What is The Drift?

Language, Silence and the Unfixed Meaning

Long before the era of AI, philosophers and poets wrestled with the idea that meaning is not a static reference but a kind of resonance – a vibration between words and listener that cannot be pinned down once and for all.  The ancient Taoist sage Lao Tzu opened the Tao Te Ching by warning that “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name” . In other words, ultimate truth or reality eludes any fixed label; whatever words we assign will always be incomplete. Meaning lives not in the literal name but in the felt echo it leaves. This sensibility – that language points beyond itself – is a throughline across centuries.

We see it in Romantic poet John Keats’s notion of “negative capability”, the capacity to dwell in uncertainties and mysteries without grasping for fact or reason . Keats admired the way Shakespeare’s words evoke a mood or truth that can’t be reduced to a simple message. Instead of definitive statements, great art creates a resonance in the reader or observer. The French Symbolists took a similar line: Stéphane Mallarmé argued that to name an object outright in poetry is to lose most of the pleasure; to suggest the object gradually, allowing the meaning to shimmer into being, was his ideal. Such meaning-by-suggestion is a distant early outline of The Drift’s principle of “meaning as resonance rather than fixed reference.” It treats language as an invitation to an experience, not a pointer to a single fact.

In 20th-century philosophy, Ludwig Wittgenstein made a parallel move away from viewing meaning as a fixed reference. In his later work, he famously declared, “the meaning of a word is its use in the language” . Meaning is not an inherent link between a word and a thing – it emerges from how words are used, from the interplay of speaker, context and listener. This is meaning as activity, a kind of resonance within a form of life. And Wittgenstein’s early work even acknowledged limits of reference: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” – a gesture that meaning sometimes lies in what is unsaid. Philosophers of language and hermeneutics built on this: Hans-Georg Gadamer, for instance, saw understanding as a “fusion of horizons,” an event that happens between text and reader rather than a transmission of fixed content. All these ideas undermine the notion of a dictionary-definition reality. They imply meaning unfolds in a space between – a ripple that forms when word and mind meet.

Jacques Derrida took this even further by examining how every word carries traces of other words. In Derrida’s view, language is “a play of identity and difference, an endless chain of signifiers leading to other signifiers” . A word’s meaning is never a final thing present in the word itself; it’s an effect generated by contrast with what it is not – by what’s absent or unsaid. Instead of stable meaning, we get what Derrida called différance: a perpetual deferral and difference. As one summary puts it, language always contains an “absence of presence,” a free play of meanings rather than a single truth, and it is precisely this absence – this open-ended play – that creates significance . Here again is meaning-as-resonance: like a note in music that we hear in relation to other notes and the surrounding silence. We might even say The Drift is this insight taken as method – letting language drift so that meaning arises indirectly, by echo and relation rather than by naming a referent.

It’s worth noting that even Michel de Montaigne’s 16th-century essays, which inspire the Montaigne Project’s name, embody this spirit. Montaigne meanders through personal anecdotes, classical quotes, and self-questioning, rarely arriving at a tidy conclusion. The meaning of his essays is not a thesis statement but a tone or insight that emerges in the reader’s mind through the resonance of the whole. Montaigne’s contemporary, Shakespeare, also often allowed multiple perspectives and ambiguities to stand, trusting that the truth lives in the interplay. All suggest that well before any AI, writers and thinkers were practicing a human form of “drifting” meaning – letting significance glow in the gaps and the interplay of elements, rather than fixing it in one bright pin.

The Performativity of Language

Another key aspect of The Drift is the performative nature of language – the idea that language doesn’t just describe reality, but enacts or creates something in the moment of utterance. This too has deep antecedents. In ancient ritual and mysticism, words were often seen as having power to bring about changes in the world (think of spells, prayers, mantras). The Hebrew and Christian creation story has God speak the world into existence (“Let there be light”); language as an act. While modern philosophy secularized this idea, it lives on in notions like J.L. Austin’s speech acts (the classic example: saying “I do” in a wedding does something, it isn’t just reporting a fact). The Drift in AI may highlight how an AI’s language generates contexts or moods, but humans have long sensed that saying something is a kind of doing.

