One reason for this is that the dimensions of ourselves that are churned up while under the influence of psychedelics are ones that we often have difficulty squaring with the persons endowed with moral agency that we ordinarily take ourselves to be. It is normal to recoil from some of what we find within ourselves, to seek to disavow it once the trip is over. But the fact that we are able to find hidden dimensions of ourselves that seem to have a life of their own, whether we like what we find or not, while under the influence of certain substances, is itself of interest, or should be, to anyone who wants to understand what it is to live in this world, with a human mind and a sense of wonder.

It raises the question: how is it that we perceive reality the way we do? And what does it say about our perception of reality that it can be so fundamentally altered through an intentional alteration of our internal chemistry? Do psychedelics warp our perception of reality, drawing us further than in our ordinary lucid state from the actual way things are? Or do they rather reveal something to us about the way things are that we ordinarily cannot perceive? It seems that to answer in favor of the view that psychedelics push us further from apprehension of the world as it is presupposes that our mind is, in its default state, naturally and adequately constituted so as to know reality itself. But philosophy has spent the last few millennia coming up with some pretty good reasons why we should be skeptical of the idea that the mind is so constituted.

Something therefore seems a bit off, a bit fishy, when philosophers, along with the surrounding culture, shy away from psychedelics, whether taking them or studying their effects, on the grounds that they distance you from reality. Philosophy is born of the realization that we already are, or seem to be, at some distance from reality even in our default mode of consciousness. Why not, then, explore all the modes of consciousness available to us, considering what each of them might have to tell us about the relationship between mind and world? That is exactly what I did while researching my new book, On Drugs: Psychedelics, Philosophy, and the Nature of Reality.

Not so long ago, I was in a city in the Netherlands for three nights. I had been invited to give a public lecture, and I decided to stay on over the weekend to conduct some research for my book. In that time, I took psychedelics twice.

The evening of the second psilocybin trip, having taken more than before, and far more than is recommended, would turn out to be one of the most intense and transformative experiences of my life. Though I bump up against the limits of language when I try to convey what it was like.

My hotel room had a cheap-looking poster of Marilyn Monroe framed on the wall. One of the first signs that the psilocybin was taking effect arrived when I was walking towards the bathroom, and I saw her there and paused in front of her image and stared at her in absolute wonder. “Do I know Marilyn Monroe?” I asked myself. I never met her, but she has been with me my whole life, just as she has probably been with everyone reading this piece. She is at least as familiar to me as, say, any of my first cousins. And yet, I reflect, I have never so much as greeted her. How strange! So, there in that hotel room, I greeted Marilyn Monroe, and it was heartfelt, and I was certain that whatever just transpired counted as a meaningful interpersonal exchange.

But this was just the beginning, as the particular quality of that encounter with Marilyn would be felt 10 times more strongly when I returned to the bed and pulled up old clips on YouTube of Cass Elliott, more commonly known as Mama Cass. For some inscrutable reason, earlier in that day I had had an earworm from The Mamas and the Papas’ 1967 song “Creeque Alley” going through my head, in particular the line that runs: “And no one’s gettin’ fat except Mama Cass.” This had come to me in my completely unaltered mental state, a reminder that the mind and memory are a marvel, too, without psychedelics. I don’t know what it was doing there. I’m not particularly a fan of Sixties folkpop. But there it was, in my head, and so I pulled it up on the computer, and I ended up spending the next few hours watching clips of Mama Cass on the talk show circuit, all the while feeling not only that I knew her, and had always known her, but that I had always loved her.

To say it like this sounds ridiculous, but the feeling was entirely sincere. Something about Mama Cass seemed to tell the whole story of my own existence. I suddenly recalled a black-and-white picture of my parents, from the summer of 1972. My mother is pregnant with me, and she is unusually heavy. Then I recalled a distant memory from early childhood when that photo was being shown around to guests at our home. I knew I was in it, though still unborn, and I knew I was the reason why my mother had gained so much weight. Then I recalled that someone, I don’t know who, said, when looking at the photo, that my mother looked like Mama Cass. Resemblance, now, seemed to collapse into identity, or rather the distinction between them no longer mattered. Mama Cass suddenly appeared to me as “Mama” in the fullest sense: the fount of my being and the origin of my world.

I am not going to attempt to defend this conviction, which felt so strong at the time. That it is indefensible, that it is ridiculous, is precisely what I am attempting to convey. Why did such thoughts come to me so intensely and unbidden? The mind, it seemed to me as I reviewed the experience on the following day, is just so much more wondrous, so much stranger, than my professional colleagues ordinarily take it to be! We philosophers are typically concerned to understand how a human mind can entertain such propositions as “There is a pain in my foot” or how it can perceive a red dot on a screen. These are fascinating problems, too, but surely we might also gain from considering how the mind can become convinced that a long-dead pop star has become identical with one’s own mother or with something like “cosmic motherhood”.

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I think at least a part of the reason we tend to stick with the pain in the foot or the dot on the screen is that, in order to talk about the stranger divagations of the mind, we generally have to acknowledge that we have experienced them, and that is an acknowledgment that typically entails a measure of shame. Part of my motivation in writing what I have written here is to push beyond that shame, to write about conscious experience in a way that truly faces up to the weirdness of the world.

Was my encounter with Mama Cass so ridiculous in the end? Was I completely out of line in my conviction that I loved her? In the Symposium Plato has Socrates describe the ideal ascension of this emotion, from its lowest to its highest expressions. Early in life, we experience love mixed with sexual desire for the beauty of a particular other person’s body, and then we move from there to love of all beautiful bodies. But if we progress as we might hope to do, towards wisdom, then as we age we will also gradually come to love all beautiful minds, and in turn all beautiful institutions and endeavors, then all beautiful knowledge, and in the end, as wise old philosophers, our love will be focused upon nothing but Love itself.

The truth is that most of us vacillate throughout our lives between the various positions on this imagined hierarchy. But whether we think of the ascension as a one-way journey or not, the key philosophical idea in it is that there is a real entity, Love, that exists independently of any of its instances as we know them from experience. This is what we generally refer to as a “universal”, and the question whether such a thing exists or not — not just loveable creatures and things, but Love itself; not just instances of justice, but Justice itself, and so on — will divide the schools of the philosophers, with their running “footnotes to Plato”, as Alfred North Whitehead described the history of Western philosophy, for millennia to come.

I am certainly not going to make any progress towards solving the problem of universals in my book, nor even stake out a position on either of the familiar sides of the debate. But I will remark, first, that psychedelic experience can itself deliver a strong argument in favor of the realist camp in the debate. Under the influence of psilocybin, I seemed not to love Mama Cass, for example, in her particularity, but rather to love her because this love is a point of entry, so to speak, to the experience of Love itself. When I listen to music while on psilocybin, I love the particular song, but I also feel, much more strongly, that the song is my point of entry to Music, with a capital “M”, to the thing itself that exists eternally behind and before all the songs that have ever been sung.

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We all have this feeling from time to time, to some extent. It’s the feeling, in fact, that music and poetry excel above all at conjuring in us: the feeling that there is another dimension that these works of art are coming from. Ordinarily, in a sober and lucid mind, this feeling mostly gets expressed in the form of longing. Songs we love have a particular power to make us feel as though there is a world that we know, somehow, but from which we are cut off. Songs seem to emanate from that world but generally do not seem fully to open that world up to us. Yet under the influence of psilocybin, one of my most vivid thoughts goes something like this: “So that other world is real after all, and it is now open to me! I wasn’t only imagining it!”

Do I still think that other world is real, now, when my brain chemistry is back to its default setting? The answer is complicated, but I believe philosophy can help us face up to the challenge somewhat.

The trouble is that Western philosophy has long valorized the sober, lucid mind above the drugged, drunk, or dreaming one. For at least the past two millennia, Western philosophy has defined itself in contrast to other related endeavors, such as mysticism, theology, poetry, and myth, even as nonspecialists often run these endeavors together. The key difference between philosophy and mysticism in particular, and indeed a key point of pride among the philosophers, is that unlike the mystics — who often rely on techniques to bring themselves into altered states of consciousness, which might include drugs, but also include meditative practices, or attention to one’s own dreams, or the hallucinations induced by descending into the dark depths of a cave — we philosophers are expected to rely entirely on the cognitive faculties available to us in our lucid, waking, and sober state. Our aim is to produce natural-language propositions that can be shared with other philosophers, discussed, argued about, and nitpicked.

Philosophy is almost always held to be concerned, by definition, with meanings and arguments, not with what lies beyond these. But there has also always been a dissenting camp, which says that philosophy should occupy itself with whatever human beings experience, whether easily rendered into propositional form or not. It may be that it is ultimately for the good of philosophy if some of its practitioners willingly run the risk of being seen as having gone off the deep end.

