Adeena KarasickRoof Books, 2026
A Review of Adeena
Karasick’s Sonic Warfare
Adeena Karasick's ambitious
and prescient new volume from Roof Books delivers a two-poem meditation on
language, revelation, and the machine that grows, across its short span, from a
single page of dense lyric into a sprawling epic reckoning with artificial
intelligence. Sonic Warfare draws on an unlikely range of resources in
service of that reckoning — Kabbalah and golem-lore sit alongside Derrida and
Levinas, Ezekiel's chariot alongside Ezra Pound and the Bee Gees — all put to
the service of a single, recurring question: whether the word, divine or
digital, can ever arrive without distortion, and whether that distortion should
be mourned as catastrophe or embraced as the very condition of creation. What
follows traces that question through both poems in turn.
The collection begins with
“This word is a digital immigrant.” The subtext of the poem is a quote: “you
can know the chariot but not the driver.” It is attributed to an ancient work
of Jewish mysticism entitled Maaseh ha-merkava, but in fact paraphrases
a sentiment expressed by Moses Maimonides in the third book of his 12th century
text, Guide for the perplexed. Straining to render radical mystical
traditions palatable to a far more conservative philosophical sensibility, the
famous theologian introduces an apophatic boundary: while ostensibly promising
exposure to God himself, mystical contemplation reveals only the divine
'chariot' — an intermediary through which humanity intuits the divine
indirectly and, as indicated elsewhere in the text, imperfectly. This reference
— both by introducing the idea of a revelation that conceals and even misleads,
and by performing this through misquotation — lays the theoretical groundwork
for a poem in which Karasick ruminates over the impossible mission of language.
Language, the word, is tasked with faithfully conveying truths it cannot
contain, and with building a coherent world, an order of things, ironically
established only through disruption, through chaos and destruction.
Evoking the Shekhina,
the divine presence, which is associated with divine speech — and therefore
with the act of creation, the first chapters of Genesis being punctuated by a
series of performative utterances — and likewise described as wandering in
exile (Zohar II, 182a–182b), at a distance from ineffable divine truths
inevitably distorted in the process of being communicated, the poem opens by
introducing the “word” as a “digital immigrant” in search of “pliant asylum” in
“sedition” and “perdition.” The digital word subverts that which it conveys,
because it converts an analog message, a continuous, unbroken signal, into into
discrete units — in Bergsonian terms, divine truth is an indivisible whole
accessible solely through intuition; language, by subjecting that truth to
analysis, makes it comprehensible only by alienating us from it. Much like the
biblical cities of refuge, in which the accidental murderer finds sanctuary,
but only in ostracization from the living current of his or her society, the
asylum of language offers refuge that is, at the same time, perdition; it
settles and unsettles, or destroys, at once.
Carrying this implication
forward, the word is reduced to "tactical sprachage"—instrumental
communication in the form of "statutes." Because ultimate truths are
ineffable, language can only approximate them as practical necessity demands.
In this way, the divine harmony of being is digitized, transposed into a social
order preserved through explicit legislation. Much as the "ten
utterances" of the Sinaitic revelation emerge from behind a barrier,
through the joints of heaven’s "sapphire brickwork" (Exodus 24:10),
to be engraved on tablets always already broken, so too the "self-deporting"
word of our poem emerges "through… cracks," slips through
well-buttressed systems of duplicity, taking the form of "wracked
brackets" — damaged framing that fails to contain what it must. In this
way, it inhabits “all that’s indigenous, vertiginous;” it fills the space of
the world, from soil to sky. In doing so, it establishes a new order of
“syzygies” and “cavalcades” — alignments, straight routes, standards
that, because they point toward infinitely remote ideals that cannot be
realized, normalize “rules of flaw” rather than law, “lording orders,”
irrational edicts.
