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            pdftitle={A Poetics of Exhaustion: Looking at the Automation of Literature from its Dead Ends},
            pdfauthor={Florian Cramer, Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam, 9-2020},
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\title{A Poetics of Exhaustion: Looking at the Automation of Literature from
its Dead Ends}
\author{Florian Cramer, Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam, 9-2020}
\date{}

\begin{document}
\maketitle

\hypertarget{abstract}{%
\section{Abstract}\label{abstract}}

\hypertarget{english}{%
\subsection{English}\label{english}}

\emph{Since Renaissance-era Lullism, the history of computational and
computer-generated literature has been one of dead ends which were
reflected among others by Jonathan Swift, Georges Perec, Italo Calvino,
Franz Josef Czernin, and more recently in the fields of Internet and
Deep Learning-based literature. These crises and dead ends have their
root in what I would propose to call the kaleidoscope constraint of
literary computation. The historical development of computational
methods and technology from simple combinatorics via Markov chains to
neural networks did not lift this constraint, since it only brought (to
borrow from finance) quantitative easing of a qualitative problem. - In
the course of sketching this history, I would also like to put some
question marks behind common understandings of ``digital'' and
``creativity''.}

\hypertarget{deutsch}{%
\subsection{Deutsch}\label{deutsch}}

\emph{Seit der frühneuzeitlichen ars combinatoria ist die Geschichte der
generativen und computererzeugten Literatur eine Geschichte von
Sackgassen und Krisen, die u.a. von Jonathan Swift, Georges Perec, Italo
Calvino und Franz Josef Czernin beschrieben wurden und sich seit
jüngstem auch auf Netzliteratur und Deep Learning-basierte Texterzeugung
erstrecken. Diese Krisen haben ihren Ursprung in dem, was ich
``kaleidoskopischen Formzwang'' berechneter bzw. generativer Literatur
nennen möchte. Dieser Formzwang wurde in der historischen
Weiterentwicklung von Rechenmethoden und -techniken - von der einfachen
Kombinatorik über Markov-Ketten bis hin zu neuronalen Netzen - nicht
aufgehoben, sondern (in der Sprache des Finanzmarkts ausgedrückt) nur
quantitativ gelockert. Im Zuge dieser skizzierten Geschichte möchte ich
auch Fragezeichen hinter verbreitete Begriffe des ``Digitalen'' und der
``Kreativität'' setzen.}

\hypertarget{dead-ends-and-crises-in-computational-poetics}{%
\section{Dead ends and crises in computational
poetics}\label{dead-ends-and-crises-in-computational-poetics}}

The likely reason for my invitation to this conference is my past work
on the automation of literature, among others in my doctoral thesis from
2006 in which I attempted to write a history of computational literature
from the Renaissance ars combinatoria to present Internet art, including
its precursors in poetry and mysticist writing of the antiquity and
Middle Ages. I have only sporadically revisited this topic since,
because my thesis concluded with a dead end: that throughout its long
but often overlooked history, computational poetry has been
characterized by a structural discrepancy between the speculative
imagination concerning the powers and potentials of computing language
versus the fragmentary and often disappointing outcomes of these
experiments.

The poetics of automated literature was, in other words, more
interesting than its poetry. With Renate Lachmann, I therefore read this
history and genre of literary writing as fantastic literature,
implicitly as belonging to (using a concept of Gert Mattenklott) a
literary anthropology of speculation. The speculative surplus of this
poetics meant that the rather simple act of shuffling words in a poem
acquired vastly different meanings throughout different centuries and
different poetics: as ecstatic mysticism or as technocratic
constructivism, as rules or as randomness, as formalist regimes or as
aleatoric anarchy, as satanic or as Christian, as classicism or as
anti-classicism, to name only a few.

