Technology, Scholarship, and the Humanities:
The Implications of Electronic Information
The Implications of Electronic Information for the Sociology of
Knowledge[1]
Richard A. Lanham
Professor of English
University of California, Los Angeles
Abstract
This paper argues that the fundamental "operating system" for the humanities
is changing from the book to the digital multimedia computer screen. It
outlines the consequences of this move for the creation, performance, teaching,
and study of literature, music, and the visual arts. It concludes with a
suggestion for how this movement from page to digital display might inform the
administrative changes forced upon the university by the current shortage of
money.
© Richard A. Lanham, 1993
The Agenda for Group III has been set by the conference organizers as
follows:
- How will electronic information affect the organization of humanistic
knowledge and the social basis of its production and dissemination? For
example, might the combination of electronic information resources with
interdisciplinary and multicultural scholarship affect the formal organization
of knowledge, whether in learned societies at the national level or in specific
departments on individual campuses?
- How will undergraduate teaching be affected by the ready availability of
electronic information?
- Will graduate training change as graduate students become more adept at
using electronic tools?
I will address these three questions in the order set.
When we ask, as in the topic set for this group, what are "the implications of
electronic information for the sociology of knowledge," I take it that we are
asking these questions:
- What cultural assumptions does electronic information bring with it?
- What basic means of thinking and working together does electronic information
call into question?
- What does electronic information reveal about how knowledge is held
under our present system?
- How will humanistic information be held in a digital electronic universe?
We're talking, then, to use a phrase we will all understand, about the
operating system of the humanities. Before we begin, let's focus our
discussion in two ways.
- By "electronic information" I take it that we mean digital electronic
information. Great confusion has been generated in the past thirty years by
the failure to make this crucial distinction. Analog electronic
information affects us mightily--as in broadcast television--but it lacks the
essential ingredient of digital electronic information: the common signal base
for word, sound, and image.
- In this paper we are reflecting upon the humanities--the creation,
criticism, teaching, and archiving of the arts and letters. None of us need
reminding how enzymatic digital computation has been for the physical sciences.
Such a story would be, indeed, almost the history of the sciences since
1945. New fields of inquiry such as chaos theory have been created by
the computer, and established fields have been revolutionized, first by digital
computation and now by digital visualization. Although there are obviously
overlaps, the humanities are being radicalized by digital computation in a
different way from the sciences. It is that different way that I consider
here.
1. How will electronic information affect the organization of humanistic
knowledge and the social basis of its production and dissemination?
The basic operating system for humanistic knowledge from the Renaissance until
the present has been the codex book. Two forces converged at that time to
establish it as the central system, one technological and one ideological. The
technology of print created in the codex book a vehicle of miraculous
versatility from which have descended alembicated variants like broadsides,
magazines, even scholarly conference proceedings. Onto this technological
marvel the humanist ideology grafted the concept of the authoritative text.
Humanistic scholarship existed to rescue, edit, and annotate the great texts of
antiquity and to publish them in definitive editions. Cultural authority
flowed from these texts and thus their dissemination mattered; the great
humanistic efforts to found grammar schools, write textbooks, and establish
libraries institutional and private, sought to insure such dissemination. This
dual explosion of a technology of expression and an operating system of
cultural authority gained additional force at every point, as we all know, by
the translation of the Bible into the vernacular languages and its
"publication," its democratization, in the new form. This heroic
democratization, with all its triumphs and mortal perils, can be followed in
the career of William Tyndale, the principal, if unacknowledged, translator of
the King James Version.
We still operate under this system and take for granted its rules. Books are
stored in libraries, taught in schools, carry on learned debate, enshrine the
truth, as we have been given to know it. After books have been printed and
bound, they are unchangeable. Thus the idea of a single author can be
protected. Because books can be physical property, they can be
intellectual property, protected by some version of copyright law. Thus
the career of authorship becomes possible. And books create a natural
authority: you can quarrel with them but only marginally or by writing another
book. If you are dealing with the ipsissima verba of God, as in the
Bible, you cannot quarrel with the Author at all. (The quarrel about
interpretation will continue, presumably, until Domesday.) Books have
always been centered in the word; illustrations can be reproduced, but they
require a different radical of expression, one which has almost always been
much more expensive than setting text; color has always been an expensive
ornament, not an essence. Sounds cannot be reproduced at all.
"We are coming to the end of the culture of the book," O. B. Hardison has
written. "Books are still produced and read in prodigious numbers, and they
will continue to be as far into the future as one can imagine. However, they
do not command the center of the cultural stage. Modern culture is taking
shapes that are more various and more complicated than the book-centered
culture it is
succeeding."[2]
What happens when this occurs, when humanistic knowledge moves from book
to screen? The
operating system changes fundamentally. Texts are not fixed in print but
projected on a phosphor screen in volatile form. They can be amended, emended,
rewritten, reformatted, set in another typeface, all with a few keystrokes.
The whole system of cultural authority we inherited from Renaissance Humanism
thus evaporates, literally, at a stroke. The "Great Book," the authoritative
text, was built on the fixity of print technology. That fixity no longer
operates. The reader defined by print--the engrossed admiration of the
humanist scholar reading Cicero--now becomes quite another person. He can
quarrel with the text, and not marginally, or next year in another book, but
right now, integrally. The reader thus becomes an author. Author and
authority are both transformed.
The possibility of such instantaneous disagreement changes the time-scale of
humanistic debate. We can compare the old diastole and systole with the new by
juxtaposing the stately pace of humanistic publication--years to write a book,
a year at least to publish it, years to review it, more years for it to affect
the debate--with online special interest groups, where the interchange happens
daily. To change the time-scale of humanistic knowledge affects its essence,
not only its pace. It changes, to take the simplest example, the paradigmatic
expressive form from the essay (another Renaissance creation) to online
conversation (a return, on a faster time scale, of the paradigmatic medieval
form, the letter).
And, as we have now all discovered, the protective carapace of copyright law
simply cannot apply. Copyright law was created to regulate a market in printed
books. Because digital information has physical expression but no physical
embodiment, it cannot be owned in the same way as a printed book. You can eat
your cake, give it away, and still have it too. A new marketplace must be
devised. The new digital bounty, by denying the laws of substance, changes
fundamentally both the career and the cultural authority of authorship. For
properties in the humanities, existing copyright law seeks to focus on a
central
question--substantial similarity. To make such a distinction, you need
a substance. Electronic text, unlike books, has none. Copyright law
must have a fixed text, with a fixed order. Such an order is an integral part
of a literary text and essential for making the comparisons copyright
litigation always involves. Yet a digital electronic text, because of its
intrinsic volatility, can leave the order up to the reader.