***

This is an excerpt from On Drugs: Psychedelics, Philosophy, and the Nature of Reality. Copyright (c) 2025 by Justin Smith-Ruiu. Used with permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation, division of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

The woman was Elisa Bindhoff, an artist and writer from Chile, whom the man had met not long before in New York. The two had come to take advantage of Nevada’s famously flexible approach to matrimony, in the hope of breaking with their pasts, to the extent that this is possible for any being with a memory and a conscience, and to start over again, together. Newly wed, the pair next took off for a nearby Hopi reservation, carrying a volume of the works of utopian socialist Charles Fourier.

I have sometimes wondered whether André Breton’s unlikely visit to Reno did not play a role in shaping my own sensibilities, given I was born just around the corner from the chapel in 1972. Perhaps the man had inadvertently shed there some animula or inferior soul, which then spent the next 27 years migrating through the HVAC systems of our town’s many casinos and breakfast smorgies, until the appointed hour arrived and it made its way into this fresh babe’s body to begin again.

I am not saying I am the reincarnation of the founder of Surrealism. Not exactly. But I do discern from his Nevada sojourn, more than from the nearby atomic tests of the following years, a certain change in the air of the place that must be taken into account when explaining the strange mutations still occurring in births there a generation later — whereby the European avant-garde contributed its venerable cachet to the new varieties of West Coast freakdom that I myself was raised on. Anyhow, stranger things have happened. Stranger things are always happening. Existence itself is vastly stranger in fact than any scenario of transmigration we might conjure in our imaginations. And it is only by full, free, audacious use of the imagination that we may hope to come to an adequate comprehension of existence. This is what we might call the philosophy of Surrealism.

This year marks an even more important anniversary than the one I am already anticipating for 2025: the centenary of Breton’s epoch-making Manifesto of Surrealism. On a certain reading, this work is but the cri de coeur of a spirited young man with bold opinions of his contemporaries’ talents, and a very high estimation of his own. More charitably, it is a resounding defence of human freedom, and of the role of an unfettered, autonomous imagination in freedom’s exercise. “The mere word ‘freedom’ is the only one that still excites me,” Breton writes in the manifesto. No matter how oppressive our social arrangements might become, there is for him no arrangement that can fully stifle freedom of thought, whose ultimate expression comes through in the faculty of the imagination. This faculty, he writes, “alone offers me some intimation of what can be”.

Imagination pullulates beneath the surface at every moment of our waking lives, yet it is only in states of altered consciousness, most notably in madness and dreams, that we may hope to have the clearest vision of “what can be”. (Breton does not have all that much to say about drugs, an interesting absence at the dawn of the age of mescalin.)

“I have always been amazed,” he reflects, “at the way an ordinary observer lends so much more credence and attaches so much more importance to waking events than to those occurring in dreams.” He anticipates a future in which the opposition between dream and reality is resolved “into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak”. He laments the absence of attention to the dream-life in modern philosophy, wondering suggestively: “When will we have sleeping logicians, sleeping philosophers?”

As for madness, Breton concedes that it is not exactly conducive to the discovery of truth, as the insane are, to some extent, “victims of their imagination”. In their case this faculty “induces them not to pay attention to certain rules — outside of which the species feels itself threatened — which we are all supposed to know and respect”. This indifference can indeed get them into trouble, and yet, Breton insists, the resolute indifference of the insane to the judgments and even the punishments doled out to them by society “allows us to suppose that they derive a great deal of comfort and consolation from their imagination”.

Already we are seeing that for Breton Surrealism is more than just a celebration of harmless reverie, but rather a bold defiance of the modern aspiration to a full rational ordering of human life and of human society. This aspiration had taken root already in early modern Europe with the emergence of rationalist philosophy, only to become hegemonic by the end of the 19th century in the institutions of science, and in the technocracy developed to manage science’s ever-accelerating progress.

But in truth France can institutionalise just about anything. One season’s ultimate transgression — Georges Bataille, say, effusing about the “solar anus” — becomes the next season’s stuffy and convention-bound academic conference. And so, too, with Breton. By the Fifties, Surrealism will have won over at least one prominent academic defender in Ferdinand Alquié, professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne, who in 1955 published a curious study entitled Philosophie du surréalisme.

Here Alquié argues that Surrealism ought to count as philosophy in the fullest sense, to the extent that it aims at liberation through self-knowledge. And in this respect, Alquié contends, Breton is in his way a legitimate heir to the tradition of his countryman René Descartes. Alquié himself had been a devoted Cartesian since childhood, convinced of the soundness and validity of the so-called Cogito argument, in which his predecessor establishes the certainty of his own existence as an immaterial thinking subject. His life-long project was to demonstrate what he took to be a significant harmony between Cartesianism and Surrealism. “There are,” Alquié insists, “points of contact between the thought of Breton and that of Descartes.” It is with respect to dreams that Alquié believes this harmony can be discerned most clearly. “Descartes is the only philosopher,” he explains, “who held that dreaming and waking are, in a number of cases, indistinguishable.”

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I think Alquié quite exaggerates the prospects for reconciliation here. For Descartes wrote about dreams only because he was worried about the possibility of mistaking them for reality, or of mistaking reality for a dream. He focused on the similarity between waking and dreaming only because he found it so urgent to identify and isolate the key markers by which we might reassure ourselves that we are not dreaming. From there he sought to cordon off and isolate the dream-life, minimising the threat it poses to the proper use of our faculty of reason.

More generally, in Cartesian rationalism the imagination, far from being the highest expression of our freedom as it will later be for Breton, is seen mostly as a degraded mental faculty, a crutch relied on by finite minds such as ours. When God, conceived by Descartes as a divine geometer, thinks about triangles, he does not form a mental image to help him comprehend their essence. He simply cuts right to the chase and contemplates the rational properties of triangles as revealed in geometrical proof. For Breton, by contrast, human imagination has an almost demiurgic power. Poetry returns for him to its most primordial sense, as poïesis, the activity of the human mind that brings us closest to the world-making omnipotence of the Creator.

Our creative potential, however, is best realised when creation occurs less in a manner analogous to an architect building an edifice, and more as a sort of hypostasis, as in a cup so full it cannot help but spill over. Yet however things may appear, our creative outpourings are never just n’importe quoi, never simply whatever happens to come out. Rather, the productions of the imagination are governed, Breton thinks, by a certain automatism, which he describes as “a monologue spoken as rapidly as possible without any intervention on the part of the critical faculties,” and thus as “akin to spoken thought”. It is in fact in terms of automatism that Breton proposes to define Surrealism “once and for all”:

SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express — verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner — the actual func­tioning of thought.

This dimension of Surrealism is perhaps most familiar from the practice of so-called “automatic writing”. This technique has a long history, and by the 19th century it was most familiar in the context of séances, where a channeler might claim to be taking dictation from a summoned spirit. A popular product of this pastime is the Ouija board, patented in 1891 and sold to Parker Brothers in 1966.

With his Cartesianism, Alquié had hoped to resist French philosophy’s overwhelming fondness, then as today, for Baruch Spinoza. But this hope compelled him to deform Descartes almost beyond recognition in order to make him fit with his other great hero, André Breton. He would have done better, perhaps, in search of such a fit, to turn to yet another of the great early modern rationalists, G. W. Leibniz, who might be seen as having anticipated Surrealism with his own idea of spiritual automatism.

As scholars such as Christopher B. Noble have recognised, Leibniz was a very special sort of mechanical philosopher. He believed, like Descartes, that all bodies are governed entirely by mechanical laws, while no internal soul-like principle of motion and activity is needed in order exhaustively to account for bodily motion in physical terms. However, he also believed that souls, like bodies, are themselves “automatic”, in that all of their successive states unfold entirely from the sum-total of their previous states, which Leibniz sometimes calls their “complete concept”. Any individual’s complete concept will remain mostly unknown to the individual, perceived only “confusedly”, as he himself would say, or perhaps “unconsciously”, to speak in the common language of the early 20th century that Breton, as well as Sigmund Freud, prefers.

Automatism is a strange notion. It is the Greek-rooted term that is typically rendered into Latinate languages as “spontaneity”. But what is “spontaneous” is generally seen not as determined by anything prior, but rather as emerging “just because”, from the groundless and arbitrary will of a free agent, or from an objectively random process such as radioactive decay.

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These considerations may shine more light on the philosophy of Surrealism than is at first apparent. The Surrealists have sometimes been criticised, notably by their contemporaries in the OuLiPo movement, for “just saying whatever”, for letting verbiage spill out of them with no sense or order. The OuLiPians were hesitant to admit that such exercises might have interesting results, preferring instead to impose external formal constraints on their own writing — for example, eliminating the letter e, or eliminating all vowels but e —, while denying that their own unconscious minds had any role in what came out of these experiments. For OuLiPo, the machine or “automaton” of writing worked best when imposed from outside; for the Surrealists, it was the internal workings of the human imagination, fuelled by half-forgotten dreams and other subconscious burblings, that made the work come out the way it did.

