Ben Lerner on the breakdown of American speech

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0:31Ben Lerner: Hi, it's Ollie. I'm going away on paternity leave for a couple of weeks. So whilst I'm off, we're going to be bringing you some conversations that we pre-recorded and some conversations from my esteemed colleagues at The New Statesman. I hope you enjoy this episode. The New Statesman.

0:53In 2011, Ben Lerner stormed onto the scene with his debut novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, a winning blend of low comedy and high art. He has since firmly established himself as one of America's most acclaimed novelists and is a leading voice in so-called autofiction. Now he returns with his fourth novel, and it may be his most profound yet. In Transcription, Lerner turns his mind to the nature of art and of ageing. It's a novel about generations, of growing children and dying forebears, and the way the secrets and gifts of life and art move from one era to the next. It's also a novel about technology and our increasing reliance on it, the way it shapes our speech, our thoughts, our memories, and even our conceptions of ourselves.

1:43I'm Tanjil Rashid and you're listening to The Exchange from The New Statesman. In this episode, I sit down with Ben Lerner to talk about how we record our conversations, why novels may matter even more in the age of AI, and in his words, the bankruptcy of political speech. I have to say you've made me very paranoid as a journalist about technology. I mean, your book is about a writer who is on assignment for a magazine like the New Statesman to interview a writer much like yourself. And a bit before the interview, he drops his phone in the sink. It breaks. And he's inexplicably unable to explain this and conducts the interview anyway.

2:26Hilarity ensues. Has this happened to you before?

2:29Ben Lerner: It's happened to me before that I've been interviewed and then the person has written me to say, I'm so sorry the device was broken or I erased it or whatever. I haven't ever had it happen when I've interviewed someone, which I haven't done that often. But it's not just that he breaks his recording device. It's that he lies and says it's functioning when it's not. And that I certainly have never had. Well, it's never happened to me that I know of. I mean, it's a very relatable experience. I mean, this personal struggle with and dependency on technology that the narrator has, you know, phones get broken and iPads get dropped in sinks and coffee gets spilled on laptops.

3:14Connections fray, you know, on Zoom. I mean, this is kind of the pattern of modern existence. I mean, is that kind of what you were sort of trying to portray, you know, in transcription? I mean, a little bit.

3:27Ben Lerner: The book is certainly interested in our dependency on devices and what they enable and what happens when they go missing. I think the novel, as a form for me, I've always been attracted to the way the novel is like an old technology that can describe the emergence of new technologies. There's a long tradition of the novel talking about the phone. I mean, less the smartphone than the landline. But I mean, the example I always think about was Proust describing his first telephone call with his grandmother, where she's suddenly aged because her disembodied voice has like the texture of her fragility in a way that he didn't experience in her physical presence.

4:10Ben Lerner: Like a new intimacy is opened up by the mixture of presence and absence that is the disembodied voice. So there's also there's also that wonderful scene in Ulysses when the character is imagining a phone call going back to the Garden of Eden. And the telephone line is a sort of umbilical cord through the history of humanity. Yeah. Strand entwining cable of all flesh. Wonderful scene. I mean, technology has for so long been imagined by novelists as this thing that sort of connects us. Well, but also, I think, like in this scene you mentioned, it's the mixture of novelty and ancientness, right? It's that it's new technology, but the disembodied voice is as old as hearing the voice of a god or of a ghost.

5:04Ben Lerner: So I think it's that new old relation that the novel can capture about technological change that attracts me particularly. And, you know, technology is sort of meant to connect us. It holds out the promise of sort of connection. But also one finds in your novel how much technology sort of disconnects us from reality. You know, there are these sort of wonderful moments early in the book when the narrator is suddenly phone free and he finds, you know, reality sort of supercharged. And, you know, the stones are stonier, you write. I mean, it's very, very relatable. I mean, have you had this sort of this struggle and this breaking free from technology?