As a brilliant recent book, Writing Space, by the classical
scholar Jay Bolter, has made
clear,[3]
the natural form of
electronic expression is not linear but hypertextual. Hypertext leaves the
organization up to the user. Beginnings, middles, and ends are what he or she
makes them out to be. The final "reading" order represents a do-it-yourself
collage, a set of user-selected variations, around a central theme. The idea
of beginning-middle-end--the fundamental Aristotelian laws of artistic creation
and indeed of rational thought itself--is called into question. Narrative
and logical order, in such a world, are not fixed in the text but a
boundary-condition which the reader can apply when and how she wants to. This
change in the fundamental nature of narrative structure, and of the human
"reason" a common reader is assumed to possess, subverts utterly the kinds of
textual comparisons any copyright jury can be expected to understand.
Consider for a moment a mock trial in which I participated at the 1991 "Digital
World" meeting. The case at bar: An academic "author" decides to develop a
multimedia program on gangs in the inner city. As one segment of this program,
he uses, without permission (it was requested but denied), the famous gang
knife-fight scene from the film West Side Story. (In the Romeo and
Juliet original, this is the duel between Tybalt and Romeo [Act III, Scene
1].) The scene is short, and forms part of a program segment on gang fights
which is much longer. A "reader" of the program need not look at this scene at
all, or need not look at all of it. It may not even be noticed. Each "reader"
makes his way through the program in an idiosyncratic way--no central guidance.
How much of the "substance" of the program does the borrowed segment represent?
Is it prominent, because it comes from a famous movie, or de minimis,
because it lurks in a corner easy to overlook? In a program basically
scholarly in nature, can it be reckoned "fair use"? If the "substance" is not
fixed in book form, nor the "reader's" trajectory of attention implied, the
true nature of the taking simply cannot be measured.
Electronic information, then, affects the organization of humanistic knowledge
and the social basis of its production in some fundamental ways.
- It changes the central humanistic artifact (the CPU, we might
call it) from printed book to digital display.
- It changes what we mean by author.
- It undermines the basic idea of originality last glorified by the
Romantic Movement.
- It changes what we mean by text.
- It radically compromises the cultural authority of the text.
- It metamorphoses the marketplace of humanistic inquiry in ways so
radical we can scarcely yet find our way.
- It desubstantializes the arts and letters (and perhaps other
area of humanistic production) in much the same way that the information
society has desubstantialized the industrial revolution.
The operating system we inherited from the Renaissance, then, undergoes digital
metamorphosis: book, author, authoritative text, book market, library, all
become something else. But this metamorphosis only begins the digital
transformation. Consider the central part of the humanistic enterprise, the
arts and letters themselves. We can do this in three parts. First, we'll
consider the current state of their new expressive medium--what people now call
"multimedia." Second, we'll sample the state of play in music, the visual arts,
and letters. Third, we'll ponder the implications for the arts of their new
fundamental boundary condition: in a digital universe, words, images, and
sounds share an isomorphic representative code.
1. The current state of multimedia. If the basic mode of cultural
expression is moving from the book to some electronic form, what does this form
look like? Do not confuse it with broadcast television. Broadcast TV is an
analog form, a fundamentally different affair. I have no doubt that Nicholas
Negroponte is right in prophesying its imminent, and let's hope, eminent,
demise. This new expressive form that is replacing the book is emerging from a
cluster of technologies which people now call, for better or worse,
"multimedia." In trying to explain it, I am severely constrained because I am
trying to explain in print, to people who have internalized print into an
unalterable condition of human life, a fundamentally different medium. There
ought to be, in every such presentation, a demonstration. But circumstances do
not permit it, so we must try to explain a dynamic medium in a static one, an
imagistic medium in words only, a hypertextual one in linear text, a color one
in black and white, a speaking one in the echoing voice of prose style.
How, thus constrained as we are by putting new wines into an old bottle, can I
describe the current expressive vehicle for the humanities? It is a composite
of techniques. Start with an electronic screen. This screen can do
everything that a computer can do. It can display and manipulate type. Unlike
print, it permits the reader to change the display from one typeface to
another, for ornamental effect, for expressive effect, or simply to enlarge it
for easier reading. (The ability to magnify print has to date been thought
simply an aid for the near-blind, but it goes much further than that. How many
books have vanished down the oubliette because of minute type? I first read
the poetry of Edmund Spenser in type 1/32nd of an inch high, and it took me
half a dozen years to get back to the poetry.) Thus type becomes, instead of
the famous crystal goblet of Victorian typesetting theory, an expressive
parameter in itself, an iconic surface that interacts continually with the
words which it bodies forth.
This new self-conscious expressive dimension isn't just a visual joke, like a
ransom note assembled from a dozen different typefaces. It introduces a
fundamentally different meaning for literacy itself. The late Eric Havelock,
the great Hellenist, argued that the Greek alphabet enfranchised modern
literacy because it was simple enough to be internalized in early childhood.
The reader thus looked through the words on the page to the thoughts
expressed. Thought was, thus, unmediated--or at least made to seem so. (Greek
and ancient Latin manuscript notation, written without word spaces, was of
course much less transparent than modern type, or even than a fine Renaissance
italic hand, but the principle remains.) This transparent medium was for
humanism what Newtonian physics was for science--a fundamental paradigm. Pure
conceptual thought, unmediated by expression, was possible and indeed ideal.
The printed page was a transparent window onto the world of thought.
The computer screen constitutes a more opaque surface altogether. We have to
decide how we are going to constitute our "reality." Much more
self-consciousness enters into the occasion. This self-consciousness affects
"the organization of humanistic knowledge" at the most intimate level. Both
author and audience, citizen and society in the world of letters, become
fundamentally more self-conscious about themselves, about writing, about how
social decorum is constituted. We have to do here not with an ornamental
elegance but a fundamental state-change in how the social imagination works.
