3. THE PARENTHESIS OF THE SUBJECT

Faced with the dispossession we feel, it can be tempting to cling to the past like a life raft. To reject artificial intelligence wholesale; to fetishize the paper book; to pit long-form reading and critical thinking against slop and generalized attention deficit; to cast our obstinacy as resistance.

I maintain that such a posture will lead to an even greater dispossession. Those who dive toward the future may have the future; those who retreat toward the past will lose both the past and the future.

When I say “have the future,” I do not mean a conquest or a personal victory. It is about taking part in the world. There are no guarantees, but the past offers only one promise: obsolescence.

What I want to show you here are the possibilities I foresee, and how, by accepting change, we may yet run the beautiful risk of reappropriation — at least for the duration of the transition.

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AI disturbs us first and foremost because it casts writing back into an externality we are no longer accustomed to. Yet in human history, words have not always emerged from the subject who says “I”; there was a dissociation between the one who thinks and the one who traces, between the one who imagines and the one who composes. When writing first appeared in Mesopotamia and Egypt, it was a highly capricious technē that only scribes truly mastered. Kings, priests, and merchants delegated to the specialist the task of composing texts in their name. The scribe is the true ancestor of the LLM: the product of a highly specialized and costly training, he has no voice of his own, for he holds every voice in the world at the tip of his reed pen. He writes only when prompted — that is, when given instructions. His linguistic memory is not tied to his identity; it is mobilized in the moment of the task, placed at the service of “the user,” then instantly dissolved. The king, the priest, or the merchant makes use of writing’s inert memory; he summons this breathless voice in an attempt to extend himself into the world — through rule, through religion, or through commerce.

Even in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, as literacy progresses, dictation remains the norm for literary and administrative production. Cicero dictates his speeches to his freedman Tiro — who invents a form of shorthand, the “Tironian notes,” that in some ways prefigures speech-to-text. Thomas Aquinas sometimes dictates to three or four scribes at once to produce multiple copies simultaneously.

Then comes Gutenberg’s movable-type printing press, which, by mechanizing the production of multiple copies, destabilizes the writing trades founded on technique alone (scribe, copyist). And so technē begins to draw closer to the one who thinks or imagines — the I — a process that will accelerate in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with mass literacy, culminating in the Romantic era.

Then the body of the author merges with the body of the text. Technē is subsumed by what we call “originality.” Writing no longer comes from outside; it is no longer a mere technique; it springs from an inner process of osmosis that borders on the divine (the notion of “genius”).

Things grow more complex and come apart with modernity. The otherness of the I is acknowledged, then its multiplicity.

The fact remains that, up to the present day, we have never fully left the Romantic regime of internalized writing. We continue to locate the origin of texts in the subject, in the Author-Self; we continue to extol the “originality” and “genius” of writers; we continue to grant the person a kind of appellation of origin for their texts — copyright.

All of this is shattered by artificial intelligence. The modern period will probably have been no more than a parenthesis. With AI, technē is violently severed from the self. It is projected into the externality of the machine. The subject, accustomed to merging with writing, is left standing with arms dangling like Watteau’s Gilles — stunned and voiceless.¹

Nothing prevents authors from continuing to write as before. But they can no longer not know: they have seen writing appear in spite of themselves, inside the machine. They can still write, but can they still believe? Believe that in their gesture, technique and spirit fuse to produce Literature?

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1. I borrow this image from Pierre Michon, Rimbaud le fils, Paris, Gallimard, “L’un et l’autre” series, 1991. ↩