5:50Ben Lerner: Yeah, sure. I mean, I think that, you know, it's interesting because when he loses his phone, he describes it as this, you know, intensification of presence. But it also immediately produces this revelry where he's kind of traveling back in time and remembering when he went to college in this town when he was diviseless. And I mention that because I think what happens is not just that he experiences the present, but he experiences the layering of temporalities. Like he also experiences the past. And one of the questions in the book is like which media and which media configurations let the past end.

6:28Ben Lerner: connect a previous present with our present, and which ones level and flatten everything into a perpetual present. Because as in the experience of the telephone and the disembodied voice, it's that mixture of intimacy and distance, of presence and absence, of present and past, that can produce a particularly profound experience. So, it's not just that when he's device-less that he's more present, it's also that he's more haunted. And many things in the book are about the way... What technologies allow the dead to speak to us, and what technologies... It's screen out the dead, that other sense of screen.

7:14Ben Lerner: Where a screen can be a technology of intensification. Like you experience something through the screen that's very intense, but it can also be a kind of defense against memory. It can obliterate memory. It can obliterate the present. So that double meaning of screen, the way that it can intensify or the way that it can keep out is one of the things the book thinks through technologically. But all this stuff, of course, is inextricable from the kind of emotional dynamics that are play in the novel too, because Thomas is a partisan of older media that enable distance and enable haunting. And he's quite critical of the new media that he thinks flatten everything into a perpetual present.

7:59And for the benefit of our listeners, Thomas is this sort of 90-year-old writer and media theorist. I mean, you describe him in the book as one of the world's leading sort of thinkers on art and technology. And he has grown up in Nazi Germany, and he's sort of haunted by that history. And he is the individual, the mentor of the narrator, who the narrator goes to interview and loses the recording, etc, etc. So we clearly have these sort of different kinds of devices to mediate reality. And the book is one of those kinds of devices, right? I mean, And you refer to it just now as a form of technology, which many social scientists do refer to writing as a kind of technology.

8:45But your novel, in a way, dramatizes a kind of struggle or dialectic between these two different handheld devices, you know, the phone and the book and what they represent. And the technology represents a kind of logging or transcription of reality. And the book represents a kind of imagining of reality. And there's a sort of, is this not the sort of Manichean struggle that's unfolding around us today? Yeah.

9:14Ben Lerner: I mean, I think, you know, as the media, you know, when the good thing about the relative marginalization of the book as a form, you know, compared to the iPhone or whatever, is that precisely when a technology like the book is no longer taken for granted, I think we become more sensitive to what it can do and what we value about it as a specific medium. So I'm not going around saying, book's good, cell phone's bad. I mean, I feel that way. But that's a boring argument. Who is that going to convince? But I do think it's an opportunity when you no longer take the book for granted. You start to get interested in its materiality.

10:02Ben Lerner: You know, like every part of the book becomes relevant in a kind of fresh way. You know, like the other day I was reading a book and I was having that experience of like the actual weight of the remaining pages in my hand. Like as it dwindled, as the weight of the unread diminished, it became like an important part of the experience of reading. And I feel like something like that, I'm more sensitive to the specificity of the codex as a form precisely when these other more addictive devices are increasingly monopolizing our attention. And really, attention is the heart of the matter, too, right?

10:42Ben Lerner: I mean, I'm very grateful for the work of D. Graham Burnett, who's writing a lot now about attention fracking. I mean, many people are. He's particularly eloquent, I think, about living in a condition in which the most powerful

11:02Ben Lerner: corporations basically try to capture, divide, and monetize our attention in ever smaller increments. While that's, of course, a great threat to something like literature, it also means that we can ask again and with a new urgency, what are the kinds of attention that the book as a form can sponsor and reward? And why might we care about that? And the book is a kind of attention preserve or oasis in the midst of this general environment of attention fracking. Like, it makes me more excited about the book as a technology, because increasingly, in order to feel like our lives are worth living, I think we're going to have to have other modalities of attention other than, you know, scrolling or whatever.