A multimedia "page" can manipulate printed text not only in visual scale but in
conceptual scale. We can construct a text, using an outlining program, in
layers, and the reader can choose which level of generality within which to
read. Typographical formatting of books tries this but within very severe
limits. Its basic cognitive scale is fixed, and with it the reader's time
scale; the reader follows the argument on the level of generality the author
has chosen to employ. With the new medium, the scale at which
conceptual thought is pursued now becomes a user-selectable parameter. Such a
scaled reading is "hypertextual," but in a particularly ordered, top-down way.
It would seem to be a natural for such written discourse as the law, for
example, though to my knowledge no one has yet used it for this purpose. It
offers some obvious pedagogical applications, but here, too, it has not yet
been exploited.
In the new expressive medium, text can also be in color. We see in magazine
formats and advertisements how such a text might look, but we dismiss it as a
possible vehicle for conceptual thought. I don't think we should. It seems
far different in the context of, for example, a digital magazine published on a
CD-ROM. We have proverbialized black and white expression as a guarantee of
the truth ("I've got it down here in black-and-white!"), but the proverbs can't
hide the technological base of this metaphysical verity. "Black and white,"
like print technology as a whole, works by sensory exclusion; there is nothing
intrinsically truthful about such a technique.
Freedom of the press, the cynical proverb hath it, means owning a printing
press. Now, through desktop publishing programs, such ownership has been
radically democratized. This democratization indeed constitutes a revolution
in "the social basis of. . .production and dissemination" for humanistic
knowledge. But desktop publishing brings other changes as well. In a print
world, we think of print as fixed, "cold type" even when it has been produced
by photography. You set it. In a desktop publishing world, you
flow type. The fundamental metaphor shifts from static to dynamic.
This "liquidity" of our basic alphabet will affect in profound ways how we
think about reading, about literacy itself. What becomes, for example, of the
stability of spelling, punctuation, and syntax? Will we return to the chaotic
days of Elizabethan orthography?
But all these changes, enzymatic though they are, only hint at the fundamental
change that screen brings to page: a radical alteration in the alphabet/icon
ratio of ordinary discursive prose. In a desktop publishing program, you not
only "flow" your text, you usually flow it around pictures. To find the
critical machinery needed to analyze such an alphabetic/iconic convention, we
have to go to previously marginal expressive conventions like shape poetry.
(We might also, if our humanistic respectability didn't forbid it, consider the
new genre of "serious" comic book.) Such a mixture of word and image is not
utterly new, to be sure, but digital expression poses it with a resurgent
force. The new humanistic "page" can reproduce images as easily as text, and
it can manipulate them to an equal depth. And the white space is free. The
playing field for word and image thus finds a miraculous enlargement. We can
now process images as easily as we do words, and this ability has called forth
horrified perturbations of dismay. Because we have thought photographs, like
"black-and-white" words, to be unalterable talismans of truth, like long-time
prisoners we shudder when our chains are removed. But all these fixities are
technological conventions, not eternal truths.
Our allegiance to the truths of alphabetic expression, in the humanistic world
especially, has become so strong that we denigrate iconic communication as
"comic book culture." But the power of the visual cortex to organize
experience, not to mention the power of visual art to render it joyful, surely
indicates that this prejudice must dissipate. We are in for a complete
renegotiation of the relationship between verbal and visual thinking. This
renegotiation, like the others we have considered, goes deep. The two sides of
the brain are being brought into a new--and, perhaps we may find, more
balanced--relationship. This rebalancing finds its scientific counterpart in
the emergent discipline of "visualization," the use of computer graphics to
think through, conceptualize, problems rather than simply to illustrate
solutions arrived at through other means. I am not sure what an imagistic, or
iconic, or iconographic, "organization of humanistic knowledge" will look like,
but it will certainly be different from our present one. Perhaps we should
look to the patterns of thought built up by logographic languages like Chinese
or Japanese for guidance. At all events, "visual thinking" will become much
more than an oxymoron, or even a paradox. The growth stock, in such a new
humanistic world, will have to be the visual arts and art history, will it
not?
Classical rhetoric spoke often of the "colors of rhetoric" and we are now
equipped to literalize this metaphor. But with even greater urgency it urged
the power of the "speaking picture." We can now literalize that ideal too, for
we can on the multimedia "page" add sound to word and image. Even entry-level
computers can now add the spoken word to the written text. Soon it will be a
common mix. Voice, written word, image. And music too. It is hard to wrap
your mind around such a complex sensory mix, but I don't see why it should
dismay us--although it does remind one a little of the Greek rhapsodic
performance which so disconcerted Plato!
So. We have an expressive surface which can mix word, written and spoken, with
image and music. A Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk for the common reader. To
this rich expressive surface, now add a dynamic digital video signal--that is,
mix in movies as well as still photos. The "capture boards" which enable us to
do this, although some impoverished English professors still cannot afford
them, have been steadily declining in price. Thus the history of film and
television's dynamic imagery becomes available, part of our new system of
humanistic "production and dissemination." The film and television world's
treatment of its rich archive has always been a scandal, but a digital universe
makes it worse than that--a financial blunder. The VCR democratized the
history of film and television, stormed the archival Bastille, as it were.
Now a further democratization offers itself: the digitization of filmic record
into an archival form where it can be stored more safely and dispensed more
widely and at less expense. More than all this, though, the digitization of
our visual archive, both still and moving, democratizes it still further, for
it offers the power to reconfigure, to reconstitute.
At this point, the great cookie monster of humanistic angst, broadcast TV, has
entered our new expressive surface. Once we digitize it for a computer screen,
we can manipulate it as easily as we manipulate every other digital signal. We
can invert beginnings, middles, and endings to make up new stories. We can use
the basic art form of our time, collage, to our heart's content. Talk about
zapping the commercials--we can zap the programs! Thus we disarm the monster
than threatens to devour us. Surely even Neal Postman could not object to
this.
The multimedia developers have chosen as their "God-term" the word
interactivity, and rightly so. At the deepest level, humanistic
expression, and the means which disseminate it, have moved from a static to a
dynamic medium. Is this not, as well, a fundamental movement of Western art
in our time? One thinks of the Italian Futurist Marinetti's exploding a printed
text into its visual components. A building for us now is not a timeless
monument but, like the Centre Pompidou, for example, a structure built
to change and interact with its environment and its inhabitants. From the
sculpture garden we move to Christo's Running Fence, and to Happenings.
