Demiurgery as Artifice and 3A

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.” — Franz Kafka, in a letter to Oskar Pollak (January 27, 1904)

I'm under the weather, taking a sick day, and thinking about The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeney. This will be a response to a great Thomas Flight video I watched on YouTube.

In my professional life, I push for colleagues to embrace new technologies, a stance that can be quite polarizing. Many of my colleagues take a “burn-it-with-fire” view of recent changes in the digital humanities, and while I understand their concerns, I try to weigh to both perspectives. Over the last year, though, it seems that something has changed. More are beginning to recognize that the lid is off, and we are entering a new age of digital production, one unlike anything that came before, very unlike, say, what Walter Benjamin called art in the age of mechanical reproduction.

One of the most unnerving aspects of the spread of AI technology, to me, is that billions of quasi-aesthetic artifacts now exist that never had any chance of possessing an aura to lose. Ideas like Plato’s cave and gnostic paranoia become exigent concerns in a world with SORA, as people slip into their idio kosmoi. Along with that, Lafferty’s insight into consensus and its relationship to art looks less idiosyncratic and more prophetic. This is a primary reason The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeney is a great work, despite what it excludes.

In Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, the Canadian writer J. F. Martel gives consensus an extraordinarily important role in the relation between art and artifice, arguing that art differs from artifacts. The latter are created to serve Consensus. Art is defined by its power to disrupt the ordinary rhythm of mental and biological routine. When it appears, it appears as an interruption, breaking the habits to which humans have been conditioned. Martel sees these habits as grounded in evolution. Lafferty would have disagreed, but he perhaps would have seen the habits as part of the amnesia that concerned him. The art and artifact distinction is one Sweeney plays with.

Because of its nonutilitarian nature, art compels us to step outside the logic of means and ends—the mindset that reduces all things to utility. One of the aspects of Lafferty that I admire is his lack of investment in this kind of thing. While mindful of reputation, popularity, and the publication of his works, he stayed hopeful and was never grotesquely preoccupied with such matters. He said he started to write because it was like playing with crayons; he wanted to leave his mark. And he said for many years writing was all fun, and after it became only half fun, he stopped. In his letters, one finds that he wants to see his works out in the world, being shared and enjoyed, but he was content whether his various contacts published them or didn’t. He left it to Virginia. There is something radically nonutilitarian about Lafferty, even if he enjoyed his paychecks, as anyone would.

When Martel argues that every authentic encounter with art halts the automatic flow of experience and demands a new mode of attention, I see a connection to my experience in reading Lafferty. Few writers who appear so demotic on the surface are so intent on arresting perception. For Martel, art suspends the discursive mind and lifts it beyond the egoic world we normally inhabit. In this stillness, the logic of subject and object, action and reaction, cause and effect, is interrupted. The mind, accustomed to motion and analysis, is suddenly, and productively, stopped. It is drawn into imaginal awareness. The self’s boundaries blur, and a more expansive perception takes hold. Martel’s arguments have a Kantian flavor, but Lafferty, I think, aims to create just this effect by tossing readers into the oceanic.

The idea is that beauty has a physical impact. It intensifies the interruption we experience in the presence of art. The ancient Greeks used the term aisthou—meaning “to perceive” and “to gasp”—to describe this shock of the beautiful. Beauty intrudes upon the body, overriding the biological algorithms of self-preservation. It cuts off the mechanical sequence of cause and effect. In its presence, perception and emotion are fused. This is what we mean when we say that we don’t see beauty but are momentarily seized by it.

Then there is Martel’s argument that art is static in the sense that it suspends the discursive mind and elevates it to a plane of reality broader than the egoic world we usually inhabit. Laffert exploits this in endings that aren’t endings, most famously in the suspension that ends Past Master (1968). Be quiet. We hope.

This momentary stillness interrupts the logic of subject and object, of action and reaction, of cause and effect. As Lafferty put it in Past Master, “The shapes they take are both subjective and objective. One can shape them a little with one’s mind.” The mind, accustomed to movement and analysis, finds itself suddenly stopped. It is drawn into a space of direct, imaginal awareness. The boundaries of the self blur, and a more expansive form of perception briefly takes hold. Martel’s arguments here have a Kantian flavor, but I think Lafferty aims to create something like this in readers by tossing them into the oceanic.

As Martel points out, the ancient Greeks used the term aisthou (meaning “to perceive” and “to gasp”) to describe this shock. It might be why there is the beautiful and the sublime in Lafferty of Bergson's idea of the comic and the mechanical. As I've written about on the blog, for Bergson, the comic arises when the living becomes mechanical, when flexibility gives way to rigidity and automatism within human behavior. And why, when the boundaries of the self blur in the schizo-gash, and apocalyptic perception briefly takes hold, it tends to create laughter and horror, and not infrequently both.

In thinking about "Phoenic" and its question—Whence is this newness?—it also occurred to me that it is, in its way, a question about consensus. In consensus, nothing really new takes place, a point made brilliantly in Shannon Vallor's The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking (2024). All creativity is subordinated to replication and familiarity. That is what Martel calls artifice—work that sustains the trance by presenting reality as a closed system, where every meaning has already been assigned and every emotion predetermined. Because the record of the past is largely a record of consensus, I think Vallor is right when she writes,

“ . . . our AI mirrors project a vision of human intelligence constructed entirely from the amalgamated data of humanity’s past. This is why our dependence on these mirrors for self-knowledge risks leaving us captive like Narcissus, unwilling to move forward and leave behind what the mirror shows. At the very moment when accelerating climate change, biodiversity collapse, and global political instability command us to invent new and wiser ways of living together, AI holds us frozen in place, fascinated by endless permutations of a reflected past that only the magic of marketing can disguise as the future.”

The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeney is a minor masterpiece for the brilliance with which it takes up these questions. And while the ethical failure of its Holocaust denial is profound, that failure makes it, to me, an even more interesting piece of art in our troubling world:

“The dreadful facsimile that this person makes will not ward off a dreadful reality. It will be the origin of that reality. It will be the invention of it. It will turn into that dreadful reality that will gobble up the world.”