I've been wanting to do some Atlanta blogging lately, but I never seem to have time. This morning Bart and Colleen and I went to the Atlanta Cyclorama, which was as awesome as you might expect (i.e. super awesome). The painting itself is of course cheesy, and the voiceover that they do for the tour does a little of that Confederate nostalgia thing, but they didn't lay it on as thick as I expected they would (I grew up in Virginia, so). The Clark-Gable-as-dead-Union-soldier figurine in the front? Amazing. I was surprised to learn that all the tchotchkes at the base of the painting were added in the 1930s, since such effects are sort of classically 1890s. But the painting was on tour in the 1890s, so I guess that makes sense. And it's a reminder of the unevenness of the way we periodize media—Frederick A. Lucas talks a lot about cycloramas in his 1920s pamphlet on the AMNH dioramas, for example. It was also, shall we say, sociologically interesting to observe the people who were on this cyclorama tour.
Sooner or later I want to write up something about the High Museum, which currently has some cool stuff on loan from MoMA, but I guess that isn't going to be today.
I may as well throw out the obligatory Americanist point, though: the High Museum has a building called the Wieland Pavilion. Seriously!
In case of fire, people, stop, drop, and roll.
Showing posts with label Walter Benjamin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Walter Benjamin. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Sunday, December 19, 2010
A Supposedly Fun Thing: Text-Mining and the Amusement/Knowledge System; or, the Epistemological Sentimentalists
If we could text-mine the internets of the last few days for the correlation between the words "n-gram" and "fun," I'm sure we'd get a nontrivial number. One of the most striking things about the reception of the Google Books Ngrams, largely in the form of the web tool, is the giddy delight with which people have announced how much fun it is. Exhibit A is the bit I quoted yesterday from Patricia Cohen at the New York Times:
The prevalence of this language of play raises two questions.
1. What rhetorical work is this move (calling Google Books Ngrams a fun toy) doing?
2. What experiential dimension of Google Books Ngrams does this rhetorical move describe, and what does it tell us about the tool's epistemic significance?
Answering the first question feeds into answering the second. To call the Google Books Ngrams web tool (henceforth "GBN") a fun toy is to hedge one's bets, to express approval without necessarily venturing into the higher-stakes terrain of approving it as a research method. Any assessment of the tool's epistemic value is channeled through an expression of pleasure (or, as Patricia Cohen and The Awl's Choire Sicha rather interestingly suggest, compulsion). Play can of course be a form of learning, and very important--that's what Dorothea Salo's tweet indicates. But play is a good learning environment precisely because the stakes are low and mistakes can be made safely, as a comment by Bill Flesch suggests: "I played around with it for about half an hour. Now I'm bored." New toy, please! With respect to knowledge, the language of play is deeply ambivalent.
As I read it, the universal declaration of fun that has surrounded the release of GBN is as much about guilt as about pleasure. Those who are compulsively "ngraming," as Sicha so amusingly puts it, are often all too aware of GBN's limitations, which have been blogged extensively, all the way down to what Natalie Binder points out, in her much-retweeted post, has to underlie the whole operation: inevitably imperfect OCR.*
Why does the GBN web tool even exist? Not to advance knowledge, I don't think, or at least not directly, but rather because it's fun. Because it directs interest toward the more substantive element of the project, the downloadable data set that relatively few people are actually going to download.
There are huge problems with using GBN (and throughout I'm alluding to the web tool/toy that everybody is saying is so much fun) as any sort of meaningful index of culture, and everyone knows it. And yet.
I would argue that the universal declaration of fun is a form of confession: I am deriving epistemological satisfaction from this unsound tool, with its built-in Words for Snowism. It's a guilty pleasure, epistemic candy: the sensation of knowledge, lacking in any nutritional value.
But the guilt goes rather deeper than the simple tension between GBN's unreliability for actual research and the "gee whiz!" quality of the graphs: GBN is fun because it is so limited.
