The endless slide show

can language deplete the world?

Harper’s recently published an essay about technology by Karl Ove Knausgaard, the Norwegian novelist best known for his autofictional novel series My Struggle. Like his fiction, the essay has a faux-naive, Chauncey Gardiner–like quality to it — it performs the ignorance he laments when he declares that “not once in those forty years have I turned my attention to technology and tried to understand it, how it works in itself, how it works in me” — but it also takes up some existential themes, lamenting how the upheavals of modernity and the overabundance of representations have dislocated humans from their authentic dasein and that sort of thing: “The ambivalence of the image — showing us reality but not itself being the reality it shows; fictional and nonfictional at once; both near and far — can shape our relationship with the world in ways that aren’t entirely clear to us, since the way we see the world always is the world.”

For Knausgaard, the problem is a general condition of mediatization that overwhelms people with pseudo-experiences, simulations, false experiences of encounters and connections.

It feels as if the whole world has been transformed into images of the world and has thus been drawn into the human realm, which now encompasses everything. There is no place, no thing, no person or phenomenon that I cannot obtain as image or information. One might think this adds substance to the world, since one knows more about it, not less, but the opposite is true: it empties the world; it becomes thinner. That’s because knowledge of the world and the experience of the world are two fundamentally different things. While knowledge has no particular time or place and can be transmitted, experience is tied to a specific time and place and can never be repeated. For the same reason, it also can’t be predicted. Exactly those two dimensions — the unrepeatable and the unpredictable — are what technology abolishes.

As the world has been turned into media, into data, into information, it loses its context and becomes susceptible to predictive modeling, to be reproduced as a simulation by generative models and so on. All the representations of the world, the images we are inundated with, cut us off from a putatively direct indwelling with the world and force us to consume the world at a remove as information, as fungible data. The systematic creation of representations, it follows, is the systematic destruction of the world, or at least of our access to it. We become marooned in the sea of signs.

This is presumably different from Knausgaard’s own efforts to comprehensively turn his personal experience into media, recounting the minute and trivial details of what is ostensibly his life for thousands and thousands of pages. Perhaps his autofictional regurgitation is meant to mark out precisely what resists recapture, shaping a mass of detail around some ineffable core that thereby becomes conveyable without being explicitly expressed (and therefore corrupted, spoiled, made instrumental). “Genuine” experience is what evades even the most determined effort to mediate it; that inexpressible gap is only registered by subjectivity and maybe even defines it. As James Bridle tells him later in the essay, “The reason we are in the hopeless state we are in is that science doesn’t believe that what is unsayable is real.” (Much of the essay is given over to recounting a conversation Knausgaard had with Bridle, who talks about taking ayahuasca and meeting the “plant spirits.”)

As with any kind of negative theology, this has to be taken on faith, which can make it mostly unconvincing if you don’t already accept the premise. Whenever I make these kinds of claims, I feel like I am taking a useless refuge in them rather than proposing some viable course of resistance. (“Trust me, thinking with your own brain is good, even if you can’t ever articulate your truest thoughts!”) Knausgaard laments not being able “find an outside to technology,” which seems like wanting to find an outside to ideology, where one can be in direct communion with the forms, or live purely on unerring instinct untouched by inadequate ideas.

Knausgaard uses this fantasy of detechnologized living at first to define the concept of literature: “What literature can do is establish an outside,” Knausgaard proposes, positioning it as the opposite of received ideas, of formulas, of predictable language — the opposite of LLM technology, and of ideology. But this just seems like a reversible postulate: Literature could also be understood fundamentally as ideology (a mystification of material relations, of class-coded ways of apprehending experience) and as a technology (a particular mode of production, an often privileged method for generating media; a means of “world-building”).

It’s somewhat ironic that Knausgaard seems especially troubled by how “everything addresses us. The products in the supermarket, the self-checkout machines there, the games on the computers, the dashboard in the car, the kitchen appliances, the billboard screens in the cities, the feeds on Instagram and Spotify and Facebook, the algorithms on Amazon, not to mention all the online newspapers and magazines, podcasts and series.” Language pumped out by “the world” will cover over and falsify our experience of the world, putting us in a false relation with nonspeaking things at the expense of intersubjective relations with human others. (Knausgaard even mentions Gilbert Simondon, a theorist of “transindividuation.”)

