Chris Bertram

Over the past few days I’ve found myself mulling the question of whether AI will destroy art and literature. Initially, I found myself comforted by a thought, articulated by Carrie Jenkins on bluesky, that since the value of art lies not simply in the product but in the process of its creation, art will survive intact. When I contemplate Van Gogh’s Starry Night, I’m not just considering a decontextualized pretty object such as an AI might produce, but something that results from human intention, contemplation and struggle and which flows from a life and its roots. So far, so good.

I was moved to think of Marx’s contrast in The Results of the Immediate Process of Production between Milton, who “produced Paradise Lost as a silkworm produces silk, as the activation of his own nature” and “the literary proletarian of Leipzig who produces books, such as compendia on political economy”. (See Capital vol 1, Penguin edition, p. 1044). The literary proletarian may be threatened by AIs, which can churn out such compendia, or perhaps boilerplate romantic fiction, but a Milton is not. But on further reflection, I think this is a mistake. Not that “Miltons” will entirely disappear but they will be oddities, isolates, like Sabato Rodia who built the Watts Towers.

The thing is, people do value products for their instrisic characteristics, divorced from the histories of the creation and creators. When people go to IKEA to buy a nice lamp or a rug, they are mostly indifferent to who has produced it: they want something that looks good, is affordable, and works. And AI can produce this, thereby depriving thousands of equivalents of the “literary proletarian” of their livelihoods. Sure, a few people might pay a premium for an Anni Albers-designed rug (and more for an original), but most will settle to adorn their home with an AI-produced knock-off at a fraction of the price.

The trouble is, that the elimination of the literary proletarians doesn’t simply leave the Miltons standing, unscathed. Mostly, art does not just emerge from a random genius popping up and producing great works but from a milieu which provides a context and an infrastructure. A network of other producers but also critics, dealers, suppliers, teachers. I believe Howard Becker writes about this in his book Art Works, but though it is on my to-read shelf, I have not yet done so. Some of those people produce output that is “art”, but since “art” is a prestige category, many others produce work that fails to rise to that level but which is merely decorative or entertaining. Many of them will have been trained in art schools or universities but have failed to make it as artists, but without them those schools will become unviable. In short, withouth the wider group of near-misses and engaged supporters it is hard to see where many artists will come from: thanks to AI they will lack a sea in which to hatch and then swim.

Having watched the film, I thought I’d get Robert Linhart’s book off the shelf and finally read it. I think I bought it in Oxford in the early 80s. To remind you, it depicts Linhart’s experience as a Maoist cadre who has chosen to get a job in a Citroen factory in Paris in order to foment “resistance”. There’s an English translation, apparently, called The Assembly-Line, long out of print.

One reason for my hesitance in reading, perhaps, is that I have quite a low opinion of Maoists, particularly Western ones, and I’m sure that Linhart had at the time all kinds of dubious opinions about the Moscow Trials or the Cultural Revolution, but there’s really none of that in the book where he comes across as a fairly generic far-leftist. Instead there’s a fascinating description by someone with real literaray talent of the human reality of mass production as it was in the 1960s and probably still is somewhere other than Europe. It aslo gives an account of the ethno-sociology of the workforce which was “multicultural” long before the rest of society meaningfully was. Possibly the best book ever written by a Maoist then.

When Linhart enters the factory it is very different to how he imagined it would be, which was an assembly line shifting in short bursts as workers performed their tasks. Instead, the line moves continuously with workers running to catch up trying do their jobs quickly so they can get ahead of the game and sneak a quick cigarette or taking too long and getting tangled up with the next section. A manager puts him in the hands of a spot welder, who makes his movements with speed, precision and grace. But when that same Arab worker hands over to Linhart the novice makes a complete mess, molten solder all over the place, and he’s a danger to others and himself with his blowtorch. In a break they get chatting and he discovers that his “trainer” is graded as an unskilled worker (despite showing consummate skill) whereas he, Linhart, has been taken on at a skilled grade. But it soon becomes clear that the assignment of workers to grades has nothing to do with the skills those grades nominally represent: blacks are at the lowest unskilled level, Arabs at the higher unskilled ones, Spanish and Portuguese at the lowest tier of “skilled” and white French people like himself a notch above that, even if they can’t actually do anything. Who says there’s no such thing as “white privilege”?

[click to continue…]

I spent a good chunk of the afternoon watching l’Etabli, the film of Robert Linhart’s book (which I own but have never read). It is an arresting depiction of the brutality of the assembly-line and the racalialised hierarchies at work in the factory. The theme of the film is of a Maoist cadre from an academic and privileged background (in philosophy!) who enters the factory to foment resistance and revolution and finds that it is a lot tougher than he had perhaps imagined. But an opportunity presents itself when the Citroen management decide to make the workers toil unpaid for an extra three-quarters of an hour each day to “repay” the gains they’d made in May and June 1968. He helps to lead a strike and watches as the his new comrades are picked off by management and their goons, as immigrant workers are threatened with deportation and they are all subjected to acts of petty humiliation. A year later, we see him lecturing on Hegel at the University of Vincennes (later, I believe, dismantled by the French authorities as a hotbed of leftism).

The film is available to watch for free here (under “Drama”)

It reminded me a little of the Fourth International (Mandel version)’s policy of sending its students and white-collar workers into the “industrial working class” a decade later. Just as the industrial working class was actually disappearing from Western Europe and North America, they decided it was (as previously announced by Marxist theory) central to the struggle to overthrow capitalism. Some of my friends did end up in a car factory in Oxford, from which they were very soon fired once their identities became known. Others gave up good jobs in health and education but failing to find factory jobs ended up working in public transport. One of them I remember absolutely loved being a train driver compared the anxiety and stress of their previous school-teaching life. As for me, I was torn between my misplaced allegiance to the organisation (which in the UK at the time was the International Marxist Group then the Socialist League) and my conviction that this was all a dreadful mistake. So I took the path of least resistance and decided to carry on being a student (a postgraduate one) until the madness blew over. And so I ended up as a political philosopher in a university rather than whatever else I might have become (a lawyer, I suspect).

I have a piece over at the London Review of Books Blog about the UK government’s appalling changes to the way refugees are treated in the country.

“After the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, announced the government’s new policies for ‘Restoring Order and Control’ in the House of Commons yesterday, one MP after another stood up to commend the British people for their ‘proud tradition’ of giving sanctuary, for their openness and toleration, before moving onto questions of ‘stopping the boats’, ‘fairness for the British taxpayer’ and whether asylum seekers might be housed near their constituents. The European Convention on Human Rights was mentioned so often that one might have imagined it to be the international treaty at the centre of refugeehood. It isn’t: that’s the Refugee Convention of 1951, largely absent from the debate.”

Read the continuation over there.

I’ve been visiting family in Germany, with only a phone, so I couldn’t post on Sunday. But here are some crows from Hamburg.