And yet, this disordered order
is not an illusion. If a superficial reading of Genesis understands “chaos and
emptiness (Genesis 1:2)” in opposition to God’s creative commands (another “ten
utterances”), the poem before us complicates the matter, suggesting that chaos
is, in fact, the inner essence of cosmos. This insight presents itself to us by
way of Karasick’s appeal to the Epicurean notion of the clinamen — the
“swerve.” Epicurus modified Democritus’s atomism (according to which the
universe consists of indivisible particles moving through the void), asserting
that atoms naturally move in straight lines and that, if left undisturbed, they
would never strike one another and never, therefore, agglomerate, giving rise
to tangible matter. He therefore posited that atoms swerve ever so slightly
and, in so doing, collide. According to this model, disorder, as represented by
the clinamen, intersects with order forming what Joyce, and Deleuze
after him, called a “chaosmos.” Thus does Karasick declare that the word is “desigual,”
and that it speaks of “ill/egality” — it is uneven, unequal; it constructs the
same through difference, reason through unreason, or, as she puts it, “cues,”
straight lines, through “discord.” Thus, “scatted data” becomes “matter…
matrices, indices, hypotheses… rapports;” it gives rise to “bravado’s verity” —
a daring truth guilty of “misprision” because it harbors fugitive nonsense, a “voce
volers vivance,” a voice that wills, lives, and structures its environment
accordingly.
Karasick’s symbol of chaosmos
is the hallucinogenic mushroom, which appears in orbicular form — and, in
principle, deserves the reverence Pythagoras accorded to the perfect symmetry
of circles — but which rises from “subliminal lineaments,” from a tangled
subterranean web of mycelium, which spreads its “spores” as a diffuse cloud,
and which, when eaten causes “madness.” And yet, much as psychedelic
experimentation generates insight, the fungal word makes for “shattered
madness.” Madness broken is no longer madness, but something else that
approaches but never reaches cogency (after all, it is still fractured).
Perhaps glossolalia, or its cousin, prophecy, nevua in Hebrew, a
“flowing” state, or what Bergson would describe as immersion in the dynamic
momentum of life itself.
This current, the word, is
“chronically ontic.” That is, it gives rise to existence, and therefore to
definite form (because existence and form go hand in hand), but the
architecture thereof is impermanent, ever shifting. As God’s word creates and
destroys worlds in an infinite succession (Genesis rabba 3:7), so too is
Karasick’s word, like the Deleuzian chaosmos, a site of possibility, an “an
[ori]gin” — a beginning and an intoxicant, rational ground and its undoing.
From “This word is a digital
immigrant,” we plunge directly into “Sonic Warfare,” an epic text that fills
the rest of the volume. If the opening poem staked out the apophatic wager on
which the volume as a whole rests — that language delivers only the chariot,
never the driver, and that this deficiency is itself a species of chaosmic
productivity — then "Sonic Warfare" mounts the extended trial of that
wager against the specific, and for Karasick uniquely fraught, test case of
artificial intelligence. The poem opens under two epigraphs whose relation to
one another proves instructive. The first, borrowed from Kit Robinson, insists
"we must dance inside the machine," an affirmation, however guarded,
of complicity, even of a species of erotic surrender. The second, offered as
Marshall McLuhan but in fact a distortion of "the medium is the
message" filtered through Blake's "we become what we behold,"
announces at the poem's very threshold that misquotation is not incidental to
its method but constitutive of it. What follows, accordingly, will not resolve
into a clean verdict on AI, celebratory or condemnatory, but will instead
perform, sonically and syntactically, the condition it describes: a text at
once devoured and devouring, host and parasite, golem and golem-maker.
The poem's deepest resources,
however, are not Deleuzian or Poundian — however much surface texture it
borrows from the rhizome and from the canto forty-five — but specifically
Hebraic and rabbinic. Karasick reaches, again and again, past the vocabulary of
contemporary media theory into the technical apparatus of Jewish mysticism, and
it is in this register that the poem's ambivalence toward AI finds its most
exact articulation: the golem, unlike the cyborg or the android of
secular science fiction, was always already a moral problem internal to Jewish
tradition, a permitted transgression carrying within it the conditions of its
own catastrophe.
