BROKEN KNOWLEDGE (15)
By:
December 3, 2025
University of Toronto philosopher Mark Kingwell and HILOBROW‘s Josh Glenn are coauthors of The Idler’s Glossary (2008), The Wage Slave’s Glossary (2011), and The Adventurer’s Glossary (2021). In 2022, they engaged in an epistolary exchange about science fiction. Via the series BROKEN KNOWLEDGE, the title of which references Francis Bacon’s philosophy, HILOBROW is pleased to share a lightly edited version of their exchange with our readers. Also see Josh and Mark’s previous exchange 49th PARALLEL.
BROKEN KNOWLEDGE: FIRST CONTACT | WHAT IF? | A HYBRID GENRE | COUNTERFACTUALS | A HOT DILUTE SOUP | I’M A CYBORG | APOPHENIC-CURIOUS | AN AESTHETICS OF DIRT | PAGING DR. KRISTEVA | POLICING THE GENRE | FAMILIAR STRANGENESS | GAME OVER | THE WORLD VIEWED | DEFAMILIARIZATION | SINGULAR CREATURES | ALIEN ARCHAEOLOGIST | THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF SCREEN-TIME | HOMO SUPERIOR | EVERYTHING IS US.
11th November, 2022
TORONTO
Hi Josh. I’m out of the hospital finally, after just over a month of treatment. This was my fifth or sixth return visit since surgery in March — it all begins to blur. I won’t bore you with all the details, but there were some new uncanny wrinkles worth mentioning. It turns out that the pneumonia I had earlier in the summer left a residue of fluid around both my heart and my lungs. Various opportunistic infections may also have contributed to it. The procedure of choice for internal fluid is centesis, which means inserting a needle or catheter into the affected area and drawing off the stuff. I already had one of these for my abdominal cavity, about a year ago. The heart and lungs are obviously more serious. Fluid on the lungs can lead to collapse, and fluid around the heart can cause what’s called “tamponade,” pressure on the heart that can be fatal. Fun! So: two separate procedures, both with local anesthetic only. I got to watch my heart beating on a big-screen TV while the surgeon snaked a line into the pericardium; and then, next day, I sat and watched 1.6 litres of wine-coloured fluid drain into bottles out of a tiny hole in my back.
Kind of awesome, really — such a wacky 2022 mix of blood-letting and miraculous cures, to quote the title of a book by my pal Vincent Lam (an MD and novelist). In a way it speaks to this larger question of whether and how any android AI could ever relate to us in non-uncanny ways. So much of our routine phenomenology is irreproducible because it lies at the level of texture, odor, nagging feelings, shards of memory, tiny anxieties, and the like. An android needs to walk around the world in order to have a world, and maybe share it with us; but it’s still hard to imagine how anything not made of flesh could possess consciousness as we think of it. I’m okay with that, as I argue in Singular Creatures. Bring on the new forms of life! I think almost all of the fear we see in examples of AIs-gone-awry depictions (I appreciate your excavation of those early literary versions) is precisely contained in your phrase “the mask slips.” This is the uncanny effect, when near imitation or identification is experienced as imperfect. And of course it’s a short step, at least in imagination, from that to some form of deception, evil plan, tyrannical lack of compassion, etc. I tend to see these anxieties as backward-facing: what we’re really worried about is not that robots lack compassion and other “human” emotions or traits, but that we do. We offload our insecurity and psychic conflict onto The Other — as usual.
Speaking further of imitation, in my own discussion I talk a fair bit about AI writing programs, which are very good now, and getting better. (They are a special interest of Stephen Marche, who provided a nice blurb for my book!) And I’ve been following some of your experiments with Midjourney at HILOBROW. They are fascinating but to my mind inconclusive. As you say, what they do is a remarkable redeployment of available banks of conventions and tropes. And the results may be more or less indistinguishable from some kinds of existing human-produced work, so there is a labour issue here (back to that!). But speaking as an art collector, I can’t see that it makes much difference to my aesthetic worldview. I own paintings (unique objects), prints (not unique), photographs (likewise), sculptures (meant to be handled as well as looked at), found objects (ditto), and lots of other things. My appreciation of them is conditioned by multiple factors. I have a Seth drawing of you, me, and him right in front of me. I know he did it because of his distinctive style and because he gave it to me personally. Behind that is a computer-generated image that illustrated my baseball book, executed using an early version of an AI-assisted illustrator. Beyond that, two paintings that the artist didn’t want to part with because (of course) they were the only ones. And so on.