That great scholar of nineteenth-century culture, Walter Benjamin, described a mode of writing that he called "information."
As soon as we raise such questions, the graph stops being "understandable in itself," stops being information. Conversely, when you aren't given the choice to sort by genre, how genres are defined necessarily stops being a question. It's the very fact that the toy is a black box and a blunt instrument that makes it feel immediate and incontrovertible and, in that very satisfying way, obvious. We get the epistemic satisfaction of information, and the thing that gives it to us is precisely that information's lack of nuance.
Yesterday I used the word "cheap" to describe the kind of historical narratives GBN suggests. There is indeed a kind of economic dimension to the satisfaction that GBN delivers. Of Oscar Wilde's many quotable lines, I am reminded of this one:
The analogy to sentimentalism is useful not only because it gives us a model for understanding the economy of feeling here, but also because it allows us to recognize that there is an element of feeling in the way that we encounter information. We are likely to find it ethically reprehensible when our emotions or what we believe we know are manipulated. And yet there are times when we want the cheap thrill. Most people I know will freely cop to liking a good emotionally manipulative movie or novel, whether a thriller or a romance or one of those movies where the dog dies. As the fun of ngrams demonstrates, we like a little intellectual manipulation too.
(I know, I know, it doesn't tell you anything conclusively, but...try Foucault versus Habermas!)
What does it mean, this liking it?
I mentioned Bill Brown's term, the "amusement/knowledge system," in my title above because it's another, perhaps more explicit way of describing the close interweaving of knowledge and fun at the end of the nineteenth century that so fascinated Benjamin (208). In my own work I have tried to make a case for taking seriously both the knowledge and the amusement in that system, notably in naturalist fiction, because it's often in such liminal places that the terms of what counts as knowledge are most at stake. Part of the reason experimental literature seems to be here to stay is that the amusement/knowledge system is, too.
The point is not to condemn fun as something that has no place in knowledge--far from it. Fun is central to how we vet knowledge--just think of how important it is that research be "interesting"! It is our highest (and also most common) praise.*** Indeed, play lies at the heart of our most cherished models of intellectual inquiry--a nonutilitarian curiosity to "see what happens." As I quoted Dorothea Salo at the beginning of this post: "THAT, friends, is how one learns."
So condemning fun is not at all on my agenda. Rather, I want to draw attention to the emotional content of the way we talk about knowledge, and to the ambivalence that intellectual "fun" signifies. Ours is an age of "news junkies" (again with the pleasure bordering on unpleasurable compulsion, à la the "addictive" ngrams) and "armchair policy wonks" and people who read voraciously, but only in the proverbial dubiously defined "nonfiction" category. Nate Silver and the Freakonomics dudes are minor celebrities. Lies, damned lies, and statistics are our idea of fun, as powerfully as a Victorian melodrama was ever considered fun. Which means we need to think much more about how fun operates, and why, and what that means for knowledge. And just as crucially: what knowledge means for pleasure.
*In fairness, Ben Schmidt argues that GBN's OCR is pretty accurate, given the state of the field, and also that "No one is in a position to be holier-than-thou about metadata. We all live in a sub-development of glass houses." But there's a big difference between "this is really good, for OCR" and "this degree of accuracy is good enough for supplying evidence for X kinds of claims."
**Taken out of context, Wilde appears here to be describing sentimentalism through an economic metaphor. In fact, it's rather the reverse, or at the very least something more confused than that: most of the surrounding text is taken up with Wilde chastising Douglas for his financial mooching.
***As Sianne Ngai points out, the "interesting," like the language of play, has a hedging quality, bridging epistemological and aesthetic domains.
Benjamin, Walter. "The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov." Trans. Harry Zohn. Selected Writings: Volume 3, 1935-1938. Ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap-Harvard UP, 2002. Print.
Brown, Bill. The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economies of Play. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1996. Print.