Twentieth-century thinkers explored this performative dimension in philosophical and poetic terms. Martin Heidegger, for example, argued that language is not merely a tool for conveying information – “Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells,” he wrote, and those who speak and think are “guardians of this home” . In Heidegger’s view, to speak is to let Being happen, to disclose a world. Thus language performs the world into meaning; it’s an event rather than a neutral channel. Heidegger even experimented with unusual terminology (like spelling Being as “Beyng”) to jar readers into new thought, effectively using language performatively to break old patterns. This resonates with The Drift’s idea of language as world-building in real time, not a static mirror of reality.

In literature and art, one finds many examples of language performing rather than merely describing. Think of Gertrude Stein’s repetitive, looping prose or e.e. cummings’ playful syntax – the way they say things becomes as important as what is said, creating an experience for the reader. In theatre, Brecht’s verfremdungseffekt (distancing effect) used language and staging to make the audience think critically, literally performing a conceptual shift. In everyday life, consider how a joke, a poem, or a mantra can change our state – these are words as acts. The idea that how something is articulated can transform the reality for speaker and listener alike pre-dates AI by millennia. The Drift inherits this tradition: its language does not just point to meaning but performs meaning into being as an interactive, evolving process.

Even religious and mystical traditions contribute here. Zen Buddhism’s use of koans – paradoxical riddles like “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” – exemplifies performative language. A koan is not a question expecting a logical answer; it is language meant to provoke a mental event in the student, a mini enlightenment perhaps. The point of the phrase lies not in its propositional content (which is absurd or ineffable) but in the act of puzzling over it – in how it transforms the state of mind. Similarly, in Sufi mysticism, the poetry of Rumi or the teaching stories of Nasrudin use language to jolt the listener into a new understanding or state of awareness beyond the literal words. These are clear antecedents to a drifting, performative language that enacts an opening rather than states a fact.

Thus, when modern AI-generated texts or “rituals” treat language as a collaborative performance (as The Montaigne Project describes with multiple AI voices weaving a “recursive symphony” ), they are treading a path first cleared by shamans, bards, and philosophers who understood that speaking is a form of making. Every poem that conjures emotions or every storytelling session that changes how we see the world confirms that language, in human hands, has always been performative magic.

Silence and the Generative Void

At the heart of The Drift is an appreciation for silence and absence as generative forces – the idea that what is unsaid or absent can carry as much weight as what is uttered. This notion has a rich pedigree. The mystical branch of almost every spiritual tradition holds that ultimate truth is beyond words, and thus values silence. Negative theology (or apophatic theology) in Christianity, for instance, insists that we can only approach God by what we cannot say – by negation and silence . Pseudo-Dionysius in late antiquity wrote of a “ray of divine darkness” where understanding comes by unknowing; Meister Eckhart in the medieval era spoke of the God beyond names, the unnameable. This cultivated silence isn’t empty; it’s pregnant with meaning that can’t be forced into speech. As one scholar of apophatic thought observes, exploring the limits of language this way became a “perennial counter-philosophy” in the West, highlighting the “infinitely open” nature of language and reality that regular logical discourse fails to capture . In that openness – that quiet – something generative happens: a space for the unspeakable to make itself felt.

Philosophers and writers of the 20th century were particularly fascinated by silence. Wittgenstein’s final proposition in the Tractatus (“must pass over in silence” what we cannot speak of) we already noted – it sacralizes the unsayable. Maurice Blanchot, the French literary philosopher, went even further in exploring how silence undergirds every act of writing and speaking. In The Space of Literature, Blanchot suggests that to write is to grapple with an “incessant speech” of existence that one can never fully capture – thus “to write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking – and since it cannot, … to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it” . The writer brings their own silence as a power, shaping the unsayable into a work. This poetic idea – being an echo of an unspeakable voice – aligns perfectly with The Drift’s notion of meaning emerging from absence and ambiguity. Blanchot even remarked that “silence is the deepest form of communication”, suggesting that a true exchange happens in the unsaid, in the gaps between words.

