I find Alan Liu’s ‘Transcendental Data’ from Critical Inquiry 31 a very interesting article because he tries to outline how the discourse network 2000 works — in reference to Kittler’s concept of the discourse network 1800 & 1900. Liu rightly identifyies XML and the ideology of division of content and presentation as the fundaments of discourse network 2000.

That is very close to what I sometimes call the php/mySQL or database-turn in online publishing. (And one can add the so-called Web 2.0-stuff). We’re all writing these tiny text-objects, (or uploading images or sounds), that are furnished with meta-data by the softwares we use, and are then possibly ‘endlessly’ redistributed over the networks, and aggregated according to various ‘preferences’, in various contexts (again, in possibly endless combinations).

A discourse network is a discursive circuit. Or — Liu quoting Kittler — “The term discourse network. ..can also designate the network of technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store, and process relevant data. Technologies like that of book printing and the institutions coupled to it, such as literature and the university, thus constituted a historically very powerful formation….Archeologies of the present must also take into account data storage, transmission, and calculation in technological media. (Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer and Chris Cullens, Stanford, Ca., 1990, p. 369)

Liu asks these question: “What is the social logic that underlies the technologic of discourse network 2000? (…) How is an author now a postindustrial producer? (…) What are the aesthetics of encoded or structured discourse or, as I will term it, of postindustrial dematerialization? (…) How is it possible for writers or artists to create in such a medium?

Well, with regard to the last question, I’m tempted to say: “Easy, we type and hit the publish button.” Writing is still ‘putting words in the right order’. But what Liu wants to get at is, of course: “How does discourse network 2000, enable a certain form of writing, of sharing knowledge, of discussing (in writing)”.

Liu then proceeds with giving a basic overview of XML, with a short reference to TEI. (I wonderded, did Critical Inquiry ever before or since print such a basic introduction to any subject?)

“These cardinal needs of transformability, autonomous mobility, and automation resolve at a more general level into what may be identified as the governing ideology of discourse network 2000:the separation of content from material instantiation or formal presentation.” (p. 58)

“Data islands, or more generally what I will call data pours, are places on a page — whether a web page or a word processing page connected live to an institutional database or XML repository — where an author in effect surrenders the act of writing to that of parameterization.” (p. 59)

“Now web pages increasingly surrender their soul to data pours that throw transcendental information onto the page from database or XML sources reposed far in the background.” (p. 61)

“What is at stake is indeed what I called an ideology of strict division between content and presentation — the very religion, as it were, of text encoding and databases.” (p. 62)

“Discourse network 2000 is a belief. According to its dogma, true content abides in a transcendental logic, reason, or noumen so completely structured and described that it is in and of itself inutterable in any mere material or instantiated form. Content may be revealed only through an intermediary presentation that is purely interfacial rather than, as it were, sacramental — that is, not consubstantial with the noumenal.” (p. 62)

He then concludes that: “Authors and readers become operators of black box machinery who select criteria for prescripted actions.” (p. 63). I’d say that’s a bit stretching the argument. It is certainly true for people who do not know how to change the defaults; it is true for those working in a fixed (institutional) context and keep to the rules, and do not want to change any of the rules. Etc. Also one has to remember that blackboxing also enables people to work with technology…, and doesn’t imply that nothing can be changed.

In the following section Liu outlines eloquently the importance of standardization, and the continuity between industrialism and post-industrialism. XML asks for standardization, yet really is no standard, but a meta-standard. In a few quotes:

“My thesis is that the postindustrial technologic of encoded or structured discourse dates back — with a signal difference I will indicate later — to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century industrialism.” (p. 64)

“New in Taylorism was the additional principle that decisions had to be extracted from the embodied work of the laborer and described on instruction cards as procedures that could be optimized, reprogrammed, distributed, and otherwise mediated.” (p. 67)

“Databases and XML are now our ultimate functional managers. They are the automatic mediators of the work of contemporary knowledge.” (p. 69)