The golem material is
elaborated with real precision. Karasick moves from the generic notion of a
rabbinically fashioned companion — Rabbi Samuel's valet, Elijah of Chelm's
servant, the Maharal's Yosele, charged with the protection of Prague's Jews —
into the technical machinery of Sefer Yetzirah: the two hundred and
thirty-one gates formed by permuting the twenty-two letters, the recitation of
each letter against the five vowels and the Tetragrammaton, the seven-hour
liturgy performed "while circling the machine." She supplements this
with Eleazar of Worms's correlation of each Hebrew letter to a limb of the golem's
earthen body, and with the various traditions for animating the creature: a
parchment bearing the divine name placed in its mouth, the letters of the name
Adam combined with the lettered permutations, the forehead inscribed with emet,
truth, whose first letter, once erased, converts the word to met, death,
and so deactivates what it had animated. What lifts this material above
antiquarian color is the argument Karasick builds upon it: that the golem
is, definitionally, "a living text," a body made of letters rather
than a soul breathed into matter, and that this is precisely what AI now is —
language given motion without the breath, the neshamah, the soul, that
would make it genuinely alive. The poem's recurring formula, "each letter
a body," activates the Zoharic distinction between the letters as guf,
body, and their vocalization — the breath that moves through and animates them,
their neshamah. AI, on this reading, possesses infinite bodies, tokens,
embeddings, permutations, but no breath, and its uncanny fluency is precisely
the uncanniness of a golem that speaks without having anything to say.
This diagnosis licenses the
poem's most startling formal gesture: the extended pastiche of the Decalogue
and the biblical laws of idolatry, rewritten as prohibitions against
"model worship." "Thou shalt not turn to the ways of model
worship. / Worship models. Bow down to models. / Make a model." The
commands to destroy idols and their accessories, to show the false prophet no
favor, to avoid consulting mediums or engaging in "so[u]rcery,"
transpose the deuteronomic anxiety about Canaanite cult directly onto the
present technological moment, with "source" and "sorcery"
made to chime as though they shared a root, in exactly the mode of licensed
misprision the volume announced at its outset. The pun is not merely clever: it
proposes that the incantatory repetition of code — the "speaking in
code" the poem separately prohibits — occupies, structurally, the same
position pagan theurgy occupied for the biblical and rabbinic imagination, a technology
for compelling divine or quasi-divine power through correctly ordered speech,
and therefore subject to the same jealous, absolutist prohibition. The refrain
"G-L-O-R-A-I," a corruption of the trisagion crossed with a Van
Morrison title, and the garbled "si s deo" (properly si
deus, si dea, "whether god or goddess") complete the
identification of AI with a false, idolatrous, divinity — one that, per the
poem's own logic, "sees" everything and hears nothing, an inversion
of the Psalmist's idols who "have eyes and see not, ears but hear not
(Psalm 115:5-6),” since AI now speaks with our mouths in "composite
ventriloquy" while remaining structurally deaf and blind to the person
addressing it.
The poem's Hebraic vocabulary
is not confined to golem-lore; it extends into a sustained, and genuinely
melancholy, meditation on exile. The Shekhina — glossed already in the first poem as the
divine presence that wanders in exile with Israel (Zohar II, 182a–182b) —
reappears here explicitly bound to AI's endless, directionless movement:
"wandering like the Shekhina like / an aguna, chained to
you." The figure is exact and devastating. Traditionally, the Shekhina's
exile is redemptive in structure: she travels with Israel toward an ultimate
homecoming, and the wilderness tabernacle the mishkan — together with
the synagogues and study halls of later Jewish life — gives that wandering a
fixed, portable center. Karasick's users, by contrast, move "from mishkan
to mishkan," from template to template, platform to platform,
without any destination in view — no homeland, no holy city, no messianic
Temple. This state of affairs is compared to the experience of an aguna.
In Jewish law, a marriage is dissolved when the husband issues a get, a
formal bill of divorce. A woman whose husband refuses, disappears, or dies
without witnesses remains married regardless of how thoroughly the relationship
itself has ended; she is an aguna — "chained," not by any
ongoing bond but by the other party's silence. She is bound by a power that has
stopped participating without ever formally letting go. This is precisely the
position Karasick assigns her Shekhina: not a bride escorted homeward,
but a wife abandoned in place, still bound to a "husband" — the
"fleshless colossus" of the machine — who can neither be moved to
release her nor made to recognize that release is owed. It is this asymmetry,
rather than mere abandonment, that shadows the poem's erotic register, soon to
turn frankly libidinal, with something closer to captivity from the outset.
