7. 'Cheating' and the Heideggerian Case against Augmentation

Some poets feel that using programs like the Augmented Imagination Project is 'cheating'. To cheat, according to the OED, is to defraud or deceive; to cheat at a game is usually to deceiptfully break the rules. There is also usually an assumption of the effectiveness of the underlying method (though perhaps not of successful deceipt): someone who rigs a poker deck so that all players receive an evenly balanced mix of cards is not obviously cheating, though they may be deceiptfully breaking the rules.

In the case of computer-assisted poetry, the assumption of effectiveness involved in the accusation of cheating is of course rather flattering to the practise: it appears to suggest that computer-assisted poetry can be at least as good, if not better, than poetry produced by traditional means. But suppose we accept this assumption and follow the objection further.

If computer-assisted poetry is cheating, is this becase it is deceiptfully breaking the rules of the game called poetry? The idea here seems to be that one of the rules of the poetry game is that all finished poems must be entirely the work of a single human author. But this is of course nonsense - most obviously because it is quite possible and legitimate for two human poets to collaborate on a single poem.

A little less obviously, it is nonsense because poetry is not really a game with fixed rules at all - at least not since the various avant-gardes of the 19th and 20th centuries showed us that it was alright to break the traditional rules of metre and form. The postmodern (or post-avant-garde) condition is one in which pretty much anything goes, at least with regard to form and compositional technique.

There is one form of compositional technique that is still widely frowned upon (despite apparently dissenting voices, such as that of Stewart Home) in the current poetic climate: plagiarism. And the issue of plagiarism seems to play a role in the charge of deceipt involved in the cheating objection. Plagiarism is generally seen as failing to publicly acknowledge the contribution of other people to a finished poem; it might also be seen as extending to a similar failure to acknowledge the role of computer programs.

However, to the extent that the cheating objection boils down to a charge of plagiarism, we could easily conclude that computer-assisted poetry is fine as long as its computer-assisted nature is publicly acknowledged. And we have also seen that the cheating objection is untenable if it merely amounts to a charge of breaking the rules of the poetry game. Is there anything left to discuss in the cheating objection?

I think there is, for the objection taps into a deeper concern about augmentation of human capacities more generally. The philosopher Michael Sandel has articulated this concern effectively in his book The Case against Perfection. Considering the impact on performance-enhancing drugs in sport, he first considers the objection that such enhancement is unfair - essentially a form of cheating. This is untenable, he argues, because it is only unfair if some of the sportsmen competing against each other have access to some enhancements, and others do not. The same applies to the parallel objection to computer-assisted poetry: the advantage gained from use of the computer-assistant is only an unfair advantage if not all poets have access to such assistance. As any poet can in principle design their own computer assistant, and most computer poets make their own computer assistants available for others to use, this is simply not the case.

Sandel next considers the objection that the problem with performance-enhancing drugs is that they 'provide a shortcut, a way to win without striving'. Again a parellel case could be made against computer-assisted poetry - or indeed the use of a thesaurus. In each case the use of the aid does provides a shortcut to the appropriate word choice, one that reduces the effort of mentally trawling through various possible words from memory. But for Sandel this objection too is untenable, for as he pithily puts it: 'Striving is not the point of sports; excellence is'. The same could be said for poetry. We should welcome labour-saving devices in poetry, if they help us to achieve poetic excellence.

For Sandel, the real problem with performance-enhancing drugs, and with technological augmentation more generally, is that they represent a failure to acknowledge what he calls the 'gifted character of human powers and achievements':

To acknowledge the giftedness of life is to recognize that our talents and powers are not wholly within our own doing, nor even fully ours, despite the efforts we expend to develop and exercise them. It is also to recognize that not everything in the world is open to any use we may desire or devise. An appreciation of the giftedness of life constrains the Promethean project and conduces to a certain humility. It is, in part, a religious sensibility. But its resonance reaches beyond religion.

This profound and complex objection to augmentation echoes Martin Heidegger's concerns (e.g. in The Question  Concerning Technology) that modern technology amounts to a worldview centred on a will to subjugate the world around us. Just as Sandel recommends humility and an acknowledgement of giftedness, Heidegger suggests that we humbly 'let beings be', acknowledging for instance that it is not we who use language, but that 'language speaks'.

It is easy to see how some kinds of technological augmentation, such as the use of performance-enhancing drugs, could be seen as part of a Promethean project of putting the world as a whole (including our physical bodies) to human use. In the case of computer-assisted poetry, however, things are much less clear-cut. The essential use of chance in the algorithms of most computer-assisted poetry means that such poetry at least partially places the rational will - characteristic for Heidegger and Sandel of the Promethean technological project - in abeyance. There is in such poetry (as in other stochastic practices such as the I Ching or the Tarot) an essential humility before the natural processes underlying randomness. Someone using the Augmented Imagination Project, in particular, experiences the same kind of passivity in the face of the pure emergence of words, as the surrealist engaging in automatic writing, or the Heideggerian thinker. Language, it could be said, speaks through the algorithms.

In The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger famously expressed the hope that poetry could be an important form of resistance to the technological will to power. He quotes the poet Friedrich Hölderlin:

But where danger is, grows
The saving power also.

If the danger lies in the technological worldview, whereby the world is subjugated to human use, perhaps the 'saving power' should be sought not in traditional forms of poetry, but in poetries that engage directly with technology, and in technologies that resist the will to power, helping language speak and beings be.