But the OuLiPians were wrong to suppose that their preferred constraint was any more disciplined or structured than that of the Surrealists. The Surrealists could not tell you in advance what form their texts would take, but this does not mean that the texts were themselves formless. The form they traced, in fact, was nothing less than that of human interiority itself. And the freedom enjoyed in such a tracing exercise was not freedom to the extent that one could simply do as one wished. It was rather freedom in a distinctly Leibnizian sense, where what unfolds from the mind does so only in consequence of the nature of that mind, rather than by any “extrinsic denominations”, as Leibniz called them, almost as if he were himself describing the OuLiPian love of explicit rules.

André Breton was a true revolutionary, who already in the early Thirties found himself at sharp odds with the French Communist Party. In the Fifties, when others of the Surrealist founders, notably Paul Éluard, were still writing fawning poems for Stalin, Breton gravitated towards the Fédération Anarchiste. What he seems to have hated most is not any particular political order, from the very short list of orders we have to choose from in the modern period, but rather the metaphysics that underlies American-style capitalism and Soviet communism alike: a flat-footed realism that stupidly and incuriously denies the strangeness of our existence by deferring to the authority of science. “I loathe [the realistic attitude],” he writes in the 1924 manifesto, “for it is made up of medi­ocrity, hate, and dull conceit.”

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I used to wonder why it is only towards the end of the 19th century that we start to see anything like an intellectual and artistic avant-garde, bubbling up in the 1890s with the ‘Pataphysics of Alfred Jarry, and roaring into full cultural ascendancy in the Twenties, not least with the appearance of the Surrealists. But the explanation is in fact very simple. It was only towards the end of the 19th century that scientific rationalism had fully evolved, from an epistemic stance of individual curiosity, into a technocratic regime that shaped and limited what happens in society as a whole no less than in the laboratory or the workshop. Surrealism could only arise when it did because it was only then, or just before then, that stubborn, proud, ignorant realism had triumphed so fully as an ideological mechanism for circumscribing human freedom.

Which brings me back to the high desert of Nevada, a state known not only for its atomic tests and its pioneering innovations in the field of no-fault divorce, but also for a certain neoprimitivist fantasy festival, of which you may have heard, which takes place each year under the name of “Burning Man”. This is not just spillover from the New Age-inflected tech culture of California, as many believe. It is rather something autochthonous to the American West more generally, another sort of world-historical Spirit that already hung over the place from my earliest childhood, and that compelled those of my Western American kind to revere any and every cultural artefact that could be characterised as “weird”. Long before I was mature enough to articulate any coherent idea at all of why I liked what I liked, I knew exactly what I wanted every time I approached a record store or bookstore or novelty t-shirt shop: I wanted the weirdest shit money could buy.

Where did this cult of the weird come from? Why was it so easy to take it for granted? We have often imagined it to be a mostly post-war phenomenon, and to have reached its most effervescent peak not long after LSD hit the streets of American cities in early 1965. But there is a more longue-durée history that might plausibly identify this mostly American chapter of the history of weirdness as a relatively faint after-echo of ideas articulated in the Old World already a century ago. Among these, André Breton’s belief that the dream-life is no less important to human existence than the world we confront upon awakening, and that the “realism” that would deny this is nothing more than the mediocre and hateful ideology of modernity trying to pass itself off as self-evident, is surely among the most powerful.

The first reason for scepticism is, simply, the tremendous distance involved in any voyage from even the nearest habitable exoplanet (Proxima Centauri, about 4.25 light-years away). If such a distance can be traversed, this is almost certainly not going to happen by a means of transportation that bears any resemblance, or evolutionary connection, to the horse-cart or the school bus, as our own space shuttles still do, and as virtually all reported UFO descriptions do as well. It would simply not be fit for interstellar travel.

Even if these UFOs are often said to be operating according to mechanical principles we do not yet understand — veering off suddenly in a different direction with no apparent acceleration period, for example — they remain conventional vehicles, containers built to transport the living bodies inside them. But when it comes to traversing distances measured in light-years, it is vastly more likely that any intelligent beings that figure out how to do so will not be relying on vehicular motion as we understand it, but on the exploitation of some physical principle, such as wormholes, or some information-theoretical principle, such as one that allows them to dematerialise the unique patterns that constitute their identity, and to “beam” them across galaxies for rematerialisation elsewhere. If there are aliens among us, in short, they almost certainly didn’t come here in spaceships.

And whether they come through wormholes, or teletransportation, or some other means, it is most probable that what will count for them as “arrival” will not be an arrival in an organically embodied form. Indeed, the idea that alien visitors would come in biological bodies such as ours is, I contend, even less plausible than that they would come in artificial contraptions. Organic substrates, as the philosopher and xenobiologist Susan Schneider has argued, may well turn out to be a relatively short-lived host for intelligence whenever and wherever it emerges in the universe, soon to be replaced, wherever a technologically advanced species appears in the cosmos, by robots.

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If intelligent beings are smart enough to get here, they are almost certainly smart enough to get here without dragging their bodies along. They could get around this hitch by transferring their consciousness or personal identity (whatever that is) into some more durable physical substrate — either a technological device of their own making, or, more intriguingly, a pre-existing physical system or process in the universe into which they figure out how to integrate themselves. To be clear, I have no clue how this would work. But neither you nor I have any idea how you could sit your living body down and fly a school-bus-like shuttle across interstellar distances — so the modal operator at work in both cases is not concrete feasibility, but only conceptual possibility.

Our alien visitors could also pull off such an impressive feat simply by means of what we, with our limited technological imagination, would classify as “simulations”. For us, when a high-powered telescope or an unmanned probe sends back images of objects in space, we consider that we are “seeing” and “experiencing” these objects only in a downgraded better-than-nothing sense, as mediated representations. But this may only be because our technologies of representation are still in a primitive stage, while another race of intelligent beings might well succeed in improving these technologies to the point where technologically mediated representation might count for them as “the real thing”. It might be both easier and more desirable for them to avail themselves of such representations than physically to travel and to experience that thing unmediated in a way that we ourselves, in our present technological condition, would consider “real”.

To imagine that one must go to another part of the universe, in one’s own organic body, in order to truthfully claim that one has been there, may turn out to be somewhat like supposing, circa 1920, that in order to participate in a conference with colleagues in Paris, one must actually go to Paris, rather than joining them by Zoom — a possibility that would only come onto the horizon a century or so later.

But let us suppose just for a moment that alien beings did set themselves the goal of making an “actual” voyage to Earth in their standard-issue, carbon-based, biologically evolved bodies. And let us suppose they succeeded. What might these bodies look like? There are at least some compelling arguments that any technologically advanced race of beings is likely to share certain anatomical traits with us: appendages that grasp, for example, or adaptations facilitating gravity-bound terrestrial locomotion. I have even heard it argued that space-travelling aliens would probably be equipped with exactly two eyes, and as with us, these would be found in the front of their faces, facilitating binocular vision.

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We know from convergent evolution in widely different phylogenies on Earth that different species can come to have similar appearances (e.g., placental wolves in the northern hemisphere and marsupial “wolves” in Australia), and in principle, it is possible that xenobiological evolution could yield up bipedal, two-handed beings with eyes in the front of their heads. But wolves and “wolves” started from a common mammalian ancestor, and what you could not expect to find in any interstellar convergence of organic Baupläne is a being such as the one purportedly discovered of late in Mexico, which clearly has not just hands, feet, and a face, but also a ribcage, a spinal column, and an unmistakable pelvis. On Earth only about 3% of all animal species are vertebrates; how strange it would be if our first extraterrestrial visitors turned out to be vertebrates too!

But the really interesting question is why, in the first place, we started thinking about the beings that inhabit the world “up there” (call it the heavens, or the celestial spheres, or outer space, according to the conventions of your era) as similar to us in their bodily conformation, which is to say as organic beings.

This habit of ours has a very precise starting point in history. We could probably find some earlier examples if we tried, but I tend to date the birth of aliens, as we know them today, to 1609, the year Johannes Kepler wrote his Somnium (which would only be published posthumously in 1634). This is a peculiar work, both a proto-science-fiction reverie, as the Latin title suggests, and a work of properly modern relativistic astronomy, in which the author attempts to describe how the orbits of the other celestial bodies would appear if one were observing them from the moon. In the dream-like part of the work, Kepler relates the story not only of the transit of his hero Duracotus to our nearest satellite (evidently with the assistance of some psychoactive plants), but also the various animal-like beings he finds once he arrives there, including some creeping and slithering reptiles, and some sort of giant camel. Some decades later, in his Histoire comique des États et Empires du Soleil of 1662, the French author Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac would describe the different species of birds that inhabit the surface of the sun.

Why are we beginning to find birds, snakes, and camels in a region of the cosmos where previously we could have expected to find only spirituous beings, divinities, and angels? During this same period, natural philosophers such as René Descartes and G.W. Leibniz were intent on arguing for the uniformity of nature. The new mechanical philosophy required its adherents to accept the principle that, as Leibniz would put it: “Always and everywhere, it’s the same as it is here.”

