Ambient Meaning: Mood, Vibe, System The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:39988028 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Ambient Meaning: Mood, Vibe, System adissertationpresented by Peli Grietzer to The Department of Comparative Literature in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of Comparative Literature Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts November 2017 c Copyright by Peli Grietzer, 2017. All Rights Reserved Dissertation Advisors: Professor Tomer Schlank, Professor William Flesch Peli Grietzer Ambient Meaning: Mood, Vibe, System Abstract This dissertation will present a mathematically informed interpretation of a classically romantic literary-theoretic thesis: that a work of literature can aesthetically communicate an ine↵ably complex holistic understanding of the real world, which we might call the work’s ‘aesthetic meaning.’ Drawing on a generalization of ‘deep learning’ (“artificial intuition”) systems and on elementary algorithmic information theory, we describe a kind or aspect of aesthetic meaning—‘ambient meaning’—that may have a special r7esonance with Modernist and avant-garde approaches to aesthetic meaning, as well as with the concepts of aesthetically sophisticated cultural-materialist literary criticism of the kind that critics like Sianne Ngai or Raymond Williams practice. iii Acknowledgements I owe this dissertation to my family’s love and support—thanks Ami, Pnina, Ohal, Fields!—and my friend Piper Harron’s LaTeX and proofreading skills. At Harvard, I am especially grateful to Steph Burt for telling me just write a chapter saying what autoencoders are,’ and to Svetlana Boym for her friendship. Also in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Owain Evans and I started making up a computational aesthetic theory we called compressiveness’ after I told him Sharon Berry whose merciless rigor saved me from myself more times than I can count stared me down with her ‘nice work if you can get it’ look when I said works of art are like mnemonics for ine↵ably complex ideas. In Israel, Tomer Schlank first encouraged me to take my ‘mathematically informed aesthetic theory’ seriously, and Tzion Abraham Hazan and Adaya Liberman told me it’s OK to su↵er for work that you care about. In New York, Alice Gregory, Lexy Benaim, Elif Batuman, and Ezra Koenig never made me feel bad about the vast di↵erences in our social capital, and took it seriously when I would text ‘havent talked to a soul in months, know any parties?’ Finally, all across my worlds, the work and friendship of so many writers in the Troll Thread and GaussPDF experimental literature collectives gave me, for the first time, a subculture to call home. Among the many friends and colleagues whose work, conversation, or critique has had an impact on the contents of this dissertation, several come to mind most easily: one thinks, for instance, of Ray Davis, Trisha Low, Cecilia Corrigan, Paul Vankoughnett, Bu↵yCain,OliSurel,Piper Harron, Tzion Hazan, Aleksandar Makelov, Gordon Faylor, Owain Evans, Abhinav Grama, Sharon Berry, Laura Peskin, Holly Melgard, David Auerbach, and Jannon Sonja Stein. iv In memory of David Bowie, for his art v Contents Abstract......................................... iii Acknowledgements ................................... iv 1 A Literary Theorist’s Guide to Autoencoding 1 1.1 TheMechanicsofAutoencoders . 6 1.2 TheMeaning(s)ofAutoencoders . 15 1.3 InternalizingSpaces................................ 26 1.4 Reading a Manifold . 39 2 Ideas in Things 47 2.1 Universaliainre.................................. 54 2.2 A Defense of Poetry . 69 3 Ambient Meaning 87 3.1 Mood ....................................... 104 3.2 Style/Vibe..................................... 115 3.3 System . 132 3.4 StructuresofWhat ................................ 143 Works Cited 149 vi Chapter 1 A Literary Theorist’s Guide to Autoencoding This chapter seeks to introduce the reader to the AI concept of autoencoding. Speaking in purely technical terms, autoencoding is the process of finding a parameterization for a low-dimensional structure in a dataset by minimizing average projection distance. Speaking informally, however, the most apt description of autoencoding may well be ‘the process of determining a worldview and a canon in developing a method of mimesis.’ This chapter, and this dissertation as a whole, attempt to bridge the language gap between these two descriptions—the formal, technical description in the language of AI, and the interpretive description rooted in the language of aesthetics and cultural theory. The study of autoen- coding, we propose, invites us to extend the concepts of a canon, worldview, and mimesis from the realm of art and culture to the seemingly extremely foreign realm of datasets and algorithms. Approaching the ideas of canon, worldview, and mimesis in a broadly ‘cultural materialist’ spirit, we will think of canon, worldview, and mimesis as a kind of necessary triplet: a single cultural-aesthetic structure that comprises a set of privileged objects, a way of seeing or interpreting the world, and a capacity to represent and reproduce the objects of the world. Autoencoding algorithms, we will argue, are defined exactly by such triplets: 1 specifically,1 we will argue for considering an autoencoding algorithm’s lossless inputs as acanon,anautoencodingalgorithm’sfeature function as a worldview, and its projection function as (a method of) mimesis. While this excursion into AI territory is an interesting philosophical adventure in and of itself, its serious purpose is to take key concepts from AI back with us to the study of the arts. Drawing its inspiration from the work of systematic cultural-aesthetic theorists like Raymond Williams and Sianne Ngai, this dissertation seeks to highlight a strong formal logic underlying the relationship between a culture’s canon of em- inent objects, the cognitive schemata that compose a culture’s worldview, and the specifics of a culture’s powers of reproduction and representation or mimesis. By treating certain mathematical structures and operations linked within autoencoding as instances of a canon, worldview, and mimesis, our ‘literary theory for algorithms’ gives a kind of microcosm where the structural relationship of canon, worldview, and mimesis is expressed in the observable, concrete dynamics of autoencoding. The purpose of this microcosm, ultimately, is to illus- trate a deeper logic that underlies the relationship of canon, worldview, and mimesis both in our simple algorithmic microcosm and in the complex world of art and culture—a logic whose expression in the complex world is necessarily di↵use and near-ine↵able, but whose expression in the simple world is partially tractable in the technical details of autoencoding. We thus look into the fine technical details of autoencoding—that is, into the relationship of canon, worldview, and mimesis in our flattened algorithmic microcosm—for a kind of trace or blueprint of the canon/worldview/mimesis triplet in its unrestricted form. Our goal, in other words, is to convert the technical concept of autoencoding into a new cultural-aesthetic concept: a new tool for discussing the relationship of canon, worldview, and mimesis in the works of art we study, and a potentially new point of view on our existing cultural-aesthetic 1These AI concepts needn’t mean much to the literary reader at this point. The task of clarifying them composes the core of this present chapter. 2 discourse about canon, worldview, and mimesis. While we will save the brunt of our discussion of established cultural-aesthetic work on canon, worldview, and mimesis for Chapter 2, it’s worthwhile to make a couple of pre- liminary points that bear directly on the orientation of the present chapter. Firstly, this dissertation uses three primary reference points to the established cultural-aesthetic work on canon, worldview, and mimesis: Raymond Williams’s theory of ‘structures of feeling,’ Sianne Ngai’s theory of ‘tone,’ and Martin Heidegger’s2 theory of ‘mood’ (Stimmung). Over this dissertation’s course, we will adopt Williams’ theory of structures of feeling as part and parcel of our own cultural-aesthetic framework, while sometimes turning to the widely influential Heideggerian philosophy of mood for a kind of cultural-aesthetic lingua franca. Ngai’s analysis of ‘tone,’ meanwhile—in part a study into Heidegger and Williams—acts as an antecedent and an inspiration for this dissertation’s highly formal point of view on Heidegger’s and William concepts. Secondly, if the idea of applying cultural-aesthetic terms like canon, worldview, and mimesis to a formal process like autoencoding has any signifi- cance, the kind of willing category error it performs by pushing ‘canon,’ ‘worldview,’ and 2Heidegger is known, among other things, for his critique of ‘technoscience,’ and the eminent contemporary Heideggerian philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, in particular, is widely known for his critique of AI. While I do not believe that philosophical systems of thought are ever so unified that an idea cannot usefully immigrate out of its native systems—if this were the case, then woe to all the Heideggerian ideas