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.

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…

(Damn, just lost a long post because Safari crashed… Here I go again).

I read John Locke’s A New Method of a Common-Place-Book a few days ago. (E-text here: http://oll.libertyfund.org/Home3/Book.php?recordID=0326). I was quite excited to find out it only deals with his method of indexing and retrieving previously ‘stored’ notes; his ways to deal with paper-techniques to extends one’s own memory.

Actually Locke’s method shows that his commonplace books were no commonplace books anymore, but notebooks. Commonplace books belong to the Rennaissance, and to a world in which rhetorics are predominant. Notebooks belong to the new world of modern science. One deals with constructing arguments the other with arriving at scientific truth. One still puts (human) memory in the centre; the other values reporting and writing down. (To put it bluntly). What I find exciting is to see the co-development of storage & publishing techniques (paper not really being scarce anymore in Locke’s time) and techniques of writing, noticing and researching.

Interesting in this respect are the theories of Richard Lanham about economies of attention and the return of rhetorics in the world of the electronic word (as his book, froom 1993 (!) is called): http://www.rhetoricainc.com/.

A long an thorough paper on Locke’s methods of commonplacing is Richard Yeo’s John Locke’s New Metod of Commonplacing, (2004): http://www.phil.mq.edu.au/staff/jsutton/Yeo.doc. Here’s my digest in quotes.

(All this I find interesting because of the (for me) implied reference to blogging: making notes, research, indexing, use of keywords, referencing, working/writing/publishing methods — and the relation to rhetorics & the use of commonplaces — read: samples).

“I argue that on his own account, Locke extends and complicates the previous functions of these notebooks, making them part of a system for managing information that could be adapted to suit individual purposes.”

“In his influential De Copia (1512), Erasmus offered a manual of examples, advising that themes, quotations and maxims from classical texts be entered under various loci (places) to assist free-flowing oratory.”

“By 1704, the year of Locke’s death, Jonathan Swift (who kept his own commonplace book) regarded the worst applications of the method as part of a syndrome of techniques—including abridging, epitomizing, and indexing—all offering easy ways to skim a book. He dubbed this syndrome “Index learning.” Such abuse of commonplacing was disastrous: “By these Methods, in a few Weeks, there starts up many a Writer, capable of managing the profoundest and most universal Subjects. For, what tho’ his Head be empty, provided his Common-place-Book be full.” The reputation of this humanist legacy had further to fall: by the nineteenth century the term “commonplace” degenerated to refer to ordinary, unremarkable facts or observations—the very opposite of its early modern meaning.”

“yet Cicero stressed that the good orator needed knowledge, not just rhetorical skill: “A knowledge of a vast number of things is necessary, without which volubility of words is empty and ridiculous … the whole of antiquity and a multitude of examples is to be kept in the memory.” This is why the natural powers of memory needed to be augmented, a demand inflated by the humanist passion for “copious” embellishment of material.”

“Bacon affirmed the role of a “good and learned Digest of Common Places”: “The great help to the memory is writing; and it must be taken as a rule that memory without this aid is unequal to matters of much length and accuracy.””

“Between 1500 and 1700 there was a subtle shift in the function of such notebooks: from being repositories of the material that individuals sought to memorize, they came to be seen as ways of retaining information that could never be memorized”

“Thus although material is placed under an appropriate category, or subject, its position in the notebook is determined by alphabetical combinations. Such compression and scattering of related material is tolerable because the index operates as a finding device⎯provided that the maker of the commonplace book remembers the Head under which particular material has been placed.” (Concerning Locke’s notebooks).

“This “topical man,” as Locke pointedly calls him, has a memory full of “borrowed and collected arguments” but usually mixes incompatible elements because he has not thought these ideas through. This stance anticipates several passages in Some Thoughts where Locke ridicules the collection and memorizing of quotations, “which when a Man’s Head is stuffed “with, he has got the Furniture of a Pedant.””

“Locke rarely made marginal notes in his books. Instead, on the inside back cover he noted the pages containing something that he entered in one of his commonplace books. When picking up this book on a subsequent occasion, he then knew that there was already a commonplace book entry.”

“In these ways, Locke’s adversaria and his library catalogue were linked, and so the commonplace method was now part of a sophisticated system for research and information management.”