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For Descartes, it made no sense to divide the cosmos into different ontological realms, as the Aristotelians had previously done, where different laws apply to each. On the Aristotelian model, the most significant boundary in the physical universe is the one traced by the orbit of the moon: everything below it is a “sublunar” being, subject to generation and corruption (i.e. birth and death), while everything above it is immortal. In the new Cartesian physics, by contrast, the laws that govern the motions of bodies here on Earth, from the arc of a projectile shot from a cannon, to the rising and lowering of the tides, to the generation of a foetus, are exactly the same as the laws that govern the formation of other star systems, and presumably also of the planets and of the beings inhabiting them.

In other words, the key theoretical innovations of the scientific revolution positively require that, if there are intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe, they are like us. Specifically, this would mean that they depend for their existence not on some fine homogeneous ether or quintessence (as the celestial beings were often conceived in premodern cosmology), but rather on a specific arrangement of internal organs constituting a fragile and perishable organic body. In short, the homogenisation of the physical universe, which had been such a key part of the new mechanical physics, caused a corollary reconceptualisation of the inhabitants of the world “up there”, from quasi-divine beings that were either immaterial or ethereal, to ordinary reptiles or humanoids such as those that have remained the staples of science fiction, and of tabloid claims of alien sightings, to the present day.

Nearly all the great Enlightenment philosophers presupposed that other worlds must be inhabited by organically embodied intelligent beings like us. Thus Immanuel Kant declares in his Critique of Pure Reason of 1781: “I say that it is not merely an opinion but a strong belief (on the correctness of which I would wager many advantages in life), that there are also inhabitants of other worlds.” Kant’s sometimes-adversary, the significantly less rigorous Emanuel Swedenborg, wrote extensively of his own purported voyages to Jupiter and Saturn, where he learned a great deal about the inhabitants’ agricultural methods, the techniques they employ for yoking their beasts of burden, and so on. For more than 200 years, for serious and unhinged thinkers alike, outer space was teeming with a very familiar variety of life, not so different from the sort we know here on Earth.

By the late 19th century, just at the dawn of the era of rocket science, with actual space exploration finally within reach (Konstantin Tsiolkovsky would publish his “ideal rocket equation” in 1903), institutional science entered a sort of “alien winter”. I deploy this term in conscious allusion to the “consciousness winter” that hung over brain science for the better part of a century, scaring researchers away from any acknowledgement of the self-evident reality of internal subjective states of the mind.

In the same fashion, for most of the 20th century — notwithstanding Carl Sagan’s enthusiasm and the small budgets allocated for programmes like SETI — sober-minded experts placed a high premium on the public expression of scepticism about non-terrestrial intelligent life. Naysaying became part of the system of values and presuppositions by which the public identity of an expert was confirmed. In the same period, preoccupation with aliens mostly became the monopoly of fantasists of various sorts, either the creators of fictional entertainments or people who were unbothered by the social stigma of holding beliefs perceived to be “fringe”.

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Why exactly this “winter” set in when it did has much to do with the broader cultural history of science and of the perception of expertise, and indeed seems not entirely separate from the long banishment of consciousness as a category of inquiry. Throughout the 20th century, for the most part, excessive interest in extraterrestrials was the telltale mark of a crank. This attitude had much to do with the reigning positivism of the scientific community, and the general consensus that speculation about things happening beyond the sphere of direct observability is ipso facto unfalsifiable and therefore unscientific.

But this era has decidedly come to an end in the past decade or so, as vast social, economic, and technological transformations have fundamentally realigned the public’s perception of expertise, and of who gets to claim to have it. After the crisis of epistemic authority that experts brought upon themselves throughout the Covid pandemic, and after the replacement of our old media ecosystem by one in which authoritativeness has become more than ever a sort of popularity contest, we are now in a period of history in which extraterrestrials are important if the masses of internet users think they are important, scientific consensus be damned. Under these conditions, the 20th century’s “alien winter” comes to look to many like a government cover-up. The truth is far more banal.

The cultural position of aliens has changed radically in the 21st century, both as a result of changes in the cultural position of science, but also as a result of real and promising scientific breakthroughs. Notably, since the Nineties, there has been a tremendous revolution in the way we observe, catalogue, and estimate the number of habitable exoplanets, and significant discoveries have also been made in astrochemistry, favouring the theory of so-called “soft panspermia”, according to which the chemical compounds that brought about the first life-forms on earth are by no means rare in the cosmos. Given these scientific advances, and given our new information ecosystem, it is safe to say that we will be hearing a lot more about aliens in the coming years. But we would be foolish to believe that this is the result of an actual uptick in sightings, or that our own most recent cultural representations of intelligent life beyond Earth get something uniquely right about the heavens that our ancestors failed to notice.

But Rothenberg’s most enduring contribution would come a decade later, after a fairly radical shift from modernism to the new project of “ethnopoetics”. This shift led him to work in the vein of the anthologist, notably while compiling his Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia, and Oceania (1968), collecting and sharing the work of poetic traditions from around the world, rather than centring his own “sole-author” work as a poet. But the line is never so clear, and in hindsight it seems reasonable to suppose that Rothenberg’s anthological work is itself a variety of poiesis, by which he transmits to the attention of English-language readers a vastly deeper and more vital sense of what poetry might be, and of what poetry long was, than the one we got stuck with in the modern period.

What we call “poetry” today is mostly an etiolated art form, a vestige of something that in its more archaic expressions does a great deal more — does everything, in fact. Poetry, for much of human history, was not words on a page, for there were no pages, and words were not conceived as having a visible dimension at all. Nor was poetry just spoken words, but rather these words were one component of a total artistic form that also included motion, gesture, and, often, rhythm and melody. Its purpose was to realign the human with the cosmic, to affirm the embeddedness of our mundane earthly experience within a vastly larger order that also includes the animals, the elements, the heavens, the ancestors, and the gods.

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The ultimate dismantling of this total art form has occurred in lockstep with the professionalisation of the scientific disciplines and with the process of secularisation over the past several centuries. Yet even in its reduced modern form, one of the things poetry still commonly aspires to do, as best it can, is to tap into the sense of the sacred — even if its creators often do so without any overt commitment to the reality of the realms their artistic sense moves them to explore.

I have for some years been working on a translation of the Siberian Sakha-language oral-epic tradition known as Olonkho. Throughout this work, for a long time, though I was becoming quite adept at simulating Sakha meter and metaphor in English, I did not think of myself as a poet. Jerry Rothenberg convinced me I was mistaken about myself. Some poets draw their material from dreams, some from childhood memories, and others from love or politics. Some poets get their source material directly from other poets working in other linguistic realities.

Yet it would be a mistake to suppose that these realities are just linguistic. For in fact the language of poetry, perhaps especially of “archaic” poetry, is typically condensed out of the entire lived translinguistic reality of the bard who channels it, and to try to reconstruct that reality in another language as if it were entirely constituted from words is to misrepresent (perhaps inevitably) the original work. For this reason, Rothenberg advocates, and practices, what he calls “total translation”: the rendering, in graphic form, of every possible element of another culture’s poetic traditions, including those elements that we do not ordinarily understand as linguistic. What results is also a pale shadow of the original, but it is at least a pale shadow that acknowledges what it is, and that points to everything our secular, textual, and de-ritualised poetry can typically no longer do.

One way of continuing to do these things today is by leaving poetry in our narrow sense behind, and pursuing the sort of performance that we today call “music”, even if archaically this too would have been conceptualised as the work of the poet. Rothenberg has himself consistently blurred the line between recitation and performance. One of the staples of his public appearances over the years has been a chant he learned among the Seneca people in Upstate New York in the Seventies, with a single line uttered in trance-like Sprechgesang — “The animals are coming” — followed by an uncannily realistic impersonation of what sounds like a bear. Many of the younger people in his audiences would likely take issue with the “appropriative” quality of this performance, were it not so compelling, were they not so undeniably in the presence — though such things are generally supposed not to happen anymore — of an old man who has just turned into a wild animal.

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Such transformation as this is among the potentials of “archaic” poetry — poetry conceived as a total art form whose purest expression is ritual — unlike what we might ordinarily expect from a recitation of the work of, say, Robert Frost. Such transformation, or something like it, is also possible through a sufficiently vibrant performance in the humble genre of the rock song, and indeed a number of this genre’s familiar names (Warren Zevon, Eddie Vedder), have, over the years, drawn inspiration from Rothenberg’s work. But surely no singer-songwriter’s oeuvre is more overtly indebted to the American poet than that of Nick Cave.

I’ve been listening to Nick Cave for about 35 years, and I have long seen him as one of the few singer-songwriters currently working whose lyrics deserve attention in their own right. But it was only when I happened to learn of our shared admiration for Jerry Rothenberg’s work that I began to see Nick’s lyrical sensibility as distinctly “Rothenbergian”. It dawned on me that Nick might have a greater claim than Jerry to be in the business of creating total works of art out of the “starter culture” of poetry.

That is, Nick generates poetic lyrical ideas, but he doesn’t stop with these. He puts them to music, and then he unfolds them in performances that have, perhaps increasingly in his “late style”, the character of ritual. He appears, in fact, increasingly committed to leading and facilitating some kind of collective transformation. He’s bringing us back to church, like it or not, or perhaps to the liminal place beside the fire in the night where strange and diurnally unfathomable transformations occur.