” The upshot of such a social history of databases and XML is that the common presumption of business writers, technologists, and others that there was a sharp break between industrialism and postindustrialism is historically too shallow.” (p. 71)

“Only by understanding the deep connection between industrialism and postindustrialism are we now prepared to discern the great difference of the latter. Both epochs, as we have seen, share the projects of standardization and management. But only postindustrialism saw these projects through to their radical conclusion, which might be called metastandardization and metamanagement.” (p. 72)

“XML, for example, is technically not a standard but a metastandard, a family form of standards that governs the extensible creation of specific standards of XML tags or schemas.” (p. 72)

The last section of the article deals with the data sublime. And that jump — to Turner, Gibson and Novak, so to the computational sublime — comes too easy.

(I also do not agree with Liu’s argument that new media arts & new media are a too new field “to commit to any one analysis”: which field commits to that anyway?)

This section is about the idea (or ideology) that a massive amount of data (dataclouds) will, who knows through self-organization, or through other ‘formations’, come to show meaningful patterns. That’s what Gibson was onto in Idoru and his other later novels. But instead of jumping to this aesthetic, one should — I think — rather look at how datamining, marketing and the search engines deal with this in a real-world way; that affects our lived reality, can be seen as one of the (f)actors that construct our reality.

Nevertheless, there are good bits here too, good treatments of Novak, Jevbratt etc. The last two pages of my photocopy of the article are again full ofpencil markings.

“But the avant-garde conviction that there was a necessary relation between form and content was nevertheless a reflection of industrial standardization and management.” (p. 79) [Yet, as Liu states, there was a third term in the modernist equation of form & content: materiality].

“When the material substrate was removed to allow for internet transmission, that is, variable methods of standardization — for example, XML documents governed by a common standard but adaptable to undetermined kinds of hardware, software, and usages — could suddenly be imagined.” (p. 80)

Liu asks: “Is the writer or artist any longer an author in such circumstances, let alone a creative one?” (p. 80). My margin says in pencil: “sure”.

“In the romantic era circa 1800, Kittler observes, the hermeneutic discourse network began when a source of meaning located in Nature or the Mother called to poets to transmit its transcendental essence through language conceived as a mere channel of translatability.” (p. 80)

“In the modernist era circa 1900, by contrast, mother nature was a faint echo. The true source of the signal, Kittler argues, (…) was an apparently random, senseless, automatic, untranslatable, and thus nonhermeneutic noise inherent in the channel of transmission itself — like tuning your radio to a Pychonesque channel of revelation indistinguishable from utter static.” (p. 81)

“The distinctive signal of 2000, by contrast, synthesizes 1800 and 1900. In 2000, the channel is just as seemingly senseless, random, and automatic as in 1900. But the source point of the transmission is phase-shifted so that phenomenally senseless automatism follows from a precursor act of sense making in the databases and XML repositories outside the direct control of the author.” (p. 81)

Wait: “databases and XML repositories outside the direct control of the author”. Not for those authors who set up their own databases, who know XML, who will manipulate Technorati, or stay out of that… So this statement, I think, is too general. The technology is partly imposed on us, partly we are able to construct it ourselves.

Liu takes away too much of the acting power (there another word…) from the writer. (Maybe he hates working with the TEI-people ;-) ). It does shows how important it is to have open standards that can be developed further and changed.

“[N]ow the author is in a mediating position as just one among all those other managers looking upstream to previous originating transmitters — database or XML schema designers, software designers, and even clerical information workers (who input data into the database or XML source document).”

Yes, but that doesn’t mean an author is not creative. It is true that our current writing and publishing technologies make it far more easy to cut-&-paste-&-change; it is true we do more ‘circulating’. it’s true, authors can be, and are often their own publishers. But isn’t that much more an ‘enabling’ feature, than a ‘loss of creativity’? Even if we work inside preformatted contexts? Not that Liu is nostalgic, he is not. He just states that we do not regard an author anymore so much as “the originator transmitter of a discourse” (p. 81).