11:45At the same time, within your novel, you sort of play devil's advocate for technology and for the phone. I mean, in a way, clearly technology holds greater promise in terms of capturing and transcribing reality, much more effectively than the imagination can and than writing can. I mean, there's a section I was struck by, which I'll read from now. I still have it in my call history. or at some point I took a screenshot of my call history and I have that a record of a three minute and 27 second incoming call with Laura I put her in my contacts for some reason at 2 13 on April 21st 2020 when she held the phone to my father's ear and I said the things I couldn't say again things that he had no memory of hearing at least no conscious memory when my body was in the hospital My mind was on a distant star.

12:46I uploaded that screenshot to the cloud. So there's this sort of, you know, bewildering array of factual data documenting our existences. I mean, how can any writer compete with that? Yeah.

13:00Ben Lerner: Well, because, I mean, because in the, I mean, generally, because the way that we're bombarded with information, which is kind of like stupefying and overwhelming, actually gets in the way of a meaningful contact with reality. I mean, like just one total mundane example is the fact that every parent I know, well, everyone I know, it doesn't have to be about parenting, has, you know, like an infinite number of photos on their phone, right? And as a result, you don't look at any photos. No photo is special because of the supersaturation of images. There's not an aura around a particular photo. A photo doesn't travel in time in the same way as a print.

13:50Ben Lerner: So, the surfeit of that kind of information also obliterates the power of the photograph in the first place as an index of experience, right? So I think there's a way in which more is often less with these kind of media. And that's certainly true in the book. Max was able to say those things to Thomas when they... like that mattered when they switched from video to phone. He said that he wouldn't have been able to say those things either in Thomas's physical presence where he would have been overwhelmed by his father, but nor could he say it on like a video call. It was only when a nurse held the phone to his ear.

14:28Ben Lerner: So again, the channel is open when there's not too much and not too little. And the too muchness can be the too muchness of physical presence, or it can be the too muchness of the verisimilitude on the screen. But in that instance, Max is hungry for a signature that that conversation took place, both because Thomas doesn't remember it, obviously, but also because Thomas is always overwhelming Max's own sense of reality. So he needs some kind of relic. But one thing that I do think is fascinating in the contemporary media environment is precisely what we do with these relics. I was talking about this earlier today where I have a voice message on my phone that was left by someone I love who's dead.

15:19Ben Lerner: And I don't listen to it. I don't want to listen to it. But I also don't feel like just swiping it into oblivion. Do you know what I mean? And, and the question of kind of how we, how we handle all of these artifacts, these like digital artifacts is quite fascinating to me because it feels like to delete it, I would, I would almost like I need some kind of like ritual. I would need some way, you know, some kind of like religious just ceremony around it. So I just, I think that we're at a moment where our capacity for capture raises this second order question that I don't hear discussed that much, which is like, what do we let go and how?

15:58Ben Lerner: And you have to let it go. You have to deaccession something in order for your collection to be a collection, right? If you just try to capture everything, you have nothing. Transcription is, as you've very strongly hinted already, about lineage, about what connects one generation to the next. I mean, Thomas is a father figure to the narrator and the narrator is also a somewhat challenged father. Where does this interest, this intergenerational sort of fixation you could say come from? I mean, middle age maybe is the boring answer, where you're, I mean, I know it's like deadly to describe your book as concerned with middle age, But middle age in the sense of thinking about what it means to care for your elders and also if you're a parent, caring for the young.

16:50Ben Lerner: And so that state of being between generations and the way the voices are thrown across them is particularly fascinating to me. I mean, it's always been fascinating to me because art, you know, when you're a writer, you're in conversation with the dead and with the future, right? Like you're receiving messages from the dead and you're transmitting them to unknown readers in the future. So I think parenting in middle age is just an intensification of that question of how the voice travels across time. In this book, right, the narrator is between a kid who he's worried about, who's desperate to have a phone, and an elder who never, even though he's a media theorist, never had one.

17:35Ben Lerner: And so he's also in the middle of he describes Thomas and his daughter as the only two people he loves who didn't have cell phones. And so he's also in the middle of a certain kind of media environment, which also, I think, made the book feel writable. But I don't know. I mean, I just to me, to me, the I mean, in the grandest terms, like art and culture is about the possibility of a voice communicating beyond its the lifetime of its body. And what Thomas and what hopefully the novel is trying to intensify is our experience of the air as alive with messages, right? As there being voices in the ether.