The brilliant Mexican poet and critic Heriberto Yépez, co-editor of Eye of Witness: A Jerome Rothenberg Reader (2013), sharply observes that “[p]ure Myth cannot exist in a world after Hollywood, nor can the shaman holistically heal because he or she is historically wounded”. Both Jerry and Nick have fully reckoned with this heavy truth of our current condition, and have succeeded in cutting their shamanic potencies with the irony and humour that are the lingua franca of our secular age. Yet for them, this is never a dilution or a compromise, but only a demonstration of their mastery of the idiom of their time and place, their commitment to being “of the world”, and of their moment, even if the aspiration of all poetry is towards the eternal.

Thus does Nick excel in the art of the juxtaposition, the mixture of registers that would be straightforwardly comical if it were not so often poignant, as in 2001’s “Darker with the Day”: “My father sits slumped in the deepening snow / As I search in and out, above, about, and below”; or in 2008’s “More News from Nowhere”: “He asks me for my autograph / I write ‘nobody’ and then / I wrap myself up in my woolly coat / and I blind him with my pen.” Again and again, Nick conjures an image from his internal world — a memory of his long-deceased father, a more recent memory of dealing with needy fans — and then projects it into the eternal mythological register of a Rumi or a Homer.

Jerry’s poetic voice is equally compelling in A Big Jewish Book, where he sought to demonstrate why it is that “after Auschwitz there is only poetry” (my emphasis). This stark reversal of Adorno’s grim formula, I believe, has something to do with Jerry’s awareness, which cannot but assert itself after any honest engagement with “archaic” poetry of the sort anthologised in Technicians of the Sacred, that the primary function of poetry for most of human history has been one of processing or managing the unceasing violence of our lived reality.

This thesis is certainly not original with me. The great Austrian classicist Walter Burkert famously speculated that the origins of human culture lie in expiation rituals meant to counteract the cosmic taint that comes with shedding the blood of animals in hunting. Much archaic poetry seems surprisingly hung up on such vivid phenomena as the sight of a deer’s viscera pouring from its underbelly when it is cut open by the knife of a hunter. Why dwell on such things? Perhaps because violence necessitates poetry; or, to put it the other way around, poetry, properly understood, concerns itself above all with violence.

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“I think on the most fundamental level he introduced me to primitive poetry,” Nick told me on the phone from London earlier this year. “I think there was a change in my writing, I can’t really pinpoint it, but I have a feeling that it coincided with me reading Technicians of the Sacred.” It is in the encounter with this anthology, too, that Nick experiences the complicated homecoming every truth-seeking colonial son must face sooner or later: “In Technicians of the Sacred, to my shame, I read my first Indigenous poetry. Even though I’m Australian, I hadn’t really read any of it.”

He recalls the excitement of discovering a new sort of poetry that was “a little violent, deeply surreal, and sexual, and also non-ironic, that was explicitly designed for ritual, and prayers, and transformation, and these sorts of things, which were really very much looked down upon by much of the modern poetry that I would read. I mean the anti-spiritual, ironic modern poetry.”

The poems in Technicians of the Sacred, Nick recollects, “reminded me of the Psalms themselves. They were these religious poems, shall we say, or spiritual or ritual poems, that were deeply violent and at the same time songs of praise, and I think that fed into something that I was blindly reaching around for… an extraordinary enmeshment of style and time, and [of] the mundane and the cosmic… It just blew my mind.” He pauses. “I mean, it’s like the fundamental… the fundamental violence of things.”

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Life grows less eventful as we age, and the gap between our quotidian experience and the heroic register into which we spent our youth projecting ourselves only seems to widen. “I keep saying to my wife,” Nick tells me, “that these songs are small, unimpressive autobiographies kind of wrapped up in heroic myths, and religious writing, and wild surrealism.” He continues: “Even though I might be seeing cosmically, [the songs] are rooted in the very most fundamental and mundane events in my rather boring life. And maybe that’s what writers mostly have to do anyway. They just sit. They don’t do anything. Most of us don’t do anything.”

The great Norman O. Brown, author of Life against Death (1959) and coiner of the term “polymorphous perversity”, was himself a famously uxorious homebody. Brown insisted in interviews that there was no contradiction here, that thanks to the liveliness of his imagination, he was able to indulge all his transgressive impulses without so much as getting up from his desk. And this is what the censorious prudes of Left and Right consistently miss about the place of violence in art: it is not a “gateway” to the real thing, nor an approval of human suffering. It is rather a lucid recognition of the fundamental violence of things — even if, per impossibile, we were to render all human beings docile, we would still be getting constantly slammed by nature — and of the deep human need to come to terms with this condition through the free play of the imagination.

We’re older now, and the light is dim. Nick Cave has done much to orient me in the world, and to give expression to my own aesthetic sensibility. In the Eighties this sensibility was, or seemed to be, fundamentally exclusionary: it was all about carving out a narrow territory of style and attitude and despising everything else. In our late dim light, by contrast, we seem to have grown far more capacious, far more generous.

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This generosity, too, it seems to me, is Rothenbergian in spirit. It has to do, I think, with a recognition of one’s place in the long chain of a tradition, which is another way of saying recognition of one’s debt to the ancestors, so that one can only approach creative work with humility and awe. We see this again and again in Nick’s willing adoption of the role of the apprentice, to sing a cover of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins or Leonard Cohen or Bertolt Brecht, without any concern to outdo the masters, but only, it seems, to experience the joy of channelling them.

Because this tradition is a mythopoetic one, the spirit channelled through its apostles takes account of the full range of human experience, and therefore often turns violent. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ landmark 1995 album, Murder Ballads, channels violence in its purest form, and perhaps gives us the nec plus ultra of homicidal ideation in its rendition of the blues classic “Stagger Lee”. Would Nick really crawl over 50 good pussies just to get to one fat boy’s asshole? Probably not, but that is a philistine question. The faculty of the imagination is not the same thing as the will, and what an artist is channelling under the spell of mythopoetic violence is not an action plan, a manifesto or a credo, but a complete picture of human life. This is a picture that traditional and popular art forms, notably Delta blues, have excelled in capturing, in contrast with profit-driven and algorithmically optimised commercial entertainments, which unsurprisingly veer towards a conception of art as handmaiden of conventional morality and thus as appropriately inhabiting only a very limited range of possible human perspectives.

That Nick has not sought to live down any of his decades-old “excesses”, but has only kept refining them into an even purer distillation of violence (“Stagger Lee” remains a staple of his performances) is a testament to his mature inhabitation of the role of mythopoetic bard and of transgenerational mediator of tradition. In a personal sense, he seems only to grow more gentle; I’ve watched a number of tense early interviews with him, and these are a universe away from the amicable and kind spirit he maintains in interaction with strangers today, at least some of whom must objectively be quite dull. On the fence about Christianity for many years, and as far as I know resigned to some permanent condition of agnosticism, Nick has for all that arrived at Christianity’s ethical core, where loving the stranger obviates any perceived need to fix your beliefs, since this love is itself a “proof” of the reality of the divine. And yet through all this moral growth Nick just keeps putting holes in Billy Dilly’s motherfucking head, night after night, year after year. This is good for his art, of course, but it is also, if violence must exist, a pretty good way of dispatching it, through sublimation, from our own midst.

There are precious few graceful old rock stars out there, and to become one seems to me almost the same thing as transcending the limitations of the genre. In Nick’s case, I think this apparent transcendence has something to do with his positioning of himself, by design or by instinct, in the lineage of the poets — and with his understanding, no doubt helped by his discovery of Jerry Rothenberg’s work, that poetry properly understood is the total art form, from which all the other modern art forms have been parted out. It is the art form that reckons with the violence of things, and continually sets our broken world back in order again.

The little melody in question is of course a pre-set. Its sequence of notes is planned in advance, and once the key is pressed, the machine may be relied upon to do only the thing it has been programmed to do. The melody, it goes without saying, is no Bach fugue. It is simple, naïve, kind of dumb; and within the context of the song, it is utterly compelling.

Several conditions — technological, cultural, historical — had to fall into place in order for this melodic interlude, with its verbal introduction, to come across to the critical listener as an expression of genius. All of these conditions might be cited in response to any philistine tempted to declare, of the pressing down of that special key, that “I could have done that too”. We are used to hearing such petulant ressentiment, especially in connection with the 20th-century avant-garde in the figurative arts: “I could have entered a urinal in an exhibition, too”; “I could have painted an all-white monochrome, too”; etc. The simplest response is, “Yes, but you didn’t”.

But this is probably too succinct to teach the philistine anything new about how art works. It is going to be particularly important to sensitise people to the logic and dynamics of artistic creation as we enter the new era of AI-generated artworks and are bombarded with new images created by machines following the input of a mere verbal prompt from a human being: DALL·E 2 being a prime example. Among other unpleasant prospects this new technology opens up, we will have to brace ourselves for a new wave of declarations from philistines telling us of the things they could have done too. It will be useful to have something new to say to them in response.

