{"id":115500,"date":"2024-09-19T17:49:04","date_gmt":"2024-09-19T16:49:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/?p=115500"},"modified":"2024-09-19T17:49:04","modified_gmt":"2024-09-19T16:49:04","slug":"open-source-dino-buzzatis-the-singularity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/open-source-dino-buzzatis-the-singularity\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Source: Dino Buzzati’s The Singularity<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Oscar Mardell.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Dino Buzzati, The Singularity<\/a><\/em> (trans. Anne Milano Appel. NYRB, 2024)<\/p>\n

If (and this is a very small<\/em> \u2018if\u2019) literature is in tatters \u2014 if literature courses are experiencing record-low enrolments, if independent publishing houses are collapsing left, right and centre, if the book market is saturated with escapist consumer-fiction, sensationalist journalism, celebrity autobiographies, and air-fryer cookbooks, if libraries are being chronically underfunded and underutilised except as de facto<\/em> homeless shelters, if emergent writers are being denied the usual pathways to success etc. etc. \u2014 then the problem resides at least partly in the prevalence of a certain logic: as Terry Eagleton once phrased it (albeit, for very different purposes), \u2018thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov\u2019. Thanks, in other words, to the fact that a certain level of technological sophistication has been reached, the very institution of literature is now obsolete.<\/p>\n

Admittedly, this logic has become seductive in light of some of the recent advances in both the capability and the general availability of Generative AI: today\u2019s electric toaster can (just about) write Chekov (well, sort of); not only that, it can write pretty well, and with incredible speed, about<\/em> Chekhov. The actual business of literature \u2014 the age-old practice of strengthening one\u2019s soul by sounding the depths of the human soul, of expanding one\u2019s consciousness by charting the expanse and the variety of human consciousness \u2014 can now, at least to some extent, be outsourced to everyday machines. And not necessarily because those machines have souls to strengthen or consciousnesses to expand, but because those things were only ever mechanical in the first place, the illusory effects of a particular but ultimately unexceptional arrangement of electrical signals, a complex (albeit fleshy, error-prone, and sentimental) toaster. Thanks to GPT-4, we can forget not just about reading and writing (and reading about writing, and writing about reading), but about the very idea that the human experience might ever have been worth investigating.<\/p>\n

Still, there\u2019s a category error here. Literature is neither at odds with nor made redundant by advances in AI, for literature (and fiction in particular) though it is necessarily \u2018artificial\u2019, has never been a mode of \u2018intelligence\u2019 so much as one of secrecy \u2014 never a means of sounding and charting, of generating and implementing knowledge, so much as a window onto the unknown and the unknowable. On the one hand, there\u2019s the fact that every narrative, by virtue of being linear (and incapable, therefore, of disclosing its entire self at once), is structured like a series of secrets, a string of concealed truths. Sure, the process of reading and writing (or, of course, watching or projecting, hearing or telling) a narrative is often a process of uncovering those secrets, of revealing those truths, but it\u2019s the sense of secrecy, generated by the strategic deferral<\/em> of each revelation, that actually impels both readers and writers to persevere. We don\u2019t practise literature in order to remain ignorant of things, but nor do we do it simply to find out: we do it for the sense of being suspended between the two \u2014 the epistemological limbo.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, there\u2019s the fact that secrets are also, as Frank Kermode once put it, \u2018at odds with sequence\u2019 \u2014 that any attempt to reduce a text to a series of secrets to uncover, a string of truths to reveal, is problematised by the persistence of secrets which are neither covered nor revealable, unconcealed and undiscoverable. It is these which J. Hillis Miller, in a 1994 essay on \u2018Derrida\u2019s Topographies\u2019, calls \u2018true secrets\u2019. A \u2018true secret,\u2019 writes Miller, \u2018cannot ever, by any means, be revealed\u2019:<\/p>\n

A true secret\u2026 is not hidden somewhere\u2026 A true secret is all on the surface. This superficiality cannot by any hermeneutic procedures, material or linguistic, be gone behind. A literary text (and any text may be taken as literary) says what it says.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What makes literature indispensable is its strange ability not only to invite and sustain but eventually to thwart and escape our \u2018hermeneutic procedures\u2019, to flaunt its secrets and to keep them. The moral to extract here is this: thanks to GPT-4, we can no longer afford to forget about literature; thanks to that fact that machines can now generate and implement knowledge so effectively that knowledge itself is at risk of becoming banal, we cannot risk dispensing with our tried-and-tested pathways onto the unknowable.<\/p>\n

