Internal exile

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2025 Book List

January

1. Hebrew Bible

2. Republic, Plato

3. Notes on Cafes and Bedrooms, Rosemary Tonks

4. No Room at the Morgue, Jean-Patrick Manchette

5. Technopoly, Neil Postman

6. The Macdermots of Ballycloran, Anthony Trollope

7. The Great Code: The Bible and Literature, Northrop Frye 

8. The Green Helmet and Other Poems, WB Yeats

February

9. Selected Amazon Reviews, Kevin Killian

10. An Introduction to Plato’s Republic, Julia Annas

March

11. Context Collapse, Ryan Ruby

12. The Two Faces of January, Patricia Highsmith

13. King John, William Shakespeare

14. The Fire and the Sun, Iris Murdoch 

15. A Rage in Harlem, Chester Himes

16. Superbloom, Nicholas Carr

17. Dissemination, Jacques Derrida 

18. Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, Diane Seuss

April

19. Some Do Not…, Ford Maddox Ford

20. Maigret Hesitates, Georges Simenon 21. The Comedy of Errors, William Shakespeare

May

22. Versed, Rae Armantrout

23. The Coming of the French Revolution, Georges Lefebvre

24. The House on Marshland, Louise Glück 

25. The Schirmer Inheritance, Eric Ambler

26. History of the French Revolution, Jules Michelet

27. Seize the Day, Saul Bellow

28. The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), WB Yeats

29. I and Thou, Martin Buber

30. Exhibit, RO Kwon

31. The Dud Avocado, Elaine Dundy

32. Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson

June

33. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M Miller Jr

34. A Cold Spring, Elizabeth Bishop

35. The Girl Who Was Plugged In, James Tiptree Jr

36. Judgment on Deltchev, Eric Ambler

37. Paris Spleen, Charles Baudelaire

38. A Short History of the French Revolution, Albert Soboul

39. Interpassivity: The Aesthetics of Delegated Enjoyment, Robert Pfaller

July

40. Postmodern Social Theory, George Ritzer

41. The Transparency of Evil, Jean Baudrillard

42. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs Basil E Frankweiler, EL Konigsburg

