The Most Human Human

by Brian Christian

  –STUDS TERKEL

  French prose poet Francis Ponge’s Selected Poems begins with the following: “Astonishing that I can forget, forget so easily and for so long every time, the only principle according to which interesting works can be written, and written well.” Art cannot be scaled.

  I remember my undergraduate thesis adviser, the fiction writer Brian Evenson, saying that writing books has never gotten any easier for him, because as he gets more adept at producing a certain kind of work, he grows, at an identical rate, less satisfied with repeating those old methods and practices that were so successful in the past. He won’t let his old models scale. He won’t let his job get any easier. To me that’s exhilarating, the economy-in-all-senses-of-the-word-be-damned battle cry of the artist.

  Ponge continues, “This is doubtlessly because I’ve never been able to define it clearly to myself in a conclusively representative or memorable way.” Perhaps the issue is, indeed, that what makes for good art eludes description, will remain, by its very nature or by its relationship to description, forever ineffable. But this misses the more important point. I doubt Ponge would scale his production if he could. Evenson clearly won’t. As former world chess champion Garry Kasparov puts it, “The minute I begin to feel something has become repetitive or easy, I know it’s time to quickly find a new target for my energy.” If, say, a musician like Carter Beauford is effortlessly and ceaselessly inventive on the drums, it is in part because he resolutely refuses to bore himself.

  I remember having a conversation with composer Alvin Singleton, over dinner at an artists’ colony last year. He told me about a clever title he’d used on one of his pieces, and I jokingly suggested a clever twist on the title, I think some kind of pun, be the title of his next piece. I expected a chuckle; instead, he was suddenly serious. “No, I would never use the same idea twice.” For him this was no joke. Later I talked to him about how whenever I try to write music, the first thirty to forty-five seconds comes naturally to me, but then I get stuck. I wondered if, for him, whole songs just spring to mind the way short riffs and vamps spring to my mind. The answer was a steadfast negative. “What you call ‘being stuck,’ ” he said, a twinkle in his eyes, “I call composing.”

  Site-Specificity

  I know when I’m working that the very first time I get something right it’s righter than it will ever be again.

  –TWYLA THARP

  One of my friends, an architecture graduate student, was telling me about a famous architect—Australia’s Pritzker Prize winner Glenn Murcutt—who’s notoriously opposed to any kind of scaling-up of his output. The Pritzker jury clearly took note, saying, “In an age obsessed with celebrity, the glitz of our ‘starchitects,’ backed by large staffs and copious public relations support, dominates the headlines. As a total contrast, [Murcutt] works in a one-person office on the other side of the world … yet has a waiting list of clients, so intent is he to give each project his personal best.” Murcutt himself doesn’t find this scale-restraint, rare though it is, odd in the slightest. “Life is not about maximizing everything,” he says. His wariness of scaling applies not only to his own operation but to the designs themselves. “One of the great problems of our period is that we’ve developed tools that allow rapidity, but rapidity and repetitiveness do not lead to right solutions. Perception gives us right solutions.”

  A fellow Pritzker-winner, French architect Jean Nouvel, concurs. “I think that one of the disasters in the urban situation today is what I call the generic architecture. It’s all these buildings, parachuted into every city in the world now—and now with the computer you have a lot of facilities to do that. It’s very easy. You can put three stories more or you can have a building be a little bit wider—but it’s exactly the same building.”

  For Nouvel, too, the enemy is scaling (made nearly effortless by the computer), and the solution is found in perception. “I fight for specific architecture against generic architecture,” he says. “I try to be a contextual architect … It’s always, for a building, why this building has to be like this. What I can do here, I cannot—I cannot do in another place.”

  “It’s great arrogance in an architect to think one can build anywhere appropriately,” says Murcutt. “Before starting any project I ask: What’s the geology, what’s the geomorphology, what’s the history, where does the wind come from, where does the sun come from, what are the shadow patterns, what’s the drainage system, what’s the flora?”

  Of course not every wheel has to be reinvented—Murcutt allegedly memorized catalogs of standard building components early in his career, stocking his imagination with available details, priming it to look for new ways to use them. It is paramount that those uses be site-specific.

  “I think every site, every program, has a right to a specific work, to a complete involvement of the architect,” Nouvel says. It’s better for the work, better for the site—but, no less importantly, it’s better for the architects. They, too, have a right to “complete involvement” in their work.

  Most people, though, are not so involved—whether it is because they are prevented from doing so by the structure of their job or because (as with firms “parachuting” cloned buildings into city after city) they are complacent, thinking the problem already solved. For me, though, complacency—because it is a form of disengagement—is a whisker away from despair. I don’t want life to be “solved”; I don’t want it to be solvable. There is comfort in method: because we don’t always have to reinvent everything at every minute, and because our lives are similar enough to others’ lives, the present similar enough to the past that, for example, wisdom is possible. But wisdom that feels final rather than provisional, an ending rather than starting point, that doesn’t ultimately defer to an even larger mystery is deadening. I won’t have it. Perception gives us right solutions.