\hypertarget{lullism}{%
\section{Lullism}\label{lullism}}

The speculative poetics of medieval and Renaissance ars combinatoria and
lullism have been summed up in Jonathan Swift's \emph{Gulliver's
Travels} as follows:

\begin{quote}
``The first Professor I saw was in a very large Room, with Forty Pupils
about him. After Salutation, observing me to look earnestly upon a Frame
{[}\ldots{}{]} by his Contrivance, the most ignorant Person at a
reasonable Charge, and with a little bodily Labour, may write Books in
Philosophy, Poetry, Politicks, Law, Mathematicks and Theology, without
the least Assistance from Genius or Study. He then led me to the Frame,
about the Sides whereof all his Pupils stood in Ranks. It was Twenty
Foot Square, placed in the Middle of the Room. The Superficies was
composed of several Bits of Wood {[}\ldots{}{]}. They were all linked
together by slender Wires. These Bits of Wood were covered on every
Square with Papers pasted on them; and on these Papers were written all
the Words of their Language {[}\ldots{}{]}. The Professor then desired
me to observe, for he was going to set his Engine at work.''\footnote{Swift,
  Jonathan. \emph{Gulliver's Travels}. Edited by Herbert Davis, Basil
  Blackwell, 1965.}
\end{quote}

This satire is effective because it does not actually exaggerate
Renaissance Lullism, but describe it very factually. In the 17th
century, the German polymath Johann Joachim Becher had constructed an
almost identical apparatus for machine translation from Latin into
modern languages,\footnote{Becher, Johann Joachim. \emph{Character pro
  notitia linguarum universali}. Frankfurt, 1661}, and the poet and
mystic Quirinus Kuhlmann had envisioned nineteen combinatorial and
automated arts and sciences, among them an automated ``ars magna librum
scribendi'' which would be "of such perfection that no mortal being
would be able to write a book that wasn't already contained in our Ars
scribendi``.\footnote{``tanta perfectione, ut nullus Mortalium librum
  edere posset, quem nostra Ars scribendi non comprehenderet'', Quirinus
  Kuhlmann, \emph{QUIRINI KUHLMANNI PRODOMUS}. Amsterdam: Lotho de Haes,
  1674.}

17th century poetic and scientific Lullism failed because its machines
never amounted to more than theoretical sketches or prototypes that
over-promised, but under-delivered. In the early 18th century, when
scholastics was replaced by empirical science and - in the arts -
rule-based poetics with the new paradigm of aesthetics, the Lullist
project of automated creativity had logically come to an end. Swift only
needed to summarize it in order to make fun of it. In a classical
paradigm shift (as defined by Thomas Kuhn), ars combinatoria and
automated creativity became marginalized, living on in the niches of
games, children's books, humorism, and also the occult.

When Raymond Queneau resurrected the literary ars combinatoria in 1961
with his \emph{One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems}, this was still in
the spirit of ludics and children's games.\footnote{Queneau, Raymond.
  \emph{Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes}. Gallimard, 1961; English
  translation in Mathews, Harry, and Alastair Brotchie, editors.
  \emph{Oulipo Compendium}. Atlas Press, 1998.} The poems initiated the
Oulipo group of literary writers and mathematicians, among them Georges
Perec and Italo Calvino. The group formally operated as a section of the
Parisian Collège de Pataphysique which had been modeled after Alfred
Jarry's poetic-absurdist science of pataphysics. The new automation of
literature in the 20th century thus did not erase Swift's epitaph, but
confirmed its framing of literary combinatorics as organized silliness.

The Oulipo began its collective work in the same years when Marshall
McLuhan's book \emph{Understanding Media} was published.\footnote{McLuhan,
  Marshall. \emph{Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man}. 1964.}
McLuhan defined media, broadly synonymous with technology, as
``extensions of man''. This discourse has since dominated the discourse
of media and technology where new technologies are understood as
progressive function updates. The poetics of Oulipo, however, was the
opposite, since it understood techniques and technologies, including
computation and algorithms, as ``constraints'' instead of extensions.

In 1968, Georges Perec wrote a radio play for the German Saarländischer
Rundfunk, ``Die Maschine'' (``The Machine'') in which a simulated
computer processes Goethe's \emph{Wanderer's Nightsong} using the very
formal text processing methods developed in the Oulipo.\footnote{Perec,
  Georges. \emph{Die Maschine}. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1972.} This
processing factually anticipates much of the algorithmic text processing
done today in the Digital Humanities. But it ends up as an ultimately
futile and pointless exercise of constraining a literary text.

