Stucco

Edmund King has published the remarks he gave last week on an authorship panel at the Open University, expanded into a short essay. Its title asks two questions: is there an author in this text, and does it really matter anymore? He answers the second. It does.

He begins with the ancient rhetoricians. Following Raymond Geuss, he lists the ways a person could be said to speak well: by persuading, by speaking beautifully, by giving good counsel, by telling the truth, by speaking correctly. Every one of them assumed a person was speaking. A language model keeps the eloquence and removes the person.

The view he argues against belongs to Leah Henrickson, for whom the author was always the reader's projection, so it hardly matters who or what wrote a text as long as the reader finds meaning in it. King answers with a magic trick. The audience cannot see the sleight of hand, and it is still sleight of hand. His example is the student. An Australian lecturer told The Guardian of students who could tell him nothing about the semester and had each handed in a beautiful essay. The beauty is beside the point. With no student behind it, the essay is no longer evidence that anyone learned anything.

Then comes the image I will keep. Baudrillard took Renaissance stucco as the first counterfeit: one pliable substance that can be modelled into any form and made to imitate any material. King thinks model prose is the same stuff, the written record taken in as training data and extruded into whatever shape is asked for. The Romans called plasterwork opus tectorium, from tegere, to cover.

Against it he sets a conversation Boswell recorded in 1778, in which Boswell asked whether every man has a style as peculiar to him as his handwriting. Johnson: "Why, Sir, I think every man whatever has a peculiar style, which may be discovered by nice examination and comparison with others."

King is not nostalgic about what the machine displaced. The student essay, he concedes, had long been a formula, which is why it was so easy to automate. Montaigne invented the form to try out a self, and assessment turned it into five paragraphs. He ends by asking what we still value in the imperfect and the not yet formed.

King stops Johnson at the colon. Boswell's text goes on: "but a man must write a great deal to make his style obviously discernible. As logicians say, this appropriation of style is infinite in potestate, limited in actu." Everyone has a style in potential and gets one in fact only by writing. An essay nobody wrote leaves nothing for nice examination to find.