From the gallery Madonna we move to Jean Tinguely's interactive junk-machines.
From the tranquil landscapes of Poussin and Lorrain, we move to the minimalist
paintings and room environments of Robert Irwin, where not only surfaces and
walls and colors but the very nature and palpability of light itself change as
we watch, and gaze, and ponder, and enter into the surface. And from
there, to continually changing, algorithmically composed computer
"paintings."
The multimedia developers keep claiming that they have created a form so new
that neither they nor anyone else knows what to make of it. But the aesthetic
we need to interpret the new expressive surface that humanism now wields can be
found just here, in the history of the visual arts from Futurism and Dada to
the present. Scale-change, repetition, collage, chance-based creation,
volatility, interchange of reader and writer, creator and perceiver, the
radical democratization of signage, etc.--all these and more reveal the
extraordinary fact that the visual arts have, once again, miraculously imagined
an expressive explosion before it took place, before digital electronic means
made it possible. People who develop the kinds of arguments I am sketching out
are always reproached with being "futuristic," prophets of a sci-fi future that
stable feet-on-the-ground people should beware of. Two answers present
themselves to this ever-green reproach. First, the new multimedia humanistic
expressive surface already exists. None of these expressive
possibilities is rare or unknown or undeveloped, some of them are quite cheap,
and all of them are getting cheaper. But the stronger argument for this new
expressive surface, and distribution system, for humanistic expression is never
brought forward--the very history of the twentieth-century arts. If the
digital revolution has not really happened to the humanities, if the changes I
have been charting have not occurred, then the history of twentieth-century art
is a meaningless aberration. It may be so, but it takes some temerity to make
such a claim.
2. The state of play in music, the visual arts, and letters. The arts
are "humanistic information" in one of its most basic forms. How, in
creation, performance, and teaching, have they been digitally transformed? We
might find our footing in the performing arts by considering music. Over half
of the music performed in America these days has a digital base. Recording and
playback are entirely digitized, with the consequences for listener-directed
reconfiguration that the compact disc has made familiar to us all. Musical
publication has been vastly democratized by electronic means. The nature of
musical instruments has been fundamentally changed. There seem to be only
three basic ones: the electronic keyboard, horn, and drum pad. From these,
all the sounds that carefully tuned brass and magically varnished wood create
can now issue. These sounds are not yet identical to those made by acoustical
instruments, but the transformation has nevertheless occurred. Musical
composition now proceeds as a collage, specific sounds or bits of performed
music are "sampled" into a single piece of music. Often the sampling proceeds,
as John Cage predicted it would, from the world of ordinary, nonmusical sounds.
It needs no extraordinary mother-wit to extrapolate from these state-changes to
the alterations required in music education.
In such a digital electronic world, "the social basis of production and
dissemination" has indeed changed. "Musical talent" in such a world means
something quite different from that in the world created by the Renaissance.
The physical talents and training necessary for performance have been radically
democratized in range and altered in kind. And the "performance" of a piece of
music resembles far more the act of writing than the high-wire act of
professional concertizing. The digital performer depends, as does the writer,
on a rush of power created by time-scale. As a writer, I work for twenty hours
to create what you read in one; the power comes from the compression of effort
and design that writing allows. That compression now can occur in musical
performance. And the performance, the act of dissemination, now occurs
in private as well as in public; since the signal is digitized from the
beginning, to replay it at home is as "authentic" as to replay it in a concert
hall. All of this sampling, collaging, and replaying creates horrendous
copyright confusion, of course.
In the visual arts, let me single out two exemplary transformations. I take
the first one directly off the screen upon which I now project these words.
Like many other people, I use a screen-darkener program called After
Dark. It takes over when the muse deserts me. After the keystrokes have
stopped for a specified time, to protect the screen from burn-in it creates,
through various algorithms, wonderful moving visual patterns on my screen.
Some are narrative and cute, one or two even cutesy--prowling cats, flying
toasters, and the like. The most beautiful ones, however, draw abstract
patterns of ever-changing catenary curves, boxes, ever-vanishing and
reappearing perspectives, Mondrians, and so on. They rival the best
conventional geometrical abstractions done with oils on canvas. I happened the
other day to look at a reproduction of a real Mondrian: it wasn't the color
differences that I noticed, but the absence of motion. Will this not
happen to anyone who is used to a dynamic visual medium? What of how we look
at still pictures? How we teach about them? Research them? Will not all of
these change radically? (You can see the changes in research techniques
peeping through in conventional art history here and there. Consider, for
example, the resurvey of the Rembrandt oeuvre now underway. Does such a
survey not, as a programmatic assumption, transfer the final reality of
"Rembrandt" to a dynamic creative energy we choose to call by the artist's
name, while the individual pictures become simply print-outs, temporary static
expressions of a dynamic center?)
After Dark has always included means for the user to vary the patterns,
combine them according to taste, repaint them as it were. These opportunities
have not gone unremarked, and customizing the After Dark patterns is now
a cottage industry. In such a world of viewer customization, conventional
still "paintings" will never be the same. The time dimension they lack will be
keenly felt, just as the noises Tinguely's machines make in a gallery make us
feel the disturbed ritual silence of a conventional gallery. And much
of the artistic "originality" we have been brought up to admire in this
breathless silence now comes from a new, algorithmic creator. If a painting is
a kind of humanistic knowledge, as I hope we can agree it is, then we have a
new way of organizing and disseminating it.
As a second heuristic example, let me discuss for a moment what I will call
"virtual architecture." This genre has always existed--plans, sketches, and
renderings of an architect's unbuilt work. In very rare cases, like that of
Frank Lloyd Wright, designs unbuilt during the architect's lifetime are built
later, as a cultural homage. Now the "social basis of production" has
changed here too. Instead of huge rooms full of drafting-table drudges working
out half-inch details with pen and ink, we have a computer-graphics program
within which the building can be designed, and then reconfigured at will, to be
printed out, with whatever scaling manipulation needed. And then, through the
simulation technique called "virtual reality,"[4] we can "walk" through a simulation of the
building's three-dimensional space. This is no blue-sky affair; in Japan,
kitchen planners sell their designs to housewives this way. These techniques
are being extended to larger civic spaces. Thus architectural design is
radically democratized. Architects without clients can yet "build," and
clients without architects can yet "design." All of us, not only those with
acute powers of spatial reconstruction, can walk through these unbuilt
architectural, and civic, spaces and see how we like them. Again, the critic
can become a creator. These computer-assisted design techniques represent an
extraordinary metamorphosis in the sociology of architectural design; they
fulfill and genuinely empower the "behavioral design" movement which has beaten
so often in vain upon the cold glass edges of the International Style.
