Technocanonization

I recently received the following CFP:

The Eighth Fordham University Graduate English Association Conference
Innovation and Evolution

October 4, 2008
New York, NY

This interdisciplinary conference seeks to explore the impulse to change, improve and evolve. What sparks literary innovation? How does social change reflect itself in emerging cultural artifacts? How will technological innovations manifest themselves in our cultural productions in the coming months, years, or decades? Is the impulse to innovate a historical phenomenon, or is the word innovation a misnomer? What myths of individual or social progress shape our reading and criticism? What is the potential backlash of innovation? How have the academic disciplines evolved (or devolved)? How and why have genres evolved over time, and how have new genres found a place in the literary canon?

Given my dissertation interests (the proliferation of print and its influence on generic development), this seems like it should be straight up my alley. I have already done some work on the novel and encyclopedia, and I imagine I could mold part of my novel chapter to meet the requirements of the conference. That said, I have put in bold something of particular interest to me -- something that is clearly (and worryingly) becoming of greater interest to those at my own and other universities: the impact of technological innovations.

The first thing I think of is online secondary research databases and what I refer to as the JSTOR effect. In a recent class of mine, we were discussing Dickens. I managed to get an article published on Our Mutual Friend in Dickens Studies Annual a year or so ago, and joked to my students that I didn't fret over them seeking it out because it wasn't on JSTOR. Rather, it's moldering away in meatspace, rightfully being ignored by those who already have enough digital material to root through without tip-toeing through the labyrinthine stacks of the library and risking doing themselves a damage by falling off one of those wheeled step-stool contraptions. You're taking your life in your hands, going after something inconveniently shelved. Best leave it alone--if it's not online, it must not be worth having, anyway; someone somewhere who makes decisions about what merits the medium clearly concluded for whatever reason that the poor folks at DSA didn't make the top tier. Or perhaps the poor folks at DSA had neither the means nor the inclination to seek digital distribution. Obviously, I don't like this or agree with it, but if it isn't already the mentality of most undergraduates it soon will be, and from this generation of undergraduates comes the next generation of graduate students, comes the next generation of professors, comes the next generation of undergraduates. The new library is digital; materiality is immaterial; the part replaces the whole; discourse is therefore restricted. This much is just a rehashing of Foucault and Liebniz and a whole bunch of other would-be librarians throughout the ages who fretted the irreconcilable tension between the essential and the comprehensive and ultimately had to make the same sorts of choices that are still made today: what to keep, what to throw away.

Every new technological medium constitutes a new way to manage the chaos--a theoretically temporary but practically long-term act of implicitly hierarchical reductionism. The pattern proceeds from the encyclopedia right through to the great digital archives: out there is everything. For our purposes, everything is infinite, and infinity is meaningless. So really there is only something, and therefore necessarily not other things. The encyclopedias have everything, but don't really; the libraries have everything, but don't really; JSTOR has everything, but doesn't really. What they have--or aspire to have, or think they aspire to have, or imply that they have--is the best of everything. This book, but not this book, this article but not that, and so on. That's all they can do. What constitutes the "best" changes, of course, but there's always a judgment being made that suggests some sort of value. Book A is online. Book B lives in the stacks; Book C lives in the underground facility; Book D lives at some location three days away; Book E lives in the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Perhaps B through D will all be reborn as PDFs eventually, but the immediate message of the medium is one of temporally based valuation and hierarchization. First things first, as they say.

The "new" genres of the 18th century, and the new features of some old genres, as I'm on about in my dissertation, are technological developments: new media designed to reduce the everything to the something and make the something into everything: the universal canon, everything you need to know. Not everything there is.

I have a Kindle now, and I quite like it. I particularly like the way it fits the pattern of reduction and hierarchization. Never mind the shockingly McLuhanite recreation of the appearance of the printed page--talk about the old medium becoming the contents of the new!--but consider what's available and what's not. Neither the Kindle nor any other electronic reader is likely to render paper entirely obsolete, but imagine an increasing portion of the population choosing this medium over print because (after the initial capital outlay) the books are cheaper, the acquisition is faster, the device is more transportable, etc. All of this should sound familiar. This readership has, at the moment, "more than 110,000 books available, including more than 90 of 112 current New York Times® Best Sellers." You can also get:

• Top U.S. newspapers including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post; top magazines including TIME, Atlantic Monthly, and Forbes—all auto-delivered wirelessly.

• Top international newspapers from France, Germany, and Ireland; Le Monde, Frankfurter Allgemeine, and The Irish Times—all auto-delivered wirelessly.

