Leonardo Sciascia, De Raad van Egypte (1963) — Dutch translation of Il Consiglio d’Egitto, buy it here: http://www.serenalibri.nl/romans.php. Sciascia continues to amaze me. This is a short historical novel, based on facts, set in Sicily (of course) at the end of the 18th century. A ‘fake translation’ of an Arabic manuscript about the history of Sicily disturbs the balance of power.

James Boswell, Life of Johnson (well, abridged version, until halfway and the rest via the index). Picked up a few old Penguin pockets, apart from this one also Selected Writings of Samuel Johnson. Why would I be interested in Samuel Johnson? Because he operated, euhm.. wrote at a moment when the press was changing, growing, becoming popular; when a General Reading Publick emerged. And because he was a voracious reader.

In Boswell’s Life Johnson comes across as, well, exactly the journalist type — spending to much time in the Coffee-House, talking too much, with controversial opinions. A quite unsympathetic conservative knowitall. But that’s Boswell’s fault as well, I understand — he met Johnson very late in his life, after Johnson did all the hard writing work — sort of defining modern journalism, modern criticism, etc.

This seems to be a good introduction to Samuel Johnson: http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Johnson/.

Texts here: http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/18th/j.html#johnson

“As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes.”

Wrote Denis Diderot, Encyclopédie, 1755

“… consider … the arts of transmission in the broad sense of the phrase as Bacon used it—namely, as the whole of the procedures that circulate, record, and organize knowledge.”

“David Hume declared explicitly that the fundamental advantage of the printing press seemed to be the potential to continuously improve and amend books in various editions.”

“On all of these levels it is interesting to note that the turning point is not the introduction of the printing press but much earlier, in the eleventh century, when the use of images became more complex and when the separation of words and efficient forms of punctuation became common. Various research instruments like verbal concordances (word indexes) and material concordances (subject indexes) were developed, overcoming even the mistrust for conventional cataloguing systems like alphabetical order, which bore no relation to the ultimate order of the world. The printing press was introduced into a foment of active experimentation with the forms of presentation and the organization of manuscripts, which were innovations connected with mostly autonomous developments like the increase and consequent standardization of available books. Collectively, these developments created a favorable environment for the consolidation and the success of the typographical innovation.”

“Terence Cave speaks of a discovery of the reader in the sixteenth century, based on a circular and indeterminate relationship between the writer and the reader; 31 the writer writes so as to compel the reader to elaborate his or her own autonomous perspective, that is, to presuppose his or her active role. A practice of generative reading is thus stabilized, where the text is used as material to be interpreted according to criteria and interests completely foreign to the one writing.” [See: See Terence Cave, “The Mimesis of Reading in the Renaissance,” in MIMESIS: From Mirror to Method, Augustine to Descartes, ed. J. Lyons and S. Nichols (Hanover, N.H., 1984), pp. 149–65.]

“[T]he medieval allegorical reading aimed at identification with, and not at detachment from, the perspective presented in the text (which was not that of the writer, but on a noncontingent and nonsubjective level).”

[Then, comparing the age of mass media with the age of the internet:]

“Where there was anonymity there is now personalization, where there was unilaterality there is interactivity, where there was the mass there is individual configuration, and above all, where there was an instrument expected to be as not noisy as possible, to not interfere with the message, there is now a machine used precisely to process information.”

“Computers and only computers are able to radically loosen the unity of communication in the search for new forms that mostly had not been considered by the one who produced the information.”

“Features that are perfectly casual from the point of view of the one drafting them, such as recurrent constructions and the redundancy present in lists or directories, are used by the computer in order to achieve effective ways of processing, with unpredictable results (think of compression techniques or the work of search engines).”

“In this case, information is valuable not because of what it conveys by itself (everyone builds their own information from their own perspective) but because it selects possibilities–a place from which one can start, like a computer does, to create more and more complex forms. Information then has value only as a precondition for a further decomposition into elements, which leads to recombination into forms.”

Elena Esposito, ‘ The Arts of Contingency’, in Critical Inquiry 31, 2004, http://www.uchicago.edu/research/jnl-crit-inq/features/artsstatements/arts.esposito.htm.

“The memo, for example, might have an audience of one, or none; it might be read once, or never. But however vanishingly ephemeral its interest, it must nonetheless be preserved, that is, filed.”

“In an argument notably ingenious, if not persuasive, he [Herbert Spencer in Philosophy of Style] asserts that poetry is in fact more economical than prose in its demand on the reader’s attention. The evidence for this point is the extreme compression of poetic language, particularly figurative language; but Spencer has confused compression, which might very well tax the reader’s attention by producing ambiguity, with a concept of brevity that would seem to resist ambiguity as an impediment to communication.”

[Ah — wasn’t it Yuri Lotman who, much later, argued along the same lines?]

“Tufte’s critique of PowerPoint confirms a distinction between concision and clarity, since the burden of his critique is to remind us that sometimes more words are required in order for communication to be effective. There is no easy correlation between the quantity of words and the quality of communication, and this mysterious intransigence of language, which goes very deep, means that it will probably never be possible to reduce writing to rules, schemata, or the algorithms that run computer programs.”

“The norm of clarity arose from the publicness of print culture, which presupposed that written communications were addressed ideally to everyone, to the hypothetical “general reader.””

John Guillory, ‘The Memo and Modernity’, in Critical Inquiry 31, 2004, http://www.uchicago.edu/research/jnl-crit-inq/features/artsstatements/arts.guillory.htm.

“If and when the old humanities deal not with man, their topics are cultural technologies such as writing, reading, counting, singing, dancing, drawing—surprisingly almost the same skills that every free young man and girl in Lakedaimon or in Athens once displayed. For the humanities, there is nothing nontechnical to teach and research.”

“[T]oday’s knowledge is only as powerful as its implementations are. The future of the university depends on its faculty to unite separated notation systems of alphabets and mathematics into a superset, which Vilem Flusser once ironically called the alphanumerical code.”

“The secret manifest in commercial chip designs, operating systems, and application program interfaces (APIs) lies in the fact that technical documentation – in screaming contrast to all technical history – is not published anymore.”

Friedrich Kittler, ‘Universities: Wet, Hard, Soft, and Harder’, in Critical Inquiry 31, 2004.

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’.