“[C]ontent held in databases and XML now sets the very standard for an ultra-structured and ultra-described rationality purer than any limiting instantiation of the Ding an Sich. And so what Kittler calls the mother tongue — now the discourse of the motherboard, of the matrix itself — seems to return.” (p. 81)

Again, this stretches the argument (into the abstract). I do not find that very productive. Motherboard, matrix… It is also not true — although texts are circulating in the network, distributed over many harddisks, aggregated in different combinations at different end points, and are ultra-structered for that purpose. But all the bits of texts are still written (typed in, copied), and still they are read, and acted upon. (True, some more by search engines than by human beings). One can let oneself be blinded by the sublimity of it all, but I don’t see why one should.

Liu concludes: “The core problem is what I have in my Laws of Cool called the ethos of the unknown — of the unencoded, unstructured, unmanaged — in human experience. In our current age of knowledge work and total information, what experience of the structurally unknowable can still be conveyed in structured media of knowledge (databases, XML, and so on)? Perhaps the arts — if they can just crack the code of ordinary cool and make it flower — know.” (p. 81).

I have two remarks to make to this (not having read his Laws of Cool):
1. Is there such a thing as a perfect divide between the ‘unencoded, unstructured, unmanaged’ on the one hand and the encoded, structured, managed? Environments that are structured on one level, can allow for total unstructeredness on another level.
2. XML can be very messy too.

I have the feeling this is somewhat a pseudo-issue. If our texts are put into XML-schemes, that doesn’t mean that our written sentences are structured better. (XML doesn’t mind if your sentence is grammatical). And it sure doesn’t mean expierence becomes more structured.

But maybe I don’t get what Liu is at.

Liu btw is a Pynchonite & a Wakian (his most recent article in Critical Inquiry deals with FW). And of course he quotes this great passage from The Crying of Lot 49:

“She [Oedipa Maas] could, at this stage of things, recognize signals like that, as the epileptic is said to — an odor, color, pure piercing grace note announcing his seizure. Afterward it is only this signal, really dross, this secular announcement, and never what is revealed during the attack, that he remembers. Oedipa wondered whether, at the end of this (if it were supposed to end), she too might not be left with only compiled memories of clues, announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself, which must somehow each time be too bright for her memory to hold; which must always blaze out, destroying its own message irreversibly, leaving an overexposed blank when the ordinary world came back.” Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, New York, 1999, p. 76

All quotes from: Alan Liu, ‘ Transcendental Data: Toward a Cultural History and Aesthetics of the New Encoded Discourse’, in Critical Inquiry 31 (Autumn 2004).

Also available here: http://www.uchicago.edu/research/jnl-crit-inq/features/artsstatements/arts.liu.htm.

“Note taking can take many forms — oral, written or electronic. At its deepest level, whatever the medium, note taking involves variations on and combinations of a few basic maneuvers, which I propose to identify as the four Ss: storing, sorting, summarizing and selecting.” (p.85)

“Each method of storage carries with it constraints of reliability, preservability, and accessibility.” (p. 86)

“Each method of sorting, too, entails constraints and easements in the retrieval of the stored material.” (p. 86)

“Francis Bacon outlined the two principal methods of note taking in a letter of advice to Fulke Greville (…): “He that shall oout of his own Reading gather [notes] for the use of another, must (as I think) do it by Epitome, or Abridgement, or under Heads and Common Places. Epitomes may also be of 2 sorts: of any one Art, or part of Knowledge out of many Books; or of one Book by itself.”” (p. 86)

“Michel Foucault reportedly expressed a desire to study copybooks of quotations because they seemed to him to be the work[s] on the self … not imposed on the individual.” (p. 88)