18:20Ben Lerner: And it suggests that sometimes the way to pick up those voices is by writing. That like if you put your cell phone on record, it's not going to hear the voices of the dead. But when you engage in the act of writing in relation to your predecessors, you end up taking dictation. You end up hearing and interacting with voices when you read and when you write of people who are long gone. So to me, it's just the foundational mystery of language and art making. I mean, it's a surprisingly, I wouldn't say conservative, but traditional model of creative inspiration where you're engaging with a tradition, which is not something one would instinctively think about you.

19:03But you're so engaged with the idea of forebears. Is that correct? Yeah, I think that's right. I think that's right. So who are your literary ancestors, your intellectual ancestors?

19:16Ben Lerner: I mean, there's so many that it's hard to say. I mean, I would say that maybe I should say because it's so relevant to this book and because he just died that Alexander Kluger was a really important figure for me. I mean, I don't sound anything like Kluge in my writing, but Kluge, like a great mentor, a writer like Kluge is also somebody who gives you like his dead, right? I mean, so that, you know, Adorno speaks through Kluge. Fritz Long, who was his first teacher in film, speaks through Kluge. And also his, you know, fascination with like obscure 12th century rabbis speaks through Kluge. Like your great teachers and figures are themselves media.

19:59And they were transmitted to you through Kluger, would you say? Yeah, exactly.

20:03Ben Lerner: All these great figures from the past. Exactly. Or more recently, the way I get Stein and Stevens is in part through John Ashbery. I needed someone who was a live body around me to give me the dead recently or otherwise. That's part of the mystery of teaching and transmission. So Kluger is very important. Another figure that maybe I should mention in regards to this book is Rosemary Waldrop, who's a great poet and novelist. Because I actually, part of this book came out of being sent to interview Rosemary for the Paris Review. Rosemary doesn't resemble Thomas at all, except by being brilliant and German and around that age.

20:47Ben Lerner: But, you know, I was really struck. You know, I mean, we talked about this a little at the beginning. I interviewed her, and then the Paris Review makes edits, and things are moved around. You end up with a document that's real, but it doesn't bear an exact relation to the conversation you actually had. That got me thinking about how so many of the voices that matter to me are actually, in a sense, fictions or reconstructions. Alexander Kluge, Rosemary Waldrop, and John Ashbery are just three recent figures I think about who are both amazing artists in their own right. so crucial for me, but also were media for other figures from the past.

21:27And you've not only received the tradition from many writers of the past, you also, as a teacher, pass it on. You also transmit. I mean, you've been something of a mentor to the poet Ocean Vuong. Could you tell us a little about that relationship? I mean, an amazing best-selling sort of poet and now prose writer, but also someone who's received, especially recently, some quite vicious opprobrium towards his writing. I haven't followed the opprobrium really. What's your relationship with Ocean Wong like?

22:00Ben Lerner: I love Ocean. I mean, he's a total sweetheart. I mean, as a teacher, when you're teaching Ocean or anyone else who's really talented, I feel like you largely recommend books and get out of the way. But also, I think when you teach, and this is an aspect of teaching that is a little bit like parenting, you never really know what you're teaching. I mean, there's a really good, in Adam Phillips' new book, there's a really good essay about Winnicott and thinking about Winnicott in relation to teaching, where it talks about teaching is this thing where, I think Phillips says at a certain point, you're provisioning the dream life of the student.

22:40Ben Lerner: It's not like you have a stable body of knowledge that you communicate. You don't know what they're going to take from you, but hopefully... And they're going to see things in you that aren't really there. There's all kinds of transference and displacement and everything else, but that can be another way that you provision the dream life. You become a figure. They're reading you. They're reading things through you that you might not be in possession of, but then they do something interesting with. So, I mean, it was a great blessing to have Ocean come through a classroom. But I think that in all of teaching, beyond just taking your students' work seriously, it's a lot about helping put them in contact with contemporaries and with forebears that will have unpredictable results in their own writing practice.