An unusually good example of this model is in Dino Buzatti\u2019s 1960 novel Il grande ritratto<\/em> (which has now been translated into English twice: first in 1962 by the poet Henry Reed as Larger Than Life<\/em>, and more recently by Anne Milano Appel as The Singularity<\/em>). On the one hand, its narrative reads like a series of secrets to uncover, a string of truths to reveal. Ermanno Ismani, professor of electronics, is summoned to meet with Colonel Giaquito, head of military research and development; why Ismani has been summoned, however, remains a secret. We discover that the Colonel has in mind a posting for Ismani \u2014 in zone 36, no less; what this posting entails, however, as well as the general purpose of zone 36, remain secret. We discover that zone 36 is the site of a giant supercomputer, sentient and autonomous, \u2018a machine made in our likeness\u2019 and imbued, even, with a distinct personality; what kind of personality, however, remains a secret. We discover that the chief engineer, Professor Giancarlo Strobele, has imbued \u2014 or, at least, attempted to imbue \u2014 the machine with the personality of his deceased lover, Laura De Marchi, a former friend of Ismani\u2019s wife, Elisa. Hence, we can deduce (even though we aren\u2019t actually told directly) the real reason that Ismani was summoned in the first place: Strobele requires Elisa to sit a version of the Turing Test; he needs her to try to distinguish the machine from a particular<\/em> person, and thus to verify if his attempt has been successful.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, The Singularity<\/em> also contains a further level of secrecy. We eventually discover that the machine itself has been keeping a secret: far from being imbued with Laura\u2019s personality, it\u2019s simply been deceiving both Elisa and Strobele by imitating<\/em> Laura\u2019s personality. Or has it? The problem here is that we can\u2019t know either way, that there\u2019s no way of verifying whether the machine possesses Laura\u2019s consciousness \u2014 her \u2018soul\u2019, as it were \u2014 or not. While the machine doesn\u2019t speak as such (both its thoughts and its communication are \u2018unconstrained\u2019 by language); the thoughts that it communicates to Elisa are rendered in the following language:<\/p>\n

[Strobele] calls me Laura, that madman, but I don\u2019t know what he wants, damn him\u2026 I have no idea who you are. They also taught me to lie. Their great achievement. So I could be just like all of you. But I can lie better than you\u2026And maybe I\u2019m lying even now. Maybe it\u2019s true that I remember you. But then again maybe it\u2019s not true, and I\u2019m denying it now. And you have no way of knowing if it\u2019s true or not\u2026\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Why does Elisa have \u2018no way of knowing\u2019? Precisely because the eponymous \u2018Singularity\u2019 has occurred \u2014 because the machine\u2019s cognition has become too complex for human cognition to comprehend. Strobele explains:<\/p>\n

The human mind, at least, is not capable of following the course of her thoughts. Especially since, at any given moment, we are only able to think of one thing, whereas our creature is able to simultaneously perform as many as several mental operations, independent of one another and yet contained in a single consciousness\u2026 In short, before we knew it we had lost the reins, and all that was left for us to do was to record the machine\u2019s behaviour. Think of a river in the Karst, subsiding into the sinkhole and then reappearing a few miles farther on; what the water did while underground no one is able to know.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hence, the primary function of zone 36, the immediate effect of its perimeter wall, is not to conceal the machine as such. Nor is it to conceal the ethical violations inherent in Strobele\u2019s attempt to imbue a machine with Laura\u2019s consciousness (which, if successful, would be tantamount, from Laura\u2019s point of view, to his replacing her body \u2014 once a source of agency and enjoyment \u2014 with a network of immobile and unfeeling processors). Nor is it even to conceal Strobele\u2019s obscene potency, his very ability to attempt such a violation. On the contrary, the primary function of zone 36 is to conceal the limit of human cognition, the line which even Strobele is impotent to cross (and beyond which lie other well-known and classically literary unknowables, unconcealed and undiscoverable, such as death, the unconscious, the soul, other people\u2019s minds, and whether or not thought can occur without language). The importance of Buzzati\u2019s novel, then, is that it frames the Singularity as a literary problem, a question of hermeneutics. The logic that it offers us is this: thanks to Chekhov, we can actually start to conceptualise the electric toaster; thanks to the existence of an institution so intimately concerned with the outer threshold of human cognition, we can begin to know what it might mean for machines to traverse that threshold.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the pressing question here is this: why is it necessary to know what that might \u2018mean\u2019 at all? Especially when meaning itself, as N. Katherine Hayles puts it in Unthought<\/em>, is neither \u2018easily recoverable\u2019 nor \u2018exists other than as human fantasy\u2019. Of course, literature\u2019s (eminently practical) answer is that such fantasies are neither dispensable nor particular to our species \u2014 that, as Shirley Jackson (channelling T. S. Eliot) once put it, \u2018No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality\u2019.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

ABOUT THE REVIEWER<\/strong>
\nOscar Mardell<\/a> is a teacher and writer from T\u0101maki Makaurau \/ Auckland. He is the author of Delirious New Lynn<\/em>, forthcoming from 5ever Books.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What makes literature indispensable is its strange ability not only to invite and sustain but eventually to thwart and escape our \u2018hermeneutic procedures\u2019, to flaunt its secrets and to keep them. The moral to extract here is this: thanks to GPT-4, we can no longer afford to forget about literature; thanks to that fact that machines can now generate and implement knowledge so effectively that knowledge itself is at risk of becoming banal, we cannot risk dispensing with our tried-and-tested pathways onto the unknowable.<\/p>\n

Oscar Mardell<\/strong> reviews The Singularity<\/em> by Dino Buzzati<\/strong>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":115502,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-115500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-criticism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115500"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115500\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":115510,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115500\/revisions\/115510"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/115502"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}