Text and image used to feel so different.
It’s one of those oppositions that make for a great narrative of history. It's most clear in mathematics. The tension between the continuous and the discrete, symbolic and spatial, is a way to structure the history of math as a dramatic conflict, constant renegotiation of borders. Neither a pure opposition, nor a reducible symmetry: the major turning points in the history of mathematics were about finding the discrete at the heart of the continuous, or continuous in the discrete: from Zeno to Newton and Leibniz, to Cantor and Dedekind, to Grothendieck - the biggest mathematical discoveries, ones that would redefine all the subsequent mathematics, were often quite specifically about finding new ways in and out of this eternal duality – about the redefinition of their respective borders, their relative reposition.
We try to fit AI into a narrative. A great tension is just what a narrative needs, it keeps the history grounded. This one is not a feedback loop – the easy kind of tension some economic narratives end up with.
The “balance” between those two sides is conceptual – we “know”, we feel that some things are “discrete”, “textual”, “symbolic”, “discursive”, “digital”, and others are “continuous”, “figural”, “analogous”. And then something comes along that redefines those entrenched borders: infinitesimal number, infinite powerset, sheaf - Planck constant, wave-particle duality - digital camera, digital circuit. Things that seemed thoroughly discrete turn out to entail continuity, and the most elusively continuous objects reveal discrete arrangements at heart. The tension never collapses, but the balance has shifted, and it’ll be shifted again.
As a kid, I saw algorithmic symbolic manipulation as something very transparent, but this one time I stumbled upon an algorithm that worked with a very simplified map (it was in a magazine from around 1991). It was truly mind-blowing for me – breaching the border between those two completely separate domains, as I saw them. Of course, I learned enough since then to know that this border is labyrinthine and porous, but the early prejudice stayed with me.
Lyotard’s book, “Discourse, Figure”, proposes that there’s no such thing as a natural image. Every image refers to a particular script that helps us understand it, a particular way to link it to the idea of reality. We understand medieval illuminations, Renaissance, or Impressionist paintings using those different scripts, which are linked to each other by being critical of one another, as Cezanne was critical of Alberti’s perspective. There’s no natural way of painting that needs no script to be understood. There’s no absolute freedom of the figural, only its existence in relation to the textual.
This applies to mathematics, as I understand it, as well, as it doesn’t deal with pure continuity as such, but only with its symbolic descriptions, successively more and more elaborate symbolic roads that lead to a wider and wider range of continuities. But it’s irreducible to purely symbolic manipulation (at least, it’s a very defensible position to think this way): the idea, the imagination of the continuous guides the symbolic inventions which would be quite hard to understand without it. And every time we find a new way to describe the continuous, its limitations inspire even further symbolic work.
Lyotard doesn’t touch upon technology at all, which surprises me, since the rebalancing that happened with the advent of the printing press, or of a camera, is pretty obvious. His point, however, is relating the different scripts, different ways of understanding the image, to each other as history. Grounding that directly in technological inventions would perhaps be too vulgar-materialistic for him. I want to elaborate the technological side of this particular version of history in a future post.
AI, as we see it now, rebalances the discursive and the figural once again. Prompt, and the vector embedding, is the new gate at the border between text and image. Again, it won’t be perfect correspondence. The image as a category is not abolished by the prompt, though a massive category of images has been, creating a new source of panic. New space for images was carved out. What is the new image that comes post-prompt? What is the new script with which we will read the new continuities of the world?