In the literary world, the patterns of postmodern fiction have anticipated
electronic display, too. Postmodern narrative patterns are hypertextual rather
than linear. The typographical manipulations in Kenneth Burke's
Flowerishes or Derrida's Glas remind us of Marinetti and the
Italian Futurists at the beginning of the century. But the real revolution in
the production and dissemination of fiction has come in participatory forms, in
video games, theme parks, and museum simulations. We discount these in the
academy because, like the novel when it first began, they are an emergent
popular art rather than belles lettres. When we talk about
"democratizing" literary experience, we usually mean taking our regular
seminars and teaching them to audiences which normally don't or can't attend
them. This is a fine thing to do, but the real, the radical democratization of
literary experience is taking place elsewhere, in the re-creational areas I've
just noted and, indeed, in the almost universal use of dramatic simulation for
all the processes in the world of work.
And not only in the world of work. We might reflect for a moment on the
implications of computer simulation for writing history. New powers of data
searching and sifting only begin the story. Historical events can be
reenacted, with the "reader" acting either as participant--"making" history--or
as interpreter--"writing" history by choosing among various possible weightings
of character and event. We can, dyslogistically, call this the
"fictionalizing" of history or view it eulogistically, as an alternative to
Ranke's positivistic history "as it really happened." Interactive videodiscs
like the CBS program on the San Francisco earthquake, or more complex programs
like the IBM Columbus, supply the raw materials from which a student can
contruct her own historical essays in video form. The use of illustrative live
video clips now often accessed in medical texts through light pen bar codes
surely will be used for historical illustration and citation. (A reader who
wants an illustration of a particular heart operation uses the light pen to
call up a real-time video of that operation on a video monitor.) But this is
an interim technology. The mature one will interpolate live video clips into
the historical text; we can do this now on a moderately sophisticated home
computer. But looming larger than these specific technologies is the whole
idea of historical simulation as a basic learning technique. Again, broadscale
democratization.
3. An isomorphic representative code for words, images, and sounds. In
a digital universe, word, sound, and image share a common notation. They are,
at a fundamental level, convertible into one another. I have a program
which traces drawings and makes them into music. You can make music from any
imagistic source this way--it has been done with hospital charts, to pluck a
pleasingly outré example from the current scene. And you can
move the other way, derive images from music. Plato dreamed of a common
mathematical basis for the Forms. Digital notation creates it, or something
very like. And Mandelbrot seems to have found another digital path to this
goal, finding the key to visual form in the arts in the self-similar fractal
patterns described by chaos theory. Thus the arts draw together, and together
with mathematics, in a truly wondrous way. What does this convergence mean?
We don't altogether know yet, but certainly the traditional areas of creativity
now overlap, with consequences for the democratization of the arts, and for the
academic organization within which they are taught. How can we keep apart the
practice of arts with common methods of input and a common digital base? Here
are grounds for a genuine revolution in the "social basis of production." How
can we keep apart the study of these arts? How long can we keep the teaching
of these arts in separate departments? Here are grounds for a genuine
revolution in the "social basis of dissemination."
It is time for another internal summary. We have seen that digital expression
has changed in fundamental ways what art is, how it is created,
and how it is disseminated. We have seen that the common digital base
brings the arts into a fundamentally new relationship, one that transforms how
they are studied and taught. We have seen that, if you wish to study how
electronic information affects the sociology of humanistic inquiry, you must
start by pondering the enormous changes that have occurred in the arts and
letters that constitute the core of that inquiry. It makes no sense to talk
about how digitization has transformed our scholarship and teaching about the
humanities without confronting the massive changes that have come to the
humanities themselves.
Having done that, at least in a preliminary way, let's switch our gaze from
the organization, production, and dissemination of the humanities themselves to
the academic humanism which studies and teaches them. What the "humanities"
are nowadays is largely what the Renaissance humanists defined them to
be: to study "humankind" is to study the great texts, literary, historical,
and philosophical, and to a lesser degree the art and music that accompany
them. We have grown so accustomed to this definition of "humanism" that we
have failed to see how narrow it has become. The narrow focus is a product of
rhetorical education. The rhetorical paideia which governed Western education
until the explosion of the modern subjects a century and a half ago taught
through a centripetal system. Every type of inquiry was included in the corpus
of great texts, and the formal system of study and performance built on them.
History was studied through formal speeches recreating famous historical
occasions. Psychology was studied through acts of personification. Political
science was studied through the dynamics of verbal persuasion. Thus to study
these texts in this way was to study all that pertained to humankind.
All the great subjects were drawn inward into the verbal center. Needless to
say, we proceed nowadays on the opposite system, a centrifugal one in which new
subjects are continually being thrown out into discrete orbits.
As a result of this rhetorical centripetality, the name "humanism" for the
narrow study of the arts and letters in their "high" or at least formal
aspects, claims far more than it should. It claims a theoretical centrality it
no longer possesses. Either this centrality must be renounced or we must
include in the humanities some fundamental areas of inquiry which we now omit.
These omissions, as I see it, constitute the great suppressed agenda of the
humanities, not the current race-gender-class obsessions. Let me discuss three
segments of this suppressed agenda: behavioral biology, behavioral
neuroscience, and the study of nonlinear systems--what is now called "chaos
theory." I choose these because, instead of being drawn into "humanism" by
conceptual affinity, as ought to have happened, they are now being driven
into collision with it by the logic of digital technology. I must address
this up-to-now unremarked technological pressure because it constitutes the
most profound way in which--to return once again to the agenda of this
session--digital technology is affecting "the organization of humanistic
knowledge."
Electronic technology has prompted so hostile a response from the humanities
establishment because it creates a different literacy from our customary
print-based one. As we have seen, electronic "text" mixes word, sound, and
image in new ways. It thus draws on different areas of the brain, and lays
down different neural pathways within it. In so doing, it affects "the
organization of humanistic knowledge" at the most fundamental organic level.