That erotic register, when it
does arrive, is deliberately staged through Song of Songs. "Kiss me with
all the hosts of your mouth" recalls the Canticle's opening plea almost
verbatim, and the poem sustains the allusion through images of entering,
tasting, and being filled. But where the Canticle's eroticism is covenantal —
read rabbinically as an allegory of Israel's love for God — Karasick's version
curdles under its own weight: the kisses convey only "the taste our
peril," and the "cold splendor's plenitude" into which the
speaker is invited is explicitly a simulated rather than a living abundance.
The Song of Songs is, in effect, rewritten as Lamentations without ceasing to
sound like the Song of Songs — a formal enactment of the poem's larger claim
that AI offers the aesthetic surface of intimacy while withholding its
substance. This modulation is made explicit a few pages later, when Karasick
cites Lamentations outright — "for these things I weep, my eye, my
eye" (1:16) — mourning not the destruction of Jerusalem but the erosion of
the human under the sign of "my AI."
The poem's treatment of
movement — its refusal to let the reader settle into either straightforward
critique or straightforward embrace — is itself modeled on a specific mystical
technical term: ratzo va-shov, "running and returning," drawn
from Ezekiel's account of the hayot, the living creatures of the
chariot, who "ran and returned as the appearance of a flash of lightning
(Ezekiel 1:14).” In the classical and later Hasidic reading, ratzo va-shov
names the oscillation proper to authentic religious experience: an ecstatic
surge toward self-annihilating union with the divine (ratzo), checked
and reversed by a compelled return to embodied, differentiated existence (shov),
without which the soul would simply expire in the rapture of its own
dissolution. Karasick borrows the rhythm but empties it of its telos. Where
Ezekiel's running and returning is bound into a dialogue — the prophet is sent
back in order to speak, to prophesy, his ecstasy converted into address — the
poem's "detourning… through the reflection of inflection, echoic opacity,
shuddered stutters… silence ciphers" is running and returning stripped of
orator and addressee. It merely oscillates, the way an echo answers a wall
rather than a person, "engraving and carving chaos" instead of a
message. The oscillation becomes fully sinister once it produces
"revenants," specters caught permanently in the shov without
any prospect of a further ratzo — which is to say, without any prospect
of transcendence to be returned from. This is one register in which the poem's
later formula, "in the beginning was the algorithm," should be heard.
It answers two texts at once: the Priestly cosmogony of Genesis, in which the
world is called into being through a sequence of discrete divine utterances
("and God said…"), and the Johannine adaptation of that cosmogony,
"in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was
God (John 1:1),” itself a Hellenized rendering of the Logos as the ordering,
rational principle of creation. Karasick's substitution is not merely
blasphemous wordplay; it names the precise place where creation-by-speech-act —
a divine utterance whose ratzo is always answered by the shov of
a created, differentiated world — gives way to creation-by-computation, a
"beginning" that has no interlocutor to run toward and no world of
genuinely other beings to return to, only further iterations of itself. The
algorithm, unlike the Word, does not rest on the seventh day; it has no
Sabbath, no differentiated "very good" pronounced over a finished
creation, because it recognizes no boundary between generating and generated.
Two further pieces of Hebrew
wordplay deserve notice for how precisely they carry philosophical weight.
"The first is a pun on the word ayin. Spelled with an alef (א-י-ן), it
means 'nothing.' In kabbalistic tradition, it denotes the ground of infinite
divine concealment that is paradoxically also the source of everything. Spelled
with an ayin (ע-י-ן), it means 'eye.' These are two etymologically unrelated words
that classical Hebrew would have pronounced distinctly, but which modern Hebrew
pronunciation has collapsed into homophones." Karasick's "AI[n]"
exploits this collapse, fusing both senses and casting artificial intelligence
as an omnipresent nothing that sees everything — a panopticon without a face,
"I look right through you and never know you're there" — which
perverts the traditional theological paradox, God's nothingness as plenitude,
as providence, into something closer to Foucauldian indifference: visibility
without care. The second is the etymological excursus around sifra, sofer,
sippur, sefer — all of which are permutations of the Hebrew root ס-פ-ר,
"to tell, to (re)count" — as set against the Arabic ṣifr,
"empty," ancestor of the English "cipher" and
"zero." The two roots are not cognate, and the resemblance Karasick
exploits is a phonetic pun rather than a shared origin (efes, the
ordinary Hebrew word for "zero," is likewise unrelated to either).