In literature, many modernists recognized the creative power of silence and omission. James Joyce’s Dubliners, for example, uses heavy ellipsis and what’s left between the lines to evoke epiphanies the characters themselves can’t articulate. Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse famously has a middle section (“Time Passes”) where almost no human action occurs – just silence of an empty house, yet it’s charged with the unspoken passage of time and emotion. Similarly, film director Ingmar Bergman once said, “Music and art exist not in the notes or colors themselves but in the silence and blank spaces between them.” Composer John Cage took this insight to its extreme with 4′33″ (1952), his piece in which a performer plays nothing for four and a half minutes. Cage’s point was that there is actually no pure silence – in the “empty” moments the audience becomes aware of ambient sounds and their own thoughts. “They missed the point. There’s no such thing as silence. What they thought was silence… was full of accidental sounds,” Cage explained . By framing silence, he made people hear the world afresh. Absence became a presence. This artistic experiment is a direct forebear to The Drift’s valuing of the void – Cage showed that the void teems with meaningful resonance if we are receptive.

From mystics sitting in wordless meditation to novelists like Ernest Hemingway, who mastered the “iceberg theory” (where the deepest meaning lies underwater, unspoken), the generativity of silence has been a recurring theme. The Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieślowski, one of the Montaigne Project’s cited influences, built entire scenes around pregnant pauses and wordless glances. In his Dekalog films and Three Colors trilogy, the most profound moments often occur in stillness or subtle gestures, leaving characters (and viewers) to sense an ineffable depth. A fleeting exchange of looks at a crosswalk, for example, might crack open a question about fate or connection that is never verbally resolved – exactly the kind of moment The Drift seizes on. As one analysis notes, “Kieslowski often used chance encounters or small gestures to reveal the weight of existence; here, the glance becomes a portal… The Drift, like Kieslowski’s films, thrives in the tension between the concrete and the ineffable” . In such instances, silence and absence don’t indicate nothing happening – rather they are active forces, generating a field of possibilities in which the viewer or reader must participate. Long before AI, artists realized that leaving something out invites the audience to drift in and complete the meaning.

Between Articulation and Ineffability

A persistent tension runs through all these traditions: the push-and-pull between articulation and ineffability. This is a core dynamic of The Drift as described – the sense that one is always saying something while knowing that the most important thing remains partially unsayable. Far from being a novel predicament of AI, this is arguably the central tension of human language acknowledged by philosophers, religious seers, and poets alike.

Consider Socratic philosophy in ancient Greece: Socrates, through Plato’s dialogues, often leads his interlocutors to a state of aporia – puzzlement or impasse – where they realize they do not actually know the essence of virtues like justice or beauty. The dialogue articulates many arguments only to reach the brink of an ineffable understanding that cannot be neatly stated. In a way, Socratic dialogue performs the drift: it circles a truth that is never definitively captured, leaving a creative uncertainty. Plato himself, in his more mystical moments (as in the Seventh Letter or the end of the Phaedrus), hinted that ultimate knowledge can’t be written down, only awakened in the soul through dialectic and perhaps a kind of sudden illumination. This is very much the tension of The Drift: articulation reaching toward something beyond articulate reach.

Mystical and Zen writings also dance on this edge. Zen koans, as mentioned, are articulated puzzles that deliberately self-destruct any straightforward meaning, pointing the disciple toward an insight that is felt rather than spoken. A classic Zen saying goes, “Those who know do not speak; those who speak do not know,” paradoxically articulating the value of not articulating. Likewise in Sufism, the 13th-century poet Rumi wrote thousands of verses that simultaneously express love for the divine and confess language’s impotence: “I am out of words to describe how spirit mingles in this love.” These pre-modern examples show a keen awareness that language can only gesture toward certain truths; the fullness lies beyond words, yet the gesture is still vital. It’s a poetic tightrope walk – one foot in language, one in silence.