• More than 250 top blogs from the worlds of business, technology, sports, entertainment, and politics, including BoingBoing, Slashdot, TechCrunch, ESPN's Bill Simmons, The Onion, Michelle Malkin, and The Huffington Post—all updated wirelessly throughout the day.

Boldface added. Kindle is a business venture, they want to attract customers, so they're making the most popular stuff available--the TOP stuff. Whatever constitutes topness on the internet is being carried over to the Kindle--but the Kindle, for the moment, simply does not give access to the not-top stuff. Where's the cutoff? More than 250 top blogs (who knew there were 250 top blogs? Top according to what? Hits? I have no idea)? Is that 260? 270? Why not 271? Who decided where to draw the line, and close off access to those who have decided to make this their principal, if not only, way of reading? This is nothing short of a technodetermined canon--a technocanon that could for some constitute a new, smaller everything. And who on earth is going to read 110,000 books, all the bestsellers, 250+ blogs and however many newspapers?

If we choose these new media--these new technologies--we (for the foreseeable future, anway) accept the temporal hierarchy, the notion that some things are only to be had later, if at all. It is in the nature of these media to demand these hierarchies; not everything can be made available all at once. So the necessity of a canon is technodetermined, but the contents of the canon derive from another, equally necessary but far less transparent process of human mediation. Information has to get through someone (person, institution, policy) in order to get to the Kindle in order to get to us. This has to happen; the human element can't be removed, even if it can be directed. If you set Kindle policy, or JSTOR policy, or ECCO policy, what order would YOU do things in?

None of this is particularly earth-shattering, I'm sure--I was just set off by the CFP. I look forward to watching the progress of archival projects like JSTOR and ECCO and EEBO and so on. I'm no utopian--I don't think they'll ever get around to everything. And even if they did, it wouldn't matter, because I can't read everything.

In fact, I'm pretty sure that the expanding archive will simply result in new opportunities in specialization. We will define whole mini-canons with our search terms, and as we need to weed out more of the more we'll pick narrower and narrower parameters. We will have to know more about less because the more is unmanageable. What does thorough research look like with a million documents at your fingertips? What first book wouldn't take a lifetime to write? The comprehensive archive cannot be understood comprehensively. The seventeenth-century librarians knew it; the eighteenth-century encyclopedists knew it; Sterne even sent up the idea in Tristram Shandy. Hence ever-increasing specialization.

Hello, my name is X. I'm interested in January 1st - January 31st, 1701 studies. What's YOUR period? Oh, you don't agree with periodicity. You say you study three-footed marmosets named Trevor in lyric poetry? I see.

I seem to have gone mad.

Gumming up the Works

In the September 24, 2007 issue of New York Magazine (which I typically thumb through while waiting for the kettle to boil or waiting for The Simpsons to come on), I came across a brief article that rather flipped my switch. Other dissertators I know have spoken of the eerie synchronicity that comes with deep involvement in a project--the sense that somehow everything is relevant, that everything everyone is talking about somehow relates to your own work. Those of you who know me well will know that I already thought everything was about me, dissertation notwithstanding. Nevertheless, even the most hardened amongst you will have to acknowledge the appropriateness of what follows.

Gum, apparently, is proliferating. I've been writing about organizational mechanisms arising subsequent to proliferation, and have even gone so far as to suggest that the rise of the novel is more intimately involved in this than has usually been stipulated. A reading audience with a taste for poems, plays, romances, epics, comedies, treatises, sermons, essays etc. can have their thirsts slaked by the super-enriched vitamin smoothie that the novel becomes over the course of the first half of the 18th century.

But back to the gum.

"It seems that new kinds of chewing gum proliferate daily," Ben Mathis-Lilley writes. "With bodega cash registers now besieged by both the classical brands and tortured-sounding variations thereon. We decided to determine the best of each genre--mint, fruit, and bubblegum--by doing a comprehensive taste test" (62).

If Fielding's comic epic in prose isn't a novelist's answer to Trident Minty Sweet Twist, I don't know what is. The "new" province of writing that he shaped into Tom Jones takes your classic brands (comedy, epic, mint) and combines them with new flavors (realism, moral ambiguity, Sweet Twist). But the point here is that as soon as there is proliferation, or the perception of proliferation (and I have to say I think it was "5" gum that put ME over the top), there follows a need or desire to establish a hierarchy of value. Some critic shows up to read/chew it all up and tell me what I can leave on the shelves with respect to book and gum alike. Wylie Dufresne and Alex Stupak, a chef-proprietor and pastry chef, inform me that in chew-wise the classics are actually the best. So your Iliad is Wrigley's Spearmint and your Margites (if we hadn't lost the thing) would undoubtedly be Bazooka Joe (valued by the critics here for its "classic" flavor).

