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Martin Ringot

Hi ! Bummed out by the latest developments? Well, let me cheer you up with my pal who already had a hot take on this issue back in 1967. 🧵 1/23

A picture of the italian writer Italo Calvino at his desk holding a pen and looking at the camera
Dec 06, 2022, 10:59 AM·Public
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Martin Ringot

Italo Calvino was an Italian writer known for his playful use of literary tradition like folktales and myth. As he grew up in a scientist family, he also was fond of scientific theories and, quite early in the years, cybernetics. 2/23

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Martin Ringot

That is why in 1965 he published his first "Cosmicomics" short stories in which he narrates the big events of the Universe through a strange character named Qfwfq. Sometimes they were amphibian, sometimes they accidentally created galaxies playing with atoms. 3/23

Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics italian original cover. I took the original one from my grand mother but I'm not sure she knows. Please don't snitch.
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Martin Ringot

Well, in 1967, Italo Calvino delivers a lecture entitled "Cybernetics and Ghosts". It is about literature as a combinatory process. Shortly after what french theorist Roland Barthes called the author's death, Calvino explores the possibilities of a literature free from the author's power. 4/23

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Martin Ringot

"It all began with the first storyteller of the tribe" he says before explaining how storytelling goes through a combinatory process using all the assets and action known to the tribe. 5/23

It all began with the first storyteller of the tribe. Men were already exchanging articulate sounds, referring to the practical needs of their daily lives. Dialogue was already in existence, and so were the rules that it was forced to follow. This was the life of the tribe, a very complex set of rules on which every action and every situation had to be based. The number of words was limited, and, faced with the multiform world and its countless things, men defended themselves by inventing a finite number of sounds combined in various ways.
The storyteller began to put forth words, not because he thought others might reply with other, predictable words, but to test the extent to which words could fit with one another, could give birth to one another, in order to extract an explanation of the world from the thread of every possible spoken narrative, and from the arabesque that nouns and verbs, subjects and predicates performed as they unfolded from one another. The figures available to the storyteller were very few: the jaguar, the coyote, the toucan, the piranha; or else father and son, brother-in-law and uncle, wife and mother and sister and mother-in-law. The actions these figures could perform were likewise rather limited: they could be born, die, copulate, sleep, fish, hunt, climb trees, dig burrows, eat and defecate, smoke vegetable fibers, make prohibitions, transgress them, steal or give away fruit or other things-things that were also classified in a limited catalogue. The storyteller explored the possibilities implied in his own language by combining and changing the permutations of the figures and the actions, and of the objects on which these actions could be brought to bear.
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Martin Ringot

From this, Calvino explains that all the folktales work according to the same logics, "so they would be studied according to the mathematical process of combinatorial analysis". And he wonders if even modern pieces of literature can also be studied that way. 6/23

Is this true only of oral narrative traditions? Or can it be maintained of literature in all its variety of forms and complexities? As early as the 1920s, the Russian Formalists began to make modern stories and novels the object of their analysis, breaking down their complex structures into functional segments. In France today the semiological school of Roland Barthes, having sharpened its knives on the structures of advertising or of women's fashion magazines, is at last turning its attention to literature; the eighth issue of the magazine Communications was devoted to the structural analysis of the short story. Naturally enough, the material that lends itself best to this kind of treatment is still to be found in the various forms of popular fiction. If the Russians studied the Sherlock Holmes stories, today it is James Bond who provides the structuralists with their most apt exemplars.
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Martin Ringot

But he is well aware that this theoretical breakthrough is just the beginning. Based on his latest readings, Calvino explains how the computer was able to impersonate a human brain and helped us understand better how it works. And for Calvino, it works in a combinatory way. 7/23

