Sapere Aude!

Today in 1707 and 1724, Henry Fielding and Immanuel Kant were born, respectively. I trust you are holding the appropriate celebrations. I, to honor the former, shall embrace the mixed quality of my moral character by robbing a charity to start another charity. In recognition of the latter, I shall calculate the exact value of the mathematical sublime.

In truth, I am thinking less about Fielding than Kant today, as I near the deadline for turning in my dissertation proposal. In speaking to two of my panel members who occupy quite opposite sides of the spectrum with respect to the beast, I was directed, broadly speaking, to make a choice between being the tip of the sword or its pommel. Do you want to run first into a new disciplinary future, though at the risk of being parried or broken off entirely? Or do you wish to write a reliable but fairly blunt instrument that distantly trails the leading edge?

One of them told me, as I dithered between these positions, to "write the dissertation you want to write." So I come back to Kant, who famously described Enlightenment thus:

Enlightenment is man's emergence from self-imposed immaturity for which he himself was responsible. Immaturity and dependence are the inability to use one's own intellect without the direction of another. One is responsible for this immaturity and dependence, if its cause is not a lack of intelligence, but a lack of determination and courage to think without the direction of another. Sapere Aude! Dare to know! is therefore the slogan of the Enlightenment.

~ from "What is Enlightenment" (1784)

I begin to understand that while you get the most formal direction during your dissertation--after all, you have a dissertation director--it is also the first real step towards maturity.

Why then, do I want to curl up with a stuffed animal and watch cartoons all day?

Fractal Geometry and the Progress of Enlightenment

I was talking with a colleague today about the digitization of the archive. This is a fairly hot topic right now, and it's in the subtext of my still flailing dissertation proposal, but I thought I'd take a few minutes to express my thoughts on the subject.

As I have previously articulated, the progress of Enlightenment in the 18th century depended on a process of systematic reduction of an archive still in the making. Too much knowledge becomes as much an obstacle to Enlightenment as too little; as that which is discovered and set down proliferates, it is increasingly difficult to comprehend into Enlightenment's supposed epistemological endpoint: a System of the World. You just can't account for everything. The system, I'm suggesting, answered this problem with the emergence and proliferation of reducing mechanisms and an organizational hierarchy: the encyclopedia, the anthology, the novel, literary criticism. These became principal (but not exclusive) tools of temporal hiearchization; they separated that which was worth keeping from that which was not, and transmitted it to the present and future. Of course, it wasn't "pure" in the sense of a closed system. Cultural values determined standards of originality and "taste"; copyright law and taxes met with the marketplace and caused tremors. There was plenty that got in wrapped up into the system apart from the mere proliferation of texts.

Nevertheless, the technology made it so that some rubric of temporal hierarchization had to be in place. You couldn't keep all the books in one place; you couldn't figure out everything that was there to be kept; things rotted and fell apart. Choices had to be made; knowledge had to be reduced and contained whether materially or conceptually. Whether it goes to a "good" place or not, any "progress" would seem to depend on leaving some things behind.

The counterargument, of course, must involve the fact that societies change; values change; and what was left behind before might be more useful now. The eighteenth century, for example, wasn't trying to understand itself in the way that scholars try to understand it. We have (or think we have) a different purpose. So we attempt to recover the forgotten, the lost, the texts tossed onto -- to borrow a phrase from Harold Weber -- the garbage heap of memory. And a lot of good stuff has come from doing this. REALLY good, seriously important stuff.

So what's the problem with the digital archive, presuming that eventually, everything will actually be made available and set on equal terms? It can feel like the undoing of Enlightenment, the total victory of some sort of moral or intellectual relativism, the final fracturing of epistemology into as many shards as there are ones and zeroes. We put all that stuff aside in order to get somewhere--why dig it all back up again? I've said it before and I'll say it again--to believe in everything is to believe in nothing. How can you form a theory when you have to account for everything, which, as I've said, is impossible? Does anything actually change, with respect to scholarship, with a completely restored archive? Do we do the same work with the awareness that we're leaving more out? Or will our research actually start to take SO much time, and attempt such extravagant levels of comprehensiveness, that producing anything takes forever? And wouldn't THAT be the end of Enlightenment? Edward Young (and later Emerson, who was certainly no Enlightenment figure, but the substance of what he said is the same) was saying in the mid-eighteenth that people would be better off doing a bit less reading and a bit more writing. But these concerns are already well-trod ground.

