In art, we donât begin from choice, but from clichĂŠ, from a position of determination and dependency. And every actual choice we make in the production of an artwork is achieved by consciously cultivated tactics of resistance to clichĂŠ. In Bacon, one such tactic was actually the restriction of his subjective âchoiceâ in the process of painting: the introduction of chance into the making of the work, the use of materials that did not easily respond to the painterâs hand, the defacing of the face in his great portraits.
A radically âchosenâ artwork, an artwork that is actually composed entirely of free âchoicesâ made by the artist, is inconceivable. We begin with our given materials, our shared language, our common history, and the overdetermined conditions of our socialization into that history. Only within and against that background of this shared meaning, only by knowing it well enough to navigate the many traps and alleys that may first appear as lines of flight, can we strike out on our own and invent something newâwhich if we are lucky will integrate itself into the tradition and perhaps even one day become a clichĂŠ of its own for others to overcome.
A defense of art-making in purely humanist-voluntarist terms will collapse under its own weight when placed under scrutiny, especially when we consider the extent to which so much writing produced by human beings, with human hands and human minds, is as automatic as that of LLMs. Iâve been hesitant to confront students about suspected AI-use because I simply cannot tell if the generic quality of their arguments and phrasing is the product of algorithmic flattening or of the quotidian automaticity of college-writing that has been around at least since Aquinas led disputations at the University of Paris.
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