Since 1959 and parallel to the Oulipo, the \emph{Stuttgarter Schule}
(``Stuttgart School'') of experimental poets around Max Bense, Helmut
Heißenbüttel und Reinhard Döhl had created computer-generated poetry
which it called ``artificial poetry''.\footnote{Lutz, Theo.
  ``Stochastische Texte.'' Augenblick, vol.~4, no. 1, 1959, pp.~3--9.}
The dead end in Perec's \emph{Machine} ended up becoming the dead end of
artificial poetry, too. According to Döhl, Perec's radio play had such a
crushing effect on the \emph{Stuttgarter Schule} that it gave up
computer generative poetry.\footnote{``{[}E{]}in Hörspiel, das
  {[}\ldots{}{]} uns, die wir ja vom Text zum Computer gekommen waren,
  wie ein vorläufiger Schlussstrich erschien. {[}\ldots{}{]} Wir haben
  diese Ansätze außer in Vorträgen und Diskussionen damals nicht weiter
  verfolgt, sondern unser Interesse an künstlerischer Produktion mit
  Neuen Medien und Aufschreibsystemen in andere Richtungen ausgedehnt''.
  Döhl, Reinhard. „Vom Computertext zur Netzkunst. Vom Bleisatz zum
  Hypertext``. \emph{Liter@tur: Computer - Literatur - Internet},
  Hansgeorg Schmidt-Bergmann and Torsten Liesegang (eds.), Bielefeld:
  Aisthesis, 2001, 27--50.}

In his 1967 lecture \emph{Cybernetics and Ghosts}, Oulipo member Italo
Calvino saw computer-generated literature at a similar dead end when he
concluded that ``the style of a literary automaton'' and ``its true
vocation would be for classicism'', in the sense of ``traditional works,
poems with closed metrical forms, novels that follow all the
rules''.\footnote{Calvino, Italo. ``Cybernetics and Ghosts.'' \emph{The
  Uses of Literature}, Harcourt, 1982, pp.~3--27.} In the same year, the
American novelist John Barth criticized experimental poetry at large as
a \emph{Literature of Exhaustion} that exhausted itself in materially
creating proteic variations instead of more simply imagining them, as
for example in the prose of Jorge Luis Borges - or, as one might add,
Jonathan Swift.\footnote{Barth, John. ``The Literature of Exhaustion.''
  \emph{The Friday Book}, 1984, pp.~62--76.}

The history of literary computing and generative poetry thus can not
only be told as a history of dead ends, but perhaps even needs to be
told from a perspective and vantage point of its periodical crises since
the collapse of the ars combinatoria at the turn of the 17th and 18th
century. More recent examples include the attempts and ultimate
frustration and failure of the Austrian experimental poet Franz Josef
Czernin to write computer-aided poetry with the experimental linguistic
processing software ``POE'' in the 1990s,\footnote{Czernin, Franz Josef,
  and Ferdinand Schmatz. \emph{Teller und Schweiss. Gedichte aus POE}.
  Pakesch \& Schlebrügge, 1991} the short-livedness of various schools
of electronic literature since the invention of the World Wide Web,
including German-language ``Netzliteratur'' and its collapse in the
early 2000s. Contemporary electronic literature suffers from the issue
that its scholars either outnumber its writers or, as Álvaro Seica has
analyzed, are even identical with them.\footnote{Seiça, Álvaro.
  ``Digital Poetry and Critical Discourse: A Network of
  Self-References?'' 2182-8830, Centro de Literatura Portuguesa Imprensa
  da Universidade de Coimbra, 2016. Many scholars formerly active in
  this area have moved on to such fields as computer game studies,
  digital humanities and cultural studies of computing and technology.}

It remains to be seen whether the current boom of artificial
intelligence text generation using neural networks and Deep Learning
will produce similar frustrations. A recent ``Guardian'' op-ed article
written by the currently most advanced artificial intelligence language
generator GPT-3, suggests that the technology does not resolve the
issues stated by Calvino and others.\footnote{https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/08/robot-wrote-this-article-gpt-3
  . Not only leaves the text much to be desired, it also turned out that
  it needed to be heavily edited by human editors:
  https://www.theguardian.com/technology/commentisfree/2020/sep/11/artificial-intelligence-robot-writing-gpt-3}
Realistically, this form of automated creativity is destined to take
over major part of vernacular text production (from articles to reports
and helpline chat bots) and thus find indirect ways into literary
writing.