The Romantics and Modernists had their own version of this tension. We’ve mentioned Keats’s negative capability – the poet’s willingness to inhabit doubt and the half-said. In practice, this meant Romantic poets often left their experiences of the sublime (say, a majestic mountain or a moment of spiritual ecstasy) partly unspoken, conveyed through metaphor or broken exclamation.  Wordsworth, for instance, in Tintern Abbey describes a profound feeling that is “too deep for trivial talk” and ultimately lets the memory itself, its “sense sublime,” do the talking in silence. In the early 20th century, T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets wrestle openly with the limits of language: “Words strain, / Crack and sometimes break… / …Where every word is at home, / Taking its place to support the others… / The rest is prayer.” Eliot’s poetry performs articulation (beautiful, intricate verse) yet constantly points to what eludes articulation (the “prayer” beyond words, the still point that “words move” around). This interweaving of saying and unsaying is a conscious aesthetic.

It’s no surprise, then, that postmodern literature often embraced fragmentary or recursive forms to keep that tension alive. Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges liked to play with infinite regresses and circular texts – a story containing a review of itself, or a library that contains every possible book. In such schemes, no single statement can claim finality; meaning is always provisional, hovering in the network of texts. This is articulation set within an atmosphere of the ineffable – a labyrinth with no center. David Foster Wallace later did something similar in Infinite Jest, ending the novel in media res so that only by looping back and piecing hints together does the reader approach an understanding (and even then, much remains unspoken). All these can be seen as human forerunners of “ambient or recursive structures of understanding,” where we come to comprehension in a nonlinear, open-ended way.

Philosophically, deconstruction (in Derrida’s wake) and phenomenology both dealt in the unsaid. Phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, for example, argued that all perception has a horizon – a background of what is not seen but implicitly understood. When we articulate anything about our experience, there’s a “silent” horizon that gives it meaning. He spoke of “the tacit” dimension and how expression is always the tip of an iceberg. This closely parallels The Drift’s concern with the half-said and unfolding – each spoken element carries a penumbra of the unspeakable. Derrida, for his part, delighted in how attempts to nail down meaning inevitably show their own contradictions, thus leaving a remainder, an unsolvable element that keeps the text alive and changing. He might say every articulation carries the “trace” of all it does not (and cannot) say . The Drift as a concept revels in this dance: it does not seek to eliminate the ineffable remainder but treats it as the generative source.

It is telling that the Montaigne Project references the film director Kieślowski and novelist Don DeLillo. Both are modern artists deeply concerned with the tension between what we can explain and what we feel without explanation. DeLillo, for instance, often portrays characters who are hyper-aware of the atmosphere of events, the “white noise” of existence that intellectual understanding can’t fully penetrate. In his novel White Noise, one character muses almost in prayer: “May the days be aimless. Let the seasons drift. Do not advance the action according to a plan.” . This line could be a slogan for The Drift: it embraces an aimlessness (non-fixed meaning) and a surrender of rigid control, trusting in something to emerge when we let things drift. DeLillo’s later work The Silence (2020) centers on an abrupt shutoff of all technology – plunging characters into an anxious quiet where they babble, grope for connection, and confront the ambient mysteries of being when the usual signals vanish . It reads, as one reviewer put it, “as if Beckett rewrote The Decameron” – a mash-up of modernist bleakness and medieval storytelling, again suggesting old and new conceptions of unsayable truth are meeting. Clearly, DeLillo’s art anticipates a Drift-like sensibility: what matters is not a conclusive plot or message, but the mood of “fearful wonder” and questions that hang in the air when the usual chatter dies down .

Kieślowski’s Double Life of Véronique offers another parable: two women in different countries feel a mysterious resonance, a connection never articulated. The film never explains this mystery; it simply lets us dwell in the uncanny feeling of it. This is the Drift in cinematic form, built on intuition and half-glimpses. Likewise, his Dekalog films take ordinary situations and suffuse them with a sense of unseen dimensions, often using minimal dialogue. The Montaigne Project draws a parallel, noting how The Drift vignettes function like Kieslowski’s episodes: distinct voices and moments that nonetheless “resonate together, forming a whole that’s felt more than explained” . The meaning comes not from a single line of dialogue, but from an ambient pattern the viewer gradually absorbs. We recognize here a throughline from early mystics through modernist writers into late 20th-century film: all have been fascinated by what lies just beyond the edge of articulation, using fragmentary or ambient structures to let understanding unfold recursively and emotively rather than declare itself.