While technical competence is unmistakable, genius has a strange way of horseshoeing with idiocy, which is why we need critics to help us tell the difference. Jimi Hendrix lighting his guitar on fire is genius; a suburban kid in 1967 attempting the same, in his parents’ garage, is idiocy. Context matters, and by 1967 Hendrix was almost uniquely positioned to change the world, at least a little bit, with a gesture that would have been merely wasteful if attempted by nearly any other human alive.

Catchphrases that we associate with a particular artist or character are almost always banal in the extreme, but when Jimmy Durante says “Ha-cha-cha-cha” or Jimmie Walker says “Dyn-o-mite!”, we are witnessing a gesture of something like genius as well, or at least of idiosyncrasy, which is akin to genius in that it flows from an individual’s unique ingenium or natural aptitude, and proves to be mostly unteachable and entirely untransferable. I can of course go around evoking “dynamite” whenever I am enthused about something, but it will come across as perplexing at best and pathetically imitative at worst. When Jimmie Walker said it by contrast, he became himself a flash of light, a rupture in our ordinary expectations of the world. I’m a critic and I’m here to tell you that that’s genius.

Wit, too, like idiosyncrasy, is a species of the genus of genius. Once Winston Churchill sat at a formal dinner, dissatisfied with the food and the service. When the champagne arrived, he is reported to have remarked: “Finally, something warm.” I could try out that same phrase in a million different settings, and perhaps one or two of these would find it landing as wit; in the vast majority of cases it would be a simple non-sequitur, in a few it would be an accurate, literal, and unfunny description of the thing or event before me. With another million attempts, perhaps an occasion would arise in which the line approached the quality it had in Churchill’s mouth. Genius, along with its lesser cousins, I mean, is a fluid and variable thing. But one thing it definitely is not is technical competence.

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Philistines go in for photorealist painting; they imagine it testifies to “progress” in representation since the time of the Dutch Masters, since its lines are sharper, its objects come across on the canvas as more like objects the way we find them in “the real world” (that is, the world mediated by the physics of light and by the physiology of vision, which ordinarily we scarcely understand, or even think about, instead taking the affordances of our sense of sight to be straightforward reports of external reality itself). But of course what photorealist paintings actually resemble are photographs, and in this respect to learn to paint the world photorealistically is to create machine-aided paintings, where the machine is, namely, the camera. If David Hockney is correct, cameras of a sort, camerae obscurae, have been deployed since the Renaissance to assist in capturing the world on canvas. We have had machine-aided visual art for a very long time, but the use of machines in one’s artistic labours has never been necessary or sufficient for the creation of works of lasting aesthetic merit.

Could that be about to change? It’s 2022 and there’s a new thing going around on Twitter. You can click on a link, and arrive at a site that invites you to upload a photo of yourself, after which you will get a “reverse AI portrait” that spells out, in language, what it is the computer is “seeing”. I give it a try, and this is what it tells me: “A man with blonde hair and a black shirt, a character portrait, inspired by Eric Peterson, reddit contest winner, precisionism, doing the bateman stare, taken in the early 2020s, photograph of Christopher Walken, Thom Wasselmann, without glasses, John Waters, face with artgram.”

I’m not impressed. It strikes me that the machine is just looking for something, anything, to say. It’s smart enough to know that many people get excited when they hear mention, any mention, of Christopher Walken; they launch into bad imitations and everyone loves it. Bring up his name along with some other nonsense phrases and some bare factual descriptions of my physiognomy, and you’re sure to get a few retweets. This little fragment of language is optimised for virality, not for saying anything true. It is just more social-media bullshit; it is not art.

It’s 2030, after the war, and I’m at an AI art fair in Vladivostok. There’s some guy, some hot new artist on the scene, who makes customised portraits of visitors based on a special sequence of keywords that he enters in secret, on the basis of his spontaneous reading of our physical, behavioural and apparent moral qualities. I wait in line impatiently, and when my turn comes and my portrait finally uploads to my retinal “screens”, I am confronted with an image of myself that appears somehow warped, perverse, somewhat beastly, and yet, I have to admit, also, profoundly familiar and true. I don’t know how the artist and his machine managed to pull it off. I’m impressed. The dude got me.

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Kraftwerk’s special key, as a pre-set, could only do one thing, and cameras too, have generally been limited to registering what is in front of their lens in accordance with the mechanical parameters, exposure time and so on, set in advance by the photographer. One genuinely novel feature of AI art is that it is not like this. Two different users can enter the same prompts into the same programme at different moments, and will get two different images in response. This places the human-machine collaborative work of creation somewhat closer to the activity of the Turkish fortune-teller who compels a rabbit to sniff out one of several possible pieces of folded paper that contains, in writing, a hint of the customer’s future. A good niyetçi will know how to manipulate his rabbit to give interesting results, even if the choice of paper depends in the end on the rabbit’s own inscrutable perception of the world.

Divination is not ordinarily considered art, though it is acknowledged to rely on artifice, and though much art incorporates aleatoric principles that share quite a bit with the work of the tea-leaf reader or the caster of knucklebones. The particular arrangement of tea leaves is generally taken to be informative, at least in a make-believe way, rather than aesthetic, but the boundary here shifts easily, and indeed we might see the category of the aesthetic as a special variety of informativeness, where the patterns or representations we see tell us something, even if we cannot say precisely what that is.

AI art will supervene, is already supervening, upon several different categories of human endeavour — the clever technology-dependent stunt, the joke, divination — and will continue to please us and disappoint us in just the same way that these other endeavours do. It is simply not a meaningful question to ask whether any AI output may appropriately be categorised as art. Art is artifice plus, one hopes, a hint of genius, or something close to that. Such hints can shine through, as I’ve attempted to remind you, in the most unlikely, indeed the silliest places. There is of course no reason why AI should not also be such a place.

Whether we enshrine AI art within our society, giving it a place in art fairs, giving out prizes for it, and so on, is entirely up to us. There is nothing about the technology in itself that can guide us in determining whether we “should” do this or not. Art is what we value, what we attend to, and deem worthy of aspiration to excellence; this is why some activities come forward as art in some cultures, but not in others — the tea ceremony is art in Japan, but if I hastily serve you a mug of Lipton, I am not giving you a poor contribution to an art-form — I’m just giving you tea.

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Quite apart from the normative question of whether AI output should be considered art under some circumstances — a question that is unanswerable — I am confident in predicting that we will have AI art. In this art there will be occasional flashes of genius, or something like it, against a general background of cultural overproduction of shit. This has also been the general balance throughout the history of photography, television, and cinema. The most significant change with the rise of AI comes with the human relinquishing of control over the pre-set parameters.

But this does not so much move us into uncharted territory, as it simply assimilates AI art to other forms of human creativity, such as divination, which in the past have used objectively random processes to make their determinations, but have also often used animals. In many ways, as with an engine and its “horsepower”, we are simply finding new ways to transfer work from animals to machines, both of which are entities that are sufficiently like us to make determinations that will resemble our own choices, but sufficiently unlike us for their determinations to come across to us as “weird”, as suitable moments to say “whoah”. That “whoah” can be interpreted as an aesthetic experience, with sufficient institutional backing.

I’m not looking forward to any of this. I am going to stick with my vintage technologies, and my aesthetic orientation will remain forever backward-looking. But even less than the new era of AI art am I looking forward to the inevitable wave of renewed debate around the inane and empty question of whether this new variety of culture-embedded and technology-dependent activity ought to count as art. It’s like asking whether a hamburger can count as breakfast. There is no ontological rift between breakfast and lunch; breakfast is what we say it is, and if you feel like your 8am burger is not doing it for you, this tells you something only about your expectations, and not about the world.

There is similarly no ontological divide separating artworks from “the commonplace”. Art tends to emerge at the sites of social value, of care. If we think AI art is a bad idea, then we might slow its ascendancy by grounding our care in other spheres of human life than those shaped by cutting-edge technologies. But this is almost certainly not going to happen.

In the shadow of Bran Castle, once home to Vlad the Impaler, you might enjoy the irony of hearing this revisionist history lesson while surrounded by a whole gallery of vampire kitsch — kiosks with plastic fangs for sale; a Dracula face-in-a-hole board as diminutive and unthreatening as his descendants Count Chocula, of breakfast-cereal fame, or Sesame Street’s own Count von Count.

Listening to such lectures in the past, I would often find myself unable to suppress that exclamation, so completely taboo in our era of stay-in-your-lane deference: “Well, actually…” Because the truth is that tales of vampires existed in the Balkans long before Bram Stoker. Between the 15th and the 19th centuries, the figure of the vampire made the gradual transition from the proto-ethnography of the Balkans to the imaginations of Gothic littérateurs.

Most succinctly, we may say that the figure of the vampire emerges out of the confluence of three elements. The first is the real historical record of the actions of a certain Vlad Țepeș (1428/31—1476/77). The violent transgressions for which he became notorious were extreme — notably, impalement on rounded and greased spikes, carefully avoiding direct puncture of inner organs so as to prolong the victim’s misery. Woodcuts depicting his deeds were soon published in German books, and as these circulated the legends surrounding him grew beyond all human proportion.

