User:Nadiners/ essay

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A ghost writer’s job is to fulfil another person’s vanity who, for the life of them, cannot write. Who then is in possession of the story’s soul?

Where does the 'spirit' reside in a ghostwritten text?

[Steve: great to see this developing. I think you are identifying a number of different types of ghosts (persona, translator &c.): this afternoon we can make a lexicon of ghost in your text and identify what they do and how to investigate them further. The idea of 'the soul of a text' is historically specific. Where did it come from? (Calvino has the answer) What made the ghosts go away? (see also Calvino). Might also be useful to stress writing as technology (see Orality and Literacy).]

Unfortunately what you are about to read is not ghost written. What if it had been written by someone else, a ghost? He who would listen to me, as the author, then write down my thoughts in a structured and comprehensible way. His job would be to keep my voice and my story, and have a nicely edited text ready to be read by the public. However, his skilled use of the language, and his choice of words might influence and read other interpretations to my actual story. Or we might end up sharing the story, desired or not. What if my ghost writer were a machine? If technology were advanced enough to give the creative literary skills of a human and have the consciousness to understand the storyteller? This would turn the machine into a sort of slave, he wouldn’t express his opinion, he would do what he is told. My thoughts tend to be all over the place, this is why I am imagining a machine that would listen to me. Of course I am aware that I am not the only one to struggle, many people especially in the arts struggle, either because we lose the practice or because we don’t consider ourselves skilled. Here is my attempt to come up with ideal solution, a ghost writing machine, far from being realised today. I would like to break it down to the consequences it would have and the problems/solutions it would encounter if it were actually to exist.

writing

I must start with mentioning Italo Calvino’s text Cybernetic and Ghosts. Calvino investigates the idea of a machine replacing the human writer. He believes the writer is confined to the rules set out by writers before him. So can the words of the writer express his own true voice. Writing, being a technology, a machine we use everyday, in effect influences our voice, we do not speak the same way we would write. So where is the “I” in what is written? who is the “I”?

And in these operations the person "I," whether explicit or implicit, splits into a number of different figures: into an "I" who is writing and an "I" who is written, into an empirical "I" who looks over the shoulder of the "I" who is writing and into a mythical "I" who serves as a model for the "I" who is written. The "I" of the author is dissolved in the writing. The so-called personality of the writer exists within the very act of writing: it is the product and the instrument of the writing process. A writing machine that has been fed an instruction appropriate to the case could also devise an exact and unmistakable "personality" of an author, or else it could be adjusted in such a way as to evolve or change "personality" with each work it composes.

Calvino is as confused as ‘I’ am, who’s voice is it? The ‘I’ indicates the person telling the story, though it’s a false ‘I’, should it be ‘we’, if there is collaboration with either another human or a machine. So, as I mentioned earlier, what if the machine didn’t replace the writer but was the ‘slave’ of the one who is telling the story. In French a ghostwriter is translated as nègre or nègre littéraire, implying slavery, thus directly giving a negative connotation to the job. The ghostwriter is simply to be told what to do, and not give his opinion, dehumanizing the writer. On a moral/ethical level would it be more justified to give this job to a machine, whom we consider is not in possession of a spirit. On the other hand, ghost writer, Andre Crofts, tells his experience to the guardian (interpreted by a journalist). He admits being in a very comfortable position, I could stick my nose into everyone’s business and ask all the impertinent questions I wanted to. At the same time, I could also live the pleasant life of a writer... He explains that through his work he meets the most extraordinary people, only accepting stories that interest him. This is after a reputation he had to gain of course. He also mentions that often the reader won’t modify his writing and will trust his words. Once given the power to make changes they nearly always decide they can’t actually think of a better way of putting things and leave it virtually untouched. This would normally be after the ghost would have caught the author’s voice, if not, the project is doomed.