This is what it will mean to have “AI” infused into everything — objects will be outfitted with sensors and will attempt to manipulate us based on whatever data they can access. No object will come without the ability to tell you how you are supposed to see it and understand it, and what you are expected to do with it. It will hail you, like any other ideological apparatus, and when you hear the call you become more the sort of subject it demands, as Althusser argued. And you will know yourself better then, for better or worse. (Therapy chabots “work” because they administer this ideological orientation; they just hail and hail and hail you, capable of nothing else.)

But the compulsory voice of these objects also suggests to me the strained objectivity and apparent automaticity of Knausgaard’s voice in his fiction, the piling up of information in an effort to make a consciousness concrete. Couldn’t one take away the lesson that having so much AI blather in the world will more sharply define the space of “authenticity” as a kind of silence, a void? That all the world’s relentless narration of itself will somehow make what is missing from it more accessible, not as more language but as a feeling, a way of being in the world that is more definitively not that of media saturation and tedious linguistic detail and so many false hailings.

One section of Knausgaard’s essay is devoted to his discovering the joys of gardening, which is offered as a kind unmediated experience, “touching grass.” “For some reason, it felt good thinking about them,” he says of his plants. His relation of care with the flowers apparently reinvests the world with the meaning that the carelessness of mediated relations had depleted. He pits this experience against his humanistic training in school, which put him at a remove from the world:

In the Nineties, for example, I studied literature, art history, and aesthetics, completely convinced that what I studied was about human nature, life, and the true fabric of existence, while the poor souls over at the natural-science department were instrumentalists fiddling with dead matter and numbers. Back then, much of literary studies was about structuralism, poststructuralism, and deconstructionism. In many instances, this meant that texts were understood to be isolated objects, with all ties to the world around them severed, including those to the author.

This is a somewhat odd way of interpreting those theories, as efforts to view the world in terms of decontextualized objects. It seems to mistake those theories for the diagnoses they want to make about contemporary conditions, but even the read of the diagnosis seems inverted. In the introduction to Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson makes a similar point in opposite terms, describing postmodernism and the theories associated with it as self-defeating attempts to describe the world without reference to discrete “works” but only to “text” — the interconnected textuality of a world that we can apprehend only through signification and the play of signs and so forth, the mediatization that Knausgaard complained about. Jameson writes:

the fundamental disparity and incommensu­rability between text and work means that to select sample texts and, by analysis, to make them bear the universalizing weight of a representa­tive particular, turns them imperceptibly back into that older thing, the work, which is not supposed to exist in the postmodern. This is, as it were, the Heisenberg principle of postmodernism, and the most difficult representational problem for any commentator to come to terms with, save via the endless slide show, “total flow” prolonged into the infinite.

That “total flow prolonged into the infinite” sounds like a book critic’s possible description of Knausgaard’s work, but it also sounds like a description of social media, or chatbot transcripts, or the experience of watching television — all one endless text which affects us in aggregate. The examples don’t matter as much as the experiential mode, in which data points can no longer be assembled into coherent and convincing stories, or rather that they can be arranged with calculative ease into an infinite number of potential stories, none of which can carry the charge of necessity. The subject confronts a world from which the other, in all its various forms, has retreated, so no friction prevents the subject from sliding on the ice forever.

Knausgaard seems to decide that the natural world is “not text”: “Everything was physical. The grass, the thoughts, the blood, the sun, the soul. Even the mystery was physical.” Though he is inspired by Bridle’s description of “organic computers” and how they “drew technology into nature,” their “mix of the physical world and the abstract nature of computers,” he concludes that neither signs nor mathematics can reconnect him with “what is”: “It must be experienced.” But what does that even mean? That conclusion too seems like a withdrawal of meaning from the world in favor of a mysticism of unutterable vibes that supposedly somehow convey reality, things in themselves, but in a way that can only be experienced in a state of holy solipsism. It seems strange to insist meaning is “in the world” without having concern for the consciousness for whom it means. Without that, it’s just programming.

It’s easy to understand the frustration with language, especially given the advent of LLMs that abuse its fundamental promise of a communion between different subjective views. Knausgaard wants to “see from the outside,” wants transcendence, a kind of unilateral god’s-eye view beyond the vicissitudes of subjectivity. But a retreat from representation altogether is a kind of retreat from consciousness, a rejection of the sort of thought that requires the existence of others who can understand us. It is a way of becoming an organic computer, a biological machine generating signals that allow for no interpretation. Construing the problem with technology as “the loss of the world” is not very useful, because technology is not in itself making everything “abstract” but is used by historical forces to enact processes of dehistoricization that make the world nearly impossible to comprehend and speak about. Still, no matter how much empty verbiage various antisocial technologies are made to generate, language remains inexhaustible. Better words will be found.