claim, there’s something essential: the idea of dedicating oneself to understanding who an author is, even if it means claustrophobically confining oneself to their world alone. What pride there is in being able to say one has read an author’s entire bibliography. To not only hold a sense of a single text, but to grasp the overarching concerns that shaped an author’s life. To trace the evolution of style and language. To watch the way their vision expanded or contracted over time, like a proud relative. To know a life’s work.
So this winter break, indulge in one writer. Read as much as you can, in whatever order you like. You’ll emerge with a reconstructed portrait of a companion; someone you know in a way no Wikipedia page could ever.
Meri-Li Mercier, contributing editor
Preaching to the choir: Much has been written about artificial intelligence (AI). With few exceptions (one being “Galatea and Claude,” published by The Harper Review earlier this fall), these think pieces follow the same tired formula: they invariably start with depressing statistics about AI’s effects on cognition and end with resigned acceptance. Wowed by the technology, the once-skeptical writer encourages readers to accept AI, reassuring them that it will never recreate the idiosyncrasies that mark human cognition. In the opening letter to their fall issue, “Large Language Muddle,” the editors of n+1 take aim at this formula and recommend a full-scale AI boycott by its consumers. AI is not inevitable, they assert, and writers who accept its future ubiquity take the hopes of developers as fact.
In making this recommendation, the editors ignore arguments that recent information technologies operate according to a distinct economic logic. As Shoshana Zuboff claims in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, new technological platforms do not treat users as consumers. Instead, by collecting reams of user-generated metadata and inserting timely advertisements, they commercialize the ability to predict and modify user behavior. Boycotts are insufficient—even if AI models continue to lose money, the potential for social control they offer may be enough to sustain the interest of corporations and governments. Besides, does anyone really believe that n+1’s readership contains a critical mass of ChatGPT users? As a primer on the pessimistic state of AI discourse among the literati, “Large Language Muddle” is worth a read. As a guide to resisting AI saturation, it falls flat.
William Moursund, contributing editor
Strange realities: Of all the nineteenth-century movements, Symbolism is perhaps the thorniest: a wide-spanning moment in the fin-de-siècle when an interest in subjectivity and private perception, stoked by modernity, scientific discoveries, artistic disillusionment, international trade, and a plethora of other happenings, dictated artistic and literary discourse. Things became signs, reflective of spiritual states. In this light, Symbolism laid the groundwork for modern art by transcending modernity, back to what its practitioners deemed “primitive” or wholly “other.”
In an 1891 essay on Paul Gauguin, French art critic Albert Aurier emphasized Symbolist painting’s ability to gesture towards “Idea” by forcing the viewer to doubt the tangibility of objects in the work. The artist has something the masses do not: an ability to translate their private language onto a page and hone its motifs to a calculated point. Art must gesture towards an interiority and subjectivity examined with formal precision.
If your curiosity is piqued, visit the Art Institute’s exhibition on Symbolist prints, on view through January 5, or browse the Smart Museum’s collection of Symbolist objects. And if you still want more, art history department chair Andrei Pop wrote a wonderful book on the movement named A Forest of Symbols: Art, Science, and Truth in the Long Nineteenth Century, which you can find at the Reg. Or just walk into his office.
Jacqueline Oury, contributing editor
Image: Géza Faragó, The Symbolist, tempera on color paper, 1908 (Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest).