I. Preface
I'll
begin by reading to you a background statement
from my home page about how I came to be doing
my current work in the humanities and technology.
My home page is written in both third-person voice
<digital-humanities.html>
(suitable for the usual, professional purposes
of an online c.v.) and a more personal, first-person
voice (suitable for what amounts to autobiographical
reflection on that vita). This is from the first-person
narration <digital-humanities-i.html>:
I took a leap of
faith in 1994 and shifted the center of my work
from New Historicism and cultural studies (originally
focused on British Romantic literature) to the
theory and practice of contemporary information
culture. After studying the relation of literature
to history, it seemed inescapable to me next to
think about the relation of the humanities to
that apparent antithesis of history, "workplace
2000." What is the culture of "knowledge work,"
"creative destruction," "just-in-time," and "innovation"
in that workplace where so many of my students
seemed headed? And is there still a role for historical
awareness—so central to the humanities,
so apparently unimportant in "knowledge work"?
I started by creating
a set of online projects (beginning with the Voice
of the Shuttle in 1994) to bring humanities people
to the Internet. I worked to raise the general
level of interest and skills in information technology
in my department and the humanities at UC Santa
Barbara (beginning with a Web-authoring collective
called the Many Wolves in the wild, early days
of the Web and continuing with courses, programs,
and other more formal activities). And I used
these platforms of experimentation with information
technology to think my way toward a large-scale
writing project on The Future Literary, the first
part of which is currently nearing completion
as a book on The Laws of Cool: The Cultural Life
of Information.
The work has been
engrossing, if also often by turns humbling and
tedious (a nadir was the week during which I spent
several full nights learning to set up and administrate
a server). I wonder if it is useful for a critic
and theorist of literature to study information
culture at the gritty level of machines and code,
or whether I am simply throwing away my original
franchise (my standing and audience in the field
of Romantic literature and literary theory). I
wonder, that is, why, I am doing this. The work
is of such compelling interest and importance,
though, and it has such a tendency to unsettle
and reconfigure the habitual ways of working I
had thought were endemic to the humanities! I
remember that when I first began working online
in the early days of the Web I felt a "wild surmise"
(like that in the Keats poem)—as if I stood
on the edge of something vast, unknown, and perilous.
Strangely, this was what once started me on Romantic
literature, too.
Finding a proper,
fruitful way to ask "why?" perhaps, is not the
origin but the goal of any truly absorbing work.
My lecture today is about working with technology
in the humanities. And my theme is "why?" Why
should the humanities engage with contemporary
technology?
This
question can be asked in many productive contexts
and on many levels of scale. I'll have time today
to offer just two phrasings of the question. The
more specific way of asking "why?" is one I more
or less feel confident I have an answer for. The
broader way of asking "why?" that I will close
upon, however, leaves me only with speculations
to offer. But it is a kind of speculation, I think,
that is now of the highest importance.
II. Some Projects
Let
me start, then, just by showing you some of the
digital projects and initiatives that I and other
faculty in the English Dept. have created in the
last decade along with teams of our graduate students
and undergraduates. This will be a very quick,
cursory tour. I won't dwell on the projects because
the point I want to harvest at the moment is just
a simple one:
I
have showed you this evolution of digital projects
and initiatives in the English Dept., as I said,
merely for the purpose of start with a relatively
simple–but in its way quite important–point.
The point is that our department has by design
chosen to produce these projects "in-house" with
our own people. That is, we've not hired out the
programming, database, and graphic design work
to engineering, computer-science, or art students
outside the department. Instead, we've concentrated
on putting in place the financial support, software,
working protocols, and training that allows our
own community of humanities faculty and students
to do as much of the development work themselves
as possible.
The
experience, I'll have to tell you, has been by
turns rewarding and frustrating. (It's not easy,
for example, coordinating the work of a constantly
changing group of students with varying skills
and various computer platforms.) And the "product"
you see on the screen–while quite good overall,
we think–is at times uneven and certainly
does not match the most technically advanced work
of specialist programmers or artists.
Why,
then? Why make humanities faculty and students
do the heavy lifting of creating technical resources
when, from another point of view, it might seem
best to provide ready-to-use resources so they
can get on with what they're specially trained
to do: read, write, research, analyze, interpret,
and so on? This is the first, most specific form
of the "why" question I want to ask regarding
humanities and technology.
The
answer is one that I and my colleagues have worked
out over the years both for our own benefit and
for the purpose of explaining our projects to
others: educators elsewhere at national conferences;
various campus, UC-system, federal, and private
funding agencies; and so forth. In our view, the
purely instrumental or practical reasons one ordinarily
thinks of for using information technology in
the humanities (e.g., to facilitate or extend
research and teaching, to give students skills
for employment in a wired world, etc.) are necessary.
