CONCEPT
Style as Will
Sontag's claim that style is not ornament but "the signature of the artist's will" — the formal record of a
specific consciousness engaging specific material from a specific position.
In "On Style," Sontag argued against the Platonic separation of form and content, insisting that style is not something added to meaning but the totality of a work's formal being. "Style is art," she wrote, compressing the claim to maximum density. Style in this sense is the principle of decision in a work — the specific choices about rhythm, register, vocabulary, structure that constitute the work's irreducible identity. These choices are not arbitrary; they are the signature of the artist's will, the evidence of a particular
consciousness engaging the world from a particular position. For AI-augmented work, the concept becomes diagnostic: AI output has formal competence without will, because there is no deciding consciousness behind the decisions. The model produces probable continuations, not chosen ones. It has no position from which to insist on one form over another. And the absence of will is legible in the output's characteristic feature: it accommodates rather than insists, it is fluent in every register rather than committed to one,