\hypertarget{structural-issues}{%
\section{Structural issues}\label{structural-issues}}

From Lull to GPT-3, there have been two, maybe three major modes - or
techniques - of language computation and machine-generated literature:

\begin{enumerate}
\def\labelenumi{\arabic{enumi})}
\item
  synthetic computation of pre-defined elements according to pre-defined
  (or ``hard-coded'') rules, in a period from the 13th to the 20th
  century - with historical origins in the medieval Kabbalah and Lullist
  combinatorics and continued up to so-called Symbolic Artificial
  Intelligence (``Symbolic AI''). Examples include Renaissance word
  permutation poems, he machine described by Swift in \emph{Gulliver's
  Travels}; computational poetry of the Oulipo including Raymond
  Queneau's 100.000 Billion Poems; but also more recent machine
  translation systems such as the Internet service \emph{Babelfish}.
\item
  analytic computation of arbitrary text input through pre-defined rules
  or algorithms, in the 20th and 21st century. It began with Andrei
  Markov's invention of Markov chains and his processing of Pushkin's
  \emph{Eugene Onegin} in 1906, continued with Tristan Tzara's 1920
  instruction to make Dadaist poetry by cutting out and shuffling words
  of an arbitrary newspaper article, Brion Gysin's and William S.
  Burroughs' cut-ups in the 1950s, and literature written with the help
  of Markov chains such as Max Bense, \emph{Der Monolog der Terry Jo}
  (1968), Jackson Mac Low's ``diastic'' poems from the 1980s, Charles O.
  Hartman's and Hugh Kenner's \emph{Sentences} (1995) and Ray Kurzweil's
  \emph{Cybernetic Poet} from 2001.\footnote{Hartman, Charles O., and
    Hugh Kenner. Sentences. Sun and Moon Press, 1995.}
\item
  analytic computation of arbitrary input through dynamically adjusted
  rules - such as in Deep Learning -, with the present-day example of
  GPT-3.
\end{enumerate}

While language computation became arguably more sophisticated with each
new technique, none of them changed the fundamental structure, and
constraint, of language computation: mathematical shuffling of
predefined (text) material. This is what I would propose to call the
\emph{kaleidoscope constraint} of generative literature, and of
automated creativity in general. But before explaining it in more
detail, allow me to first digress on the notions of ``digital'' and
``creativity''.

\hypertarget{digression-digital-creativity}{%
\subsection{Digression: digital,
creativity}\label{digression-digital-creativity}}

In the history I presented, electronic computer technology plays an
important yet not decisive role, since most literary computations do not
fundamentally depend on it. But this is not to dispute digitality.
Digitality only needs to be put into a larger historical perspective.
Since the standardization of alphabets and the equation of letters to
numbers in the Greek and Hebrew antiquity, writing in Western culture
has been digital; not in a metaphorical, but in the literal scientific
definition of ``digital'' as information encoded into discrete,
countable units.\footnote{This also is how Goodman, Nelson. \emph{The
  Languages of Art}. Hackett, 1976, defines digital versus analog.} The
early digitization of language into alphabets was a necessary
precondition for any combinatorial poetics, including the computation of
names as numbers in the Kabbalah and older schools of mysticism and
magic.\footnote{As described in Dornseiff, Franz. \emph{Das Alphabet in
  Mystik und Magie}. Teubner, 1925.}