enormous) number of sensory and motor organs. Electronic brains, even if they are still far from producing all the functions of the human brain, are nonetheless capable of providing us with a convincing theoretical model for the most complex processes of our memory, our mental associations, our imagination, our conscience. Shannon, Weiner, von Neumann, and Turing have radically altered our image of our mental processes. In the place of the ever-changing cloud that we carried in our heads until the other day, the condensing and dispersal of which we attempted to understand by describing impalpable psychological states and shadowy landscapes of the soul — in the place of all this we now feel the rapid passage of signals on the intricate circuits that connect the relays, the diodes, the transistors with which our skulls are crammed. Just as no chess player will ever live long enough to exhaust all the combinations of possible moves for the thirty-two pieces on the chessboard, so we know (given the fact that our minds are chessboards with [...]
[...] hundreds of billions of pieces) that not even in a lifetime lasting as long as the universe would one ever manage to make all possible plays. But we also know that all these are implicit in the overall code of mental plays, according to the rules by which each of us, from one moment to the next, formulates his thoughts, swift or sluggish, cloudy or crystalline as they may be.
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Martin Ringot

For the Italian writer, this is huge progress because we finally cracked the code of human language. And diferent literary groups emerge from these discoveries, such as the French OuLiPo. 8/23

Mankind is beginning to understand how to dismantle and reassemble the most complex and unpredictable of all its machines: language. Today's world is far richer in words and concepts and signs than the world that surrounded primitive man, and the uses of the various levels of language are a great deal more complex. Using transformational mathematical patterns, the [...]
[...] American school led by Chomsky is exploring the deep structure of language, lying at the roots of the logical processes that may constitute no longer a historical characteristic of man, but a biological one. And extreme simplification of logical formulas, on the other hand, is used by the French school of structural semantics headed by A. J. Greimas. This school analyzes the narrative quality of all discourse, which may be reduced to a ratio between what they call actants.
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Martin Ringot

The natural following would be to have a machine that can replace the author and the poet, just as we already have machines to read and analyze text. Would it be possible? he asks.
(I remind you that he wrote this in 1967) 9/23

Having laid down these procedures and entrusted a computer with the task of carrying out these operations, will we have a machine capable of replacing the poet and the author? Just as we already have machines that can read, machines that perform a linguistic analysis of literary texts, machines that make translations and summaries, will we also have machines capable of conceiving and composing poems and novels?
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Martin Ringot

And he really though it through, wondering if a machine could emulate the whole psychological and biographical troubles that lead to writing what an author could write at a given moment.
What would be a machine's style ? Could it be other than classicist? 10/23

And I am not now thinking of a machine capable merely of "assembly-line" literary production, which would already be mechanical in itself. I am thinking of a writing machine that would bring to the page all those things that we are accustomed to consider as the most jealously guarded attributes of our psychological life, of our daily experience, our unpredictable changes of mood and inner relations, despairs and moments of illumination. What are these if not so many linguistic "fields," for which we might well succeed in establishing the vocabulary, grammar, syntax, and properties of permutation?
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Martin Ringot

Because, as he adds, "the true literary machine will be one that itself feels the need to produce disorder" but not only! It could be a machine capable of analyzing the market's and critics' needs thanks to machine learning and big data analysis.
(Again. 1967. Star Wars wasn't even a thing yet.) 11/23

The true literature machine will be one that itself feels the need to produce disorder, as a reaction against its preceding production of order: a machine that will produce avant-garde work to free its circuits when they are choked by too long a production of classicism. In fact, given that developments in cybernetics lean toward machines capable of learning, of changing their own programs, of developing their own sensibilities and their own needs, nothing prevents us from foreseeing a literature-machine that at a certain point feels unsatisfied with its own traditionalism and starts to propose new ways of writing, turning its own codes completely upside down. To gratify critics who look for similarities between things literary and things historical, sociological, or economic, the machine could correlate its own changes of style to the variations in certain statistical indices of production, or income, or military expen- diture, or the distribution of decision-making powers. That indeed will be the literature that corresponds perfectly to a theoretical hypothesis: it will, at last, be the literature.
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Martin Ringot

Why on earth is this good news? Well, according to Calvino, it is because at last we understand how the whole literary machine works instead of hiding behind false curtains like "genius", "talent", "inspiration" or "intuition" which are all worse ways to get things done than letting a machine "follow a systematic and conscientious route". 12/23