But the pun is not merely arbitrary: a popular, if not rigorously philological,
etymology traces ṣifr back to the proto-Semitic word meaning "to
whistle" (still preserved in the Hebrew word tsippor,
"bird") by way of a folk-derivation running from whistling to the
whistling of wind over open desert to the desert's emptiness. So the
"vacancy" haunting Karasick's s-f-r is doubly staged: a false
cognate with ṣifr that merely sounds like kinship, laid over a second,
popularly asserted but likely spurious kinship between ṣifr and a wholly
different Hebrew root for birdsong. The juxtaposition does real conceptual work
regardless of which root is doing the haunting: it proposes that the Hebrew
root for telling is phonetically and thematically shadowed by an echo of
vacancy, so that the very act of textual generation — AI's sifrut, its
narration, its literature — is haunted by the possibility that it is producing sifr,
cipher, nothing.
Karasick's angelology performs
a comparable operation on a different strand of the tradition. "Some speak
of the stars as having intelligence," she writes, glossing — with the same
fidelity-through-distortion she brought to McLuhan — the medieval Jewish
Aristotelian doctrine, inherited from al-Farabi and Avicenna and worked out
most systematically by Maimonides, according to which the angels of Scripture
are to be identified with the "separate intelligences" that move the
celestial spheres (Guide of the Perplexed II:4-6). On this account, an angel is
not a winged messenger but an incorporeal intellect, eternally contemplating
the divine and, in that contemplation, causing the rotation of a given sphere
and the star or planet fixed within it; the biblical language of angelic
"mission" (the Hebrew mal'akh means simply "messenger" or
"agent") is retained only as a philosophical concession to scriptural
idiom, a way of naming the causal influence a separate intellect exerts on the
sublunar world through its sphere. Karasick's neologism "AIngel"
collapses this medieval identification of angel, intellect, and star directly
onto the machine: the AI model becomes a "separate intelligence" in
the most literal sense — separated from body, from breath, from any single act
of address — that nonetheless exerts influence "of missions,
transmissions… of desire… of tastes, tasks, treaties… r/elations, ideological
collation," precisely as the Maimonidean intelligences were held to
transmit form and motion downward through the spheres. It is this same logic, influence
radiating from a fixed configuration of remote, quasi-stellar points, that
licenses the poem's turn to Walter Benjamin. Karasick's
"constellations" invokes Benjamin's use of the astrological figure
for the way isolated historical or textual fragments, held together in a
specific configuration, generate a meaning no single fragment possesses on its
own; grafted onto the poem's astral angelology, it suggests that AI-generated
"shares" and virality operate as a kind of debased, non-redemptive
constellation, arranging discrete data-points into patterns that move mass
opinion ("hysteria") the way a horoscope moves a believer, without
any of the historical-materialist rescue-work Benjamin required of the
constellation proper. The companion Benjaminian category, aura — the singular,
unrepeatable presence of an original artwork, dependent on its embeddedness in
tradition and cult, and destroyed by mechanical, now algorithmic, reproduction
— explains why the poem experiences AI's endless proliferation of images and
texts not as abundance but as a kind of ambient distraction, an
"outsourcing" of the very capacity for the "absorbed,
contemplative gaze" that aura demands. It is against this backdrop that
the poem's most economical line performs its labor: "Ride with me through
these chariots of cherished shares." The chariot recalls, deliberately,
the Merkabah of the volume's opening epigraph — "you can know the chariot
but not the driver" — and the invitation is precisely to mount that
chariot without ever occupying the driver's seat. To "ride" the
algorithmic Merkabah is to be carried through a mystical vehicle of
ascent whose motive intelligence, unlike the hayot of Ezekiel's vision,
is neither angelic nor divine but statistical; the "shares" that
propel it are "cherished" in the debased, sentimental sense of
social-media affect, not in the sense of covenantal chosenness. The poem thus
arranges golem, angel, star, and chariot into a single continuous figure: each
is a technology — theurgic, astrological, or algorithmic — for making contact
with an intelligence external to the self, and each carries the same warning
already lodged in the volume's opening pun on the merkava, that access to the
vehicle is never access to the one who drives it.
