If some poetry boys exhibit pack behavior, so what?
—Johanna Drucker, "Politics of It All?, The," The noulipian Analects, ed. Wertheimer and Viegener
Showing posts with label experimental literature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label experimental literature. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
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
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Knowing stuff
Apropos of yesterday's post, here's Ezra Pound on the question of when you can make judgments (this will come as no surprise):
Notice Pound's commitment to the value of education. Pound's model, which he explicitly believes to be scientific, contrasts with another scientific model, which prefers the perceptual capacities of the untrained worker because it is unbiased.
-----
Ezra Pound. A B C of Reading. 1934. New York: New Directions, 1960. Print.
Even if the general statement of an ignorant man is 'true', it leaves his mouth or pen without any great validity. He doesn't KNOW what he is saying. That is, he doesn't know it or mean it in anything like the degree that a man of experience would or does. Thus a very young man can be quite 'right' without carrying conviction to an older man who is wrong and who may quite well be wrong and still know a good deal that the younger man doesn't know. (26)
Notice Pound's commitment to the value of education. Pound's model, which he explicitly believes to be scientific, contrasts with another scientific model, which prefers the perceptual capacities of the untrained worker because it is unbiased.
-----
Ezra Pound. A B C of Reading. 1934. New York: New Directions, 1960. Print.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
L'esprit de l'ascenseur
I've been thinking about a question I was asked at MLA this year. Someone asked me about the moment at the end of Marianne Moore's "To a Snail," which ends by alluding to "the curious phenomenon of your [the snail's] occipital horn." In an eventually-to-be-published article, I pointed out that, first of all, "occipital horn" sounds terribly technical, and that, second, when it comes to snails, it isn't technical at all. Snails don't have a part called the "occipital horn"; in the poem it's, in my belief, a metaphor for the whorl of the shell.
The question was, simply, what's up with that? Is Marianne Moore punking us? Are we meant, now, to lose faith in reference, in scientific language, in reality, in all that is good and dear?
The superficial answer (which I think I gave) is that she isn't punking us exactly, but she isn't making a mistake either. She's recuperating the aesthetic (here, metaphoric) properties of scientific language, much in the way that she recuperates the aesthetic properties of quotations from various pop-cultural and/or bureaucratic materials elsewhere in her work.
But there's something else going on here that the occipital horn marks in "To a Snail." The words "occipital horn" are a note of finality; they are the last words in the poem, but also the last and incredibly fitting words in a lengthy, syntactically balanced, chiasmic sentence, a real rhetorical gem. When we get to "occipital horn," we have settled. We have landed, and landed with finality, on something solid, an apparently technical term for a part of the snail. This is why the tricky reversal -- the technical term turning out not to be technical but rather metaphorical -- might seem a little rude.
But not only are we not being punked, I would argue; we are being offered a sense of the real. Turns like the one I've just described characterize the experimental mode all the time. Things are not what they seem -- that's why we need complex experimental processes and regulation of the senses to access reality. The experimental mode takes this as a given; to push on the capacities of technical language doesn't therefore make us lose faith in technical language in general, but rather ground us in the exigencies of particularity that make "occipital horn," in this moment, metaphorical rather than strictly referential. (There is, in fact, such a thing as an occipital horn. Two such things. But not on a snail.) The turn, the revelation that things are not as they seem, helps to impart the sense of the real. But equally, there's no infinite regress or infinite play of meaning here: the words "occipital horn" finally fill a rôle that's aesthetic, and the syntactic balance of the sentence that these words help to complete support the metaphor and lend it formal solidity in lieu of referential solidity.
This is why the language of the joke or of mischief seems wrong to me in the case of "To a Snail." While the experimental mode can be playful, it is not irresponsible. Experimental play works in the service of negotiating an intractable reality -- like the model of play discussed by D.W. Winnicott in Playing and Reality, for instance. Winnicott isn't central to what I'm saying here, but reality is, because the experimental is above all interested in a place for the genuine, in mobilizing whatever mad powers of language there are to create a sense of the real, to land, ultimately, on something solid. It's a responsible mode -- as some put it, "sincere" -- with all the moral overtones that the word entails. This is not intrinsically good or bad, although I think it produced quite a lot of good art.
