Deepfake and the Triumph of Lying

Deepfakes generated from a single image by researchers at Samsung's AI lab in Moscow: 
Egor Zakharov / Aliaksandra Shysheya / Egor Burkov / Victor Lempitsky

For those who don't know, deepfake is a technique using artificial intelligence to synthesise reality.

Pre-existing sounds and images are combined or superimposed on one another in often humorous, sometimes malicious, always slightly uncanny new ways, creating extremely convincing new sounds and images that are, as Baudrillard would say, hyperreal (i.e., more real than real).

The technology that enables this, developed over the last twenty years or so, is increasingly sophisticated and the game has moved way beyond a few pervy nerds swapping homemade videos online in which the faces of celebrities such as Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, or Emma Watson are placed on the bodies of porn actresses.

Perhaps not surprisingly, there are calls in the UK and US to criminalise the making and distribution of deepfake material; the real concern being fake news, rather than fake nudes, as politicians have also been subject to deepfake trickery. Some commentators fear this could have damaging (even dangerous) consequences, technology making it impossible for us to determine the truth of what we see and hear.*

On the other hand, fears about new technology have a long history and are often overstated. Perhaps deepfake will oblige us all to think a little more artistically and critically and not just assume the real as a pregiven or something fixed. And besides, hasn't life always unfolded within some kind of generative adversarial network and aren't the only real people ones who have never existed?

*Note: anyone who wants to give deepfake technology a go before it's banned, can download FakeApp, which allows for the creation of photorealistic face swapping videos, or open-source alternatives such as Faceswap.

D. H. Lawrence and the Poetry of Evil

Surprisingly, evil isn't an idea that features very often in Lawrence's poetry. 

Indeed, prior to the handful of late verses that I wish to comment on here, I can recall only two earlier poems in which the concept appears: 'Cypresses', wherein Lawrence makes the Nietzschean claim that life-denial is the only real form of immorality; and one of the Pansies in which he suggests that the root of our modern iniquity is free trade and so calls for a religiously inspired communism (as if that wouldn't result in the tyranny of evil men). 

Happily, the Last Poems Notebook provides some further reflections on the question of evil ...

Evil is homeless

In this verse, Lawrence challenges the conventional idea that evil is located in (or leads to) Hell. Hell, he says, is the "home of souls lost in darkness", not of evil. For evil is decentred and without dwelling-place. It flourishes on the "outskirt fringes of nowhere"; a non-place [ου-τοπία] where grey carrion-eaters roam in perpetual twilight and human beings fall into fixed automatism.

What then is Evil?

The invention of the wheel is often seen as marking a great leap forward for humanity, having a fundamental impact on the development of civilisation. For Lawrence, however, "the wheel is the first principle of evil" - both within the external world of things and material activity and within the inner workings of the psyche.

For when the mind consists of a circle in a spiral and a wheel within a wheel, turning "on the hub of the ego" and driven by the will - and when "the wheel of the conscious self spins on in absolution", liberated from "the great necessities of being" (such as strife and kisses) - then, says Lawrence, we witness the birth of pure evil.  

The Evil World-Soul

Although he doesn't here speak of the demiurge, Lawrence does insist on the existence of a malevolent world-spirit. However, he again blames this on man and technology; "it is the soul of man only, and his machines / which has brough to pass this fearful thing called evil".   

Using a word that was very much in vogue in the 1920s - having only recently entered the English language via Karel Čapek's seminal sci-fi play R. U. R. - Lawrence declares: "The Robot is the unit of evil. / And the symbol of the Robot is the wheel revolving."

Later in this series of verses, Lawrence identifies more familiar sources of evil, such as war,  although it's important to note that he insists that strife is a good thing and that killing one's mortal enemy may in fact be a pure form of passion and communion. 

Murder, however, is always evil and modern warfare fought with guns, explosives and chemical weapons, is essentially murderous and thus, as such, profoundly evil. 

Departure

Finally, we come to a poem in which Lawrence calls upon a few individuals to find their courage in the face of the corruption that threatens them and decisively turn their backs on it: "Now some men must get up and depart / from evil, or all is lost." 

Lawrence also extends his list of evil things to include not only old favourites, such as spinning wheels, but also all forms of abstraction: as found in the fields of finance, science, education, popular culture, politics, etc. We must say no to all these things - setting up a profitable business, turning on the radio, believing the false claims of astronomers - if we are to make ourselves impregnable against evil.     

Of course, this would mean leading a life at such odds with almost everyone and everything that one might question both the feasibility and desirability of doing so ...

Notes

All of the above poems may be found in D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, Vol. 1, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), as can the related verses 'Doors', 'Death is not Evil, and 'Evil is Mechanical'. 

Readers might be interested to know that Lawrence originally wrote a 123-line poem entitled 'When Satan Fell' which he then broke into the evil series of verses discussed here. 

The poem in Pansies that I mention is 'The root of our evil' (ibid., 418-19). 

Surprise musical bonus: click here. 

 

O Wonderful Machine: Nihilism and the Question Concerning Technology (Part I)

Charlie Chaplin: Modern Times (1936)

According to Blanchot, Nietzsche is quick to grasp that all the modern world’s seriousness is confined to science and the "prodigious power of technology". Lawrence refers to this (poetically) as the triumph of the machine.

