The Cannibal Machine

On writing

In the YouTube video, ‘David Cronenberg Interviewed by a Teenager’, the Canadian film director and writer, when asked what changes in the industry he saw and liked, answered that the jump to digital was the main one. He had no nostalgia for working with film (as in the physical material on which images are captured), and drawing on his own life as a comparison, stated that he had a great affection for typewriters, having falling asleep listening to his father on his typewriter, but that he wouldn’t write using one, and that using historic and less advanced methods could actually limit or worsen the work you are producing. To Cronenberg, there was zero reason to use film when you could replicate the effects of film on digital, amongst many of its other possibilities.

At the end of her short essay ‘Poetic Destitution’, the Martinician author Suzanne Césaire ended with a call to arms against the saccharine and archaic literature of the tropics that had hitherto existed. She writes:

Come on now, real poetry lies elsewhere. Far from rhymes, laments, sea breezes, parrots. Stiff and stout bamboos changing direction, we decree the death of sappy, sentimental, folkloric literature. And to hell with hibiscus, frangipani, bougainvillea. Martinician poetry will be cannibal or it will not be.

The final line was at the same time a rejection of European values, a call to identify with the barbarians killed and slaughtered by the colonizers, a surrealist evocation of boundless violence, and an act of cannibalism itself, having taken and ‘corrected’ the final line from Andre Breton’s novel Nadja ‘Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all’ so it fits the conditions of Black surrealists and Negritude artists in Martinique.

With these two fragments of text in mind, it’s time to talk about the cannibal machine.

In a revolutionary organisation I am part of, what comes up from time to time is a discussion of encouraging people to write. Not enough people are writing for the publication or website or pamphlet or the internal bulletin or writing in general; it also becomes clear that no-one outside a certain demographic of people (read: white men) is writing. But the problem with these debates is that they often don’t result in a workable strategy to get people to write. They don’t lead into a discussion about how we can encourage and provoke people to articulate themselves, how we can educate people about writing without treating them like empty banks for language to be deposited in. Enough. People will never have the fire to write if we don’t give it to them, if we do not make it freely accessible.

So, this is my effort to do that. To convince others to write, as a creative, critical act done for one's own enjoyment or fulfilment, and as part of an effort for mass communication and consciousness raising and changing as part of abolishing the present state of things. Below are the means by which I think people can learn to write, to develop the skills and fire which already exist within them. If you are someone who would like to write, but doesn’t have the confidence or know-how (or so you feel), then this one take (amongst many others) which is attempting to communicate those tools to you.

So the first you’re going to want to do is start stealing stuff.

And when I say stealing stuff, I mean stealing it left, right and centre (but mostly left). Find works, any work (and not even necessarily written works) consume them, and then steal all the good parts and use them in your own writing.

You might say at this point:

– Oh, by stealing you mean take influence from these writers, let them inspire you, let them push me to greater literary heights.

To which I would say:

– No, I mean literally steal from them.

And you might say:

– Steal from them?

And I’d say:

– Yes, steal from them, take the sentences from their work and put them in your own work.

– Steal from them, steal the sentences from them?

– Yes.

– You mean plagiarise them?

– Yes.

– But that’s theft.

– Yes, that’s what I said.

– But you can’t do that.

– Why not?

– Because that’s illegal.

– Okay.

– But it’s against the law.

– I know that. Though it’s not always against the law if we’re being precise. And regardless, I’m saying you should do it anyway.

– But, but…

So the first you’re going to want to do is kill the cop in your head, specifically the intellectual property cop. All of human culture, heritage and knowledge, belongs to you. It belongs to all of us. You might feel, when you’re writing, that there is an immense pressure to be original, and you might feel that’s a pressure you can’t live up to, that you can’t write something original and new. Well, good news: nothing you were going to write would be original. A lot of things have already been said and you have already absorbed a significant amount of that, sometimes simply by living in the society that you do. So acknowledging that and accepting it allows you to have a greater critical relationship with those works and authors, and opens the possibilities of how you can engage with those works beyond mere reference. It might not be original, but it may very well be something new.

Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It holds tight an author’s phrase, uses his expressions, eliminates a false idea, and replaces it with just the right idea. Cannibalise the work, and shit out the bad parts. The writer is a thief of fire, and it turns out the fire was always already stolen.

The digital tools we have at our disposal these days allow us to do this at a greater rate than ever before. With search engines, online archives and libraries, everything has the potential to become intertextual, to be detourned and reimagined as we see fit. Not only do we approach an era when absolutely no one who really doesn't want to pay for a book will have to, but one in which the digital availability of the text alters the relationship between reader, writer, and book. You can buy a cannibal machine from Currys for not that much. You might have to use one for work. The means by which we can actualise ourselves as writers are not far from us these days.

