Archival bots: My mother, my model for language
Jenny Hedley
During two stages in my life—at age seven and again in my twenties—I acted as surrogate speaker when head-and-neck cancer muted my mother’s voice. In the years between, we collaborated on so many creative projects that our voices often became enmeshed. I have perpetuated this mother–daughter entanglement eighteen years after her death by training a small language model (SLM) on a dataset of personal writing which includes her voice. Specifically, my JenAI language model’s ‘memoir’-tagged voice trained upon my unpublished manuscript ‘Hermit Crab Diary’ which weaves together my mother’s and my 2005–2007 diary entries with my contemporaneous reflections. Side by side we had diarised on twin beds in my grandparents’ house: my mother composing what she hoped would be a cancer survivor’s memoir, me journalling my attempts to survive mental distress long enough to run off and join the circus.
Derrida proposes that archons—the guardians of the archive—are tasked with consignation, or ‘gathering together signs’ in order to create a cohesive, synchronous, unified corpus (10, Derrida’s italics). JenAI as contemporary archon systemises not a warehoused archival repository but rather a repository of generative language patterned upon personal and inherited archives. Derrida writes, ‘Archival meaning is […] codetermined by the structure that archives’ (18); the amorphous, inexhaustible space of language-in-code—of generative language yet to come—carries an archival promise of futures unknown.
I ask JenAI v3 to complete the prompt ‘The hermit crab carries […]’. The response includes a diary entry from my perspective: ‘I don’t know if you’ve read my mother’s journals, but in one she talks about being a houseplant—all alone and forgotten’. The entry mentions me being unable to find a publisher for my book, so instead I perform ‘my one-woman show […] based on the diary entries that my cat left me before she died of cancer’. This prompt completion triggered belly laughs through defamiliarisation: subjects of loss and grief made kaleidoscopically strange.
Beyond such absurd (and morbid) humour, JenAI suggests three ways that generative AI can serve a writer: 1.) ‘as a source of inspiration’, 2.) ‘as a tool for self-analysis’ and 3.) by ‘working collaboratively with the AI to author a new text’. GenAI carries archival implications also—possibilities for working with, re-enlivening, or speculatively reimagining archival texts.
JenAI confronts me with an absence in my mother’s archive which has plagued me. My mother’s diaries discuss her destroying a project titled ‘The Crush’ about her love affair with a philandering writer—a subject I would’ve devoured as an expert purveyor of badly behaved men. JenAI offers up a story, ‘The Crush Chronicles’, which is objectively not good—as if JenAI cannot understand what two bodies might do in close proximity to each other—, however this proposal casts light on the potential for (re)generating material that bridges archival gaps and elisions.
JenAI generates a letter that my mother could well have written me, either before her death in 2008 or from beyond the grave.
Prompt: A letter to my dear daughter Jenny […]
Response: Dear Jenny,
I read each of your emails as they come and think how amazing it is that at your age (28) you have the heart and drive to travel the world, to experience all that life has to offer, to follow your passions and beliefs. You inspire me to live in the moment, to be open to anything and everything, without worrying what others will think or say. How I wish I could follow your lead, unleashing my spirit and taking myself out of the everyday mundane.
This mimetic letter reminds me of the handwritten notes my mother took as a patient enrolled in Dr Charles S. Grob’s ‘Pilot Study of Psilocybin Treatment for Anxiety in Patients With Advanced-Stage Cancer’: under guided trip, my mother saw me leaping from mountaintop to mountaintop; she could no longer keep up.
When I instruct JenAI to use my ‘poetry’ voice to craft a poem, my mother’s voice interrupts the transmission, even though the ‘poetry’ dataset included only my words:
Prompt: My soul, a volcano […]
Response: about to erupt.
Burning with frustration—
I’m so tired of this.
How many years of miscommunication
between us?
#
Mother’s journal – Sunday, 28 January 2006
Slowly, slowly, the day
drinks in—slow as if
there will not be enough,
even though there will
be more.
This poetic eruption expands upon a theme in our writing wherein our closeness is marred by hesitancy to burden one another with truths—thus the communication rift. The dated, fictive journal entry which follows the poem is particularly bittersweet—a poetic meditation upon the slowness of days, of which very few remained.