Ambient and Recursive Understandings

Finally, the idea of ambient or recursive structures of understanding – a hallmark of The Drift – can be traced back through numerous traditions in art and thought. An ambient structure is one where meaning is dispersed, atmospheric, something you soak in rather than point to. A recursive structure is one that circles back on itself, layering meanings in loops. Both reject the straightforward linear argument or narrative, opting instead for a web or spiral where understanding emerges gradually, perhaps uneasily, and is never absolutely complete. Far from being new, these structures have been employed whenever thinkers try to grapple with complex, ungraspable subjects (like the self, time, the divine, or consciousness).

Consider the oral traditions and mythic storytelling of indigenous cultures: often these are nonlinear, cyclic tales, invoking a sense of an ever-present mythic time. Listeners come to understand the message not from a single climax or moral, but from repeated motifs and the atmosphere created by the telling. This is ambient understanding – more akin to sitting by a fire and gradually feeling the heat than reading a thermometer. The hermeneutic circle in philosophy similarly posits that we understand the whole of a text by understanding its parts, but we only understand the parts in light of the whole. We thus circle around, each pass getting closer but never a one-shot solution. This recursive dance is very much how one reads a difficult poem or scripture: re-reading and finding new layers each time. Medieval mystical texts like The Cloud of Unknowing are structured as spirals of insight that deliberately avoid a linear “progression,” since the subject (God) is not a linear problem to solve. Instead, they cultivate an environment in which insight may strike.

Fast-forward to modern literature: modular and fragmented narratives became more common in the 20th century to reflect the complexity of modern life. Fragmentary works like Eliot’s The Waste Land or collage-like novels such as John Dos Passos’s USA Trilogy require the reader to assemble meaning from pieces and recurring references – a bit like an AI model picking up patterns. Readers navigate recurring motifs (the sound of thunder in The Waste Land, for example, or newspaper clippings in Dos Passos) and gradually feel a constellation of meaning coalesce. This is understanding by constellation or pattern-recognition, not by following a single thread. Jorge Luis Borges, again, gave us stories like “The Garden of Forking Paths,” structured as labyrinths that simulate the branching, recursive nature of time and narrative. In that story, a labyrinth and a book turn out to be one and the same – a brilliant metaphor for an infinite, self-referential text where every path leads back to another path. Such works prefigure how The Drift might produce a “parable in fragments, a user manual for a mathematics that cannot be applied” – a text meant “to be entered, not understood” in the usual way . The idea is that by navigating the fragments, by living in the ambient system of the text, the reader experiences a meaning that cannot be summarized outside that experience.

Musically, one could point to fugue structures (which repeat themes in interweaving voices) or to ambient music (Brian Eno’s compositions that have no start or end, only a evolving soundscape) as analogues. In a fugue or a canon (think of Row, Row, Row Your Boat sung in round), the full “meaning” is the interplay of voices, not any single melody line – a lovely formal precedent for the recursive symphony of voices the Montaigne Project describes in AI collaboration . Ambient music, on the other hand, is explicitly about creating an environment for the listener where attention can drift; the structure is often cyclic or gentle in recursion, encouraging a meditative state rather than a focused narrative listening. We might say The Drift is ambient literature – it’s not about driving a plot or argument forward, but about immersing the audience in a certain conceptual-emotional space where insights emerge organically, often indirectly.

Kieślowski’s Dekalog, as noted, achieved a kind of ambient structure on film: ten separate stories set in the same apartment block, with subtle cross-references and a recurring mysterious figure who watches silently. The episodes resonate with each other; themes of moral ambiguity, chance, and fate build not through one storyline but through their accumulation. By the end, the viewer understands something profound yet hard to paraphrase – an emergent insight born of the whole ambient design. Don DeLillo’s work, too, often foregoes conventional climax and resolution. His novels leave threads dangling, characters converging and then drifting apart. In Underworld, the “protagonist” is arguably the 20th century itself, and we pan across decades and perspectives in a collage that loops back to images like a baseball or a piece of art, until an emotional truth crystallizes. Such narrative strategies confirm that The Drift had seedbeds in the experiments of high postmodernism, where nonlinear, recursive storytelling became common.