But such rationales are by themselves insufficient
because they offer only a very limited notion
of what it might mean to "use" technology in the
humanities. Instrumentalist rationales, for example,
make it seem that contemporary technology is just
a tool–a better pen or typewriter, as it
were–that enhances
the work of the humanities but that is conceptually
external
to that work. Yet from another point of view,
the complex nature of current information technology
and the equally complex ways in which it is now
interwoven throughout society means that the proper
comparison for the computer is not the "pen" or
"typewriter," but writing–i.e.,
the whole intellectual, social, economic, and
political system of life that historians of the
rise of literacy show was made possible by the
invention of writing.
See,
our English Dept. missed the original "information
revolution" (as it has been called by such scholars
of information history as Albert Borgmann, Michael
Hobart, or Zachary Schiffman)–the revolution
when oral cultures changed into writing cultures.
So, too, we missed such subsequent turning points
in the evolution of media as the transition from
manuscripts to print and, only a century or so
ago, the transition from print to the analog electronic
media that Walter Ong has called "secondary orality"
and that Marshall McLuhan called the very "message"
of modernity. Our Dept. thinks we'd be crazy–and
not just us, but any progressive humanities department
today–if we didn't now seize the opportunity
to get as close as possible to the ongoing digital
and networked
information revolution.
We
want our students to study it; work with it; live
with it in a way that integrates the practical
acquisition of technical skills with serious reflection
upon the conditions, possibilities, and problems–at
once philosophical, social, economic, and political–that
underlie those skills. Put simply, we want our
people in the humanities not just to "use" information
technology but also to make that technology an
object of thought.
Thus,
for example, the main mission of the Transcriptions
Project is to create a curriculum that studies
information technology both as a phenomenon of
contemporary culture and
as part of a longer history of evolving "language
tech," as it might be called (i.e., the historical
technologies of oral, manuscript, early-print,
late-print, broadcast, and other literary cultures).
Examples:
III. Larger Contexts
That,
in any case, is one answer to the question: why
the humanities and technology? The answer is that
the humanities stand to gain not just skills and
tools but a whole new range of intellectual inquiry
that extends its traditional range.
But
there is a larger aspect of the question "why?"
that I would like to share with you that concerns
not so much what the humanities have to gain from
engaging with information technology but what
general
society can gain from the humanities doing
so. This larger, public dimension of the problem
is actually what has most absorbed me in my own
research and teaching in the past few years.
The
nature of the problem came to me originally some
years ago in what amounts to a vision–or
as near a thing to a vision, a revelation, that
a scholar is likely to have. As I was walking
down to UCEN one busy school day circa 1994, I
stopped at the plaza to watch a noon concert featuring
the band Toad the Wet Sprocket. They were
still together back then; and I enjoyed their
music. Or more accurately, I enjoyed observing
the crowd enjoying their music. It was one of
those bright, warm days of spring before our usual
"June gloom," and the sun poured down crisp and
smooth, mellow, over the tousled hair, bare arms
and shoulders, rapt faces of several hundred students
watching the band–and not just watching,
but rocking gently, rising up and down in time
to  that
strangely innocent yet also world-wise music that
was the signature of Toad the Wet Sprocket.
It was a moment of delicious pause in the ordinary
rhythm of work and study, of what ungenerous commentators
on Gen X at the time might have called "slack"
but that seemed to me to be "recreation" in something
near to the original, sacral meaning of "re-creation,"
i.e., the experience of a diffuse, saturated re-origination
of spiritual meaning in everyday life akin to
that glimpsed in the Old Master tradition of paintings
of "repose." <Claude
Lorrain, Rest
on the Flight into Egypt, 1644>
But
then, as the poet Shelley said in his last, Dantesque
poem, "The Triumph of Life," "a Vision on my brain
was rolled." For just a moment, I saw ahead into
the future. I saw each of those bright, young,
free people–the students who are the real
work, the lifework of myself and my colleagues–taken
out of the open air and the music and captured
(each alone) in a cubicle. I saw each student
bathed not in sunlight but in a cold flourescent
glow or, equally cold, the phosphor glow of a
computer screen. I saw each student, that is,
caught not in an "iron cage," as the German sociologist
Max Weber famously called modern bureaucratic
institutions, but a "silicon cage" into which
not even music would be allowed to flow (alas,
poor Napster, we might now say, as the bard once
said, "alas, poor Yorick"). In sum, I saw the
bright yet cold world of "Knowledge Work"–as
our New Economy calls it–that the majority
of my students were headed for willingly or not.
It
was, in its way, a moving vision–at once
sweet and bitter–something I have hung onto
through the years as, like some Mr. Chips, I head
into the latter half of my career as an educator
when (if you know the end of that old movie) all
the students' faces will begin to blur together
in a montage. What a bright world of "knowledge
work" all you students are heading into–nothing
short, perhaps, of another "Enlightenment"! But
what is that new Enlightenment? What is knowledge
work, which has snuck up on an education system
that once had the franchise on "knowledge" but
that now increasingly appears to be a junior partner
to the great knowledge firms of society?
I
have been studying that topic, as you can see
in a large-scale bibliography I developed titled
<Palinurus:
The Academy and the Corporation–Teaching
the Humanities in a Restructured World>.
Since there is not time enough here to present
anything like a full picture of what business
leaders and commentators call knowledge work,
let me give you only two snapshots to put you
in the picture:
In
short, this is a bright–and brave, too–new
world of knowledge. Yet, as I said earlier, it
can be a cold world,too. It is chilling, after
all, to realize that the "creative destruction"
that churns out so much "new" knowledge also churns
through legions of people with old knowledge by
means of the now well-known processes of restructuring
and downsizing ("right-sizing," "flex-sizing,"
"proactive outplacement").
How
do contemporary artists and writers using new
media react to the world of knowledge work? This
will be the subject of my next book, which will
be about the avant-garde aesthetics of information.
<The
Art of "Destructive Creation">.
How
do ordinary people–the people like my students
who will start their professional lives by going
into those cubicles–react to the world of
knowledge work? This is a more fundamental issue
than that of the avant-garde arts. It is the subject
of my current book, The
Laws of Cool: The Culture of Information,
which is forthcoming from Stanford Univ. Press.
Consider this fact: "cool" is the great, dominant,
even ubiquitous "ordinary" aesthetics of information
technology today. "Cool" is how the most vibrant,
interesting people today–people like the
students in this room–respond to the "cold"
world of knowledge work:
<Survey
of Cool on the Web>:
First,
there is clearly much more cool on the Web in
the form of self-declared cool pages, references
to other cool pages, and general appreciation
of things cool than might be expected for a word
whose usage is non-functional. AltaVista's count
for "cool" (5.68 million), for instance, tops
its count for "useful" (3.95 million) and far
exceeds matches on such other specific stylistic/aesthetic
descriptors as "beautiful" or "nice." The frequency
of "cool," indeed, falls in the range of such
relevant genus-level concepts as "style" (5.79
million). Only "hot" among other comparison terms
that readily come to mind exceeds "cool" in matches
(12 million in AltaVista) because of its overwhelming
presence on sex sites (as in "hot hot bodies"
or "hot hot hot XXX hot hot hot"). To put things
in proper scale, we might consider that such mainstay
words of the medium as "computer" and "business"
produced counts in AltaVista of 29.8 and 43.4
million, respectively. This means that "cool"
occurs on a Web page once for every five to eight
times that such words as "computer" and "business"
occur. (And this is just to count the Web itself
and not such other provinces of the Internet as
Usenet, e-mail, instant messaging, etc.) It is
as if cool were the chorus of information: wherever
information and its technology enact the contemporary
drama of knowledge, there a chorus sings, "cool."
Secondly–and
here I begin to shade into qualitative analysis–the
raw totals understate the case considerably because
cool collects disproportionately in those parts
of Web pages that have premium value: in the encoded
page title, the links on the page, and frequently
even the URL or domain name (e.g., "www.coollinks.com").
Concentrated in these locations, cool
is a rhetoric that is purposely installed as closely
as possible to the functional code of the Web–the
parts of the HTML that are not simply content
but that allow browsers to navigate and operate
upon
content.
What
is the meaning of "cool"? That is the inquiry
of my book: <Table
of Contents of book>
"Cool,"
I argue in the book, "is information designed
to resist information" (early precedent: Processed
World collective). "What's really cool,
after all? At the moment of truth on the coolest
Web sites–when such sites are most seriously,
deeply cool–no information is forthcoming.
Cool is the aporia of information. In whatever
form and on whatever scale (excessive graphics,
egregious animation, precious slang, surplus hypertext,
etc.),
cool is information
designed to resist information–not
so much noise in the information-theory sense
as information fed back into its own signal to
create a standing interference pattern, a paradox
pattern. Structured as information designed to
resist information, cool is the paradoxical "gesture"
by which an ethos of the unknown struggles to
arise within the very midst of knowledge work.
In
any case, the main point I wish to make here does
not inhere in the particular thesis of my book
about the nature of "cool." Instead, it inheres
in the method
of my book: historical inquiry. For, from the
point of view of the humanities, of course, the
world of "knowledge work" is uncanny in Freud's
sense of that term ("unheimlich": unhomely). Knowledge
work is both familiar and weirdly unfamiliar.
Like knowledge work, the humanities are all about
"knowledge." Yet unlike knowledge work, the humanities
focus primarily not on "new" knowledge but historical
knowledge.
Why
is it important for general society that the humanities
to engage with information technology? The speculative
answer, upon which I would like to conclude, is
this: by itself, "cool" is not enough to deal
with the contemporary life of knowledge work so
as to make of it a fully humane life (i.e., what
the ancient philosophers called the "good life"
not just in the material but in ethical senses
of the word "good"). The humanities surely do
not have all of the answers; but they can contribute
one part of the answer to the question of what
is the "good life" in the age of knowledge work.
That answer is that "cool"–which by itself
can be a shallow, narrow, even cruel (as in the
common high-school judgement that "either you're
cool, or you suck")–needs the complement
of a historical view of the technological life
in order to be more humane.
That,
I speculate, must be the larger answer to the
question: why should the humanities engage with
technology? |