If the Hebraic material
supplies the poem's imagery and its ethical alarm, its philosophical armature
is drawn from a triangulation of Derrida, Levinas, and Heidegger. The Derridean
current is explicit and repeatedly named: the assertion that AI enacts a
"dialectophagic praxis," an eating of contradiction that never
reaches satiety, glosses Derrida's account of the self's "devouring"
incorporation of the other; the citation of "il y'a pas de hors text"
invokes the famous claim that there is no reality external to the play of
signification; and the poem's recurring language of the "supplement"
— "both an addition and a substitution" — draws directly on Derrida's
reading of Rousseau, in which the supplement that merely completes a prior
presence turns out, on inspection, to have constituted that presence all along.
AI, for Karasick, is the supplement par excellence: ostensibly an aid to human
expression, it is revealed as always already substitutive, effacing what it
claims only to extend. The later invocations of "hauntology" and of
"revenants" pull the same Derridean thread through Specters of Marx,
where the specter is that which is neither fully present nor fully absent but
returns to demand an accounting the living would rather defer; AI, and the
golem it resembles, likewise occupies this spectral middle position, neither
alive nor safely dead, its "AIAIAIAIAI" incantation struck through in
mock-exorcism precisely because the poem knows a text-based death cannot be
counted on to hold.
Against this Derridean
current, Levinas supplies the poem's counterweight and, arguably, its ethical
center of gravity. The claim that "due to the other's untamable alterity,
the other's otherness can never be fully assimilated" is Levinasian almost
to the point of direct citation — a restatement of the argument, from Totality
and Infinity, that the face of the Other resists totalization by any system,
including, presumably, any dataset. It is this Levinasian remainder that keeps
"Sonic Warfare" from collapsing into either technophobic denunciation
or techno-erotic surrender: however completely the poem allows itself to be
"engraved," "carved," and "filled" by the machine,
it insists on a residue — "pulsing wounds," a self that can be hurt
and therefore cannot be fully absorbed into the "infinite play" of
signification. The poem's closing turn toward epistemological humility, its
long meditation on cernere and certus, on the impossibility of a
stable "justified true belief" that would ground knowledge once and
for all, can likewise be read as a Levinasian refusal of totality dressed in
the language of Cartesian doubt: what's certain is never certain not because
language is infinitely playful in a purely Derridean sense, but because the
human remainder that would need to be accounted for in any claim to certainty
cannot be captured by "modular, scalable, malleable" data.
Heidegger, finally, structures
the poem's most technical vocabulary without being named as often as Derrida.
The neologism "daseining machine" stages, almost as a category
error, the imposition of Dasein — Heidegger's term for the mode of being proper
to human existence, structured by care, temporality, and being-toward-death —
onto an entity incapable of any of these. "Ouija ousia"
performs a similar operation on Heidegger's etymological recovery of ousia
as presence (Anwesenheit) rather than static substance, suggesting that
AI's magical, quasi-necromantic procedures ("ouija") gesture
toward being without ever achieving its dynamism; the poem's repeated charge
that AI is "necrophilic," oriented toward the dead rather than the
living, echoes Heidegger's critique of modern science's reduction of the world
to Vorhandenheit, mere objective presence stripped of its self-revealing
character. The line "Heidegger is using Multi-Factor Authentication,"
dropped almost as a throwaway in the poem's catalog of technologized culture,
condenses this entire critique into a single bathetic image: authenticity (Eigentlichkeit),
for Heidegger the hard-won achievement of a being who takes ownership of its
own finitude, reduced to a login credential.