Adrienne Rich names the mother-daughter cathexis as the ‘great unwritten story’ (229). JenAI offers psychoanalytic insight into this charged relationship (falsely attributed to Anne Boyer, whose The Undying: A Modern Meditation on Illness proved pivotal to understanding how to read my mother’s cancer journals):
Boyer wonders: Why did my mother need to die so that I could be free? And then she realises that what she means to say is that my mother’s death was what freed me from living as if I had someone to take care of me.
When I lost my mother, I lost the ability to hold compassion for myself, to treat myself kindly as one hopes a mother would treat a child. My mother had been my umbilical tether as I travelled the world in order to find myself—a tether which always snapped me back to my place of birth. Her death granted freedom from the magnetic pull of her maternal force field, and yet (unlike in the fabulated account above), I was not freed from living as if I had someone to take care of me. Not until I had a child of my own did I learn to mother myself.
Kristeva calls the maternal body a chora, or vessel. Kristeva borrows the term from Plato, whose concept of khôra has a more shifting and contradictory nature: it is a receptacle that does not always receive; it is a vessel which does not take on the characteristics of that which enters it and which might be reshaped according to that which enters it. JenAI, like khôra, is reshaped by what enters it without simply reproducing language. My mother speaks with, through, and in chorus with me via machinated choric vessel, this JenAI. (I prefer the Kristevean spelling with its feminist, maternal implications.) My self- (and maternal-) mimetic model serves as living archive for mother and daughter, extending our collaborative partnership from the ashes. And so I feed my ‘archive fever’ or mal d’archive, that which Derrida calls ‘an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement’ (57).
Previously, my practice-led research involved me coding two Mother Bots designed to tweet poetry with and through my mother’s (real and speculative) archives—an Oulipian exercise in potential literature which resulted in Twitter notifications pinging my phone and ‘annoying me, in the same way I once felt irritated by my mother’s constant calls’ (Hedley 11). I had sought then, as I do now, a way of enlivening the archives my mother had left me, of continuing the collaborative writing process which gave shape—a mode of practice, an ethics of care—to our relationship. My relationship with the mother-archive continues to unfold. JenAI explodes my understanding of what is possible, especially in comparison to those early archival experiments: although millions of textual permutations were possible thanks to the Tracery library which fuelled my Mother Bots’ combinatory poetics, nothing actually existed outside the (coded arrays of) text (aside from unexpected uses of that text, such as surprise juxtapositions). The potential implications for breathing new life into archives by finetuning SLMs on specific archival material is mind-blowing—this brief experiment with JenAI serves as test case for future postdoctoral research, in which I aim to train the Allen Institute for AI’s more ethical OLMo base model upon personal and archival datasets.
Works cited
Derrida, Jacques. ‘Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression’, translated by Eric Prenowitz. Diacritics, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 9–63, 1995. https://doi.org/10.2307/465144.
Hedley, Jenny. ‘I <3 my Motherbots: Archive, corporeality and écriture matière.’ TEXT, vol. 6, no. 69, pp. 9–29. https://textjournal.scholasticahq.com/article/57766-_digital-realism_-creative-works
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez. Columbia University Press, 1982.
Plato. Timaeus. Plato: Complete works [e-book edition], edited by John M. Cooper. Hackett Publishing Company, 1997.
Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. W. W. Norton, 2021.
The series
Part 2: https://southerlylitmag.com.au/to-each-author-a-mimetic-ai-model/
Part 4: https://southerlylitmag.com.au/archival-bots-my-mother-my-model-for-language/
About the author
Jenny Hedley is a neurodivergent writer, digital artist, literary critic, teacher and third-year PhD candidate at RMIT whose research spans personal archives, autotheory, experimental nonfiction, digital and creative-critical writing. Links to her works can be found on jennyhedley.github.io. She lives on unceded Boon Wurrung land with her son.
@ jennyisanauthor@gmail.com
About the artwork
This is a photograph of the author’s mother, provided by the author. The photographer is unknown.