Now, some of you may wonder why I so gaily announce prospects that in most men of letters arouse tearful laments punctuated by cries of execration. The reason is that I have always known, more or less obscurely, that things stood this way, not the way they were commonly said to stand. Various aesthetic theories maintained that poetry was a matter of inspiration descending from I know not what lofty place, or welling up from I know not what great depths, or else pure intuition, or an otherwise not identified moment in the life of the spirit, or the Voice of the Times with which the Spirit of the World chooses to speak to the poet, or a reflection of social structures that by means of some unknown optical phenomenon is projected on the page, or a direct grasp on the psychology of the depths that enables us to ladle out images of the unconscious, both individual and collective; or at any rate something intuitive, immediate, authentic, and all-embracing that springs up who knows how, something equivalent and homologous to something else, and symbolic of it. But in these theories there always remained a void that no one knew how to fill, a zone of darkness between cause and effect: how does one arrive at the written page?
Writers, as they have always been up to now, are already writing machines; or at least they are when things are going well. What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration or intuition is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking short cuts, whereas the machine would follow a systematic and conscientious route while being extremely rapid and multiple at the same time.
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Martin Ringot

Finally, the one thing every writer complains about - writing - will be over because a machine will be able to do it for us! We'll just have to do the pleasant thing, that is reading ! Actually, the only thing we'll get rid of is the author, "that spoiled child of ignorance".

Yay !... right? 13/23

The work will continue to be born, to be judged, to be destroyed or constantly renewed on con- tact with the eye of the reader. What will vanish is the figure of the author, that personage to whom we persist in attributing functions that do not belong to him, the author as an exhibitor of his own soul in the permanent Exhibition of Souls, the author as the exploiter of sensory and interpretive organs more receptive than the average.... The author: that anachronistic personage, the bearer of messages, the director of consciences, the giver of lectures to cultural bodies. The rite we are celebrating at this moment would be absurd if we were unable to give it the sense of a funeral service, seeing the author off to the Nether Regions and celebrating the constant resurrection of the work of literature; if we were unable to introduce into this meeting of ours something of the gaiety of those funeral feasts at which the ancients re-established their contact with living things. And so the author vanishes-that spoiled child of ignorance-to give place to a more thoughtful person, a person who will know that the author is a machine, and will know how this machine works.
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Martin Ringot

But Calvino wouldn't stop to this conclusion as he's not keen on losing his job. Rather he explores the opposite thesis as the idea of being replaced by a machine is both reassuring and deeply frightening. 14/23

Let us see what my psy- chological reaction is when I learn that writing is purely and simply a process of combination among given elements. Well, then, what I instinctively feel is a sense of relief, of security. The same sort of relief and sense of security that I feel every time I discover that a mess of vague and indeterminate lines turns out to be a precise geometric form; or every time I succeed in discerning a series of facts, and choices to be made out of a finite number of possibilities, in the otherwise shapeless avalanche of events. Faced with the vertigo of what is countless, unclassifiable, in a state of flux, I feel reassured by what is finite, "discrete," and reduced to a system. Why is this? Does my attitude contain a hidden element of fear of the unknown, of the wish to set limits to my world and crawl back into my shell? Thus my stance, which was intended to be provocative and even profane, allows of the suspicion that, on the contrary, it is dictated by some kind of intellectual agoraphobia, almost a form of exorcism to defend me from the whirlwinds that literature so constantly has to face.
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Martin Ringot

Literature could just be a combinatorial process using the existing words and concepts, but is that all? In fact, for Calvino, "the struggle of literature is [...] a struggle to escape from the confines of language." Literature relies on the untold, on the dark side of language. Even the storyteller of the tribe is aware of it. 15/23

Did we say that literature is entirely involved with language, is merely the permutation of a restricted number of elements and functions? But is the tension in literature not continually striving to escape from this finite number? Does it not continually attempt to say something it cannot say, something that it does not know, and that no one could-ever know? A thing cannot be known when the words and concepts used to say it and think it have not yet been used in that position, not yet arranged in that order, with that meaning. The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.
The storyteller of the tribe puts together phrases and images: the younger son gets lost in the forest, he sees a light in the distance, he walks and walks; the fable unwinds from sentence to sentence, and where is it leading? To the point at which something not yet said, something as yet only darkly felt by presentiment, suddenly appears and seizes us and tears us to pieces, like the fangs of a man-eating witch. Through the forest of fairy tale the vibrancy of myth passes like a shudder of wind.
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Martin Ringot