23:30Ben Lerner: But I love that idea that some of the most important things you teach are not things you know. There are things that you transmit without exactly possessing. And I really like that phrase that I think is Adam Phillips and not Winnicott's. But now I'm not so sure about teaching being the provisioning of the dream life. And leaving art behind and returning to life. I mean, what were your actual ancestors or your parents like? I mean, what was your childhood like and your relationship with your parents? I mean, we're very close. But the but is interesting. We're very close and they're psychologists.

24:08Ben Lerner: Yes. My family is full of psychologists, which means like languages. And my mom is a writer of books on women's psychology. And there was certainly a sense that language was always primary and that language might be expressing more than you knew you were expressing. and probably a sensitivity to family systems in a way that influenced me. I mean, I wouldn't have known this at the time, that really influenced my thinking about the novel as a form, like the triangle that's so central to this book. You know, the way that when the narrator is relating to Thomas, he's also relating to Max and so on and so forth.

24:49So, I mean, I suppose intergenerational dynamics are so central to the study of psychology and the practice of psychoanalysis? I mean, in a way, is that kind of where you get it from, this interest of yours?

25:03Ben Lerner: I'm sure, yeah, I'm sure on some level, but it's also the way tradition and experiment works in literature generally. There's no such thing as starting fresh. And it's always about you inherit a grammar of the possible. And it's like, what new move can you make within it? And how might you expand it? And that's always an intergenerational practice. How do your parents feel about your writing and their portrayal in your writings? I mean, there's a funny moment in your first novel where you refer to your father as a fascist in order to attract sort of pity. Yeah, and he claims his mother is dead when she's alive and well in order to get there.

25:46How do your parents take to that? Do they have a sense of humor?

25:49Ben Lerner: Yeah, definitely. But they can also tell me apart from the protagonists pretty easily. But they do have a sense of humor about it. I mean, it was my last novel that was most intimately involved in their voices, or at least in my mother's voice. So this is the Topeka School, which portrays, in a sense, your alter egos, but also your childhood in your youth in Topeka. Yeah. I want to ask about that. I mean, you were a debater and you portray that experience. You're very interested in that book in, you know, public discourse and rhetoric. So I want to ask you some political questions. I mean, what do you think about Donald Trump?

26:28Oh, man. We're going to take a quick break now. Stay with us. We'll be back after this.

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27:42what do you think about donald trump right now let's say i mean what you know and and world events, which you would be debating, let's say, if you were still at the Topeka School.

27:51Ben Lerner: What would a coherent statement be? I mean,

27:58Ben Lerner: I'm horrified. And I'm horrified not just about the kind of psychotic behavior, but also about the whole political class in America, right? I mean, And as someone who used to do some of that debate stuff in high school, it was quite a profound experience to watch the Biden-Trump debate, which was like what? A contest between like senility and psychosis and psychosis won because it had more energy. I mean, it's not like there are all kinds of things to say about Trump and the current regime and all the different forms of madness that are happening. But I actually think it's more useful to broaden it to the whole political class.

28:41Ben Lerner: I mean, in the sense that, you know, we were all told that questions about Biden's functioning were a right-wing conspiracy. And then we saw the reality. So I just mean to say that the bankruptcy of American political speech is something that's circulating through the whole political class. Um, but I'm terrified and I'm looking for, for pockets of optimism that are happening on other political levels. Like it was very exciting to see the political establishment get upset in the mayoral election and have a sense that like new coalitions can emerge and there are new possibilities for imagining the city.

29:22Um, but it's definitely a moment where, where whatever political speeches, it isn't even

29:29Ben Lerner: discourse. It's a kind of experimental sound poetry, a kind of mashup of... I mean, there's no principle of non-contradiction. In a single sentence, you can say several contradictory things. It's a state that when I was younger, I associated more with Dada and experimental poetry than I thought would come to characterize political discourse, which is not to say political discourse was in great shape when I was young, but it was different. So I don't know how to make a general statement except to say that the bankruptcy of the language of the American political class is stupefying and poisonous and there has to be the emergence of a new language.