There will be a shakedown in some kind of writing and illustrating — I’m sure you’re right about that. It may even be as devastating as the music-industry and book-world implosions. But we know that two things remain possible no matter what: (1) there is always some monetizable element of creative production. From Radiohead charging zero dollars for their music but fetishing gatefold vinyl and the concert experience, to Instagram and TikTok celebrities who score big without gatekeeper culture, creative acts find ways to make it to market. It’s a harsh market, yes, and the middle will suffer; but being distinctive is what it’s all about, what it’s always been about. The other thing is that (2) so far we still harbour an interest in the human behind the creation. This may change, in fact it already has in the form of hybridized undertakings. For example: Frank Gehry’s architecture is machine-assisted to a degree earlier generations would have found baffling, if not obscene. But he has successfully fronted the enterprise by using himself and his story — the avatar of Frank Gehry, you might say, sometime Simpsons character — as the (human) face of the work. Artists’ collectives and studios have done similar things for centuries. What is a flunky in a Renaissance painter’s studio other than a piece of trained machinery, nameless and programmed to execute conventions and tropes of some master and/or tradition?
I’m going too long, so let me say something quickly about two other points you raise. Like you, after a couple of decades of watching movies (and TV) with little or no self-consciousness, I started to notice how things work in their construction. (I remember Tatum O’Neal saying, around the time of Paper Moon, that when she was young she thought movies were shot in exactly their running time, like plays. Me too!) Your series at HILOBROW on “Shocking Blocking” rang an immediate bell with me: why are the actors placed like that? What the hell is that guy doing over by the window? I’ve also become a bit of a connoisseur of car chase and fight sequences, which are among the most closely choreographed aspects of contemporary action thrillers. The chase, indeed, lies close to the origin of film itself (early “classics” of eligible bachelors being hounded by gangs of young women, for example — hilarious). You begin to appreciate why John Woo is witty as well as explosive in his action sequences, how Cronenberg makes visceral dance out of sharp objects and vulnerable bodies. Alas, speaking of conventions, most chase and fight scenes now follow a tired set of cliches and physically impossible moves. There are exceptions — the car-chase scenes in the Bourne franchise are all pretty great, and master John Frankenheimer has two in Ronin. Drive and Baby Driver are movies about the very idea of the car chase, which is great. But the classics remain: Bullitt, The French Connection, The Blues Brothers.
Fun uncanny fact: suppose Vertigo is read as the slow-motion version of Bullitt? Same winding San Francisco streets prowled by car, same obscure object of desire, same troubled detective figure at the centre of the action, same inversion of chased and chasing.
Music is another thing I pay more attention to now. I often have muted films on my TV, but in the background — I’m not really watching them, they’re just visual adds, like a window. I’m struck more by the use of soundtrack and, especially, diegetic and non-diegetic music. Kubrick is a master of blurring the last distinction, but he’s not alone. In Eyes Wide Shut, music that we at first take to be soundtrack (non-diegetic) ceases when Nicole Kidman’s character turns off the radio (diegetic). It’s a simple trick, but a neat one — a tiny bit uncanny, a reminder of our cinematic situation, an enjoinder not to get too comfortable. Used liberally, this is the stuff of comedy (Police Story, say); used sparingly, it’s very cool. On a different point, I’m amazed at how much soundtrack there is in certain movie periods. The Eighties were brutal — the original Terminator is almost unwatchable now because of the relentless sound-over. Like you, I appreciate what I can see when I can’t hear.
OK, finally, ontology. Yes, bad times for it, most recently I think because of something called Object Oriented Ontology (OOO), which had a vogue with some influential art-theory types. And contemporary analytic metaphysics, which dominates the profession, has never been kind to the idea of asking “what is the meaning of Being?” But I was trained as some sort of Heideggerian, especially when it comes to art and technology (not so much politics!), and I can’t imagine thinking philosophically about the world without invoking, as Heidegger would say, the worldness of the world. Why is there something rather than nothing? In film, the ontological questions are both general and specific. What is the nature of a film as a work of art? (Think of the problems we have trying to say what music consists of.) But in finer-grain, what does it mean that film uses the world as its raw material, over and over? You can’t answer these questions merely analytically without disappointment and, worse, a departure from what draws us into cinema (or “screen”) over and over. This is where Cavell is so interesting: he takes conventions like the cowboy and the femme fatale and probes them not just culturally (that’s pretty easy) but ontologically. Like those boots in van Gogh’s famous painting as discussed by Heidegger, what do these figures tell us about the world beyond themselves, the world that created them and which they, in our spectation, they create?
Okay, enough for now! I’d love to talk more about blocking, but maybe that’s too far away from sf?
Mark
ALSO SEE: Josh’s BEST 250 ADVENTURES of the 20th CENTURY list | Mark on BATTLESTAR GALACTICA and THE HONG KONG CAVALIERS | Mark and Josh’s exchange 49th PARALLEL.