If the metaphor of cannibalism is too visceral, then let's choose another one with a bit more romance: bank robbery. A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery, and the writer must approach his work in the same frame of mind in which the criminal commits his deed. If you feel you have not been left with the means to articulate by this society as well as you should have, then stealing, plagiarising is the best initial means you have of getting even.

Now at this point some might be questioning this essay, and say: is this not simply AI, and what AI does? Should we not argue for originality against the dogshit that AI puts out, and see IP laws as a barrier, an essential means of protecting the hard work of artists against corporations? Now, in a way, the comparison is not entirely inaccurate. To some extent the need to get even felt by most ‘AI artists’ is the same, though they displace and transfer it onto artists themselves – through AI, they can displace the artists themselves and get the praise and adulation they feel they are missing out on. But the key difference is that AI is owned and propagated by corporations, and seeks to divorce the work of art from the process of human creation entirely, both to free itself of the need to pay artists for their work, but also to ‘liberate’ culture and art from the grubby hands of commoners who might dirty it. What it seeks is not the communization of culture but simply a different form of private property – one that is de facto rather than de jure. The kind of theft and cannibalism I am arguing for is an entirely human process, where technology only serves to facilitate human input – whatever you choose to steal, you must make the choice and effort by yourself. You have to be the one to make it work – writing, like bank robbery, carries a lot of risk and requires bravery. The difference between the two kinds of theft I am speaking of is that in the latter, even an absolute disaster can still be beautiful.

But more than that, we shouldn’t attempt to shore up IP laws as a defence against AI. It’s important to remember these also lean heavily towards protecting the corporation and the rich over the working class. The novelist China Miéville articulates this issue with this tendency in his talk/article ‘The Future of the Novel’ where he describes the Creators Rights Alliance putting out a manifesto arguing for copyright education in schools. To this he says:

A collection of artists and activists advocating the neoliberalisation of children's minds. That is scandalous and stupid. The text is open. This should – could – be our chance to remember that it was never just us who made it, and it was never just ours.

Every writer who has ever written has only been a genius by means of the collective, by being part of a wider culture, society or movement in which they have grown and developed their ideas. And the possibilities opened up by this are profound, as Miéville lays out:

To love literature doesn't mean we have to aggrandise it or those who create it. That aggrandisement is undermined by the permeable text. Be ready for guerrilla editors. Just as precocious 14-year-olds brilliantly – or craply – remix albums and put them up online, people are starting to provide their own cuts of novels. In the future, asked if you've read the latest Ali Smith or Ghada Karmi, the response might be not yes or no, but "which mix", and why?

We'll be writing as part of a collective. As we always were. And so might anyone else be.

You might want to forego just stealing sentences, and instead edit novels to provide a completely different interpretation. Through rejecting the idea that certain works are closed and inviolable once they hit the press, we can begin to reinterpret and recreate our common heritage. This possible future frightens both the corporations and the petit bourgeois minded artists. In the latter case, as Miéville notes, at least some of the fear of communization of writing and culture (and perhaps even AI), comes from the fear that the public might improve their works, and stop them seeming so special, as well as an ignorant fear they might end up like all the undervalued people in capitalist society.

You don’t even have to plagiarise other writers, you can just plagiarise yourself. Literary autocannibalism has been done before – in the first of the Jerry Cornelius quartet of novels, Michael Moorcock has the characters re-enact the events of two of his Elric of Melnibone stories. To speak from personal experience, having done communications work for some organisations, I have often cannibalised stuff from previous work in order to produce communications work at a faster rate, and to take the pressure off myself to simply write some of the same things over and over again. I know many NHS staff, in particular clinical staff, will often work from templates for their clinic letters. People, and workers in particular, are already doing this when they have to, so why not make that part of our engagement with culture? Would it be better to turn these things into modes of play?

And through a more playful, critical relationship with writing we can expand it into the life we live, and abolish the distinction between it and art. Art must inform the living; we envisage a situation in which life is continually renewed by art, a situation imaginatively and passionately constructed to inspire each individual to respond creatively, to bring to whatever act a creative component. Otherwise we may find ourselves outpaced and outmaneuvered by the capitalist mode of culture production that is steadily growing. Alongside a coup du monde, we need a coup du langue, a seizure of language. You need to start writing now – the bastards are already in the process of stealing the fire away from us. We must take it back. And that will require the participation of every human being – for poetry must be made by all.