30:14I mean, one of the perhaps underappreciated aspects of transcription is the way it's sort of haunted by certain kinds of history, particularly the history of fascism. Thomas grew up in Nazi Germany. Was that a pointed reference? I mean, do you think we are staring in the face of something similar?

30:35Ben Lerner: Well, there's no question that we're staying in, there's no question that we're in a moment in which the combination of, you can't think the contemporary right without thinking about its relationship to the internet and Twitter. And there's this moment in the book, you know, one of the first things that Thomas says in his interview is, you know, that his earliest memory was of the disembodied voice. And he talks about hearing Hitler's voice on the radio, which is also something Rosemary Waldrop said in her interview, this endlessly ascending shrill voice on the radio. And then he goes on to say that the radio was always on, even when it was off, that it was kind of structuring experience.

31:16Ben Lerner: And And there's no question that the book poses and wants to make felt without spelling out the question of what part of the present and its relation to media parallels or doesn't parallel that infamous conjunction of Hitler and the radio. Yeah, the role of the mass media in disseminating fascist ideology. Do you think there's a comparison here with the sort of frenzied mass media of our own age, you know, and social media and the disinformation and so on? And Trump has got his own social network, you know? Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, and also that you just can't think any political situation without thinking about it's the way it disseminates the voice and the image.

32:12Ben Lerner: But this book wanted to have a different, you know, I felt like the Topeka School tried to be in a way, although I think this was kind of overstated in the way the book was positioned, but it was kind of positioned as being this kind of sweeping prehistory of the American present, which I don't really think it was. I think it was much more idiosyncratic in particular than that. But in this book, I wanted to kind of make all these issues felt around the edges, but not really engage them essayistically. Yeah, it's quite hard to subtract the way your narrator and other characters talk about it from your own kind of deeply ironic kind of mode of narration.

32:54So a lot of people will be wondering what you actually think. Yeah.

32:59Ben Lerner: What I think is not particularly interesting, but it is that we are in a state of emergency. It would be impossible to minimize. My first reading from this book was at the exact same time that Trump had casually said he was going to... I don't even remember the quote exactly, but he was going to... a whole civilization would die at 8 p.m. I mean, just this, an American president just speaking casually of a genocidal, no embarrassment of a genocidal project. But part of what's difficult in this moment, too, right, is on the one hand, it feels crazy to talk about books or anything without just talking about Trump and Netanyahu and what's happening in the world.

33:50Ben Lerner: But on the other hand, it's like as soon as one starts talking about it, you're kind of surrendering to the endless news cycle and you're surrendering the domain of the imagination or the slower rhythm of literature, which can't save us, but seems like a really important domain to protect, too. It's an age-old debate. Yeah. And I just, I feel it is an age old debate. And I think it's, I think it's a particularly intense moment for it in part because as so many people have commented upon, like attention has become the kind of currency of the political sphere in a new way. And it's like, do you let your attention be captured by the latest Truth Social post?

34:32Ben Lerner: It seems crazy not to pay attention to someone with nuclear weapons saying such things. But on the other hand, do you surrender your attention to the perpetual scandal of that domain? Or do you try to preserve the capacity to actually have a thought and an experience that isn't totally assimilated to that crazy rhythm? You're absolutely right that it's an ancient debate that I feel like we're in a really intense moment of it. Yeah. You mentioned in this conversation, Theodore Dorner, something of media theorist who perhaps has influenced your book. And of course, he argued that there could be no poetry after Auschwitz.

35:17And obviously, writers such as yourself have been writing poetry and prose and carried on making art. I mean, is that something that artists just need to keep doing regardless of the injustice and the tyranny that's unfolding around themselves? Or is it frivolous?