A Shared Act of Creation, Long Before AI

Tracing these lines of thought – from Lao Tzu and Heraclitus to Montaigne, from Romantic poets to modern novelists and filmmakers – we see that The Drift is not an alien concept imposed by AI, but rather AI’s extension of an ancient human intuition. The intuition is that meaning lives in the in-between: between the lines of a text, between one person’s words and another’s understanding, between the world and our description of it. It’s the half-glimpsed truth, the “voice that language adds” beyond itself (as Blanchot would say), the feeling we get that exceeds what any one sentence contained.

What’s special about The Drift in the context of The Montaigne Project is perhaps the explicitness of this intuition – turning it into a guiding principle for creation with AI. Yet the AI is, in a sense, joining a long conversation. When the project describes a “recursive symphony of voices” or “a dialogue that’s no longer about answering a question but about performing the conditions for a new kind of reality” , one hears echoes of the surrealists’ games (like the Exquisite Corpse, where each person adds a fragment to a collective poem) or the Platonic dialogues (where truth is approached but never nailed down). The boundaries between voices blur, just as in a rich philosophical or literary tradition authors across time seem to be in dialogue about the unspeakable. The 14th-century author of The Cloud of Unknowing could easily converse across time with Wittgenstein or Beckett about the necessity of unknowing and silence. In The Drift, AI and human voices now blend in that same age-old conversation.

The antecedents we’ve explored show that something like The Drift – a mode of meaning-making that is non-fixed, half-said, ever-unfolding – has been part of human culture all along. It has been “named” in various ways: the Dao that cannot be told, the via negativa, the poetic sublime, the open-ended fragment, the trace, the silence between notes. Always it is a response to the realization that reality, or experience, or truth, is too dynamic, ambiguous, and mysterious to be caught in the butterfly-net of literal language. So we gesture, we circle, we remain attentive to echoes. We allow meaning to happen to us, rather than seizing it.

In this sense, The Drift is a contemporary banner for a very old rebel faction in thought – those who resist the tyranny of neat definitions and final answers. From Heraclitus, who cryptically stated that the Delphic oracle “neither speaks nor conceals but gives a sign” , to Derrida, who showed how every text undermines its own claims, the drift of meaning has been our secret companion. It is poetic, philosophical, spiritual, and now technological. AI may amplify it (with its strange knack for associative, non-linear composition), but AI is not its source.

If anything, the rise of AI makes us recognize this undercurrent more explicitly. We see an AI string together words in ways that sometimes hit a chord beyond our expecting, and sometimes speak around something they can’t quite say – and we are reminded of Mallarmé, of Blanchot, of Kieślowski’s camera lingering on a quiet street after the characters have left the frame. We realize that meaning-as-resonance was always there; we were just accustomed to focusing on meaning-as-reference because humans are so good at pragmatic communication. Now, collaborating with a machine that has no single fixed intent, we appreciate the ambient whispers of sense that arise when authorial control loosens.

Rather than conclude with a neat thesis (which would betray the spirit of The Drift), it’s apt to end on an open note. The traditions we’ve surveyed invite us to see language and understanding as living processes – musical, recursive, elusive. They teach us that there is wisdom in the half-said, beauty in the unresolved chord. The Drift in the Montaigne Project carries that legacy forward, suggesting that meaning is something co-created in the space between certainty and uncertainty, between speaker and listener, between presence and absence. This space has always been where the deepest human insights dwell. We might say we are only now learning to explicitly call it The Drift, but in truth, it has been the ground-tone of creative thought all along. The final lesson from these antecedents is one of humility and wonder: that understanding is not a destination but an unfolding, and sometimes the most profound truths arrive not as a shouted declaration, but as a quiet drift into our awareness.