Repairing Rationality: Max Bense and the Automation of Literature in Post-War Germany

Abstract

The study of the correlation between natural and machine languages – the foundation of today’s Large Language Models – is often traced to the work of cognitive psychologists, logicians and early computer scientists of post-war America. However, this narrative overlooks alternative explorations of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly outside the US, which pursued different objectives: not control or simulation, but epistemic renewal. In the aftermath of war, in which Western rationalism had lost much of its moral credibility, some thinkers turned toward the relation between technology and aesthetics as a way of navigating the crisis of reason. For them, AI was not a means to automate intelligence, but to redefine it. This essay focuses on one such project: the work of German philosopher, cybernetician, and litterateur Max Bense. Bense’s take on information aesthetics offers a very different vision of AI. Rather than conceiving AI as the simulation of human problem-solving, or as a substrate for predictive control, Bense understood it as a generative, aesthetic project – a way to reconcile the estranged traditions of logic and poetry in the cultural shadow of fascism. His work, and that of his circle known as the Stuttgart School, therefore, reveals a neglected lineage in the history of AI, one that foregrounds the aesthetic, cultural, and reparative potentials of machine systems. By revisiting Bense’s take on information aesthetics and what he called ‘text theory’ this essay aims to reframe the history of generative AI as generative aesthetics.