Jane Healy has argued, in a thoughtful recent
book[5] that
we are educating a generation of
children whose brains lack the neural networks needed for higher-level
cognitive processing. Their brains have not received the social and verbal
stimulation needed during the brain's critical periods of development. The
villains rounded up for this impoverishment--broadcast TV, high-decibel rock
music, the decline of family nurturance, drugs--also include the new
alphabet/image ratio I have been discussing. No one I know thinks the
electronic universe will go away. If we are to understand the
"literacy" it creates, we will have to school ourselves in the work now being
done by behavioral neuroscience, which teaches us how the brain processes the
various components of that new literacy. Humanist inquiry of all sorts depends
on such an understanding. Nothing less than human reason itself stands at
risk. Electronic technology is driving the humanities toward learning how our
knowledge is organized at the neural level--the "sociology" of neuroanatomy.
Digital information drives the humanities toward behavioral biology as well as
toward behavioral neuroscience. I must now make an argument essential if we
are to understand how digital information affects the sociology of humanist
inquiry --that is, the social matrix within which that inquiry proceeds. But
to do so, I will have to use a very high compression ratio--about 100/1. Bear
with me.
It is apparent, I think, to anyone who has worked in the computer world that
the spirit of play and game works there more strongly than it does in the world
of print. We have to do here with a fundamental change in motivational
balance. The three basic areas of human motivation--game, play, and
purpose--are mixed in different ways by different technologies. The history of
that mixture--genetic, evolutionary, behavioral--is what behavioral biology
studies. As more and more of our communications become digitally based, we
will more and more need to master a new mix of human motive. The humanities
come into vital play because they exist to balance and remix human motive, to
infuse the world of purpose with the world of play and game. Behavioral
biology gives humanistic inquiry its evolutionary history--a history we
desperately need in order to understand the new motivational mix that
humanistic expression will now embody. Thus, in the effort to devise a new
sociology of knowledge for digital communication, electronic technology drives
humanistic inquiry toward behavioral biology as well as behavioral
neuroscience.
As if this weren't difficult enough, we must confront a third area of inquiry
which the digital computer has made essential to humanistic inquiry: chaos
theory.[6]
Whatever else it may be, the new
mixture of word, image, and sound that digital communication brings with it
will be radically nonlinear, associative, discontinuous, interactive. As
postmodern art has predicted, such communications procedures will depend
heavily on scale-changes. As it happens, we now have a new way of thinking
about such nonlinear systems of organization, and especially about
scale-changes. It is called "chaos theory." It may be, according to this way
of thinking, that the arts are nonlinear systems. Mandelbrot argues that the
forms of visual art constitute one such system. Certainly if you are trying to
write the intellectual history of a computer network, you will have to use
chaos theory to do it. When we think about the "organization" of
anything in the world of digital communication, we will go greatly
astray if we apply to it Newtonian patterns of thought. It is fatally easy to
do this. We thus touch here a potential reorchestration of intellectual
history itself.
For example, might the combination of electronic information
resources with interdisciplinary and multicultural scholarship
affect the formal organization of knowledge, whether in learned
societies at the national level or in specific departments on
individual campuses?
We've pondered, in considering Jane Healy's work, whether electronic
text actually forms the brain in different ways from printed text. Looking
toward the other Working Groups in this conference, might we not scale such a
question up to network level? This reordering of how the brain is affected by
verbal, imagistic, and auditory input during its formative stages must model in
little, must it not, how we will communicate about the humanities at the
digital-library network level? May it not be the case that the nature of
scholarly communication, of how we write and read about the humanities, as well
as create and socialize them, will be similarly altered? That our scholarly
communication will mix words, images, and sounds in the same way that digital
"artistic" texts do? Gregory Ulmer has written a provocative book on this
subject.[7] He argues that we must invent a
new mode of scholarly conversation based on the new mix of word and moving
image. Will not such a new mix inevitably become part of how digital library
networks process information? Might scholarly communication become
iconic in ways never seen before? It is fun to think about.
Learned societies, like academic departments and at about the same time, were
formed as part of an academic specialization based on print communication.
They started journals. Now we have special interest groups communicating
online. Do these SIGs not constitute the "learned societies" of the digital
future? Their communication is already radically hypertextual--discontinuous,
associative, based on oral conversation rather than print. SIGs are
fissiparous. They form and re-form continually, work on the formative edge of
interdisciplinary inquiry. They model, too, the way multicultural perspectives
invade and invigorate traditional professional specializations. Print
publication encourages disciplinary differences by its very fixity and by the
time-scale of its scholarly interchange. Computer-based "publication" works
the other way, encourages the mixture of fields, of perspectives, of
"publication" channels, which lies at the heart of both interdisciplinary and
multicultural scholarship. Both the "national society" and the "national
meeting" are more print-based than we customarily think. It seems unlikely
that they will remain unchanged in a digital universe.
2. How will undergraduate teaching be affected by the ready availability of
electronic information?
Let's start with the idea of a "class." I'll use an example close to home, my
Shakespeare class. I give it every year. I always recommend additional
reading which the students never do. Partly they are lazy, but partly they
can't get to the library, for they work at outside jobs for 20-30 hours a week
and commute from pillar to post. Each year's class exists in a temporal,
conceptual, and social vacuum. They don't know what previous classes have done
before them. They don't know how other instructors teach their sections of the
same class. They seldom know each other before they take the class. They never
read each other's work--though sometimes they appropriate it in felonious ways.
I read all their work myself, and mark it up extensively, often to their
dismay. A few of them take me up on my rewrite options but most don't, and
hence don't learn anything much from my revisions, since they are not
made to take them into account. They thus have an audience they know,
but it is a desperately narrow one.
Imagine what would happen were I to add an electronic library to this class.
Students access it by modem or through a CD-ROM or whatever. On it, they read
papers--good, bad, and indifferent--submitted in earlier sections on the topics
I suggest. They read scholarly articles--good, bad, and indifferent--on these
same topics. They read before-and-after examples of prose style revision. A
revision program is available for them to use--licensed by me to UCLA, since it
depends on my own textbooks! They can do searches of the Shakespearean texts,
also available online, when they study patterns of imagery, rhetorical
figuration, etc. They can make Quicktime(c) movie excerpts from the
videos of the plays and use them to illustrate their papers. (The papers will
not be "papers," of course, but "texts" of a different sort.) They needn't go
to the campus library to do any of this. They can access this library wherever
and whenever they find time to do their academic work. All their work--papers,
exams, stylistic analyses--is "published" in the electronic library. You got a
"C" and feel robbed? Read some "A" papers to see what went wrong. Read some
other papers, just to see what kind of work your competitors are producing.