Ngai, Sianne. "Merely Interesting." Critical Inquiry 34.4 (Summer 2008): 777-817. Print.
Wilde, Oscar. "To Alfred Douglas." Jan.-Mar. 1897. The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde. Eds. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-David. New York: Henry Holt, 2000. Print.
Previously on text-mining:
Google Books Ngrams and the number of words for "snow"
Dec. 16, 2010
Dec. 14, 2010
Google's automatic writing and the gendering of birds
The intended audience is scholarly, but a simple online tool allows anyone with a computer to plug in a string of up to five words and see a graph that charts the phrase’s use over time — a diversion that can quickly become as addictive as the habit-forming game Angry Birds.But that's just one example--the fun of the Google Books Ngrams tool is almost universally noted. See, for instance, "Fun With Google's Ngram Viewer" (Mother Jones), "Fun with Google NGram Viewer" (WSJ), and "BRB, Can't Stop NGraming" (The Awl). And Dorothea Salo tweets,
What I like about the GBooks n-grams is seeing all kinds of people playing with it. Just playing. THAT, friends, is how one learns.
The prevalence of this language of play raises two questions.
1. What rhetorical work is this move (calling Google Books Ngrams a fun toy) doing?
2. What experiential dimension of Google Books Ngrams does this rhetorical move describe, and what does it tell us about the tool's epistemic significance?
Answering the first question feeds into answering the second. To call the Google Books Ngrams web tool (henceforth "GBN") a fun toy is to hedge one's bets, to express approval without necessarily venturing into the higher-stakes terrain of approving it as a research method. Any assessment of the tool's epistemic value is channeled through an expression of pleasure (or, as Patricia Cohen and The Awl's Choire Sicha rather interestingly suggest, compulsion). Play can of course be a form of learning, and very important--that's what Dorothea Salo's tweet indicates. But play is a good learning environment precisely because the stakes are low and mistakes can be made safely, as a comment by Bill Flesch suggests: "I played around with it for about half an hour. Now I'm bored." New toy, please! With respect to knowledge, the language of play is deeply ambivalent.
As I read it, the universal declaration of fun that has surrounded the release of GBN is as much about guilt as about pleasure. Those who are compulsively "ngraming," as Sicha so amusingly puts it, are often all too aware of GBN's limitations, which have been blogged extensively, all the way down to what Natalie Binder points out, in her much-retweeted post, has to underlie the whole operation: inevitably imperfect OCR.*
Why does the GBN web tool even exist? Not to advance knowledge, I don't think, or at least not directly, but rather because it's fun. Because it directs interest toward the more substantive element of the project, the downloadable data set that relatively few people are actually going to download.
There are huge problems with using GBN (and throughout I'm alluding to the web tool/toy that everybody is saying is so much fun) as any sort of meaningful index of culture, and everyone knows it. And yet.
I would argue that the universal declaration of fun is a form of confession: I am deriving epistemological satisfaction from this unsound tool, with its built-in Words for Snowism. It's a guilty pleasure, epistemic candy: the sensation of knowledge, lacking in any nutritional value.
But the guilt goes rather deeper than the simple tension between GBN's unreliability for actual research and the "gee whiz!" quality of the graphs: GBN is fun because it is so limited.
That great scholar of nineteenth-century culture, Walter Benjamin, described a mode of writing that he called "information."
Villemessant, the founder of Le Figaro, characterized the nature of information in a famous formulation. 'To my readers,' he used to say, 'an attic fire in the Latin Quarter [Paris] is more important than a revolution in Madrid.' This makes strikingly clear that what gets the readiest hearing is no longer intelligence coming from afar, but the information which supplies a handle for what is nearest. Intelligence that came from afar--whether over spatial distance (from foreign countries) or temporal (from tradition)--possessed an authority which gave it validity, even when it was not subject to verification. Information, however, lays claim to prompt verifiability. The prime requirement is that it appear 'understandable in itself.' (147, emphasis added)What GBN delivers is information in this sense. It is near at hand, easy to use, and puts out a nice visualization that appears "understandable in itself." It's easy to deliver, in that way, not unlike a pizza. It's no good to point out, as Mark Davies does, that the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) allows one to look at specific syntactic forms, or include related words, or track usages by the genre of the source. Such capacities only raise anxieties. (For example, what gets tagged as "nonfiction"? Where, for instance, do autobiographies go? I once, to my astonishment, saw The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in the nonfiction section of a book store--along with Three Lives! But I digress.)