And this dark side, Calvino calls it myth. It is the hidden part of every story, "a language vacuum that draws words up into its vortex". In other words, it is "a vestige of taboo", the land of prohibition, of the things we'd like to say but can't. 16/23

Myth is the hidden part of every story, the buried part, the region that is still unexplored because there are as yet no words to enable us to get there. The narrator's voice in the daily tribal assemblies is not enough to relate the myth. One needs special times and places, exclusive meetings; the words alone are not enough, and we need a whole series of signs with many meanings, which is [...]
[...] to say a rite. Myth is nourished by silence as well as by words. A silent myth makes its presence felt in secular narrative and everyday words; it is a language vacuum that draws words up into its vortex and bestows a form on fable. But what is a language vacuum if not a vestige of taboo, of a ban on mentioning something, on pronouncing certain names, of a prohibition either present or ancient? Literature follows paths that flank and cross the barriers of prohibition, that lead to saying what could not be said, to an invention that is always a reinvention of words and stories that have been banished from the individual or collective memory. Therefore myth acts on fable as a repetitive force, obliging it to go back on its tracks even when it has set off in directions that appear to lead somewhere completely different.
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Martin Ringot

The more the literary processes are discovered and reproduced with a machine, the more unconscious remains uncharted and frightening. What machines can't say is the unsayable. Here come the ghosts ! 👻 17/23

The unconscious is the ocean of the unsayable, of what has been expelled from the land of language, removed as a result of ancient prohibitions. The unconscious speaks-in dreams, in verbal slips, in sudden associations-with borrowed words, stolen symbols, linguistic contraband, until literature redeems these ter- ritories and annexes them to the language of the waking world. The power of modern literature lies in its willingness to give a voice to what has remained unexpressed in the social or individual unconscious: this is the gauntlet it throws down time and again. The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts. Dreams of progress and reason are haunted by nightmares.
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Martin Ringot

Moreover, are the two - cybernetics and ghosts - really far from each other? One has to go through the combinatory game to find the untold and discover the unsayable. Through playing on words to poetry. 18/23

Literature is a combinatorial game that pursues the possibilities implicit in its own material, independent of the personality of the poet, but it is a game that at a certain point is invested with an unexpected meaning, a meaning that is not patent on the linguistic plane on which we were working but has slipped in from another level, activating something that on that second level is of great concern to the author or his society. The literature machine can perform all the permutations possible on a given material, but the poetic result will be the particular effect of one of these permutations on a man endowed with a con- sciousness and an unconscious, that is, an empirical and historical man. It will be the shock that occurs only if the writing machine is surrounded by the hidden ghosts of the individual and of his society.
To return to the storyteller of the tribe, he continues imperturbably to make his permutations of jaguars and toucans until the moment comes when one of his innocent little tales explodes into a terrible revelation: a myth, which must be recited in secret, and in a secret place.
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Martin Ringot

Actually this is the conclusion to my PhD dissertation: for Italo Calvino, literature lies in breaking the structure that let it happen. The ghost can take more untold and unsayable shapes than the machine will ever dream of. 19/23

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Martin Ringot

After Cosmicomics, Italo Calvino wrote a kind of sequel entitled "T Zero". One of the short stories tell the story of Edmond Dantès, the Count of Monte Cristo who, in order to escape the Fortress, while Faria keeps digging in random places, tries to imagine the perfect unescapable fortress. 20/23

If I succeed in mentally constructing a fortress from which it is impossible to escape, this imagined fortress either will be the same as the real one-and in this case it is certain we shall never escape from here, but at least we will achieve the serenity of knowing we are here because we could be nowhere else-or it will be a fortress from which escape is even more impossible than from here-which would be a sign that here an opportunity of escape exists: we have only to identify the point where the imagined fortress does not coincide with the real one and then find it.
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Martin Ringot

This unescapable fortress is the literature freed from authors - and, I think, readers. But all the AI will always have holes and dark spots and ghosts they cannot see. That's for us to spot them and make myth come true. 21/23

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