43. Audition, Katie Kitamura

44. My Face for the World to See, Alfred Hayes

45. The Wild Iris, Louise Glück

46. Tristano, Nanni Balestrini

47. Language Machines, Leif Weatherby

48. Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968, Ryan H. Walsh

49. A Burnt-Out Case, Graham Greene

August

50. The Tempest, William Shakespeare

51. Valentino, Natalia Ginzberg

52. Maigret at the Crossroads, Georges Simenon

53. Crush, Richard Siken

54. Cane, Jean Toomer 

55. Prejudices: A Selection, HL Mencken 

56. Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, Ross Gay

57. Maigret and the Wine Merchant, Georges Simenon

58. Sagittarius, Natalia Ginzburg

59. The Perfect Crime, Jean Baudrillard

60. The N–– of the Narcissus, Joseph Conrad

61. Spring and All, William Carlos Williams

62. A Hazard of New Fortunes, William Dean Howells 

September

63. The Winter’s Tale, William Shakespeare 

64. Shakespeare’s Last Plays, EMW Tillyard

65. A Kind of Anger, Eric Ambler

66. The Tennis Court Oath, John Ashbury

67. Death in the Clouds, Agatha Christie

68. Love’s Labor’s Lost, William Shakespeare

69. Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy?, Ian Hacking

70. Time Out of Joint, Philip K Dick

71. How to Do Things With Words, JL Austin

72. Firstborn, Louise Glück

October

73. Mythocracy, Yves Citton

74. Questions of Travel, Elizabeth Bishop

75. Meditations in an Emergency, Frank O’Hara

76. In a Lonely Place, Dorothy B Hughes

77. A Damsel in Distress, PG Wodehouse

78. The AI Con, Emily Bender and Alex Hanna

79. Malina, Ingeborg Bachmann

80. According to Queeney, Beryl Bainbridge

81. Toward a Philosophy of Photography, Vilém Flusser

82. Summer, Edith Wharton

83. The Duinio Elegies, Rainer Maria Rilke

November

84. Lady Yesterday, Loren D Estleman 

85. Into the Universe of Technical Images, Vilém Flusser

86. The Day of the Owl, Leonardo Sciascia

87. Love’s Work, Gillian Rose

88. Does Writing Have a Future, Vilém Flusser

89. Airless Spaces, Shulamith Firestone

90. Maigret and the Nahour Case, Georges Simenon

91. The YouTube Apparatus, Kevin Munger

92. The Rubber Band, Rex Stout

93. Seven Types of Ambiguity, William Empson

94. Something Fresh, PG Wodehouse

95. The Birth of Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche

December

96. The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester

97. Cards on the Table, Agatha Christie

98. Nietzsche and Philosophy, Gilles Deleuze

99. My Mortal Enemy, Willa Cather

100. Murder Fantastical, Patricia Moyes

101. The Getaway, Jim Thompson 

102. Leave It to Psmith, PG Wodehouse

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From "The Last Days of Social Media" by James O' Sullivan.

I don't disagree with this at all, but it seems worth dwelling on what it means for "attention" to be opposed to "meaning" instead of consisting of the search for meaning. What does it mean to "optimize" for this condition, to train users to enjoy it? Why is it most profitable for companies to train us in wanting to pay attention as a way of avoiding rather than seeking meaning?

To pay attention while remaining indifferent to "meaning" is to ingest content the way a machine does, recording superficial differences and patterns as one's intake apparatus passes from one data point to the next, with no impetus but to keep ingesting.

Perhaps there is a kind of pleasure in submission to inertia, in drifting beyond the threat of friction, that is easier for us to access, and easier for media companies to trap us with, as their algorithms and data analytics reveal: Escaping subjectivity by emulating machines and becoming immune to meaning.

Feeds train users in a kind of dissociative experience, that sensing things and thinking about them can be separated, and the process of separating them and having them held apart can be a source of pleasure or perhaps relief.

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The miserable glass vessel

In the theory chapter of Jameson's Postmodernism book, he quotes Paul de Man criticizing the passage below from Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, in which he talks about the power of pure music being made tolerable by being mitigated by words and images:

De Man is somewhat skeptical:

Given that "bad faith" applies to anything generated by an LLM, I wonder whether de Man's description also serves as a description of how LLMs "ring false." Regular exposure to generated text trains a human reader to be sensitive to certain rote applications of rhetorical formulas and to the awkward use of both clichéd expressions and idiosyncratic modifiers that come across like a writer straining to make an impression.

Not that "AI" tries to do anything, but they way they are trained — by human workers being paid by the piece to rank samples and incentivized to pursue the most easily explainable justifications for their choices — leads their output to manifest the most obvious of rhetorical moves. The laziest critiques of writing samples are operationalized to make output that depends heavily on trite observations about what "effective writing" is: use three examples, stage parallel comparisons ("not just this but that"), employ transitions like "But what really stands out is" and so on. These now announce "bad faith" (i.e. no one "means" or "intends" what is being said) in similar ways to what de Man felt in Nietzsche's advertising-like moves. 

This also suggests something about what function such obviously "bad faith" text serves: It comes across to us not as pure Wagnerian music liable to shatter the meager glass vessel of our brains, but gives us "the world" (or at least whatever answers or performances we seek) as mediated and neutralized by the emptiest and most harmless rote phrases. We don't want to hear unmitigated truth but rather unmitigated ideology — the world as filtered through past expressions of "how things are supposed to sound" in their most obvious and marketable instances. We know wea re safely conforming when we hear the tones and strains of marketing discourse; when we hear sycophantic ad-speak we know we aren't going to be challenged but flattered, and who cares if it's all lies and hallucinations?

The bad faith text generated by LLMs remythologize the idea of the "true" — the "real human performance" as something that truly exists but also as something that most of us truly can't stand.

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From Georg Lukács, "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat."

I was rereading this as a way to think through whether LLMs can be said to capture "the concrete historical totality" or whether they merely reify the inadequate "immediate" understanding of the world within which, in Lukács's terms, the bourgeoisie are trapped.

Lukács argues that the worker's experience of being commodified within capitalism opens the way to a shared class consciousness of how capitalism works as a process, while capitalists see it merely as the "way things really are," a set of immediate facts, quantities (rather than quantifications), and laws (rather than applications of social force). But that privileged insight doesn't automatically achieve anything; one way to understand LLMs and "AI" as a project is to make sure that insight is maligned, stunted, eradicated, abandoned.