As soon as we raise such questions, the graph stops being "understandable in itself," stops being information. Conversely, when you aren't given the choice to sort by genre, how genres are defined necessarily stops being a question. It's the very fact that the toy is a black box and a blunt instrument that makes it feel immediate and incontrovertible and, in that very satisfying way, obvious. We get the epistemic satisfaction of information, and the thing that gives it to us is precisely that information's lack of nuance.
Yesterday I used the word "cheap" to describe the kind of historical narratives GBN suggests. There is indeed a kind of economic dimension to the satisfaction that GBN delivers. Of Oscar Wilde's many quotable lines, I am reminded of this one:
The fact is that you were, and are I suppose still, a typical sentimentalist. For a sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it. (768)Feeling, Wilde suggests, has to be earned.** Bracketing the question of whether this is a good description of sentimentalism, it's a good analogue for the epistemic candy of GBN. One receives the apparent solidity of research--the nice graph that summarizes and visualizes what might otherwise be years of labor in the making--without having to have actually done any research. This is only a cheap thrill, "fun," when it is actually cheap--that is, when we don't inquire into how the corpus was prepared, or what effects GBN's case-sensitivity is having on our results.
The analogy to sentimentalism is useful not only because it gives us a model for understanding the economy of feeling here, but also because it allows us to recognize that there is an element of feeling in the way that we encounter information. We are likely to find it ethically reprehensible when our emotions or what we believe we know are manipulated. And yet there are times when we want the cheap thrill. Most people I know will freely cop to liking a good emotionally manipulative movie or novel, whether a thriller or a romance or one of those movies where the dog dies. As the fun of ngrams demonstrates, we like a little intellectual manipulation too.
(I know, I know, it doesn't tell you anything conclusively, but...try Foucault versus Habermas!)
What does it mean, this liking it?
I mentioned Bill Brown's term, the "amusement/knowledge system," in my title above because it's another, perhaps more explicit way of describing the close interweaving of knowledge and fun at the end of the nineteenth century that so fascinated Benjamin (208). In my own work I have tried to make a case for taking seriously both the knowledge and the amusement in that system, notably in naturalist fiction, because it's often in such liminal places that the terms of what counts as knowledge are most at stake. Part of the reason experimental literature seems to be here to stay is that the amusement/knowledge system is, too.
The point is not to condemn fun as something that has no place in knowledge--far from it. Fun is central to how we vet knowledge--just think of how important it is that research be "interesting"! It is our highest (and also most common) praise.*** Indeed, play lies at the heart of our most cherished models of intellectual inquiry--a nonutilitarian curiosity to "see what happens." As I quoted Dorothea Salo at the beginning of this post: "THAT, friends, is how one learns."
So condemning fun is not at all on my agenda. Rather, I want to draw attention to the emotional content of the way we talk about knowledge, and to the ambivalence that intellectual "fun" signifies. Ours is an age of "news junkies" (again with the pleasure bordering on unpleasurable compulsion, à la the "addictive" ngrams) and "armchair policy wonks" and people who read voraciously, but only in the proverbial dubiously defined "nonfiction" category. Nate Silver and the Freakonomics dudes are minor celebrities. Lies, damned lies, and statistics are our idea of fun, as powerfully as a Victorian melodrama was ever considered fun. Which means we need to think much more about how fun operates, and why, and what that means for knowledge. And just as crucially: what knowledge means for pleasure.
