Piercing the Algorithmic Fog: Algorithmic Taylorism, AI Poetics, and the Fate of the Avant-Garde

Abstract

Abstract This epistolary dialogue between Charles Bernstein and Jiang Wang, occasioned by Bernstein’s 2025 visit to Chongqing University and a subsequent transpacific correspondence, examines the fate of literary avant-gardism under algorithmic conditions. Situating the discussion between China’s platform-driven literary economy – where XiaoIce’s robot poetry and Qidian’s recommendation engines exemplify a new regime of machinic aesthetics – and Bernstein’s experimental Artie Intaglio suite, the dialogue develops two interlocking critical concepts: Algorithmic Taylorism, a mode of platform-mediated labor discipline that standardizes literary production through engagement metrics, and the Inverted Turing Test, in which human writers must demonstrate algorithmically legible interiority to secure visibility. Reading these phenomena against Byung-Chul Han’s “aesthetics of the smooth,” the interlocutors explore how Bernstein’s procedural poetics – embracing large language model (LLM) “hallucination” as productive misalignment, curating machine error as method, and deploying tactical opacity – furnishes strategies of resistance to algorithmic consensus. The dialogue thus argues that the demand for lyric legibility in American poetry culture and the algorithmic governance of content in China – the respective contexts of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E tradition and China’s digital literary ecosystem – constitute two faces of the same structural crisis, and that poetry’s critical potential now resides in its capacity for roughness, artifice, and dissent.