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Offers a new theory of realist character through character's unexpected afterlife: the intelligent machine. In Seeming Human, Megan Ward contends that mid-twentieth-century versions of artificial intelligence (AI) offer a theory of verisimilitude omitted by traditional histories of character, which often focus on the development of interiority and the shift from "flat" to "round" characters in the Victorian era. Instead, by reading character through AI, Megan Ward's Seeming Human argues that routinization, predictability, automation, and even flatness are all features of realist characters. Early artificial intelligence movements such as cybernetics, information theory, and the Turing test define ways of seeming-rather than being-human. Using these theories of verisimilitude to read Victorian novelists such as Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James, Seeming Human argues that mechanicity has been perceived as anti-realist because it is the element that we least want to identify as human. Because AI produces human-like intelligence, it makes clear that we must actually turn to machines in order to understand what makes realist characters seem so human.
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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor
Megan Ward is Associate Professor in the School of Writing, Literature, and Film at Oregon State University, where she teaches courses on British literature from 1800 to the present, the history of the novel, and archival theory. Her work on technology and realism has appeared or is forthcoming in edited collections such as AI Narratives and The Routledge Guide to Politics and Literature as well as journals such as New Literary History and Public Humanities. She is also Co-Editor of the Nineteenth-Century Data Collective and has published writing on the Victorian antecedents of contemporary culture for general audiences in The Atlantic, Wired, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Seeming Human is her first book.
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Introduction
AI as a Theory of Character
IN THE MIDDLE of the twentieth century, scientists and mathematicians began
creating machines that imitated human intelligence. Their definition of intelligence went beyond solving math problems to include what we might call subjectivity: creativity, tastes and preferences, self-awareness, and learned behaviors. We have come to call this artificial intelligence (AI), a term that captures the tensions inherent in that project between artifice and nature, between reproduction and original creation. How might intelligence, which is fundamental to defining human subjectivity, be created anew? Does intelligence mean looking, walking, and acting like a human? Or is human intelligence more abstract, disconnected from behavior and material form? These questions were fundamental to the inception of AI and their answers dramatically changed the direction of AI research.
Though these questions have been identified as inaugurating a new era, they had been posed before. The Victorian novel, too, asks how to create human subjectivity: can it be represented through the material surfaces ofthe body? Or is it an ineffable essence, untouchably interiorized? Can it be programmed or is it spontaneous? Such questions are at the heart not only of twentieth-century AI but also of the Victorian novel’s fictional practice. But the Victorians did not see themselves as producing artificial intelligence; they called it character.
This book reconsiders realist character by reading Victorian novels through mid-twentieth-century forms of artificial intelligence. Theorists of the novel at least since Ian Watt have defined realist form by its “stress on the subjective and psychological direction.” (1) This has been a remarkably durable argument; when in 2007 George Levine defines realism by “the shift to focus on characters’ interiority,” he is not advancing an argument so much as voicing an established commonplace.(2) In turn, the focus on inner life shapes the history of the novel into a narrative of ever-increasing interiority, as in Blakey Vermeule’s observation that “the history of literary forms is punctuated by [. . .] changes designed to get inside the mind and go along for the ride.”(3)
The result of the critical emphasis on interiority is a progressive narrative of the development of an ineffable, idiosyncratic sense of consciousness as definitive of realist, “round” characters. (4) This narrative depends on a belief that psychological depth defines humanlikeness. (5) Victorian characters that do not conform to the depth model have been dismissed as stereotypical, didactic, sensational, or flat, or recuperated as deliberately antirealist or posthumanist. Although realism’s self-referentiality, its awareness of its own artifice, has long been the best critical defense against charges of realism’s political conservatism, (6) the attribution of self-awareness has not extended fully to fictional character, of whom we expect human-like referentiality, usually in the form of represented thought. (7) In other words, we adhere to a definition of realist character that is at odds with the essential fictionality—the non-human-ness—of fictional character.
Seeming Human reconsiders the critical history of realism through Victorian character’s unexpected afterlife: the intelligent machine. Rather than reading fictional character through the study of humans, I turn to machines meant to seem human for a theory of character verisimilitude. The emergence of AI in the 1940s through the 1960s offers a theory of human mimesis that is not limited to represented thought but instead sees behavior, connections, surfaces, and perceptions as key elements of seeming human. Perceiving human-likeness in mechanicity as well as idiosyncrasy, in connectedness as well as particularity, disrupts the critical emphasis on fictional techniques of individual inner life such as free indirect discourse and represented thought. (8)
By reading Victorian novels through AI’s mimetic theories, Seeming Human argues for an alternate genealogy of realist character, one that is not predicated on the development of individual interiority but encompasses a variety of fictional selves. This genealogy tempers the dominance of individual inner life through these characters’ blatant artifice. They may be feedback loops, information systems, flat fakers, or networked bodies; each one challenges prevailing assumptions about what makes a realist character seem real.
Each chapter takes as its starting point one aspect of fictional character—development, predictability, flatness, and mind—that AI also conceives of as central to the cultivation of intelligent machines. Forms of AI here constitute structures of mimesis: the cybernetic feedback loop; the connected surfaces of information theory; the Turing test’s imitation game; the perceptron’s web of embodied sense perceptions; and the physical symbol system’s abstracted cognition. This book has been inspired by studies of Victorian culture’s afterlife by scholars such as Alison Byerly, Jay Clayton, and Richard Menke, who read Victorian literature through its anticipation of contemporary technological concepts such as virtuality, networks, cyborgs, and informatics. It departs from these studies, though, in identifying an afterlife for Victorian culture in the under-studied, under-theorized period between the Victorian era and the present—the afterlife of Victorian ideas and the past of our own. This project excavates mid-twentieth-century models of machine intelligence in order to, in turn, resuscitate the realist characters that came before them and of which they bear traces.
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