*In fairness, Ben Schmidt argues that GBN's OCR is pretty accurate, given the state of the field, and also that "No one is in a position to be holier-than-thou about metadata. We all live in a sub-development of glass houses." But there's a big difference between "this is really good, for OCR" and "this degree of accuracy is good enough for supplying evidence for X kinds of claims."
**Taken out of context, Wilde appears here to be describing sentimentalism through an economic metaphor. In fact, it's rather the reverse, or at the very least something more confused than that: most of the surrounding text is taken up with Wilde chastising Douglas for his financial mooching.
***As Sianne Ngai points out, the "interesting," like the language of play, has a hedging quality, bridging epistemological and aesthetic domains.
Benjamin, Walter. "The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov." Trans. Harry Zohn. Selected Writings: Volume 3, 1935-1938. Ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap-Harvard UP, 2002. Print.
Brown, Bill. The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economies of Play. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1996. Print.
Ngai, Sianne. "Merely Interesting." Critical Inquiry 34.4 (Summer 2008): 777-817. Print.
Wilde, Oscar. "To Alfred Douglas." Jan.-Mar. 1897. The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde. Eds. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-David. New York: Henry Holt, 2000. Print.
Previously on text-mining:
Google Books Ngrams and the number of words for "snow"
Dec. 16, 2010
Dec. 14, 2010
Google's automatic writing and the gendering of birds
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Attention and Length
In the midst of a satisfying rant about the recent NYT faux-forum on tenure, Aaron notes:
What caught my eye in Aaron's statement was the point he makes about the cheapness of space on the web. The available space is, if not limitless, much more than anyone could possibly need. This is a point that digital humanists make all the time. This is just a true fact: space is cheap on the web. The capacity to store large texts is there.
Yet there's also a contrary notion, namely that, despite arbitrarily expandable space, the web is not the natural home of the long form but rather a "shallows," a place of soundbites and snippets and Hollywood movies illegally uploaded to YouTube in nine-minute chunks.
This is something less than a true fact, but something more than just a rumor. There is certainly a culture of the internet that privileges the short form, and culture is very, very strong.
Moreover, the web is not only virtual but also material, and while virtual space may be infinite, the ability of my wrists to withstand trackpad scrolling is not. Perhaps iPads and Kindles are more ergonomically sound than is my trusty MacBook (not perhaps: definitely), but there's still a physical limit to the amount of on-screen reading one can do. I don't think the internet makes people stupid, but I also don't think it's especially accommodating of long-form reading, at least not yet.
The web has two great strengths that lie in tension. One is the aforementioned availability of space. The other is ease of linkage: the web makes it very easy to travel around this vast space. (It's less good at marking stable places, keeping the ground from shifting.) So it's possible to stay in one place for a long, long time, because there are no technical obstacles to storing War and Peace online. But to do so mitigates against the other strong impulse of the web, transit -- what Anne Friedberg has pointed to as an arcade-evoking virtual motion through interconnected, visually captivating spaces.
The your-brain-on-teh-internets debates are very much reminiscent of modernist debates about distraction; there's that same fear that attention and the moral rectitude that it implies have been replaced by superficial and trashy pleasures, as Jonathan Crary has so persuasively documented. And yet, I recently had the pleasure of hearing my fourteen-year-old brother narrate the ins and outs of his most recent internet RP in excruciating detail, and it was I, the Ph.D., whose attention wandered (A LOT).* The internet narrative bested my attention span.
Is the internet the future of long-form publications, as the digital humanists would have it (because paper publishing is in the throes of death)? Or is it culturally and materially inimical to longer forms?
Perhaps on the internet the attention-distraction dialectic that Crary describes is simply operating in a way we're not yet used to discussing, offering us a new way to experience old anxieties about where an idle mind might go.
*While the RP itself bores me to tears, I absolutely love that my brother wanted to tell me all about it.
Crary, Jonathan. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: MITP, 1999. Print.