“Yet even today note taking generally remains an area of tacit knowledge, aquired by imitation rather than formal instruction and about which there is little explicit discussion.” (p. 89)

“But there is little so far that addresses how note taking is changing as new tools have become and continue to become available, from the Post-it and the highlighter to software programs and the Palm Pilot.” (p. 89)

“There are many possible criteria on which to draw up a typology of note taking broadly conceived: by field (commercial, legal, medical, literary, philosophical), by type of source (from listening, from reading, from travel and direct experience, from thinking), by intended audience (for short- or longterm use, for sharing with others or for private use), by general purpose (rhetorical, factual, playful).” (p. 90)

“Robert Grosseteste, for example, drew up a topical index to his readings using 217 symbols that linked collections of citations kept in a seperate manuscript to the corresponding passages in the books he owned in his library” (p. 95)

(About Robert Grosseteste: http://www.grosseteste.com/.)

(Other persons that Blair discusses are Francesco Sacchini (who wrote On How to Read Books with Profit, that is De ratione libros cum profectu legendi libellus, first published in 1614) and Jeremias Drexel, author of Aurifodina, or The Mine of All Arts and Sciences, or the Habit of Excerpting (1638).)

“Early Modern scholars praised for their memories did not rely on the techniques attributed to Simonides but rather on abundant note taking; indeed pedagogues in the humanist tradition are routinely hostile to the arts of memory from Erasmus to Drexel.” (p. 97)

“Instead he [Drexel] concludes that “human memory is slow, narrow, volatile and unfaithful unless it is strengthened with memory aids” ( A, p. 3) (p. 99)

“The association of note taking with moral worth has proved persistent. Many a self-improvement program in the eighteenth century and beyond involved the promise to keep one’s diary or reading notes more religiously.”

(Drexel call for 3 kinds of notes: lemmata (bibliographical references), adversaria (copied quotations), and historica or exempla.)

“On Drexel’s account the note is an aid to memory because it triggers recall of the reading or experience recorded, and one should study one’s notes in order to remember them. “One seeks from excerpts aids, not to exercise one’s memory less, but in order to help memory more happily in its activity” ( A, p. 67). (p. 103)

“The memory function was explicitly delegated to paper because, according to Chavigny, “too much memorizing can be harmful to the higher intellectual qualities.”.” (p. 106) [This is in the 1920’s, Chavigny was a medical professor].

“Today we delegate to sources that we consider authoritative the extraction of information on all but a few carefully specialized areas in which we cultivate direct experience and original research. New technologies increasingly enable us to delegate more tasks of remembering to the computer, in that shifting division of labor between human and thing. We have thus mechanized many research tasks.” (p. 107)

“[I]f every text one wanted were constantly available for searching anew, perhaps the note itself, the selection made for later reuse, might play a less prominent role.” (p. 107)

“Notes must be rememorated or absorbed in the short-term memory at least enough to be intelligently integrated into an argument; judgment can only be applied to experiences that are present to the mind.” (p. 107)

All quotes from Ann Blair: ‘ Note Taking as an Art of Transmission’, in Critical Inquiry 31 (Autumn 2004).

I know: too many quotes….

Complete text available here: http://www.uchicago.edu/research/jnl-crit-inq/features/artsstatements/arts.blair.htm.

Yeah, behind the academic wall, but luckily here they are for everyone: http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/journal_of_the_history_of_ideas/v064/64.1blair.html; Ann Blair, ‘Reading Strategies for Coping With Information Overload ca. 1550-1700’, and the Rosenberg article: http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/journal_of_the_history_of_ideas/v064/64.1rosenberg.html.

The whole list: http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/journal_of_the_history_of_ideas/. But you got that already.

Another article to read: Daniel Rosenberg, ‘Early Modern Information Overload,’ Journal of the History of Ideas (2003). Behind the academic walls… Rosenberg is here: http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~dbr/.