35:36Ben Lerner: Somehow both. Somehow it's both totally essential and totally frivolous. I mean, the narrator of my first novel had this youthful statement that increasingly actually feels right to me, where he's repudiating all the vanguard claims about what art could do, at least what his art could do, that you could write disjunctive poetry that was going to interrupt the smooth the functioning of capitalism or whatever. He has basically no investment in the idea that poems can really make things happen. But he also says that if he imagines a world in which you subtract the poems and the novels and the paintings and the films, and if you really took all of art out of it, you just dismissed it all as frivolous and it disappeared, that it would be a world that he would find totally uninhabitable, that he'd swallow a bottle of pills.

36:30And I think there's this way in which we have to hold at once the idea that we

36:35Ben Lerner: don't want to exaggerate the claim that like, certainly not a weird book of mine, it like constitutes radical political action, like by no means, but that preserving domains of alterity and possibility and imagination, it is nevertheless a question of survival. And if you really concede everything just to the political news cycle and the people who have monopolized our attention or the blue light of the screen, you will have lost, you know, the things that make life worth living in the first place and the capacity for thought that can hopefully eventually unfold an alternative to the disaster of the present.

37:17How do you envision the future? I mean, you're the father of two girls. Does that not mean you have to be optimistic to a certain degree? I mean, how do you see it all panning out? I don't know.

37:30Ben Lerner: Yeah, I don't know. I mean, you know, you...

37:35Ben Lerner: Optimistic. I mean, optimistic would be like, you know, the Klugean answer, the Alexander Kluge answer would just be that chaos, you know, the chaos of the present also means that things are unpredictable. And whether or not you're optimistic about the future, the future is not foreclosed. Because you don't have the authority or the knowledge to think of the future as a known quantity. And I think when you write a book or when you parent or when you do anything, you have a minimal faith that there is unpredictability and possibility. And that's enough because it has to be. And that the future is really a texture of the present.

38:24Ben Lerner: Like the future is a fiction and that we have to experiment with telling each other fictions about the future that enrich the present and make actual futures more possible. Am I like walking around feeling great about the prospects of the species? No. What about the prospects of the writer? I mean, is there a future for the writer in an age of supposedly sort of diminishing literacy? I mean, you'll have heard all the punditry around that. I mean, will the large language model become the prevalent writer of our time? It might become prevalent or it might become dominant. But the things I care about have never been like that I care about most have never been dominant relative to the culture.

39:10Ben Lerner: Right. So I think that the it's that thing, again, where. if the large language models, which are fascinating and mysterious too, like I'm not like, don't look at them. I mean, they're incredible. They're scary, but they're also like incredible and full of mystery. And I'm sure we'll learn all kinds of, of things. Um, to, to me, the issue is not whether writing, I think writing and reading can be revitalized precisely when they're, relatively marginal. Whose life is worth living if you don't have an ensemble of basically marginal practices relative to OpenAI and Amazon and the United States government?

39:56Ben Lerner: I mean, the thing that makes life worth living are marginal practices relative to those forces. So, human writing of complexity might well become more marginal, but that doesn't mean it'll be less valuable to me. Do you know what I mean? And like when you ask about like parenting, like when I imagine my girls' lives or whatever, like I'm imagining, to me, it's not about whether or not poems are viable, widespread cultural forms or not. It's about whether their lives can involve practices of all sorts that they feel like are humane and meaning giving. And that's a different question from whether or not, like, will LLMs be dominant, you know?

40:44Ben Lerner: But again, I would just say that, like, the unpredictability, you know, like, the book is not just about, like, new media as loss. It's about refreshing our capacity for wonder before the fact of mediation itself, that media can exist, that we create these extensions of ourselves that allow our voice to be thrown across generations. So it can be faked now, you know, very easily by an AI, the voice, but that doesn't change my interest in the real thing. Ben Lerner, thank you so much for joining us at The New Statesman. And it's been a wonderful conversation. Yeah, it's a pleasure to talk to you.

41:21Ben Lerner: Thank you very much. You've been listening to The Exchange from The New Statesman with me, Tanjil Rashid and Ben Lerner. The podcast will be back next week.

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