Whilst Nietzsche doesn't entirely deplore this fact, happy, for example, to support the experimental practices of science, he is by no means able to affirm the above development without reservation; not least of all because he identifies modern science as the descendant and heir of Christian moral culture. In other words, it's a machine-embodied unfolding of the ascetic ideal; an expression of mankind's pathological will to truth.

Thus, for Nietzsche, science and technology is fundamentally nihilistic in character, full of thinly veiled metaphysical prejudices and productive of reactive knowledge-forms which may yet prove fatal not only to the Christian moral culture from out of which it has grown, but to the possibility of culture per se as it puts on ice all the illusions which are necessary for the sustaining of culture and, indeed, life itself.

In addition to this fundamental antipathy between vital illusion and the pure knowledge drive, Nietzsche claims that science is incapable of serving as the foundation of culture because, unlike art, it knows nothing of “taste, love, pleasure, displeasure, exaltation, or exhaustion” and so cannot evaluate, cannot command, and cannot create. At best, when coupled to the huge resources of capitalism, science is capable of building a tremendous industrial-technological civilization, such as our own, but, for Nietzsche, this is not a genuine cultural formation because, whilst it is certainly capable of organizing the chaos of existence and constructing a monolithic system or network, it lacks style.

Style, insists Nietzsche, always involves the constraint of a single taste. But it is not merely the imposition of universal laws or categorical imperatives; nor does it seek to make all things and all forces familiar, similar, and predictable. The ideal abstractions of science may very effectively allow for the manipulation of the world and the subordination of life to a tyrannical knowledge form - logic - but this is not the same as mastery and the artist of culture is more than a mere systematizer.

Failing to make the distinction, the technocratic man of reason confuses bullying with a display of strength and mistakes force for power. This is perfectly illustrated in  Lawrence's novel Women in Love by the figure of Gerald Crich; a character driven to impose his will and authority over himself and his workers, just as he does over his red Arab mare. Gerald’s world, the world of industrial civilization, has been described earlier by Lawrence in The Rainbow:

“The streets were like visions of pure ugliness ... that began nowhere and ended nowhere. Everything was amorphous, yet everything repeated itself endlessly ...
   The place had the strange desolation of a ruin. ... The rigidity of the blank streets, the homogeneous amorphous sterility of the whole suggested death rather than life. ...
   The place was a moment of chaos perpetuated, persisting, chaos fixed and rigid.” 

If such a mechanical world essentially lacks style, so too does it entirely lack meaning. At best, it retains a strictly functional residue of the latter that allows it to continue to operate. How to give value back to such a world - and a little loveliness - is a concern shared by Nietzsche and Lawrence. They both fear, however, that so long as the nihilistic-scientific perspective retains its authority, there can be no revaluation. For such a perspective has not only made the barbarism of the modern world unavoidable, but it ensures the destruction of all other perspectives and modes of being.

And yet, perhaps there is hope to be found where we might have least expected to encounter it. This is one of the great lessons of encouragement given to us by Heidegger in his essay entitled ‘The Question Concerning Technology’. At the heart of this work are the following lines from Hölderlin: Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst / Das Rettende auch.

Commenting on these lines, George Steiner writes:

“To realize that false technicity has edged the human race to the brink of ecological devastation and political suicide, is to realize also that salvation is possible ... It is in the very extremity of the modern crisis, in the very time of nihilistic mechanism, that hope lies ready.”

It is important that we avoid misunderstanding here; hope does not lie in the fruits of science and technology themselves and it is not, therefore, a question of accelerating the production and proliferation of ever-more sophisticated machines in the erroneous assumption that only a micro-chip can save us. If, on the one hand, technophobes who rebel naively against technology and curse it as the work of the devil should rightly be challenged, then, on the other hand, technophiles and neo-futurists who argue for an ever-greater technological manipulation of life deserve also to be met with critical resistance.

Heidegger would surely have agreed with Lawrence that “the more we intervene machinery between us and the naked forces, the more we numb and atrophy our own senses”. Thus, if we are to find our way into a new revealing, then we will have to find a way to creatively manifest these forces. And if we are to deepen our questioning of nihilism and technology, then we will need to resist the temptation of easy solutions and the blackmail of being either for or against science.

It is only via such a questioning - one that manages to touch on the essence of technology - that we can find hope. For it is only by daring to think the latter, which is to say, move closer to the very danger that threatens us, that “the ways into the saving power begin to shine” more brightly.


Bibliography

Maurice Blanchot, 'The Limits of Experience: Nihilism', essay in The New Nietzsche, ed. David B. Allison, (The MIT Press, 1992).
Martin Heidegger, 'The Question Concerning Technology', essay in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (Routledge, 1994).
D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge University Press, 1989).
D. H. Lawrence, 'Dana's Two Years before the Mast', essay in Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Nietzsche, 'The Struggle between Science and Wisdom', essay in Philosophy and Truth, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale, (Humanities Press International, 1993). 
George Steiner, Heidegger, (Fontana Press, 1989).


Note: Part two of this post can be read by clicking here.