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From Techniques of Persuasion (1963) by J.A.C. Brown.

Mainly interested in this claim:

“Now there is every reason to believe that mass hysteria has become increasingly rare in the more technically advanced countries and that a leading characteristic of modern mass society, in spite of the powerful media under its control, is a kind of deadening of feeling accompanied by a rather sterile tendency to rationalize all experience. Our trouble, if trouble it be, is not that people come together too often in collectivities but that, even when they do, they are essentially the 'lonely crowd'”

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From Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (1979)

"AI" is less a technological innovation than the result of the unrestrained drive to commodify knowledge. LLMs produce the illusion of knowledge without knowers, similar to the fetishized commodity that seems to produce itself and its own value without labor.

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From Jean Baudrillard, "The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media" (1985)

People "stay connected" to remain uninformed and use media to reassure themselves of the impossibility of knowing "truth" and assuming responsibility for it.

A key assertion of Baudrillard's is that the media circulate not information but simulation; LLMs collapse the two so that one can feel safe from the possibility that they will become disentangled again.

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From this essay by Andrea Long Chu. How do people even know whether they want subjectivity or not? It takes a certain tenacity to put oneself in the position to even confront the question. Yes, ideology is what "hails" us into identity, but it also often consists of convincing us to see subjectivity as simply given rather than achieved.