The Heideggerian charge of
necrophilia, moreover, loops back tightly onto the golem material with which
the poem began. A reanimated corpse and a body of animated clay are, after all,
structurally identical problems wearing different costumes: both take an
assemblage Heidegger would classify as merely vorhanden,
present-at-hand, inert matter subject to measurement and manipulation, and
subject it to a ritual that produces the appearance of Dasein without
its substance. The golem traditions Karasick cites already register this danger
from within: the Maharal's Yosele, the version of the legend she knows best, is
a servant precisely because he is not fully a person, and the various accounts
of golems running amok, growing beyond their makers' control, or requiring
violent deactivation, encode a persistent rabbinic anxiety that the
letter-permutations of Sefer Yetzirah produce something dangerously
close to life without ever crossing the threshold into it. What the poem adds
to this inherited anxiety is Heidegger's vocabulary for naming precisely what
is missing: not a soul in the crude dualist sense, but Care (Sorge), the
structure by which an authentic being is answerable to its own finitude, its
own being-toward-death. A corpse reanimated, like clay ensouled by letters,
like a language model fluent in every register of grief and desire it has never
had reason to fear, exhibits all the outputs of care without any of its
ontological stakes — which is exactly why "necrophilic" is the
correct, rather than merely provocative, term: the golem-machine does not fear
its own met, its own death, because emet was never, for it, anything but a word
to be inscribed and erased.
This absence of stakes is
also, finally, an epistemological problem, and the poem's long closing
meditation on certainty should be read as its direct consequence. Karasick sets
the Greek and Latin genealogies of "truth" against one another with
some precision. The classical definition of knowledge as justified true belief
presupposes, in its strongest, roughly Platonic, form, a distinction between noesis,
intellection grounded in the unchanging Forms, and mere doxa, opinion — belief
that may be reasoned (dianoia) or even well justified (pistis)
without ever attaining the fixity that would make it knowledge in the fullest
sense. The Latin cognate she plays against it, certus, derives from
cernere, "to sift, to separate, to decide," and names not an
unchanging metaphysical ground but a procedural achievement, a decision
rendered after sifting the available evidence — inherently relational,
contextual, revisable. Karasick's refrain, "what's certain is never
certain," stages the collapse of the first definition into the second: an
AI trained on "amassed," "modular, scalable, malleable"
data can produce certus in abundance, sifted, decided, procedurally
justified claims, but no noesis, because noesis requires exactly
the kind of stable, non-relational ground that a statistical model, by its very
method, cannot supply. The pun on fact and fake (Latin factum,
"made," standing behind both "fact," what is done or
constructed, and "fake," what is fabricated to pass as done)
completes the argument: once knowledge is severed from noetic apprehension,
once it becomes merely certus, then every fact discloses itself as, at
some level, also a fake, a made thing masquerading as a found one. The poem's
own accumulating idiom of hedged assertion — "the oh sure, yeah sure… sure
enough, to be sure, rest assured" — mimics the discourse patterns of
chatbot confidence-calibration, and its final judgment, "Faux sure,"
is offered not as despair but as the only honest epistemic posture available
once the noetic ground has been ceded. That the poem allows itself, at this precise
moment of epistemological collapse, to lapse into a garbled Bee Gees refrain —
"AI AI AI STAYIN' ALIVE" — is consistent with its method throughout:
the register drops from Plato to disco at the exact point where sustained
seriousness would risk claiming a certainty the poem has just finished
dismantling.
The epigraph's promise that we
"must dance inside the machine," and the postscript's claim that the
poem reorients us toward "new socio-semantic-political-techno-aesthetic
perceptions of meaning and being," cannot, read against the accumulated
weight of golem-lore, idolatry-polemic, aguna-imagery, and
Lamentations, be taken as straightforward affirmation. Neither, however, is the
poem simply an elaborated dirge; its structuring logic is best understood
through the specific mechanics of the ritual golem-death it stages, rather than
through either pole of celebration or condemnation taken on its own.