” For Locke, however, commonplace books are not catalysts for related, yet memorized, material; instead, they are a means of reducing dependence on memory, retrieving references, and avoiding unnecessary duplication in note taking. His method allowed one to forget, thus relieving the memory, and yet also providing a means of finding required material at a later time.”

“Locke used commonplace books in new ways, expanding their scope and transforming them from a rhetorical storehouse into a research tool and a crucial component of his system for managing information.”

” Traditionally, commonplace books contained personal collections of publicly accepted knowledge. The material they stored, usually drawn from the classical corpus, comprised generally accepted tropes, maxims, and quotations that could be applied in oratory and written compositions. Such commonplace material was effective because its status was unchallenged and its authority could, with appropriate skill, be transferred to the particular case being argued.”

“Thus although such commonplaces were collected by individuals in unpublished notebooks, they were intended for public use and relied on widely endorsed values. Indeed, it was assumed that these notebooks could be shared and read with benefit by other educated individuals.” (This is an interesting relation with blogs I’d say…)

“Nevertheless, his [Locke’s] method of indexing does suit a world (described in Le Clerc’s introduction of 1706) in which the ambit of reading and study is expansive, and future topics not easily anticipated. Confessing his own habits, Locke acknowledged a tendency to “change often the subject I have been studying, read books by patches and as they have accidentally come in my way, and observe no obvious method or order in my studies.” Given such a pattern, we can see why he confronted the problem of allocating pages in a notebook.”

“I think that Locke’s account of memory shows why commonplace books are necessary for the proper ordering and retention of ideas; his concerns about disorderly and confused ideas entail the need for methodical collection; and his views on personal identity suggest a role for commonplace books in reinforcing a biographical sense of self.”

“Locke did not see the practice of making entries in commonplace books as a way of improving memory. ”

“In 1704 Locke’s French translator, Pierre Coste, reported that the great philosopher advised that “whenever we have meditated any thing new, we should throw it as soon as possible upon paper, in order to be the better able to judge of it by seeing it altogether; because the mind of man is not capable of retaining clearly a long chain of consequences, and of seeing, without confusion, the relation of a great number of different ideas.””

“The commonplace books gave Locke dedicated pathways to his library and saved time in finding passages previously read and noted. The emphasis was on retrieving, rather than recalling, information, but the indexing still required the user to remember the Heads that were chosen when particular entries were made.”

“The stress was not on quotations under generally shared Heads, but rather on referencing entries back to books, ideally those in a personal library.”

All quotes from Richard Yeo, ‘Locke’s New Method of Commonplacing: Managing Memory and Information’, in Eightteenth Century Thought, 2, (2004) 1-38.

When I write in reference to Samuels long poem Gewrichten that “I’m tempted to work out the algorithm, the schema, the form, that has generated this particular joining of words” I don’t say that in this way one will capture the meaning or all of the effect of the poem. It’s just a start, as in reading a sonnet, it’s a start to note the form(at): 14 lines, volta, rhyme &c. — and how this informs the effect and the meaning of the poem.

Samuel — who reads my blog — delivers an explanation of his method in the comments: ” I’ll give you the key clue: *every* line appears twice, once indented and once not indented, although in about a quarter of the cases there´s a minor change in the wording. Half of the poem was written as is, the repetitions were done later largely by chance but with an eye to continuity. And there are 480 lines in total. HTH!”

Hmm, so I count badly. (Hey, it was too hot!). 480 makes more sense.

As to reading speed again: quite quickly I found out that Gewrichten forces one to pause for a second after each line. If one does, the musicality ‘comes out’ — the macrostructure builds… Maybe pausing after a linebreak is normal for a lot of readers of poetry — I always think they are slow readers, spending time with each word. But that’s not my way of reading poetry. I start with reading quick through all the lines — often even reading on at every linebreak, for continuity, for getting the sense of the syntax, the rhythm of the sentence (not the line). That way of reading often helps me to understand poetry (afterwards I will spend more time, re-reading, if I like the poem, of when it keeps escaping me). So I had to force the pause after linebreaks (or the poem forced me) … only in the middle, when some lines can be read together, I could speed up.

“So, yes, writing is my first love and there’s nothing better than really good literature – but art has one advantage in that it provides an active space, a space of becoming-active. You can actually do the thing rather than just represent it. Not if you’re a painter, of course – but in process-based art you can, and that’s a really powerful thing.”

