Relational Novelty

Novelty, in the ordinary understanding, is something a creator possesses: an inner fire, an original sensibility, a gift that produces work which has never existed before. Groys’s On the New dissolves this understanding with surgical precision. The new is not intrinsic to the creator or the object. It is a relational property—the relationship between the object and the cultural archive, the institutionally maintained totality of what a civilization has recognized as valuable. An object is new if and only if it differs from what the archive already contains; the archive’s specific contents at any given moment determine what counts as new at that moment. Marcel Duchamp’s urinal was new not because it was beautiful, skillful, or expressive but because it occupied a position in relation to the archive of fine art that the archive had not previously registered. This relational account has a consequence the AI discourse has barely absorbed: a large language model