Lots of other neat things happen in such a universe. But you can fill in the
blanks yourself.
Such a course--here is the vital point--now has a history. Students
join a tradition. It is easy to imagine how quickly the internets
between such courses would develop. We can see a pattern in the
hypertextual literary curriculum developed by George Landow and his colleagues
at Brown
University.[8]
The isolation of the
course, not only in time, but in discipline, is broken. The
course constitutes a society, and it is a continuing one. The students
become citizens of a commonwealth and act like citizens--they publish their
work for their fellow scholars. The mesmeric fixation on the instructor as the
only reader and grader is broken.
Now imagine another course--the independent study or "honors" course. A
student in my Shakespeare course is interested in music and wonders what I
mean when I keep using analogies between musical ornament and verbal
ornament. When I talk about sonata form vs. theme-and-variations in a
lecture on the Sonnets, she comes in and asks for a fuller
explanation. Could she do a special study with me on this topic? Well,
I'm not a musicologist. What do I do now? "Next time Prof. Winter
teaches his Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven
course, you ought to take it." I'm certainly not competent to teach such a
course. In a multimedia environment, I'd pursue a different route. "Sure,
I'll do this course with you. We'll construct it around Winter's wonderful new
multimedia programs on Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Stravinsky's Rite
of Spring , Mozart's Dissonant String Quartet, and Bach's
Brandenburg Concertos. You can play them all on the equipment in the
music school or the library. Using them, you can teach yourself the
fundamentals of music harmony, find out all you need to know about classical
sonata form, learn about what happened to music when sonata form no longer
predominated, and so on. You can play these pieces' theme and motif at a time,
dissect them, learn how the orchestra is constructed, what the instruments are,
etc." I am, with Winter's help, perfectly competent to teach such a course.
Such a procedure not only generates new kinds of disciplinary relationships; if
used widely it would save money for both student and school.
Now, the classroom itself. The "electronic classrooms" in use now, at least
the ones which give each student a computer, have generated some preliminary
generalizations. Just as "author" and "authority" change meaning in electronic
text, they change meaning in the classroom. The professor ceases to be the
cynosure of every eye: some authority passes to the group constituted by the
electronic network. You can of course use such a configuration for self-paced
learning, but I would use it for verbal analysis. Multimedia environments
allow you to anatomize what "reading" a literary text really means. This
pedagogy would revolutionize how I teach Shakespeare. (Again, in suggesting
how, I run up against the difficulties of discussing a broadband medium with
the narrowband one of print.)
Now the textbook. Let me take another example from my backyard. Let us
consider the dreariest textbook of all, the Freshman Composition Handbook.
You all know them. Heavy. Shiny coated paper. Pyroxylin,
peanut-butter-sandwich-proof cover. Imagine instead an online program
available to everyone who teaches, and everyone who takes, the course. The
apoplexy that comp handbooks always generate now finds more than marginal
expression. Stupid examples are critiqued as such; better ones are found.
Teachers contribute their experience on how the book works, or doesn't work,
in action. The textbook, rather than fixed in an edition, is a continually
changing, evolutionary document. It is fed by all the people who use it, and
continually made and remade by them.
And what about the literary texts themselves? It is easy to imagine (copyright
problems aside) the classic literary texts all put on a single CD-ROM, and a
device to display them which the student carries with her. What we don't often
remark is the manipulative power such a student now possesses. Textual
searching power, obviously. But also power to reconfigure. Imagine for a
moment students brought up on the multimedia electronic "texts" I have
been discussing. They are accustomed to interacting with texts, playing games
with them. Won't they want to do this with Paradise Lost? And what
will happen if they do? Will poems written in a print-based world be
compromised? Will poems which emerged from an oral world, as with so much
Greek and Latin literature, be rejuvenated and re-presented in a more
historically correct way? And what about the student's license to re-create as
well as read? If Marcel Duchamp can moustache the Mona Lisa, why can't
they? Once again, questions of cultural authority.
Now the "major." If electronic text threatens the present disciplinary
boundaries in the humanities, it threatens the major in the same way. I don't
have space to discuss this question now, but it is developed at length in
The Electronic Word, the book from which this paper draws its
argument.[9]
The major is constructed, at least when it retains any disciplinary
integrity, on a hierarchical and historical basis. Such means of
organization and dissemination, as we have seen, do not last long in a
digital domain.
Now the curriculum, or at least two words about it. First, the debate about
the university curriculum has centered, in the last century, on what to do
about a "core" curriculum in a fragmented and disciplinary world. Various
"core curricula" have been devised and, in some times and places, taken over
the first two--or even, at St. John's, all four--undergraduate years. We have,
in all these programs, hearkened back to a linear course of study. For all
kinds of reasons, practical and theoretical, such a pre-planned program has
rarely worked. What digital networks suggest is a new core constituted
hypertextually, on a nonlinear basis. None of the obstacles to the traditional
core curriculum apply.
Second, the current streetfight about the undergraduate curriculum--Great Books
or Politically Correct Books--ignores the probability that our "texts" won't be
books at all. Both sides base their arguments on the fixity of print, and the
assumptions that fixity induces in us. Thus they both, and the curricular
debate they generate, depart from obsolete, indeed otiose, operating
principles.
3. Will graduate training change as graduate students become more
adept at using electronic tools?
This is the wrong question. It presumes, as do many of the questions framed
for this conference, that digital communications changes our tools but not our
products. In framing the proper question, and an answer to it, I'll stick
again to my own backyard. The crucial question for graduate training in
literature is not whether students will become skillful in online searches and
database manipulations, important though that is. We should be asking rather
whether the subject they study will continue to exist. I taught a graduate
seminar last year called "The Death of Literature." The class took its name
from Alvin Kernan's recent
book,[10]
wherein
he argues that electronic communication, with some help from theory, is killing
literature, at least print-based literature. The class considered three other
new books that, in very different ways, debated the same proposition. I myself
don't think literature will die, but clearly it will change as it moves from
page to screen. Graduate programs in English ought to be considering that
movement. I know of none that does. Even as we are conducting "literacy"
campaigns based on a print-based literacy which is, as Hardison argues,
disappearing up the skylight, so we are educating graduate students to read and
teach literature in the same print-based way in which literature will no longer
be written or read. We are indeed, to borrow Charles Horton Cooley's wonderful
phrase for ossified instruction, educating "clerks of a forgotten mood."
