The Essayist's Notebook

Washing dried, flight over, sat at my desk in a different location carrying the seeds of a different stance, I re-read the piece I wrote above.

I have written before on Defining Sentences that device that literary critics (and AI too now it seems) love to use; to identify a phrase or a sentence to which they can point and declare “this is what the story, essay, polemic, whatever, revolves around. And I have explained my own rebellious nature and how I seek to de-focus this. Because it is one thing to be focussed in the written expression of the thought. But that does not mean that the thought itself is focussed. And that very lack of focus needs to be protected. There is frequently a reason for it. Even now I know there is another note destined to follow this on “Anchor Points”.

Never-the-less I am nothing if not an essayist and must confirm that the first person educated (if I may use the word) by my writing, is me. So today I walked back through the note on “the mimicry of uncertainty” and here is what I found:

The note is not about AI trawling my work, but about intellectual honesty and the apparent performance of it. That's why Orwell entered my head so readily, occupying my attention because he represents a competing account of what intellectual honesty looks like when confronted by disappointment.

Orwell has been much on my mind lately, not because I disagree with his commitment to honesty, but because I am increasingly persuaded that disappointment can masquerade as honesty. To lose faith in a possibility because one has witnessed its failure is not necessarily realism. It may simply be another form of injury. An essayist must remain open to what remains unresolved. As I have written elsewhere there is always value in negative results

The whole piece seems to revolve around this: It remains an unresolved ache. The whole piece appears to turn on that idea. Elsewhere I say ...to endure a life of open wound and not collapse into cynicism. That feels like one of the underlying propositions of Essayism. The cynic closes the wound. The essayist keeps it open. Not because suffering is noble, but because closure too quickly becomes blindness. The essayist remains susceptible to surprise, disappointment, contradiction, wonder and connection. There is a cost to that susceptibility, but there is also insight.

The machine cannot live with an unresolved ache. The road-layer must pave it. The formulaic essay must convert it into a takeaway. The cynic must explain it away. The essayist, by contrast, carries it forward.

That's why I suspect Orwell and the AI essay ultimately occupy the same place in my argument. Both are, in different ways, examples of the urge to escape uncertainty. One escapes through disenchantment, the other through optimisation. The essayist's task is to remain present to it.

Overall, the note reveals something rather interesting: my criticism of AI is not primarily technological. It is ontological. The machine's failure is not that it lacks information. It lacks a lived history through which one thing unexpectedly becomes another thing. It cannot stand beside a washing machine and find Leicester, Mondragon, worker ownership, Orwell and the nature of essayism already waiting there.

That, I think, is the deeper argument beginning to emerge beneath the surface of this possible essay.