Image: Passage Jouffroy, Paris. Wikimedia.
But the real problem is simply that this was never going to be a real discussion anyway; in 350 words, not much can be said about a complicated issue, and so it’s hardly surprising that not much was said. The NY Times’ decision to limit these contributions to such a microscopically small word count — in a virtual forum whose space is virtually infinite — illustrates that they were far more interested in the pretense of debate than an actual discussion (the same way grabbing onto a reliably orthodox leftist and two reliably orthodox conservatives demonstrates an interest in the pretense of balance, rather than the reality of actual discussion). Which is why, as irritating as this non-discussion is, it’s totally unsurprising.Aaron complains about the shortness of the pieces, none of which respond to the others, because it prevents any depth of discussion. (Uh, MLA roundtable, anybody?)
What caught my eye in Aaron's statement was the point he makes about the cheapness of space on the web. The available space is, if not limitless, much more than anyone could possibly need. This is a point that digital humanists make all the time. This is just a true fact: space is cheap on the web. The capacity to store large texts is there.
Yet there's also a contrary notion, namely that, despite arbitrarily expandable space, the web is not the natural home of the long form but rather a "shallows," a place of soundbites and snippets and Hollywood movies illegally uploaded to YouTube in nine-minute chunks.
This is something less than a true fact, but something more than just a rumor. There is certainly a culture of the internet that privileges the short form, and culture is very, very strong.
Moreover, the web is not only virtual but also material, and while virtual space may be infinite, the ability of my wrists to withstand trackpad scrolling is not. Perhaps iPads and Kindles are more ergonomically sound than is my trusty MacBook (not perhaps: definitely), but there's still a physical limit to the amount of on-screen reading one can do. I don't think the internet makes people stupid, but I also don't think it's especially accommodating of long-form reading, at least not yet.
The web has two great strengths that lie in tension. One is the aforementioned availability of space. The other is ease of linkage: the web makes it very easy to travel around this vast space. (It's less good at marking stable places, keeping the ground from shifting.) So it's possible to stay in one place for a long, long time, because there are no technical obstacles to storing War and Peace online. But to do so mitigates against the other strong impulse of the web, transit -- what Anne Friedberg has pointed to as an arcade-evoking virtual motion through interconnected, visually captivating spaces.
The your-brain-on-teh-internets debates are very much reminiscent of modernist debates about distraction; there's that same fear that attention and the moral rectitude that it implies have been replaced by superficial and trashy pleasures, as Jonathan Crary has so persuasively documented. And yet, I recently had the pleasure of hearing my fourteen-year-old brother narrate the ins and outs of his most recent internet RP in excruciating detail, and it was I, the Ph.D., whose attention wandered (A LOT).* The internet narrative bested my attention span.
Is the internet the future of long-form publications, as the digital humanists would have it (because paper publishing is in the throes of death)? Or is it culturally and materially inimical to longer forms?
Perhaps on the internet the attention-distraction dialectic that Crary describes is simply operating in a way we're not yet used to discussing, offering us a new way to experience old anxieties about where an idle mind might go.
*While the RP itself bores me to tears, I absolutely love that my brother wanted to tell me all about it.
Crary, Jonathan. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: MITP, 1999. Print.
Image: Passage Jouffroy, Paris. Wikimedia.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Time scales
Giles Slade's Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America offers a history of planned obsolescence.
One is tempted to argue for a "slow scholarship" movement parallel to "slow food." Like slow food, it would be problematic. It would require the revaluation of time (difficult), and if there ever was a golden age of slow scholarship it probably rested on the unpaid or underpaid labor of women and people of color, as in the case of food. What's odd is that in contrast to publish (something very innovative)-or-perish, the dissemination of literary-critical ideas through popular culture, and even in teaching, seems quite slow. Witness high schools: still New Critical and proud. And yet it is precisely mass culture that is (alleged to be) the culture of planned obsolescence. From a mass-cultural perspective, literary criticism itself is outdated. Or as Carolyn Dinshaw says of her historical period in particular, "This American present abjects the medieval -- in such manifestations as Gregorian chants -- as irrelevant, by definition lifeless and inaccessible" (177). What Dinshaw is pointing out is a conflation between the ideas of "old" and "obsolete." Perhaps what is at issue is not fast or slow but a multiplicity of time-scales, as Mark McGurl suggests, that are not (cannot be?) aligned.