I cannot help thinking that the same thing is happening in other fields of
humanistic inquiry. It certainly seems to be so in music and the fine arts.
Surely someone ought at least to be talking about this vital
metamorphosis.
4. Conclusion
When we speak of the "sociology of knowledge," we ponder how knowledge is held.
I think that matrix of cultural grasp which such a phrase seeks to describe, at
least for the humanities, is now dominated by three convergent forces:
technology, theory, and democracy. Technology--digital communications
technology--we have now considered. "Theory"--by which I mean the postmodern
critique, whether pursued in literary studies, art history, linguistics, or the
law--lies outside our present discussion, though it informs it at every point.
(I have, after all, argued that the aesthetics of electronic expression were
laid out by twentieth-century visual art before the computer was invented.)
What of democracy? Clearly higher education has been democratized in the
United States since World War II. We need not debate that. Does electronic
technology constitute an exclusionary force, as many people now argue?
Certainly in some ways it does. Inner-city schools have fewer computers than
Andover and Exeter. Colleges and universities vary widely in their computer
resources and their dissemination. But in the long run, indeed in the short run
too, I would argue, digital technology democratizes the arts and
letters, rather than the reverse. Simply by opening discourse out from a
strictly verbal base, it enfranchises not only the left-handed but the
right-brained of all sorts. It will have, in my field, an extraordinary impact
on what we still call "remedial" training. It opens out both artistic
composition and performance to people formerly excluded from it, and it has
enormously expanded the audience for artistic and learned expression of all
sorts. Our discussion of the "access" question has been far too narrowly
based, and far too unimaginative.
When I read down the list of the participants in this conference a few
spear-carriers like me turn up, but most of you are movers, shakers, and
decision-makers. How, you may well ask, does such theorizing as I have been
doing affect your daily decision-making life? Here is a quick list of some
decisions which, according to the arguments posed in this paper, are affected
by the digitization of the humanities.The fundamental change in operating
system which the humanities are now undergoing
- affects libraries because it affects books, and in the most intimate way.
- affects, therefore, library buildings and the budgets thereof.
- affects all the issues of intellectual property.
- affects professional specializations and departmental structures, and
therefore university administrative structures at all levels.
- affects "access" in all its aspects, especially in the most profound ones,
access to creation and performance of humanistic works, as well as learning
about them.
- affects "literacy," literacy programs, and every social impact they
exert.
- affects the neural pathways of the brain, and how they are being
irreversibly laid down; thus it affects whether students will be able
to pursue any intellectual work which requires the higher processes of
symbolic thought.
- affects a "class" and how it works.
- affects what a "classroom" is and how it works.
- affects what a "textbook" is and how it works.
- affects the undergraduate "major."
- affects what the undergraduate curriculum will become.
- affects what traditional graduate disciplines will study as well as
how they will study it.
In The Aims of Education, Whitehead argues that higher education should
always be concerned with "the insistent present." This list constitutes a
pretty insistent present, it seems to me. I've tried to sketch out a
theoretical context to explain or at least contain the items on it, but there
is nothing theoretical about the list itself.
So hard does the current budget crisis press upon universities that many
participants will come to this conference, I suspect, like so many cancer
surgeons fresh from the operating table. Cut. Cut. Cut. What does this change
in the humanistic operating system have to do with all this surgery? Let me
close by suggesting a connection.
When you talk about digital technology, someone will always dismiss it as
"futuristic." None of the technology I have talked about is futuristic.
It all exists now. It is the cutting that involves planning for the
future. Why not use the occasion for some long-term planning in terms of this
new operating system for the humanities we have been discussing? The planning
I read about at my own institution and others like it amounts to keeping on the
same way, with as few changes as possible. Review departments, drop the weak
ones--but don't rethink what a department is. Ditto "programs." Review
majors, drop the weak or obscure ones, but don't rethink what a "major" is.
Review courses, cut out frivolous and ornamental ones, but don't rethink what a
"course" is. Ditto graduate programs. Nothing new or promising can emerge
from any of this fire-fighting.
The short-term approach--how do I keep on doing what I have been doing in the
ways I have been doing it, but with much less money?--hasn't worked for the
rest of American enterprise. Why should it work for us? It has all been done
over and over in America in the last two decades, in the automobile industry,
the steel industry, the railroads, the farm machinery business--the list goes
on and on. Department stores are worrying about which departments to phase out
while the traditional idea of a department store is drifting down the stream of
mercantile history. In the academy we are prisoners of the same inert patterns
of thinking that have dominated the rest of American corporate enterprise.
There is nothing "futuristic" about trying to break out of these patterns; it
is the most insistent present one can possibly imagine. It will be our own
fault, not the fault of our funders, if we continue to imitate the Post Office
and worry about moving letters around in an electronic way, when it is not only
the delivery system but the "letters" themselves which have fundamentally
changed.
Footnotes
[1]The arguments in this paper are drawn from The
Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts, forthcoming from the
University of Chicago Press, 1993.
[2]O. B. Hardison, Disappearing Through the Skylight:
Culture and Technology in the Twentieth Century (Penguin Books, 1989), p.
264.
[3]Jay David Bolter, Writing Space: The Computer,
Hypertext, and the History of Writing (Earlbaum Associates, 1991).
[4]Howard Rheingold, Virtual Reality: The Revolutionary
Technology of Computer-Generated Artificial Worlds (Summit, 1991).
[5]Jane Healy, Endangered Minds: Why Children Don't Think
and What We Can Do About It (Simon & Schuster, 1990).
[6]James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (Viking,
1987).
[7]Gregory Ulmer, Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of
Video (Routledge, 1989).
[8]George Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of
Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (Johns Hopkins, 1992).
[9] See footnote 1.
[10]Alvin Kernan, The Death of Literature (Yale, 1990).