Different ways we can refer to the term

In Tim Mackintosh-Smith’s small book called ‘Ghost Writer’, he puts himself in the skin of an ancient manuscript from Aleppo. Here, Mackintosh-Smith in the voice of the manuscript describes his; birth, his author and his journey right up to the Bodleian Library in Oxford. This makes us question who the ghost really is? Would it be the first person being the manuscript telling his story, or author of the manuscript (Abd al-Latif ibn Yusuf ibn Muhammed ibn Ali) born in 1162, so he has been dead for a while. Now he is being revived through the personification of his manuscript. Or is the author of the physical book ‘Ghost Writer’ that is ghosting the whole thing. Maybe everyone takes on the role of the ghost, because the story wouldn’t be what it is without all the characters. This adds another dimension to the whole idea of ghost writing, which led me to question all types of ghosting, through various forms of creation. In writing, painting, design and technology.

Ghost Painting

We can apply this method of ghost writing to painting. There is a similarity and something to understand in the two domains, although they have rather different purposes. For example an art forger is one who enters the skin of the painter and draws in the style of, in his voice. In the film ‘F for Fake’, Orson Welles talks about art forger Elmyr de Hory, who sold his soul to the devil. Elmyr explains in an interview that he has no creativity, only the skill. He is incapable of coming up with his own style, however he can perfectly imitate Picasso’s or Modigliani’s style to perfection, so much so that he fools the experts, making us doubt their very job titles. But here, in art forgery, it is the ghost haunting the storyteller, rather than the storyteller haunting a ghost. the ghost finds a person and enters his skin, another art forger, Guy Ribes, explains his method in an interview on French TV show ‘Le terrien du samedi’ (translated): you must know everything about the painter’s life, what day in his life he would have painted the piece, because I put myself in his psychology, in his soul, to think like him, I have to be him, to be able to have his magic.

The other way round would be, an artist (with the concept) hiring artisans to physically create their piece, yet the artist remains the sole author of the piece. Jeff Koon’s even has his own factory full of ghosts. Today drawing machines are being developed, machines can already create visual art, however the programmer behind his machine possesses the spirit of the art work. Unless the machine out of its own terms decided to wake up one morning and create disorder on a canvas, physically or digitally. So who is the author? Or can we accept that in most art works there is nearly always a collaboration, but like with film, there is just one name on the cover. The world of film, has different system of credits, and maybe can't be compared.

Bots

Sex bots on dating websites are writing to you, and neither of you are conscious of it. “A lot of people think this only happens to dumb people, and they can tell if they’re talking to a bot. But you can’t tell. The people running these scams are professionals, they do this for a living.” (quote from rollingstone.com) You as the reader, may not recognise chatting to a bot, and the reason why it is not as evident as we think, is because after all the bots don’t actually make up things to talk about. The humans behind them do, humans programme and control them. Humans here possess the soul, they give their machines personalities. The bots are just there to carry out the automatic commands and in masses. So until the bots won’t have the crazy desire to talk about sex with random profiles, it will be humans doing the job for them.

The Spirit in the Templates

Templates are used for design, writing or in many other creative industries. I’ll take a few specific examples:

Wordpress Website templates Originally made by someone who whose name is long lost, or not even worth mentioning. These templates are used by millions of people, all possessing the same layout for their website, using the same old poor soul, thus becoming soul-less.

Ready-made Duchamp never mentioned the poor designer of the urinal, he reappropriated it, and now this piece belongs to him in every single way. This is not to say it wasn’t a brilliant idea, in fact the soul was already lost, and he revived this object.

Language templates In Politics and the English Language, George Orwell states that “Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of prefabricated hen-house.” He then goes saying “...letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you – even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent – and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.”

Feeling templates Today we can make this clear connection with what Orwell says to Facebook’s ‘like’, ‘love’, ‘angry’ etc. buttons. The icons are feeling your thoughts for you as a user, so that you don’t have to think, or come up with them yourself.

These are just a few examples of how templates in many fields, can cause the spirits to disappear. However, it is not always negative, they can of course help people gain time, money, energy or whatever they need to save, apart from their souls. SOS.

Bibiliography

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