The nightmare of materialism, which has turned the life of the universe into an evil, useless game, is not yet past; it holds the awakening soul still in its grip. - Wassily Kandinsky
It has become difficult to hold on to a sense of what one is. The discourse around artificial general intelligence is everywhere now, and even those of us who try not to follow it find it has followed us. There is a low, persistent feeling of uprootedness that I notice in myself and in nearly everyone I talk to. The ground is not where it was. When exactly did it shift?
Charlie Chaplin saw it clearly in 1940. At the end of The Great Dictator, in the borrowed uniform of the man he was mocking, he broke character and spoke straight into the camera.
"Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men - machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men!"
He meant the fascists, but he was naming something larger and older than fascism, something that fascism had only borrowed and amplified. He was naming what happens when human beings are organized into a system that needs them to be smaller than they are.
The factory, the office, the army, the party — each of these had already been making machine men for a long time before Hitler thought to put them in uniforms. Chaplin's speech worked because the audience felt, dimly, that something in them was being asked to go quiet.
A few years later, in occupied France and then in exile in London, Simone Weil was writing about the same wound from the other side. She called it uprootedness — déracinement — and she described it as the disease of the modern age, worse than poverty and worse than oppression because it was the precondition that allowed the others to take hold.
A rooted person, she wrote, has multiple real participations in the life of a community: in work, in place, in the past, in something larger than themselves. An uprooted person has these only in the form of memory or slogan.
The factory worker, separated from the meaning of the work; the colonized person, separated from the land and the language; the modern citizen, whose traditions have all been turned into products to consume — Weil thought a society of the uprooted could not last, because it could not produce people capable of attention, and attention, for her, was the whole of the moral life.
"Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity." - Simone Weil
It is what we owe each other. It is what we cannot give if we have nothing in us that is rooted enough to do the giving.
Chaplin and Weil were describing the same condition with different instruments. Both were saying that the project of the modern world had begun to produce people who had been thinned out — people whose inner lives had been replaced, gradually and without anyone meaning anything cruel by it, with the language and shapes the system needed them to have.
The past they were measuring against was not, itself, a paradise. The point is not that we have fallen from a better state, but that not all progress moves together. We have gotten extraordinarily good at extending our reach, at building systems that store and process and recombine more than any one of us could hold. We have not gotten correspondingly good at the work that reach is for. When the two fall out of sync, we begin to feel that something has gone wrong without quite knowing what to call it.
What the language machines have done is reveal and exacerbate the cracks that were laid in the long arrangement of human beings into productive shapes, the patient hollowing-out that Weil and Chaplin saw in their own century. But the machines have made the cracks visible by doing, with frightening competence, the very thing many of us had come to think was our thinking.
It is one thing to feel uprooted in your work and your civic life. It is another to read a paragraph generated by a machine and recognize, in its rhythms, your own. The doubt that follows is not really about the machines but about us. Not because the machines have surpassed us in any full sense, but because they have caught up with the part of us we allowed to become mechanical — the part of thinking that was already a performance, oriented toward producing acceptable forms.
If an artificial process can produce what I produce, then what was I doing all those years that I called thinking? What was the I in the sentence?
Maybe much of what we called thinking was something like a resource — a kind of capacity for producing acceptable forms, generating paper trails, recombining what was already there. The machines have made that capacity industrial. They produce it at scale, on demand, without any fuss.
We had been training ourselves to do this kind of work for a long time, in school and at work, and we mistook it for the whole of our cognition because it was the part that left a paper trail. The machines are very good at the paper trail. They are not good at — they cannot do at all, as far as I can tell — the thing underneath, the part that does not leave words.
Kandinsky knew about that part. He called it the innerer Druck, the inner pressure, and he said it was the only reason he ever made anything. Sometimes the pressure asked for paint, sometimes for a poem, sometimes for a different language than the one he had used the day before. He spoke of "changing instruments," meaning he might put the palette aside and use the typewriter in its place, but the force driving the work remained the same.
He had a word, too, for what happens when the pressure is sounded in more than one form at once: Zweiklänge, two-sound. Two distinct incarnations held side by side without collapsing into one — a Russian poem and its German twin, a woodcut beside a verse — neither the original, the meaning living in the standing wave between them.
Zweiklänge is more honest than the older idea of a universal language underneath all languages because it does not promise a single bedrock that words and pictures translate from. It says, instead, that the truth lives between attempts. No instrument catches it whole.
This is what art has always known and what the rest of the culture forgets at its peril: language is one instrument. It is mostly holes. We catch what we can with it, and we tell ourselves we have caught the fish, but anyone who has stood in front of a painting and felt it vibrate, or listened to a song and failed to say afterward what happened in the room, knows that the fish was always somewhere else. The pressure was real, and the words only a souvenir.
Weil knew this too, in her own register. Her writing on attention is not really a philosophy of perception but a philosophy of contact with what cannot be summarized. To attend to a person, for Weil, was to make oneself empty enough that something other than your own categories could enter. The categories are the net. Attention is what happens when you let the net go slack and feel for the pressure on the other side.
The reason that language machines unsettle us, then, is because they are an unanswerable mirror held up to the part of us that had already been replaced. The part that had learned to live entirely inside the net. The part that mistook the souvenir for the dream.
And the answer to them is not to root our sense of self within the production of language, but to remember, slowly and stubbornly, what we are when we are not producing language — when we are attending, or making, or sitting with another person and saying nothing, or feeling the pressure of something that no sentence will ever quite reach.
We are not language machines. We are the pressure, expressed through many instruments. Language is but one of them. The work of being human, now and probably from now on, is to remember that — to stay rooted enough to attend, and to refuse the long invitation, much older than language machines, to become smaller than we are.
Forgetting was the first move, a long time before the machines arrived, in becoming the kind of people Chaplin was warning us about. Remembering is the work the machines have, in their strange way, returned to us — work that remains as difficult, and as fragile, as it has always been.
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