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2024 Book List

January

1. Trances of the Blast, Mary Ruefle

2. Falling Star, Patricia Moyes

3. Labyrinths, Jorge Luis Borges

4. Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss 

5. The Sweet Dove Died, Barbara Pym

6. The Prison-House of Language, Fredric Jameson

7. The Order of Things, Michel Foucault

8. Illuminated Manuscripts, Tamara Woronowa and Andrej Sterligow

9. Structuralism, John Sturrock

February

10. Immediacy; or the Style of Too Late Capitalism, Anna Kornbluh

11. The Dark Frontier, Eric Ambler

12.  Macbeth, William Shakespeare

13. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow

14. Don’t Look at Me Like That, Diane Athill

15. The Most of It, Mary Ruefle

16. The Archaeology of Knowledge, Michel Foucault

March

17. Henry IV Part 1, William Shakespeare

18. A Murder Is Announced, Agatha Christie

19. Shakespeare, Johan Gottfried von Herder

20. Literary Theory for Robots, Dennis Yi Tenen

21. Henry IV Part 2, William Shakespeare

22. Richard II, William Shakespeare

23. Lucy Gayheart, Willa Cather

24. Henry V, William Shakespeare

25. Mimesis, Expression, Construction, Fredric Jameson

26. Four-Legged Girl, Diane Seuss

27. Death of a Nationalist, Rebecca Pawel

28. The Flight From the Enchanter, Iris Murdoch

29. The Purloined Clinic, Janet Malcolm

April

30. King Lear, William Shakespeare

31. White Butterfly, Walter Moseley

32. Humanism and Antihumanism, Kate Soper

33. The Illusion of the End, Jean Baudrillard

34. Discourse on Method, René Descartes 

35. Meditations on First Philosophy, René Descartes

36. Cambridge Companion to Descartes, John Cottingham ed

37. The Ordinal Society, Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy

38. Much Ado About Nothing, William Shakespeare

39. Primer, Bob Perelman

40. As You Like It, William Shakespeare

May

41. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, William Shakespeare

42. The Ballad of Peckham Rye, Muriel Spark

43. Preface to Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson

44. The Weariness of the Self, Alain Ehrenberg 

45. Harmonium, Wallace Stevens

46. Mr. Scarborough’s Family, Anthony Trollope

47. Computing Taste, Nick Seaver

48. Hamlet, William Shakespeare

June

49. On Shakespeare, Northrop Frye

50. The Taming of the Shrew, William Shakespeare

51. The Double Shift, Jason Read

52. Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare

53. La Vendée, Anthony Trollope

54. Mirror Worlds, David Gelertner

55. The Commercialization of Intimate Life, Arlie Hochschild

July

56. In Our Own Image, Fred Ritchin

57. Bending the Frame, Fred Ritchin

58. After Photography, Fred Ritchin

59. Cue the Sun!, Emily Nussbaum

60. Appointment With Death, Agatha Christie

61. The Friend, Sigrid Nunez

62. Libra, Don DeLillo

63. The Interpretation of Cultures, Clifford Geertz

64. Mimesis, Erich Auerbach

65. Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare

August

66. Antony and Cleopatra, William Shakespeare

67. Nonrequired Reading, Wisława Szymborska

68. Traveling, Ann Powers

69. Annie Bot, Sierra Greer

70. Regency Buck, Georgette Heyer

71. Coriolanus, William Shakespeare

September

72. Troilus and Cressida, William Shakespeare

73. Fools of Time, Northrop Frye

74. Bel Canto, Ann Patchett

75. Measure for Measure, William Shakespeare

76. William Shakespeare, Terry Eagleton

77. Shakespeare’s Problem Plays, E.M.W. Tillyard

78. Twelfth Night, William Shakespeare

79. The Merchant of Venice, William Shakespeare

80. Othello, William Shakespeare

81. AI Snake Oil, Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor

82. Passage of Arms, Eric Ambler

October

83. All’s Well That Ends Well, William Shakespeare

84. The Book of the Courtier, Baldesare Castiglione

85. Fables of Aggression, Fredric Jameson

86. Intermezzo, Sally Rooney

87. The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes

88. Liars, Sarah Manguso 

89. James, Percival Everett

November

90. Aesthetics and Politics, Bertholt Brecht, Walter Benjamin et al.

91. Protocol, Alexander Galloway

92. Sartor Resartus, Thomas Carlyle

93. The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies

94. Timon of Athens, William Shakespeare

95. Machines Who Think, Pamela McCorduck

December

96. Henry VI, Part 1, William Shakespeare

97. Henry VI, Part 2, William Shakespeare

98. The Triumph of Achilles, Louise Glück

99. All Shot Up, Chester Himes

100. The Saint-Fiacre Affair, Georges Simenon

101. Henry VI, Part 3, William Shakespeare

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From Jerry Mander's Four Arguments For the Elimination of Television (1978)

Generative AI is meant to produce this type of overload in perpetuity.

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From Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (1979).

I wrote a bit about this book the other day, but I forgot to quote this passage, which was the one that started me thinking about the book in conjunction with generative AI in the first place.

Wyndham Lewis was at once a reactionary critic of modernity and a practicing modernist; in Jameson's reading he sought to defend "individuality" against capitalist reification and socialism that he supposed threatened it from opposite sides and turned people into the masses or into machines that could be manipulated behavioristically.

Lewis's style attempted to crack deadened and stultified language, as Jameson suggests in the passage above. But it sounds a lot like a characterization of how LLMs work, and perhaps how LLMs as a cultural phenomenon should be understood: as demonstrations of how language no longer "reproduces the real" under our sociohistorical conditions, how the "collective mind" has been contaminated precisely in the ways that LLMs can be said to plausibly "work" as communicators, as reasoners.

Every generated text, regardless of its content or its pertinacity, is a critique of a culture that would permit machine-made language to have uses — a critique of a society that has let communication become so rote, so automatic, so instrumentalized, so devoid of reciprocity. The efficiency of LLMs itself has become a "well-nigh impenetrable obstacle that aesthetic production must overcome in the age of reification." As AI reifies language and degrades communicative practices, how do we reinvest language with "energy" without falling into Lewis's despairing, protofascist predilections?

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From Terry Eagleton, William Shakespeare (1986)

A useful passage for understanding the intrinsic limitations of LLMs, which try to reduce paradoxes to parameters.

"Language is a specific event" also means predictive text isn't really language.

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From Don Delillo, Libra (1988)

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From Ian Hacking, "Canguilhem Amid the Cyborgs"

It's hard to imagine a more "full emotional life" than the one described here. If you want to experience the range of emotions, just say them out loud and pull the appropriate faces.

Not that this theory of the emotions is necessarily viable, but it's also worth considering what form the "computer-controlled bio-feedback system" that exercises our emotions independent of the their objects might currently take, and how people — not necessarily marooned bin outer space but perhaps equally isolated — might be compelled to use it.

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From Mirror Worlds by David Gelertner (1991)