But to clarify a little further what I mean, think of the 'pataphysical tradition, which runs through surrealism on one side and the Oulipo on the other. The entire 'pataphysical tradition (as the name suggests) is deeply invested in the trappings of science, but largely in the name of travesty, puerility, and irresponsibility. In the 'pataphysical tradition, an infinite regress of meaning is not only possible but desirable; any obligation to reality may be abdicated; 'pataphysical art treads the fine line between meditation and gimmick, and is not sorry when it strays well into gimmick territory. This is art that actually does want us to lose faith in all that is good and dear -- and to laugh about it. (Flarf is without a doubt indebted to the 'pataphysical tradition.) This, too, has produced good art. But it is qualitatively different from the experimental mode, despite some of its practitioners' insistence on the word "experimental."
The distinction between experimental and 'pataphysical is not the same, by the way, as the distinction between modernist and avant-garde, although perhaps the lines often fall out that way. The distinction between modernist and avant-garde is typically thought of in the terms of a relation to the social body, whereas the distinction between experimental and 'pataphysical is given by an attitude toward knowledge.
The question was, simply, what's up with that? Is Marianne Moore punking us? Are we meant, now, to lose faith in reference, in scientific language, in reality, in all that is good and dear?
The superficial answer (which I think I gave) is that she isn't punking us exactly, but she isn't making a mistake either. She's recuperating the aesthetic (here, metaphoric) properties of scientific language, much in the way that she recuperates the aesthetic properties of quotations from various pop-cultural and/or bureaucratic materials elsewhere in her work.
But there's something else going on here that the occipital horn marks in "To a Snail." The words "occipital horn" are a note of finality; they are the last words in the poem, but also the last and incredibly fitting words in a lengthy, syntactically balanced, chiasmic sentence, a real rhetorical gem. When we get to "occipital horn," we have settled. We have landed, and landed with finality, on something solid, an apparently technical term for a part of the snail. This is why the tricky reversal -- the technical term turning out not to be technical but rather metaphorical -- might seem a little rude.
But not only are we not being punked, I would argue; we are being offered a sense of the real. Turns like the one I've just described characterize the experimental mode all the time. Things are not what they seem -- that's why we need complex experimental processes and regulation of the senses to access reality. The experimental mode takes this as a given; to push on the capacities of technical language doesn't therefore make us lose faith in technical language in general, but rather ground us in the exigencies of particularity that make "occipital horn," in this moment, metaphorical rather than strictly referential. (There is, in fact, such a thing as an occipital horn. Two such things. But not on a snail.) The turn, the revelation that things are not as they seem, helps to impart the sense of the real. But equally, there's no infinite regress or infinite play of meaning here: the words "occipital horn" finally fill a rôle that's aesthetic, and the syntactic balance of the sentence that these words help to complete support the metaphor and lend it formal solidity in lieu of referential solidity.
This is why the language of the joke or of mischief seems wrong to me in the case of "To a Snail." While the experimental mode can be playful, it is not irresponsible. Experimental play works in the service of negotiating an intractable reality -- like the model of play discussed by D.W. Winnicott in Playing and Reality, for instance. Winnicott isn't central to what I'm saying here, but reality is, because the experimental is above all interested in a place for the genuine, in mobilizing whatever mad powers of language there are to create a sense of the real, to land, ultimately, on something solid. It's a responsible mode -- as some put it, "sincere" -- with all the moral overtones that the word entails. This is not intrinsically good or bad, although I think it produced quite a lot of good art.
But to clarify a little further what I mean, think of the 'pataphysical tradition, which runs through surrealism on one side and the Oulipo on the other. The entire 'pataphysical tradition (as the name suggests) is deeply invested in the trappings of science, but largely in the name of travesty, puerility, and irresponsibility. In the 'pataphysical tradition, an infinite regress of meaning is not only possible but desirable; any obligation to reality may be abdicated; 'pataphysical art treads the fine line between meditation and gimmick, and is not sorry when it strays well into gimmick territory. This is art that actually does want us to lose faith in all that is good and dear -- and to laugh about it. (Flarf is without a doubt indebted to the 'pataphysical tradition.) This, too, has produced good art. But it is qualitatively different from the experimental mode, despite some of its practitioners' insistence on the word "experimental."
The distinction between experimental and 'pataphysical is not the same, by the way, as the distinction between modernist and avant-garde, although perhaps the lines often fall out that way. The distinction between modernist and avant-garde is typically thought of in the terms of a relation to the social body, whereas the distinction between experimental and 'pataphysical is given by an attitude toward knowledge.
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