Secondly, with Oulipo's concept of the constraint along with the
observation that automated literature boils down to shuffling linguistic
units, one could ask whether computational poetics are \emph{uncreative}
rather than creative. Here I am borrowing from the poet Kenneth
Goldsmith.\footnote{Goldsmith, Kenneth. \emph{Uncreative Writing:
  Managing Language in the Digital Age}. Columbia University Press,
  2011.} Conversely, the notion of ``automated creativity'' risks to
reinforce a problematic romanticist, and nowadays neoliberal,\footnote{Such
  as in the policymaking concepts of the ``creative class'' and
  ``creative cities'' in Florida, Richard. \emph{The Rise of the
  Creative Class} Hachette UK, 2002 and Landry, Charles. \emph{The
  Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators}. Earthscan, 2012.}
concept of art as creativity.

\hypertarget{kaleidoscope-constraint}{%
\section{Kaleidoscope constraint}\label{kaleidoscope-constraint}}

Constraints, exhaustion and dead-ends of generative systems are not only
a matter of poetics, but above all of aesthetic experience. This
experience kicks in soon enough when reading permutation poems or robot
journalism, watching algorithmically generated visuals and listening to
computer-generated music.

Whatever the technique or technology, `automated creativity' not only
boils down to remixing, but also to remixing as an aesthetic end to
itself.\footnote{Except when those computations are being tactically
  used outside their own logic, such as by the YesMen for its spoof of
  the WTO website, for example: Bichlbaum, Andy, et al. \emph{The Yes
  Men: The True Story of the End of the World Trade Organization}.
  Disinformation, 2004.} The constraint of every generative system is
that recombining elements means almost endless possibilities in theory,
but gets dull and pointless very soon in practice.

As a result, the promise of extension conflicts with the reality of
constraint. This does not only apply to automated literature, but to any
programmed system. It is the same aesthetic effect as that of watching
the visual shapes generated by a kaleidoscope - an instrument whose
early history is part of 17th century ars combinatoria since it was
co-invented by the Lullist polymath (and later correspondent of Quirinus
Kuhlmann) Athanasius Kircher. When talking about machine-generated art
and automated creativity, we are effectively talking about glorified
kaleidoscopes. Therefore, I propose the concept of the ``kaleidoscope
constraint'' for computational poetics and aesthetics, and use it to
explore poetics that do not exhaust itself in it.

The history of computational poetics could be told as a history of
quantitative easing of the kaleidoscope constraint: that is, burying a
structural problem by throwing more resources at it. Since the
larger-scale emergence and institutionalized of computer-generative
arts, this quantitative easing has disguised a much smaller extent of
qualitative (such as: aesthetic and hermeneutic) ``gains''. Thereby it
has also upheld the McLuhanian and techno-Hegelian narrative of
extension rather than constraint, and fostered collective failures to
think of any extension as being a constraint simultaneously.

\hypertarget{postscript-on-deep-learning}{%
\section{Postscript on Deep
Learning}\label{postscript-on-deep-learning}}

What are the foreseeable limitations of Neural Network-based ``Deep
Learning'' algorithms (which nowadays are often - but not quite
correctly - understood as being synonymous with ``artificial
intelligence'')?

First and foremost, these are systems for pattern \emph{recognition};
algorithms that find regularities in unstructured data sets. They thus
are primarily perception, not creation systems. However, when performing
pattern recognition, they reconstruct information that is not actually
contained in a data set, such as object details in a blurry photograph
or, hypothetically, missing words in a fragmented text.

Deep Learning algorithms are therefore likely to become part of ordinary
word processing software where they could, among others, auto-complete
sentences that only consist of a beginning or a few keywords. Their
`learning' is purely based on heuristics - respectively on probabilities
found in the training material. As a result, these algorithms
reconstruct the present from the past; or, more simply put, they
constantly stereotype.

An advanced Deep Learning system trained on 19th century realist novels
as a data set would forever keep writing novels in the style of 19th
century realism (or better phrased: remixes of these novels), but it
would never be able to write \emph{Ulysses}, for example. Arguably,
Italo Calvino's diagnosis of classicism, or conservatism and
conventionalism, applies to Deep Learning even more than to the
combinatorial poetics he studied with the Oulipo in the 1960s.

\end{document}