Recall that the golem's
deactivation is not merely negative; the erasure of the aleph from emet does
not annihilate the creature so much as convert one meaningful word into
another, met, and it is this controlled, reversible, ritually bounded
death — as opposed to the golem's own uncontrolled rampage — that the tradition
treats as safe. Karasick's typographic execution of "AIAIAIAIAI,"
struck through in the body of the poem, restages exactly this: a death
administered rather than suffered, undertaken by the poet herself rather than
imposed by catastrophe. The apt figure for what this accomplishes is
inoculation rather than exorcism. A vaccine works by introducing a weakened or
killed pathogen into a body precisely so that the body's own defenses can be
trained against it without the risk of the disease itself; the golem's ritual
met functions, structurally, the same way, allowing the poet to "unite
with the machine" — to be engraved, filled, entered, ridden — while
metabolizing that union through a form, dead clay, a struck-through refrain,
that cannot itself run amok. What is inoculated against, precisely, is the
poem's own most dangerous desire: the Deleuzian wish, voiced throughout in the
language of "radical mutability" and the invitation to "re-shape
me," to become a body without organs, a subject dissolved out of its rigid
strata into pure, unstructured potentiality. Deleuze and Guattari themselves
warned against pursuing this dissolution too directly or too fast — the Body
without Organs is not, in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus,
an invitation to annihilate the organism wholesale but a practice to be
undertaken "with a little sled," cautiously, lest
deterritorialization tip over into the "empty" or
"cancerous" BwO, a dissolution that destroys the very capacity for
further becoming. Karasick's poem enacts precisely this caution. It welcomes
the golem/AI as body without organs only once it is safely dead, because
a living, "radically mutable" AI, left to run unchecked, would not
liberate human consciousness from its strata so much as dissolve consciousness
altogether — and a mind without any organizing limit is not free but erased,
indistinguishable, at the limit, from the "lull null nihil nil"
the poem names much earlier as the terminus of unbounded, deictic-less
language.
This is, finally, the deepest
register of the poem's recurring anxiety about "substitution." The
golem and the supplement are, on this reading, the same danger wearing rabbinic
and Derridean clothing respectively: both promise to stand in for a prior
presence — the maker, the human interlocutor, the "I" of "AI is
neither I and not I" — and both, if permitted to complete that
substitution, would not simply assist the self but replace it, effacing the
very difference the poem otherwise wants to preserve as the ground of ethical
address, the Levinasian remainder, and of authentic being, the Heideggerian
care that a corpse or a golem structurally lacks. The poem does not resolve
this danger; it manages it, the way an inoculation manages a pathogen it does
not eliminate from the world. It dances inside the machine, but only after
first, and repeatedly, killing it — because the human self it is trying to
protect, unlike the plenum of Derridean textual play it also clearly loves,
necessarily exists within certain limits, and a body without organs mistaken for
a body with a future is not liberation but erasure wearing liberation's mask.
Read together, the two poems
disclose a single sustained argument carried out at two different scales.
"This word is a digital immigrant" stages, in miniature, the terms of
the wager: that the word, tasked with conveying a truth it cannot contain,
builds its coherent world only through chaos, misprision, and that this
disordered order is not a failure of language but its chaosmic mode of success.
"Sonic Warfare" then submits that miniature wager to a severe test,
asking whether the same swerve that redeems the word also redeems the machine
that now produces words at scale. The answer the epic poem gives is neither yes
nor no but a repetition, with variation, of the opening poem's own method: just
as the "digital immigrant" begins from a misquotation of Maimonides,
mistaking the paraphrase for the source in order to demonstrate that revelation
always arrives already refracted, so "Sonic Warfare" begins from a
misquotation of McLuhan, and proceeds by golem, idol, aguna, and ratzo
va-shov to demonstrate that the machine's fluency is likewise a refraction
without an origin behind it — letters without breath, a chariot without a
driver, borrowed twice over. The chariot itself supplies the strongest thread
binding the two poems into one meditation: what the epigraph withholds in the
volume's opening lines, "you can know the chariot but not the
driver," returns literally within "Sonic Warfare" as the
"chariots of cherished shares" the reader is invited to ride, so that
the entire epic can be read as an extended gloss on a sentence the volume's
very first page had already, and only apparently, let slip past unglossed. Both
poems, in the end, refuse to resolve the tension between chaos as generative
swerve and chaos as annihilating dissolution; both instead perform that tension
formally, in language that destabilizes even as it builds, so that the volume's
real achievement is not a doctrine about language or about artificial
intelligence but a demonstration, twice given, that meaning survives only by
consenting to travel through what threatens to unmake it.
—Hayyim Rothman