And did not know this project: http://www.hti.umich.edu/d/did/. Collaborative translation of Diderot & D’Alemberts Encyclopedia.

Also very handy; the dictionary of ideas: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/DicHist/analytic/.

Of course I’m following all the current stories about doping & cycling. The entanglement of sport and — hmm — “experimental” medicine is fascinating. It is a big ugly mess too. What has changed in respect to former times (let’s say pre-’80’s) is that no-one questions anymore that ‘doping’ does make you go faster, makes you stronger. It’s taken as a scientific fact (and in most cases, it is a proven fact, I think). But if the pro-peleton is also a — half illegal — laboratory for experimental medicine, did medicine ever learn anything from cycling?

(yes, that EPO does work &c.)

Some knowledge, that is later used for ‘good’ purposes? This would be scarier than a peleton of stupid junkies taking dope to perform better — because it would mean that sports is really a laboratory, and the sportsmen guinea pigs for the ‘human good’.

Copied two articles from Critical Inquiry 31, (Autumn 2004) on the art of transmission & read those this afternoon:

Ann Blair, ‘Note Taking as an Art of Transmission’ (p. 85-107)
Alan Liu, ‘Transendental Data: Toward a Cultural History and Aesthetics of the New Encoded Discourse’ (p. 49-84)

Ann Blair writes: “This historical interest [in note taking] is fueled not only by the rapid growth of the history of reading, of which the study of note taking is an offshoot, bit also by our current experience with new technologies and our sense (often more diffuse than articulate) that the computer is changing both the way we take notes and the kind of notes and writing we produce.” (p. 89)

Let’s make that ‘sense’ more articulate…

Apart from that, I think that my interest in note taking also derives from the fact that I have never been able to devise a working systems of note taking for myself, but keep on dreaming about it. Notes are in my notebook, on post-its stuck on the pages of books, in the margin on photocopied articles, in text-files on the computer (both in VoodooPad, TextEdit, BBEdit, MacJournal and — very rarely — a wiki), entries on my blog, and sometimes even sheets of A4-paper. I dream of having a database of quotations (like a commonplace book), a full bibliography with annotations, also covering websites. It seems so easy…

More browsing: from Jeroen Mettes on Romanticism, http://n30.nl/2006/08/schetsmatig-pleidooi-voor-de-romantiek.html, to the piece by Benjamin Kunkel on writing and memoir, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/16/books/review/16kunkel.html”, to the n+1 magazine, http://www.nplusonemag.com/, in which a.o. I find this text that voices my opinion on Eggers & The Believer: http://www.nplusonemag.com/situation_2.html — regressive avant-garde.

As I mentioned Braxton playing with a noise-punk band, yesterday, I guess I’m allowed to mention today that The New Yorker features an article on Yamataka Eye and The Boredoms, from which I learn that Jeffrey Deitch has discovered them too, and will host a Boredoms installation in his gallery next year: http://www.newyorker.com/critics/music/articles/060807crmu_music.

(Yes, I’m wasting my time, browsing & blogging).

(Good friends of mine have followed The Boredoms since 1987. I saw them twice in the early nineties. An audience of what, twenty? thirty? forty? made them play three encores. We had beer with them backstage. “Those were the days”.)

Ha, in twenty years time Jeffrey Deitch will host an Oorbeek-installation!

Just a sentence I read upon opening Dewey’s The Public and its Problems from 1927: “In general behavior in intellectual matters has moved from the public to the private realm.” (p. 50). Would that hold in times of ubi-blogging? Not if blogging is taken as publishing (which I think it should). Could you now write “In general behavior in intellectual matters has moved from the private to the public realm”? Not yet, I’d say. Though for some it would be true.

Anthony Braxton plus, uh, relentless noise-punk? I’d missed that: http://www.boomkat.com/item.cfm?id=22814 and http://www.wordthecat.com/goku/2006/07/28/wolf-eyes-and-anthony-braxton/.