A COMMENT on "real art" and AI art and the petty bourgeoisie

Pao Ching-ming
19th June, 2024

A COMMENT on this COMMENT: Too diffuse, too incoherent, too diffusely and incoherently acerbic. But whatever—I stand by most of the basic points. One of these days, when I've engaged more in art and in culturoïntellectual production in general, and when I've learned to articulate my thoughts in clearer, less mind-numbingly unconcise ways, I'll do a follow-up.

Quezon City, R. P.
8th September, 2024

MILES ASTRAY, photographer "disqualified from a picture competition after his real photograph won in the AI image category," over e-mail to PetaPixel: I wanted to show that nature can still beat the machine and that there is still merit in REAL WORK from REAL CREATIVES. (Emphasis mine!)

PAO CHING-MING, me, tweeting: fascism, unironically

PAO CHING-MING, me, tweeting, again: you are hitler's strongest soldier

Now, NUANCE: In the first place, I think there's something deeply wrong and basically antiproletarian with restricting the category of "real art" to art made by "real creatives" (i.e., the petty bourgeoisie!) according to some necessarily mystical, necessarily élitist set of standards and mores which are only coherent, only workable insofar as bourgeois, and by extension class, society insists they are---

QUESTION: What is human-made and what isn't? Is digital art drawn with the help of a reference taken or done by someone else, of brushes and erasers and shortcuts and effects programmed by countless others labouring on the shoulders of countless more, of ideas and techniques derived from the productive succession of generation after generation going back to the first Neanderthal to consciously and appreciatively draw a circle with his own spit on a cave wall, really art? Is the person who made it a real creative? really original? Who decides these things?

ANSWER: The strongest, most passionate sentiments of the petty bourgeoisie--that class of small proprietors, small producers, small landowners, small minds; of the Professional and the Educated and the Cultivated and the Free; of, in other words, the petty bourgeois--as regards anything in and of the superstructure, of culture and of art specifically, will always fall back on fascism and fascism alone, for any true democratism of culture would not be anything but proletarian; only that class which owns nothing and thus cannot lose anything (that class which has, as Kim San puts it, "lost everything to gain a whole new world in the last battle") can genuinely grasp the substance of and need for the abolishment of private property in all senses and all modes, including the superstructural, the cultural, the intellectual, the artistic, &c., &c.

The big bourgeoisie in promoting AI (which I should say has been a thing for decades now; ChatGPT in my opinion is just a more superficially impressive Google, a cleaner and more accessible/amusing presentation and summing-up of functions that have been there since forever, memorially) is of course not doing so altruistically, to liberate Man from information-parochialism and artistic élitism or whatever, but to better standardise and commodify (thereby making more profitable) the total(ising) process of intellectual/artistic/cultural production. Replacing the writer/artist/producer-of-culture paid a livable or almost-livable wage by First World standards with AI models trained and maintained by an army of people-drones in the Third World paid literal cents for hours of labour (even sans AI, the freelance writing, virtual assistant, and BPO industries have thrived in the Philippines and elsewhere for the past three decades) means more bullshit papers with bullshit figures to publish in bullshit closed-access journals, more bullshit art and more bullshit music to slap on bullshit ads for bullshit products, bullshit products whose provenance in the final instance is the blood and sweat and tears and flesh and bones of six or seven times a billion souls again in the Third World, in the imperialised and semifeudal periphery.

The two classes thus find themselves in terminal opposition--on one end the (post)modernity of Capital and on the other a kind of pseudomediaeval sanguinism, a shallow, vulgarised worship of the Real and the Good and the Beautiful (see: The Rt. Hon. The Lord Clark's Civilisation series), only really possible under the former. What the big bourgeoisie is pushing for is the proletarianisation of all professions besides bare proprietorship, or, put another way, the complete division of society between bourgeois and proletarian, the complete realisation of the capitalist ideal. Conversely, what the petty bourgeoisie is pushing for is the obstruction of that world-historical realising, for as a class it is all too aware that, being a vestige of premodernity (in Europe, of the unlucky or plainly reactionary/stupid/unsavvy merchant, the actually sentient serf, or the obstinate petty noble; in Asia and the rest of the periphery, of the village-level freeman-turned-colonial collaborator, the magistratic clerk, or the artisan in chronic financial ruin), its only hope for survival is to stall progress, to stall modernity (for it knows, too, that there is no true stopping nor reversing development--Himmler, "enthusing over every potsherd and stone axe he finds" in antecivilised/semicommunal Germania's "villages of mud huts," dreaming of the dismantlement of that bulwark of bourgeois republicanism in Europe, France, and the return of Burgundian feudalism, is thus deemed whackier and more hopeless than der Führer himself), leaving room for Intermediacy (beauty), for Middlingness (greatness), for Mediocrity (intellect), for Great Art and for syphilis and cholera and consumption and base hatred and narrowmindedness and gallant stupidity and romantic pox-death and chivalric cock-sores (famous enemy of Marx) and all those antihumanisms which the petty bourgeoisie and its agents claim make us truly Human.

Such then are the tendencies of the middle classes, who not so long ago stood one with the scriveners deploring "printed books crammed with the foolishness of common folk" and bewailing the fate of the "true writer"; who with Byron die soul-profoundly disappointed that the Grecians of the liberation were not, in point of fact, the Grecians of their imagination, of heroic remoteness--the Grecians whose leisure time was devoted to the rape of young boys, the Grecians whose working hours were occupied by slave-raids and lootings and razings, the Grecians whose chiefest (in truth, sole) instruments of anal hygiene were pebbles and broken ceramic, &c., &c.; and who with Huxley hue and cry over the possibility of some future time in which there shall be no more child-deaths and war-wagings and rape-murders out of which to make Art, Art That Is True, Art That Is Original, Art That Is--blessedly and christofascistly (no matter their outward professions)--Soulful. Borrowing from Césaire somewhat: At the end of the prehistoric road of Ego, after every oppression and every exploitation and every despotism and every revolution of class versus class, and just before the start of History and of Humanity both, there you will find the last of the petty bourgeoisie; there you will find Hitler's final incarnation, blocking the way with vendor booths and zine displays and appeals to the Community/Volk and whatever other hold-outs of race-hate and class-anxiety there are left unstruck by the fist (the world-historic fist) of proletarianism, of liberation in motion.