The passage above is one of several that gets at that point. LLMs are a mobilization of "the overwhelming resources of knowledge, culture, and routine" against the free, historically novel insights made possible by a different standpoint that looks for processes and dynamic relations rather than facts and statistics on an aggregate of static moments. AI models exemplify what Lukács calls a "petrified factuality in which everything is frozen in 'fixed magnitude,' in which the reality that just happens to exist persists in a totally senseless unchanging way that precludes any theory that could throw light on even this immediate reality."

In other words, AI models are nondialectical pseudo-totalities: They present what has already existed as a set of given truths, and encourages everyone to abandon understanding why they are interrelated in the ways that the model captures but doesn't explain. Just take the "answers" it immediately gives and forget about changing the world.

But trying to rebut those "overwhelming resources" in their reified form (the trained model) with a flat reference to the importance of "human capability" or "what machines can't really do" etc. (cf Leif Weatherby's critique of "remainder humanism) reinforces the problem of mystifying what is given, romanticizing the power of individuals to make themselves an exception to the "laws" that remain unchangable, and of extracting humanity from shaping and being shaped by historical processes.

The whole point is to understand historical processes as they unfold, not to be able to seemingly calculate the results in advance. Things change by being thought through, collectively; nothing changes when answers are simply given as a calculation.

Lukács argues that

As long as man adopts a stance of intuition and contemplation he can only relate to his own thought and to the objects of the empirical world in an immediate way. He accepts both as ready-made—produced by historical reality. As he wishes only to know the world and not to change it he is forced to accept both the empirical, material rigidity of existence and the logical rigidity of concepts as unchangeable. His mythological analyses are not concerned with the concrete origins of this rigidity nor with the real factors inherent in them that could lead to its elimination. They are concerned solely to discover how the unchanged nature of these data could be conjoined while leaving them unchanged and how to explain them as such.

You could do worse for a definition of LLMs: They show how data are "conjoined" — how words and concepts have historically fit together — while leaving them unchanged and unexplained, convincing users that they are all ultimately unchangeable.

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From Techniques of Persuasion (1963) by J.A.C. Brown.

Mainly interested in this claim:

“Now there is every reason to believe that mass hysteria has become increasingly rare in the more technically advanced countries and that a leading characteristic of modern mass society, in spite of the powerful media under its control, is a kind of deadening of feeling accompanied by a rather sterile tendency to rationalize all experience. Our trouble, if trouble it be, is not that people come together too often in collectivities but that, even when they do, they are essentially the 'lonely crowd'”

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From Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (1979)

"AI" is less a technological innovation than the result of the unrestrained drive to commodify knowledge. LLMs produce the illusion of knowledge without knowers, similar to the fetishized commodity that seems to produce itself and its own value without labor.

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From Jean Baudrillard, "The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media" (1985)

People "stay connected" to remain uninformed and use media to reassure themselves of the impossibility of knowing "truth" and assuming responsibility for it.

A key assertion of Baudrillard's is that the media circulate not information but simulation; LLMs collapse the two so that one can feel safe from the possibility that they will become disentangled again.

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From this essay by Andrea Long Chu. How do people even know whether they want subjectivity or not? It takes a certain tenacity to put oneself in the position to even confront the question. Yes, ideology is what "hails" us into identity, but it also often consists of convincing us to see subjectivity as simply given rather than achieved.