The second element is the arrival of Germanophone Habsburg administrators in newly subordinated regions of Southeastern Europe, who had been influenced in their practices by the emerging culture of the Republic of Letters, which encouraged literate travellers in little-known places to note down and to report back to the metropole all rare or mysterious incidents. The third element, finally, are the ancient folk-cultural practices and beliefs that these humble clerks observed and documented.

Of particular importance in the revisionist lesson for foreigners in Transylvania is the task of clearing Dracula from any association with vampirism. “Dracula”, they explain, is simply the title, but not the name, of Vlad Țepeș, also known as Vlad III or Vlad the Impaler. He inherited it from his father, Vlad II, a member of the Order of the Dragon. In Romanian, dracul derives from the Latin draco, and simply means “the dragon”.

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It is not in fact in the castles, but in the villages of Romania that we typically hear rumours of the strigoi, which are in turn close cousins of the vrykolakas of Greece and the upior of the Slavic countries. These are, in all their regional variants, ghosts of the deceased, poltergeists who return to trouble the living. A common belief holds that one may prevent their apparition by sealing the coffin of the dead shut with extra nails, and by driving a stake through the chest of the corpse. Should one encounter a strigoi, some texts and traditions counsel the use of apotropaics such as garlic or holy water to ward them off. These folkloric characters thus share some, but not all, of the traits associated with the Stokerian vampire. There is as yet no strong association with bats, for example, or with hematophagy.

It is at least true, then, that Stoker’s rendition bumps the vampire up several social classes from where it had always resided in “authentic” folk culture, from the peasantry to the aristocracy. And it is the elevation of traditional village practices to a form of aristocratic decadence that enables Stoker to give his fiction a historical grounding, and to identify his own protagonist’s vampirism as part of an inheritance from none other than Vlad the Impaler:

“Who was it but one of my own race who as Voivode [a military leader] crossed the Danube and beat the Turk on his own ground? This was a Dracula indeed! Woe was it that his own unworthy brother, when he had fallen, sold his people to the Turk and brought the shame of slavery on them! Was it not this Dracula, indeed, who inspired that other of his race who in a later age again and again brought his forces over the great river into Turkey-land?”

In portraying Vlad as a hero in the war against the Turks, the Irish novelist is channelling a historiographical tendency more commonly seen in Russia and the Balkans than in Western Europe. In the Orthodox lands, while his cruelty is acknowledged, Vlad is mostly seen as a valiant defender against the Ottoman menace, and therefore as a bulwark of Christendom. In the German-speaking world, by contrast, his significance as a military leader pales in comparison with his inhuman and gratuitous cruelty. Beginning as early as the 1460s, broadsides circulated describing the delight Vlad took in roasting babies alive and forcing their mothers to eat them, in hearing the low moans of his impaled victims as musical accompaniment to his meals.

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Horrific tales of Vlad the Impaler were not the only source of vampire mythology. Non-fictional writing on strange incidents and curiosities stretches back to antiquity, but it is in the wake of the scientific revolution that a more systematic approach develops to the collection of eyewitness reports, largely inspired by the learned journal of the Royal Society of London, The Philosophical Transactions, founded in 1666.

The first extant treatise on vampirism is De masticatione mortuorum in tumulis [On the Chewing of the Dead in their Tombs], published in 1725, by the German Lutheran pastor and historian Michaël Ranfft. In his work, Ranfft helped to make vampires known throughout the German-speaking world by republishing a report from a minor administrator in the Serbian provinces of the Kingdom of Hungary, who described some peculiar events in the village of Kisolova following the death of a certain Petar Blagojević, of whom “it was stated that, within eight days [of his death], nine people, both old and young, died after enduring an illness of 24 hours”. It is reported that: “As they still lay alive on their death beds… the above-mentioned Plogojovitz [sic], who had died ten weeks prior, came to them in their sleep, lay down on top of them, and croaked that they must now give up their souls.”

The author of the report cited by Ranfft uses the word “vampire” in one of its earliest printed occurrences. He reports that “since among similar people (as are called Vampyri) there must be visible various signs, as that their bodies are undecayed, with skin, hair, beard, and nails growing”, the villagers resolved to open up the grave of Petar Blagojević and to see what they might discover there. Here is what they found:

“That, first of all, the body and its grave were not in the least touched by the usual smell of the dead. The body, other than the nose, which had somewhat fallen off, was very fresh; the hair and the beard, and also the nails, of which the older ones had fallen away, had grown on him; the old skin, which was somewhat white, had peeled away, and a new fresh skin had come forth underneath; the face, hands and feet, and the whole body were so composed that they could not have been more perfect during the course of his life. Not without surprise I glimpsed fresh blood in his mouth, which, according to the common expression, he had sucked from those he had killed.”

At issue in part was a puzzlement about some unexpected contingencies in the way bodies decompose. While they often rot quickly, depending on the circumstances of the air, the temperature, and the presence of microorganisms, bodies can also come to appear, under the right conditions, even more healthy than they had been just prior to death. Sometimes a corpse is found with blood streaming from the mouth, a natural consequence of the internal breakdown of the organs, which nonetheless can easily be mistaken for a vestige of recent feasting. They frequently become bloated, and in an era in which corpulence was still strongly associated with health, this temporary condition could easily appear as an improvement only to be explained on the assumption that the corpse had been ingesting food — food, that is, or blood.

The difficulty of determining the precise boundary between life and death is a subject that reappears throughout the 18th century — not just in reference to vampires, but in numerous medical treatises. The most interesting example of such work is undoubtedly the Danish-French physician Jacques-Bénigne Winslow’s 1742 Dissertation on the Uncertainty of the Signs of Death, and the Misuse of Burials, and Rushed Embalmings. Winslow cites several authorities to establish the view that “putrefaction is the only infallible sign of death”.

Winslow also peppers his treatise with macabre reports, many of which read like Gothic fiction. Thus we learn of a lady of Auxbourg, who, “falling into a Syncope, in Consequence of a Suffocation of the Matrix, was buried in a deep Vault, without being covered with Earth… Some Years after, however, one of the same Family happening to die, the Vault was open’d, and the Body of the young Lady found on the Stairs at its Entry, without any Fingers on the Right Hand.” Soon enough, documentary sources such as this were sublimated into fictional stories about the undead, Edgar Allen Poe’s The Premature Burial (1844) being a prime example.

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The early modern explosion of interest in Balkan “superstition” is, as we have begun to see, in no small measure an effect of the encounter between the Catholic and Orthodox worlds, and in particular of the expansion of Habsburg rule into regions of the Balkans that had previously belonged to the Ottoman Empire. This encounter triggered a long — and indeed still ongoing — habit of representing Southeastern Europe as a land of benighted and backwards belief.

In his contribution to the 1776 Dictionnaire philosophique, none other than Voltaire, who never misses an opportunity to scoff at people who happen not to be French, takes up the example of vampires not only as a measure of the distance between Enlightened Europe and those other parts, but also between the rationality of the ancient Greeks and the irrationality of their degenerated modern descendants. “Who would believe that the fashion of vampires came from Greece? This is not the Greece of Alexander, of Aristotle, of Plato, of Epicurus, of Demosthenes, but rather Christian Greece, which is, unfortunately, schismatic.”

Voltaire is a defiant atheist, but his polemical anti-clericalism brings him close to some of the themes of anti-Papism familiar from Protestant lands. For many Protestant authors, the difference between Catholicism and worship of the forces of darkness is but another case of the narcissism of minor differences. Voltaire, writing in this same spirit, speaks mockingly of a young sceptic who had dared to question the truth of a number of reported miracles involving the Virgin Mary, and who finally was won over to all manner of Catholic articles of faith as a result of exposure to folk-beliefs about vampires. In his satirical account, it was best for the weak-minded to shelter themselves from stories of vampires, if only because these can all too easily serve as a gateway drug to the Roman religion.

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Among Catholic authors, by contrast, we generally see not mockery of folk-beliefs about vampires, but rather a subtle, almost mischievous, effort to occupy the ambiguous space between affirmation and scepticism. Indeed, a convention emerges in vampirological works over the course of the 18th century, whereby the author is generally presented as an intrepid and dedicated, but perhaps somewhat shadowy character. This doubt is in turn offset by an assurance that the author is a man of the cloth, an abbey or a clergyman who has immersed himself in the study of dark forces in order to better combat them for the sake of humanity’s salvation. Which side, a reader constantly wonders, is the author really on?

Whether writing as a science-oriented debunker, or as a pious fighter against the forces of darkness, or indeed as some mixture of these two, vampirologists always seem to be infected by their subject. Sceptics will see them as frivolous for wasting their intellectual energy on an old folk myth, and the pious will see them as rather too interested, for suspicious reasons, in the very thing they are supposed to be fighting against. It is hard to be taken seriously as a vampirologist.