Lorine Niedecker writes: "I must possess myself, get back into pure duration" (28).
Indeed.
(Via Harvard UP.)
Benjamin, Walter. "The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov." Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken, 1968. I am aware of problems with these translations.
Dinshaw, Carolyn. Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern. Durham: Duke UP, 2009.
Niedecker, Lorine. Collected Works. Ed. Jenny Penberthy. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002.
Every single university press is currently tweeting the Chronicle's coverage of AAUP. That's old news, Columbia UP!
Made to Break is a history of twentieth-century technology as seen through the prism of obsolescence. America invented everything that is now disposable, Giles Slade tells us, and he explains how disposability was in fact a necessary condition for America's rejection of tradition and our acceptance of change and impermanence.I recognize the irony of thinking this just after joining Twitter, which is perhaps the consummate purveyor of Benjaminian information, "[t]he prime requirement [of which] is that it appear 'understandable in itself'" (89). But it seems to me that the same desire for innovation as such characterizes contemporary scholarship: forward-thinking yet wasteful. Scholars keep hoping for the newest "killer app" -- indeed, we keep hoping to publish it ourselves (nobody wants to be doing ordinary science; everybody wants to be Einstein). And yet old theoretical ideas are still productive. I'm not talking about theory (TM) so much as scholarship per se. I just finished reading Carolyn Dinshaw's Getting Medieval, which is ten years old and yet full of ideas that were new to me, and not only new but theoretically rich. We will certainly continue to teach Foucault and Barthes, but will we teach Dinshaw and Halperin? Perhaps this is just griping over canonicity, and perhaps my view of this is skewed by my position as a young(ish) scholar. But it seems, you know, wasteful to produce so much knowledge at what seems like a fairly pressured pace. I remember a professor talking about the time she spent reading George Saintsbury's History of English Prosody. "I don't know why I thought I had time to do that," she said, laughing. But: oughtn't she have that time?
One is tempted to argue for a "slow scholarship" movement parallel to "slow food." Like slow food, it would be problematic. It would require the revaluation of time (difficult), and if there ever was a golden age of slow scholarship it probably rested on the unpaid or underpaid labor of women and people of color, as in the case of food. What's odd is that in contrast to publish (something very innovative)-or-perish, the dissemination of literary-critical ideas through popular culture, and even in teaching, seems quite slow. Witness high schools: still New Critical and proud. And yet it is precisely mass culture that is (alleged to be) the culture of planned obsolescence. From a mass-cultural perspective, literary criticism itself is outdated. Or as Carolyn Dinshaw says of her historical period in particular, "This American present abjects the medieval -- in such manifestations as Gregorian chants -- as irrelevant, by definition lifeless and inaccessible" (177). What Dinshaw is pointing out is a conflation between the ideas of "old" and "obsolete." Perhaps what is at issue is not fast or slow but a multiplicity of time-scales, as Mark McGurl suggests, that are not (cannot be?) aligned.
Lorine Niedecker writes: "I must possess myself, get back into pure duration" (28).
Indeed.
(Via Harvard UP.)
Benjamin, Walter. "The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov." Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken, 1968. I am aware of problems with these translations.
Dinshaw, Carolyn. Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern. Durham: Duke UP, 2009.
Niedecker, Lorine. Collected Works. Ed. Jenny Penberthy. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002.
Every single university press is currently tweeting the Chronicle's coverage of AAUP. That's old news, Columbia UP!
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