  I think of site-specificity as a state of mind, a way of approaching the world with senses attuned. The reason to wake up in the morning is not the similarity between today and all other days, but the difference.

  Site-Specificity in Conversation

  If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.

  –1 CORINTHIANS 13:1

  And if you’re just operating by habit, then you’re not really living.

  –MY DINNER WITH ANDRE

  Many of my all-time favorite movies are almost entirely verbal. The entire plot of My Dinner with Andre is “Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory eat dinner.” The entire plot of Before Sunrise is “Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy walk around Vienna.” But the dialogue takes us everywhere, and as Roger Ebert notes, of My Dinner with Andre, these films may be paradoxically among the most visually stimulating in the history of the cinema:

  One of the gifts of “My Dinner with Andre” is that we share so many of the experiences. Although most of the movie literally consists of two men talking, here’s a strange thing: We do not spend the movie just passively listening to them talk. At first, director Louis Malle’s sedate series of images (close-ups, two-shots, reaction shots) calls attention to itself, but as Gregory continues to talk, the very simplicity of the visual style renders it invisible. And like the listeners at the feet of a master storyteller, we find ourselves visualizing what Gregory describes, until this film is as filled with visual images as a radio play—more filled, perhaps, than a conventional feature film.

  Sometimes there’s so much that needs to be said that the literal “site” disappears, becomes, as in My Dinner with Andre, “invisible.” Shawn and Gregory’s restaurant seems to be one of those restaurants that’s “nice” to the point of invisibility, as if any “holds” on their attention would be a distraction, as if (and this was Schopenhauer’s view) happiness consisted merely in the eradication of all possible irritants and displeasures, as if the goal were to make the diners consent that they’d enjoyed themselves primarily through the impossibility of any particular criticism. The restaurant mak
es it a point to stay out of the way.6 And in this particular movie and situation, it works brilliantly, because Shawn and Gregory just riff and riff, out to infinity. (And in fact, the next time they “notice” the restaurant, it ends their conversation—and the film.)

  But remember, Gregory and Shawn are old friends who haven’t seen each other in years; Delpy and Hawke are just, like Turing test participants, starting from scratch. It’s telling that in the sequel, Before Sunset, they walk around Paris, but Paris is much more “invisible” to them than Vienna was. They have, themselves, become the site.

  Part of what makes language such a powerful vehicle for communicating “humanly” is that a good writer or speaker or conversationalist will tailor her words to the specifics of the situation: who the audience is, what the rhetorical situation happens to be, how much time there is, what kind of reaction she’s getting as she speaks, and on and on. It’s part of what makes the teaching of a specific conversational “method” relatively useless, and part of what makes the language of some salesmen, seducers, and politicians so half-human. George Orwell:

  When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases … one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy … And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance towards turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church.7

  This is also what makes the meeting of strangers such a difficult place to defend against machine imitation: we don’t yet have the kind of contextual information about our audience that would enable us to speak more responsively and uniquely.

  In these moments, where the metaphorical site-specificity of audience temporarily fails us, literal site-specificity may be able to help.

  In Before Sunrise, set in Vienna when Delpy and Hawke are strangers and don’t even know what to ask each other, the city itself spurs, prompts, and anchors the dialogue by which they come to know each other. Professional interviewers talk about how helpful these site-specifics can be. Their stance on the My Dinner with Andre / Before Sunrise question turns out to be surprisingly firm. “It’s one thing to have lunch with a celebrity in some nice restaurant … It’s another when you can just follow that person around for a while and see them in action,” says Rolling Stone’s Will Dana in The Art of the Interview, where the New York Times’s Claudia Dreifus concurs. “Certainly no restaurants.”

  At a Turing test, one of the things that every bot author fears is that the judge will want to talk about the immediate environment. What color is Hugh Loebner’s shirt? What do you think of the art in the lobby? Have you tried any of the food vendors outside? It’s extremely hard to update your program’s script that close to the contest itself.

  I should think that a non-localized Turing test, in which participants don’t gather at a particular city and building but are connected to other humans (and bots) at random around the world, would be much, much more difficult for the humans.

  The conversational encounters of the Loebner Prize are frequently compared to those between strangers on a plane; I think part of the reason this analogy appeals so much to the contest’s organizers (who of course are hoping for a close fight) is that planes are so alike. And seatmates have nothing really in common. But of course on a real plane the first thing you talk about is the city you’re leaving and the city you’re flying to. Or the book you notice in their lap. Or the funny way the captain just said such and such. Site-specificity manages to get its foot in the door.

  When a round of the Loebner Prize in Brighton was delayed by fifteen minutes, I smiled. Any deviation from the generic plays into the humans’ hands. As the round finally got under way and I began to type, the delay was the very first thing I mentioned.

  The Problem of Getting the Part

  Every child is born an artist. The trouble is how to stay one as you grow up.

