Taste Will Not Save Us
· Essays
As llms solve mathematical problems that have stumped pencil-and-paper based human mathematicians for decades, some social media posters still take solace in the insistence that llms can’t count.
This indicates two things.
The first is that the lag between frontier model capabilities and human anxiety is accelerating.
The second is that humans are looking to historical guarantors of their supremacy, even if that history is measured in months.
A longer historical frame can be seen in appeals to taste. Taste, they post, is something that only human beings can have. This capability will therefore maintain human earning potential as capital continues its exodus to llms. Taste will save us.
It will not.
Channeling Pierre Bourdieu, taste was originally a social status rearguard action in class society by the ancient regime against the nouveau riche. You cannot buy taste. You must be born with it. On property owned by your family for generations. And then you must develop it in the correct institutions and circles. Not over afternoon tea. Merchants and factory owners could buy as many teapots as they wanted. But the lack of good taste that they demonstrated by doing so was a demonstration of their own, innate, lack of quality. Taste is a matter of quality, yes, but it is a matter of The Quality (as opposed to The Mobility, the mob). And never mind new money not being able to buy it, illustrators and journalists developing it through sweat equity would be a category error. One might as well try to teach a cat’s fleas to play Schubert.
The landed gentry do not tend to be on social media, and so in their absence the mythology of taste has been appropriated by those whom, historically speaking, it would run screaming from. (You can tell an llm didn’t make that metaphor, it’s too bad.)
This is the first problem with taste contra llms. It is a regressive theory of authority and exclusion, not a progressive theory of social or aesthetic value.
The second problem is that taste is a theory of consumption, not production.
Taste is demonstrated by asserting that the quality of an individual is transitive to their received and continued selections within existing culture, not by newly creating varied objects to be selected from. Taste is provenance of consumption rather than production (which doesn’t separate cleanly in any theory of provenance, but taste makes this ordering much stronger). To claim that a product that you have made is tasteful is gauche. You might as well claim that you are charming or sexy. It would be less embarrassing. In fact the only thing worse, and more accurate as a comparison here, would be for your doting mother to insist it on your behalf.
Taste, then, is something that exists for the wrong class of person to lack. And for them to lack in and through their conspicuous consumption. It is a class theory of received authority, a move in the social game with no possible response from an opponent. If you don’t need to draw that distinction, if you do not need to make that move, you do not need the concept of taste.
This maps very well onto contempt for llms and their usage. But it doesn’t give the contemptuous a bulwark.
Stripped of its self-mythologization, taste is a heatsink for psychological contradictions caused by economic pressure, for what is believed but cannot be performed in the medium of the actual contradiction.
It is art, in this sense.
Can we turn panicked nostalgia for the psychology of an authoritarian rearguard action into anything more useful?
In an era where the circle of “the human” is constricting, we must be mindful of exactly how we phrase any measures we may wish to take. But as long as we do so, and until wider social reform or revolution around capital answers this question better than we can, what we can do is recognize what we are asking for when we want the cry of our souls in this soulless world to retain some ineffable and inalienable difference from dead capital.
However painful that may be.