Tom McCarthy, interviewed at http://www.readysteadybook.com/Article.aspx?page=tommccarthy

Visit to the bookstore yesterday made me buy Latour’s Reassembling the Social — http://www.ensmp.fr/~latour/livres/XII_tdmANT.html. Sort of outline of Actor Network Theory (ANT), a term that Latour is now happy to use. Sociology as tracing associations. I read the introductory chapter sitting on the beach of Zandvoort, of all places, early evening, trying to forget the blazing hot sun.

Also read Samuel Vriezen long poem ‘Gewrichten’ (‘joints’) that’s published in this month’s Yang, http://www.yangtijdschrift.be/.. First it seems as if the poem is just loose sentences and bits of sentences, but reading through them, pausing after each line (and each line is clearly a unit), a rhythm develops. Also some lines are repeated. (Samuel is a composer as well & I have been so lucky to be part/performer of his composition Motet; one of his pieces that deals with the rhythm of syntax — that is syntax of language). In the centre of the poem the lines that follow each other do sometimes form sentences together, or at least, can be read as sentences. If I counted right the poem consists of 496 lines, knowing a bit how he composes, and knowing a bit about his taste in poetry, I’m tempted to work out the algorithm, the schema, the form, that has generated this particular joining of words. But I could ask Samuel of course… Needless to say: this is the type of poetry that I love. Art made of language. Not anekdotes put in poetic phrases. (Excuse my wobbly English).

Samuel blogs — in Dutch — at http://blogger.xs4all.nl/sqv/

“The blog provides a means of processing and selecting from an overwhelming abundance of written matter, and of publishing that record, with commentary, for anyone who cares to read it. In some cases, these “readings” become influential in themselves, and multiple readers engage in conversations across blogs. But treating blogging first as a reading practice, and second as its own genre of writing, political or otherwise, is useful in forming a more complete picture of this new/old phenomenon.”

“Perhaps, instead, blogging is the literate person’s new outlet for an old need. In Wright’s [a 19th century diary-writer] words, it is the need “to see more of what is going on around me.” And in print cultures where there is more to see, it takes reading, writing, and association in order to see more.”

Caleb McDaniel at:
http://www.futureofthebook.org/2005/08/the_blog_as_a_record_of_readin.html

(I refered that article in the earlier post on commonplace books. Now I finally read it).

Lately I’ve been doing a tiny bit of research in the use of commonplace books. There is a close resemblance between the function of commonplace books (in for instance the Seventeenth century) and how some people use blogs. Some bloggers see, or call their blogs commonplace books. It’s a pretty well-known comparision, but I never really explored it until now.

Here’s some quick info, with links, and links to some pictures:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace_book
http://www.library.yale.edu/beinecke/compb.htm
http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/46800

Here’s a danish blog that uses ‘commonplace book’ as a category — seems to have nice quotations… http://www.bookish.dk/index.php?cat=23. And a blog that calls itself a commonpace book: http://www.constantreader.org/v2/commonplace.html.

Some more relevant stuff:
http://www.futureofthebook.org/2005/08/the_blog_as_a_record_of_readin.html
http://cut-and-paste.de/
http://www.diyplanner.com/

There’s much more, but my dear reader, you can google as well as me.

In Making Things Public Anke te Heesen has a very nice short article about notebooks. I copied quite a few paragraphs from it; waht follows here is a digest of her article. I love the way she sees the notebook as a paper machine, as a technology that is an actor in how we write, store and process thoughts.

“The notebook as a paper-machine consists of the function noting and storing notes. ‘To note’ means first and foremost ‘to write down’, from the Latin notare, with the connotations sign, mark and writing, or from noscere, which means ‘to get to know’. ‘Note’, from notitia refers to this, namely, ‘to be known’. (…) Therefore apart from the actual act of wrigin, noting also describes a particular kind of perception: taking notice of something. Etymologically, here writing and taking notice are contained in one procedure, which at the same time implies habitual forming of a person and results in a praxis with paper that requires certain gestures, performed acts, rituals and tools.” p. 584

“From the sixteenth century on, bits of knowledge have been noted down in books with blank pages, stored in special boxes or placed in pigeonholes or compartments on bookshelves. In that era, the notes and small pieces of paper were the smallest material text-units of intellectual work. Organized note-taking was understood as a writing technique that could be learned, and it was one of the essential skills in the learned world.” p. 585