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2024 Book List

January

1. Trances of the Blast, Mary Ruefle

2. Falling Star, Patricia Moyes

3. Labyrinths, Jorge Luis Borges

4. Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss 

5. The Sweet Dove Died, Barbara Pym

6. The Prison-House of Language, Fredric Jameson

7. The Order of Things, Michel Foucault

8. Illuminated Manuscripts, Tamara Woronowa and Andrej Sterligow

9. Structuralism, John Sturrock

February

10. Immediacy; or the Style of Too Late Capitalism, Anna Kornbluh

11. The Dark Frontier, Eric Ambler

12.  Macbeth, William Shakespeare

13. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow

14. Don’t Look at Me Like That, Diane Athill

15. The Most of It, Mary Ruefle

16. The Archaeology of Knowledge, Michel Foucault

March

17. Henry IV Part 1, William Shakespeare

18. A Murder Is Announced, Agatha Christie

19. Shakespeare, Johan Gottfried von Herder

20. Literary Theory for Robots, Dennis Yi Tenen

21. Henry IV Part 2, William Shakespeare

22. Richard II, William Shakespeare

23. Lucy Gayheart, Willa Cather

24. Henry V, William Shakespeare

25. Mimesis, Expression, Construction, Fredric Jameson

26. Four-Legged Girl, Diane Seuss

27. Death of a Nationalist, Rebecca Pawel

28. The Flight From the Enchanter, Iris Murdoch

29. The Purloined Clinic, Janet Malcolm

April

30. King Lear, William Shakespeare

31. White Butterfly, Walter Moseley

32. Humanism and Antihumanism, Kate Soper

33. The Illusion of the End, Jean Baudrillard

34. Discourse on Method, René Descartes 

35. Meditations on First Philosophy, René Descartes

36. Cambridge Companion to Descartes, John Cottingham ed

37. The Ordinal Society, Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy

38. Much Ado About Nothing, William Shakespeare

39. Primer, Bob Perelman

40. As You Like It, William Shakespeare

May

41. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, William Shakespeare

42. The Ballad of Peckham Rye, Muriel Spark

43. Preface to Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson

44. The Weariness of the Self, Alain Ehrenberg 

45. Harmonium, Wallace Stevens

46. Mr. Scarborough’s Family, Anthony Trollope

47. Computing Taste, Nick Seaver

48. Hamlet, William Shakespeare

June

49. On Shakespeare, Northrop Frye

50. The Taming of the Shrew, William Shakespeare

51. The Double Shift, Jason Read

52. Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare

53. La Vendée, Anthony Trollope

54. Mirror Worlds, David Gelertner

55. The Commercialization of Intimate Life, Arlie Hochschild

July

56. In Our Own Image, Fred Ritchin

57. Bending the Frame, Fred Ritchin

58. After Photography, Fred Ritchin

59. Cue the Sun!, Emily Nussbaum

60. Appointment With Death, Agatha Christie

61. The Friend, Sigrid Nunez

62. Libra, Don DeLillo

63. The Interpretation of Cultures, Clifford Geertz

64. Mimesis, Erich Auerbach

65. Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare

August

66. Antony and Cleopatra, William Shakespeare

67. Nonrequired Reading, Wisława Szymborska

68. Traveling, Ann Powers

69. Annie Bot, Sierra Greer

70. Regency Buck, Georgette Heyer

71. Coriolanus, William Shakespeare

September

72. Troilus and Cressida, William Shakespeare

73. Fools of Time, Northrop Frye

74. Bel Canto, Ann Patchett

75. Measure for Measure, William Shakespeare

76. William Shakespeare, Terry Eagleton

77. Shakespeare’s Problem Plays, E.M.W. Tillyard

78. Twelfth Night, William Shakespeare

79. The Merchant of Venice, William Shakespeare

80. Othello, William Shakespeare

81. AI Snake Oil, Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor

82. Passage of Arms, Eric Ambler

October

83. All’s Well That Ends Well, William Shakespeare

84. The Book of the Courtier, Baldesare Castiglione

85. Fables of Aggression, Fredric Jameson

86. Intermezzo, Sally Rooney

87. The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes

88. Liars, Sarah Manguso 

89. James, Percival Everett

November

90. Aesthetics and Politics, Bertholt Brecht, Walter Benjamin et al.

91. Protocol, Alexander Galloway

92. Sartor Resartus, Thomas Carlyle

93. The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies

94. Timon of Athens, William Shakespeare

95. Machines Who Think, Pamela McCorduck

December

96. Henry VI, Part 1, William Shakespeare

97. Henry VI, Part 2, William Shakespeare

98. The Triumph of Achilles, Louise Glück

99. All Shot Up, Chester Himes

100. The Saint-Fiacre Affair, Georges Simenon

101. Henry VI, Part 3, William Shakespeare

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From Jerry Mander's Four Arguments For the Elimination of Television (1978)

Generative AI is meant to produce this type of overload in perpetuity.