And yet it still seems to me that vampires are due a certain measure of rehabilitation. The vampire, I think, is at least as “good to think with” as the “philosophical zombie” that has historically been preferred by analytic philosophers. Zombies give us all of the conceptual problems about mind and consciousness, but none of the feeling, and are thus perfect water-carriers for whatever it is the analytics are trying to do. To “think with vampires” is by contrast to think about feeling, mood, and the dimensions of human existence these disclose.

In its essence, a vampire is a being that knows it is dead, and feels infinite sadness about its plight. This is a paradoxical situation to be in, since death is supposed to be the cessation of all consciousness. But it is also fairly close to what we imagine when we try, per impossibile, to imagine death. We do so, mostly, by feeling our way into it, until we can bear no more and recoil. We do so by allowing what that feeling discloses to us to count for something. And also in our dreams, notably, we encounter dead people with surprising regularity. They walk and talk, and give us tidings, yet there’s something off about them, by which we understand that they are dead. An impossible condition — yet there they are.

While this may seem an unassailable injunction, it is at least somewhat at odds with an equally ancient demand of Western philosophy, which may in fact be offered up in direct response to what the oracle says: “Don’t tell me what to do.” This response gets close to the spirit of the Cynics, who, like Plato, also believed they were following the teachings of Socrates, yet took his philosophy not to require some arduous process of self-examination, but only a simple and immediate decision to conduct one’s life according only to the law dictated by nature.

There are good reasons to defy the oracle beyond simply a distaste for taking orders. For one thing, it is not a settled matter that the commandment to “know thyself” can be followed at all, since it is not clear that there is anything to know. In the end the self may be the greatest “nothingburger” of all; there may simply be nothing there. The self may be an illusion, as most strains of classical Buddhist philosophy held; or it may be a “hole in being at the heart of Being”, as Jean-Paul Sartre disconsolingly suggested; or it may be perfectly real, but by definition beyond the bounds of knowability.

If you become convinced that the self is unknowable, there are a few different ways you might react. You might decide to “go with the flow”, to live out your days in happy ignorance of your “true” nature, but in sentimental harmony with the world around you. Or you might turn your attention to the body, as the closest thing you’re ever going to get to the self itself, and learn everything you can about it. In doing this, over time you and your peers might come to believe that the information derived from such investigation counts as self-knowledge in the fullest sense, that it is not just as good as it gets, but good purely and simply.

This impression that knowledge of the body’s “vital stats” is good in itself may come to appear particularly compelling when it presents itself not only as good, but as cool. And there is no more effective way to make learning cool than to make it depend on the intermediation of some sleek new device, some bit of technology, a gadget that did not exist at all just a few years before. In a world flooded with such new devices, it is not at all surprising to find that many people now are not even aware of any aspiration to self-knowledge beyond what may be revealed by the AppleWatch or the Fitbit.

Of course, these devices are only the tip of the iceberg. For some years we have heard reports of “tech bros” willingly cyborgising themselves to monitor a constant stream of data concerning their blood-sugar levels, or the chemical composition of their urine or sweat. Nor is such pervasive monitoring always part of a project of self-cultivation, nor even is it always voluntary. Doctors are increasingly able to monitor the vital signs of outpatients going about their lives far from the centres of medical care, and now we are starting to hear of pills that can send an electronic signal once they have arrived in their swallower’s stomach: a potential way of ensuring that a patient is adhering to some court-ordered medical regime of anti-psychotics, or even, potentially, of chemical castration.

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It is not hard to imagine a near-future scenario in which countless data-points from all of our bodies are quietly and unceasingly transmitted to the cloud and available for inspection by “the authorities”: how many calories we consume per day, how often we get sexually aroused, as well as the old standards of steps, heart-rate, blood-sugar, and so on.

For now, anyway, most of these corporeal metrics are noted only by the person whose body they quantify, and they are noted, most commonly, as part of a project of what we may call “ersatz self-knowledge”: the kind of knowledge of who you are that can still be obtained even after you and your culture have given up on any conception of the true value of a human being.

But everything we have considered so far is only half the story. In a first phase of this materialist reduction of the self, the body is taken as a reliable source of the best sort of information that we may hope to obtain about who we are. In a more advanced phase, typical “soul activity” — all the things we do that are expressive of our agency and creativity — is passed through what are essentially the same metrical filters. The daily quota of steps for which our Fitbit — and perhaps also our health-insurer or our government — may be programmed to congratulate us is not so different, in the end, from the quantity of “likes” we feel, or are made to feel, are the appropriate recompense for the expression of some political opinion on social media.

In the Objections and Replies to the 1641 Meditations on First Philosophy, Thomas Hobbes made fun of René Descartes’s famous claim that we may know ourselves to exist from the fact that we think: “I think therefore I am.” Why not say instead, Hobbes wondered, “I walk therefore I am”? Whether or not Hobbes was fully appreciating the subtleties of the Cartesian Cogito, we may at least note that his observation was a sort of prophecy: in our present materialistic age, ambulation and cogitation really have become one and the same sort of thing. They are both, now, but fodder for metrics.

We know very well that the motion of megafaunal herds, like the behaviour of bacteria clustered into a cooperative brain-like system, may be modelled algorithmically. It is, therefore, not at all surprising that as thinking degenerates into like-seeking, as soul activity becomes a mere subset of measurable data, this activity is correspondingly conceived as if it were itself the output of an algorithmic process.

There is a familiar notion of “algorithm creep”, in which the gamified incentives that structure our online behaviour spread into other domains, such as labour (as when an Uber employee is compelled to pursue his work in pursuit of points, as if it were a video game), logistics, medicine, and, increasingly, the economy. But the ultimate case of algorithm creep, which might better be called “algorithm leap”, occurs when the rules that structure our experience of the online world jump across the screen and begin to structure our understanding of ourselves and of other human beings.

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It is common, now, to read on the internet accounts of human action that model it on artificial systems, and that have no other resources for conceiving human motivation than those borrowed from programming, even when what is at issue is human moral failure. Let us consider one striking example from a few years ago. In 2020, a controversy was triggered by the behaviour of a well-known comic-book artist accused by numerous younger women, most of them fans of his work and aspiring comic-book authors, of sexually inappropriate behaviour, emotional manipulation, and what is known as “grooming”.

A website was set up for his proclaimed victims to share their testimonials. On this site, the author’s grooming behaviour is described as: “rel[ying] on subtle techniques that leverage ‘compulsion loops’, which are well-established in scientific literature and video gaming, and are commonly utilised by modern businesses to achieve addiction, AKA ‘user retention’. Examples include daily quests in games, getting a higher reward (more ‘XP’, etc.) for the first game of a day, more ‘karma’ for the first post of a day on a message board, etc. The main driver is a regular daily dopamine boost sustained over time.”

At issue here is the moral conduct of a person who in another era would have been accused of lechery, of being manipulative, of playing the cad. Here, the accusation against the comic-book author, however, eschews inherited moral categories, and blames him, effectively, for instantiating the same features we also know from our use of social media. The author has had programmed into him, it would seem, the same addictive hooks for which we rightly criticise Facebook. He now stands accused of “user retention”.

Nor is this modified use of language confined to the realm of human behaviour. Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay, “The Artwork in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility”, sought to chart the fate of art’s “aura” in an era in which likenesses of any given work may be generated cheaply and without limit. Effectively, in the age of the photograph, the Xerox, or the screenshot, all art becomes “allographic” — to see a copy of a work is for most purposes as good as seeing the real thing. Though there may be some qualities in the brushstrokes that only the original canvas can reveal, it is by now a plain social fact that the added value in the work itself, as when tourists leap over one another to take an iPhone photo of the Mona Lisa, is pure aura. To say that the aura is pure is to say that what gives the work its perceived value is by now entirely disconnected from its aesthetic properties, and entirely caught up in fantastical speculations as to how much money it could fetch, or how much it would cost the museum if someone were to slash it.

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When culture arrives at this point, the NFT, though it has hit some bumps recently, cannot but become the artwork par excellence. Some people will still try, laughably, to feign connoisseurship and to explain to the rest of us yokels why the obscene price attached to some token or other derives from its aesthetic properties. But this is a bluff, for what we have in fact seen with the rise of the NFT is the literal convergence of art and money. A work can only be assessed, now, in terms of its financial value, and is therefore perfectly interchangeable with any other work of the same value. Financial value, in turn, becomes the ultimate metric — the one we are all really hoping to convert our likes and faves and followers into eventually, somehow. Otherwise the like-seeking that has taken away our souls over the past decade is just too sad to contemplate: we will have been doing it for literally nothing, not even money.

But while art may now seem fully elided with capital, this only relates to works of art that are put forth as candidates for exchange, which is to say works that have been entered into the metrics game. There is, of course, a vast reserve of other artworks, and an even vaster reserve of human creative potential, that lie outside of that whole bleak nexus — as, for example, the sweet and rough airs that come from an old bard’s broken singing voice, busking for change, as you walk past him in the metro. Such moments provide not only brief access to art in its unmetricised and therefore borderline-outlawed form. They can also have the power to summon us back to ourselves, to our proper selves: grounded only in phenomenal consciousness, and following no rule.