Inifinity is the death of meaning. You need an endpoint to give anything you do purpose. It's only the fact that life ends that makes life special. So in that respect, the digital archive is a bad thing. We'll never be able to make sense of it all. Something will contradict everything. It won't cohere, everything will be refutable, and we'll all have to embrace nihilism. And that's just depressing. It might be the reality of things. But why should we be flummoxed by realities? History might not be teleological (religious doctrines aside), but wouldn't it be nice if we kept on thinking we could make it go someplace good anyway? If we treat it that way, might it not happen? Is that more important?

The only hope with respect to the digitization of the archive and the negative effects it could have on scholarship is the possibility that Enlightenment isn't over. That complete availability might return us to a purer Baconian enterprise. The eighteenth century attempted to systematize prematurely. Bacon warned us about that. Then Romanticism came along and splintered everything up into individuality and specialization. The disciplines burrowed narrow and deep for a couple hundred years. We exhausted the potential of what was available. And we have seen -- with interdisciplinarity, with dedesciplinarity -- the beginning of a return to systematizing. But perhaps we the moment has still not come.

I submit that we are trapped in a fractal. That knowledge, as a system, works the same way. The micro level looks just like the macro; the pattern repeats. Enlightenment built its systems out of print. We used what they built to build more systems. Our systems will be the foundation of larger systems. And we will discover that what we thought was a system--or a discipline, a theoretical approach, whatever--was actually just a tiny piece of a much, much larger system that operates the same way but contains everything built over generations of scholarship. I use the encyclopedia to demonstrate this. Every individual edition of an encyclopedia looks like the as of yet unwritten "master" encyclopedia, that will contain all the knowledge of its predecessors. It will be complete, just as each edition was "complete" in the time it was made. What if the entire system works this way? We're all just writing an unbound encyclopedia. What we do will be contained by the next one.

I'm not speaking metaphorically, here. I think the system of knowledge might actually work this way. We treat the Enlightenment like it's over. But the greatest trick the devil ever pulled...this is how the system organizes itself. We're part of that system.

Perhaps our not thinking we still serve its purposes is precisely what enables us to do so? We lose faith in the system--and in doing so we eventually engender precisely those conditions that Bacon predicted would enable the system to emerge?

Well? Anyone want to drink my Kool-Aid? If it all comes true remember you heard it here first. COPYRIGHT.

More is Less

As I try to account for more in this dissertation proposal, I realize only that ever more is left out. Every sentence I write is an event horizon -- the outer edge of a phenomenon I don't understand and which I can only hope leads to some parallel dimension wherein my ideas actually make sense. Though I suspect it's simply a place of infinite density whereat I'll just be crushed into oblivion or spewed out in the form of a depressive Barnes and Noble employee.

Earlier I likened the proposal in its current manifestation to an octopus with a confidence problem trying to juggle two bowling balls, an anvil, four cats, and a chainsaw.

As I've said, I know there's a there there, but for the moment I'm completely off the edge of the map. It's a very difficult genre to work in, the dissertation proposal. Most of my peers have found it challenging, I think. I have set out to pick apart a truly capacious problem, more out of ignorance than ambition. This is the problem when one starts talking about systems. The whole point of a system is that everything's involved. I am no Isaac Newton, I can tell you that; nevertheless, here I am, trying to invent a calculus that'll explain the universe of print.

Here's a choice sentence: "The nature of futurity as a feature of writing changed with the proliferation of print; under the pressure of amassing knowledge in the form of texts, the division of the ephemeral from the durable constituted part of a broader process of epistemological hierarchization involved in the "progressive" model of history associated with Enlightenment ideology."

It's one of the first, and one of the last I believe in.