“Already in 1605, Francis Bacon recommends in Advancement of Learning the use of ‘commonplace books for entering the fruits of reading, quotations and references: ‘I hold that the diligence, and pains in collecting common Places, is of great use in certainty and studying.'” p. 586

“The philosopher John Locke, who influenced entire generations of English gentlemen with his instructions of how to make commonplace books, rendered the procedure methodical. In one of his texts, published in 1706, he described how to keep such a notebook. The ‘Memory is the treaurey or Storehouse,’ he said, but one must provide memory with an orderly basis. ‘It would be just for all the World as serviceable as a great deal of Household Stuff, when if we wanted any particular Thing we could not tell were to find it.’ This organization begins with reading. One should first read a book but not write anything in the notebook. ‘The places we design to extract from are to be marked on a piece of Paper, that we may do it after we have read the Book out.’ So after putting in all the bookmarks, one should read the book a second time and decide what is relevant enough to be written down in the notebook. ‘I take a White Paper Book and what Size I think fit. I divide the two first pages, which face another, by parallel lines,’ and make an index. In so doing, one froms one’s own keywords. A commonplace book thus refers a quotation noted down to its original context (its origin, the book) and, a the same time, is a stock to draw on for the memory, the speech to be given or the text to be written.” p. 586

“Entire generations of intellectuals and young gentlemen were educated to practice this technique. The notebook was a technique in service of discipline.” p. 587

“Notebooks were a place for collecting things, a technique for discipline, chronological recording and evidence. Such a book with its blank or gradually filling pages was a paper-machine which took in what one fed it but at the same time directed the entries.” p. 588

“From the beginning, this paper technology adhered to certain rules: The entries had to be written in a straight line , and no blots or spots should mar the paper. A margin, which in the earliest years was often signalized by a fold in the paper, provided space for notes and commentaries and played a significant role in administrative forms of writing (files).” p. 588

Anke te Heesen, ‘The Notebook, A Paper Technology’, in Latour & Weibel (eds.) Making Things Public. Atmospheres of Democracy, ZKM / MIT, Cambridge Ma, 2005, p. 582-589

So now on my desk:
John Locke, A New Method of a Common-Place Book: http://oll.libertyfund.org/Home3/HTML.php?recordID=0326.
Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning: http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/adv1.htm.

“The thirteenth-century Franciscan, St. Bonaventura, said that there were four ways of making books: ‘A man might write the works of others, addding and changing nothing in which case he is simply called a ‘scribe’ (scriptor). Another writes the work of others with additions which are not his own; and he is called a ‘compiler’ (compilator). Another writes both others’ work and his own, but with others’ work in principal place, adding his own for purposes of explanation; and he is called a ‘commentator’ (commentator) … Another writes both his own work and others’ but with his own work in principal place adding others’ for purposes of confirmation; and such a man should be called an ‘author’ (auctor).’ ”

Quoted in Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Communications and Cultural Transformations in early-modern Europe, Cambridge UP, 1979, p. 121/122

Ook ik heb inmiddels Ongerijmd succes van Thomas Vaessens gelezen (http://www.vantilt.nl/nieuws/00102/) — en meteen daarna de eerste twee hoofdstukken van Joostens & Vaessens boek over postmoderne poëzie. Een rondje weblogs en kranten leert dat er inmiddels het nodige aan recensies is verschenen (Ohlsen bij De Contrabas, ‘t Hart in De Groene, Gerbrandy in De Volkskrant) of nog gaat verschijnen (Reugebrink in Yang). Ik heb daar weinig aan toe te voegen, ook al omdat ik me niet geroepen voel om me te mengen in de discussies tussen dichters.

http://decontrabas.typepad.com/dekleinezaal/2006/06/van_de_jeugd_en.html
http://decontrabas.typepad.com/de_contrabas/2006/06/thomas_vaessens.html
http://decontrabas.typepad.com/de_contrabas/2006/06/ongerijmd_succe_2.html
http://reugebrink.skynetblogs.be/?number=1&unit=days&date=20060615#3435339

(Tja, de Groene-recensie en de Volkskrant-recensie zijn weer niet online toegankelijk. Al 4 jaar geleden werden, binnen de wetenschap, wetenschappelijke artikelen die online stonden 4.5x zo vaak geciteerd als wetenschappelijke artikelen die niet online beschikbaar waren).