  –PABLO PICASSO

  Most of the classes an actor takes are about how to get the part, and how to prepare for opening night. For the college actor, that’s about all there is—the longest run of any show is typically two weekends, with many only scheduled for one or two shows total. The film actor is in a similar position: get it right and never do it again. But the professional stage actor might land a role that he or she has to reprise eight times a week for months, even years. How do you still feel like an artist in the tenth performance? The twenty-fifth? The hundredth?

  (As Mike LeFevre in Studs Terkel’s Working puts it: “It took him a long time to do this, this beautiful work of art. But what if he had to create this Sistine Chapel a thousand times a year? Don’t you think that would even dull Michelangelo’s mind?”)

  Art doesn’t scale.

  This problem fascinates me, in part because I believe it to be the problem of living.

  How do you still feel creative when you’re creating more and more of the same thing? Well, I think the answer is that you can’t. Your only choice is to create more and more different things.

  One of my favorite theatrical events, and a yearly ritual since I’ve lived on the West Coast, is Portland’s Anonymous Theatre. One night only, one performance only: the director has cast the show and rehearsed with each of the cast members for weeks—that is, rehearsed with each of them separately. They don’t know who else is in the show, and they won’t meet until they meet onstage. There is no set blocking—they must react dynamically and without much of a preset plan. There’s no rehearsal-dug ruts or habits between the actors—they must build their rapport and repartee in real time, with all eyes watching. It’s fascinating and sublime to watch this happen.

  When I talk to friends of mine who are actors, they say that this is more or less the answer that the actor in the long-running show must find, in his or her own way. How do you deviate? How do you make it a new show?

  It’d be tempting to think that you spend a certain amount of time learning what to do, and the rest of the time knowing what you’re doing, and simply doing it. The good actor will refuse to let this happen to him. The moment it does, he dies. A robot takes his place.

  I think of neoteny, of my younger cousin, age four or so, careening into walls, falling over, getting up, and dashing off in the next direction. Of the fact that kids are much quicker studies at learning to ski because they’re not afraid to fall. Fail and recover.

  For the architect, it’s site-specificity; for the actor and the musician, it’s night-specificity. My friend Matt went to see a songwriter that he and I admire a lot, and I asked him what the show was like. Matt, unenthusiastic, shrugged: “He has a set list, and, you know, he plays it.” It’s hard to imagine what the artist or the audience gets out of that. A great counterexample would be a band like Dave Matthews Band, where one night a song is four minutes long and the next night, twenty. I admire the struggle implicit in that—and the risk. There must be this constant gravity toward finding what works and sticking with it, toward solidifying the song, but no, they abandon what works as righter than it will ever be again, or come back to it the next night, but only to depart and try something else that could well fail. This is how you stay an artist as you grow up. And both they and the fans get a once-in-a-lifetime thing.

  I suppose when you get down to it, everything is always once in a lifetime. We might as well act like it.

  I saw my first opera this past year: La Traviata, starring soprano Nuccia Focile in the lead role. The program featured an interview with her, and the interviewer writes, “It’s those unexpected moments that blindside a singer emotionally, Focile feels. In performance, a different phrasing of a word can suddenly take the involved singer by surprise and make her gulp or blink away t
ears.” Focile seems to think of these moments as hazards, saying, “I must use my technical base to approach certain phrases, because the emotion is so great that I get involved too much.” As a professional, she wants to sing consistently. But as a human, the fine attention to and perception of the tiny uniquenesses from night to night, the cracks in technique where we get involved, get taken by surprise, gulp, feel things freshly again—these are the signs we’re alive. And our means of staying so.

  1. “Her” name is an allusion to Eliza Doolittle, the main character in George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play Pygmalion. Inspired by the myth of Pygmalion, a sculptor who creates a sculpture so realistic he falls in love with it (which also inspired, among many other works, Pinocchio), Shaw’s play (itself the inspiration for the musical My Fair Lady) takes this idea and makes it into a tale of fluency and class: a phonetics professor makes a bet that he can train the lower-class Eliza Doolittle in the spoken English of the aristocracy and have her pass as a noble—a kind of Turing test in its own right. It’s easy to see why Weizenbaum drew from Shaw’s Pygmalion to name his therapist; unfortunately, he ended up with something closer to Ovid’s story than Shaw’s.

  2. The only difference, which may be an important one, is that the book’s boundaries and extents are clear. If you read it front to back, you know exactly which areas it covers and which it doesn’t. The bot’s extents are less clear: you must, probing the bot verbally, find them. One can imagine a bot that contains a useful response that the user simply doesn’t know how to get to. Early “interactive fictions” and text-based computer games sometimes had this problem, nicknamed “guess-the-verb” (for instance, a 1978 game called Adventureland required the user to somehow know to type the ungrammatical command “unlight” to extinguish a lantern). It might be fair to say that therapy bots are to therapy books what interactive fictions are to novels.