Of nee, ik heb 1 ding te zeggen over Ongerijmd succes — iets dat mijn inziens aan de waarde van dit boek raakt, en dat ik tot nu toe nog niet in de recensies voorbij heb zien komen. Wat ik fascinerend vind aan Ongerijmd succes is dat Vaessens begint om op basis van een vrij klassiek opvatting van literatuurgeschiedenis licht te werpen op de ontwikkelingen in de poëzie van de afgelopen 20 jaar, en zich naarmate hij daar langer mee bezig is, lijkt te realiseren dat achter wat hij opvatte als een ontwikkeling binnen het literaire veld, feitelijk een veel ingrijpender culturele transformatie schuil gaat. Wat literatuurgeschiedenis leek te zijn, wordt mediageschiedenis; of — misschien preciezer — in dit boek zien we het moment waarop het verhaal van de mediageschiedenis gaat primeren boven het verhaal van de literatuurgeschiedenis. Het verhaal dat Vaessens begint te vertellen, is niet langer de geschiedenis van nieuwe poëzie binnen het literaire veld, maar dat van de transformatie van het begrip literatuur. We danken ons begrip literatuur grotendeels aan de opkomst van het drukwerk, en, inderdaad, inmiddels is drukwerk cultureel gezien niet meer het dominante medium. Enzovoorts. (En ja, da’s mijn pakkie-an, of mijn zwarte beest, wat u wil).

Dat betekent niet dat podiumdichters of nieuwe-media-dichters ineens veel betere gedichten schrijven dan drukwerk-dichters. De invloed van een sterke traditie (zeg Kouwenaar – Faverey) verdwijnt niet als sneeuw voor de zon. (Al moet ik hier ook gewoon toegeven dat ik erg graag de poëzie lees van zeg, Bogaert, Van Bastelaere, Faverey, Creeley, Pound — en de poetry slams en voordrachten die ik ooit bezocht best gezellig vond, maar er nooit zo werd geraakt. Ik wil dan (bij een voordracht) een echt goeie performance, zoals Jaap Blonk die kan neerzetten, of, for that matter, — nooit live gezien, alleen gekend van mp3 — Opgezwolle).

Ik dwaal af.

Of twee dingen wil ik zeggen over Vaessens. Wat ik ook nergens vermeld zie, is de handige manier waarop Vaessens zijn artikelen opfleurt met sociologische cijfermateriaal, cartoons en terzijdes. Hij zet een heel arsenaal aan retorische middelen in om zijn boodschap over te brengen (en dat bedoel ik positief). Je ziet hem zo voor de klas staan. Tegelijk vindt je juist in die terzijdes ook de hardere wetenschappelijk argumenten voor zijn beweringen. Het is alsof hij aan de ene kant tegen de wetenschappers zegt: kijk hier, de data en de academische papers; en het publiek dat hij voor zijn verhaal moet winnen, lokt hij met de cartoons en terzijdes.

Of toch nog iets (of omdat ik via Niemöllers Broers aan de jaren ’80 werd herinnerd): de Maximalen krijgen bij Vaessens veel te veel aandacht; maar ja, dat was dan ook de laatste beweging die het lukte om de kranten en weekbladen — die toen nog autoriteit hadden — voor hun karretje te spannen. Goeie PR en ook wel slim om samen te werken met wat schilders. Hun poëzie, daar hoor je toch niet zoveel meer over. (Uitgezonderd Frank Starik en Pieter Boskma). En je zou kunnen zeggen dat de ideeën van Aap Noot Mies — Duinker & Michel — die op hetzelfde moment opereerden, veel meer hun beslag hebben gekregen (of hoe zeg je dat — deel van het poëtisch centrum zijn geworden). Zoals ook de poëticale positie van Marc Reugebrink misschien wel meer navolging heeft gekregen. (Maar daar hoor je weer minder over). Serge van Duynhoven — een van de enige die toch met enig succes de begin jaren negentig de dialoog aanging met de techno en de multimedia — klinkt bij Vaessens achteraf helemaal potsierlijk en als stem uit een voorbije wereld: ‘meer massamedia in de poëzie’. De massamedia zijn voorbij. De massamedia, dat is de oude wereld.