Between them (both in flavor and on the actual magazine page) in the fruit category is Adams Sour Cherry, which I haven't tried, but which I am nonetheless confident would to an adept synaesthesiac taste like Tom Jones reads.

All other gums--and books--you can discard as being both literally and figuratively beneath your taste.

The Medium is what, now?

I have read Understanding Media more than once. I consider myself bright--not a genius, certainly, in the solving a Rubik's Cube while blindfolded way--but I like to think I'm somewhere on the right side of the bell curve. Nevertheless, I do not fully understand the distinction, such as there is one, between technology and medium, to say nothing of the distinctions between medium, genre, format, and form. I hereby invite my betters to enlighten me with respect to all things McLuhan.

In the thin tissue of lies that my dissertation proposal is rapidly turning out to have in fact been all along, I wrote a line that has since become a bit of a sliver in my eye: "Following Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media, 'old' literary forms became the contents of the 'new' organizational technology called 'the novel.' Rather than read an epic, a comedy, and a romance, for example, one could read Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, a 'comic epic-poem in prose.'

Statement of the obvious that it is, I have begun to wonder if I'm not grossly misapplying McLuhan's understanding of media to matters of genre. To allay this fear requires a better understanding of media than I have.

Certainly the novel as it came to be understood in the latter half of the eighteenth-century (at least according to Watt and his ilk)--a realistic middle-class prose narrative, to be reductive about it--behaves and/or causes the sort of behavior attributed to a new technology (I'll overlook for the moment the most obvious of these being "newness" to which the novel repeatedly laid claim). The new realistic novel mediates, as I suggested above, older forms, and as McLuhan says specifically a new medium will always have an old medium for its content. Writing is a new medium that has speech as its content; print is a new medium that has writing as its content. The novel contains (and by containing, changes) the romance, poetry, essays, letters, sermons, what have you. They are mediated by the novel at the same time they constitute it--which is where I run into the perilous form/content quagmire. Is it the content that makes the novel what it is? Or is it something else? Or is content AND something else? And if the novel is a medium having another medium as its content, then what do these other literary forms mediate? How is the romance a medium, when one could argue that it's print that constitutes the medium and content that makes the romance?

Certainly Dr. Johnson seems have fallen into what McLuhan calls the "somnambulism" of the content-worrier; it's the mixture of vice and virtue that bothers him about Tom Jones. To me that reads as a man concerned about a supposedly "neutral" tool fallen into the wrong hands, like General David Sarnoff claiming at the University of Notre Dame that the goodness or badness of a technological instrument depends on the use to which it's put (McLuhan 23). If guns shoot our enemies, they're good. If they shoot our enemies, they're bad. The gun in itself is neither. The novel is out there; Johnson simply wanted Richardson behind the trigger rather than Fielding. If novels present pure pictures of virtue a la Clarissa, they're good. If they portray moral ambiguity a la Tom Jones, they're bad. This interpretation of Johnson's statement could construe "the novel" as a technology used to represent and comprehend the real world. The bigger deal--the medium being the message part of this affair, as the rise-of-the-novel folk might tell you--is that it's the "real" world that's going to be represented, as opposed to some idealized nonsense with noble heroes, mustache-twirling villains, and perhaps the occasional dragon.

I am thinking specifically here of Lennox's The Female Quixote (1752), in which the female protagonist, Arabella, is both so comically and frustratingly addled with French romances that they utterly define her reality. The characters around here, with whom the readers are clearly meant to identify, are appropriately befuddled, bemused, or beleaguered by this epistemological and ontological aberration. In technological terms, and borrowing from the lexicon of a medium oft-cited by McLuhan, this could be construed as the difference between black-and-white versus color television. The medium is the same--television--but there's a critical technological development that permits more "realistic" portrayal of an image (setting aside considerations of cinematographic aesthetics, etc.--I'm just trying to draw out a distinction; the analogy breaks down a bit quickly). We are meant to snicker at Arabella, just as we frequently snicker at someone who refuses to live in the now--the "now," as it so often is, being technologically defined. Email, cellphone, computer instead of letter, landline, typewriter. Realistic novel (Female Quixote, Tom Jones, Clarissa) instead of romance. (My friends snicker at me because I still watch television the old way--that is, with commercials--because I don't have TiVo.) The realistic novel is a technological improvement over the romance so long as realism is defined as the desirable quality. It does a better job of representing the "real" world.*

Another way of phrasing the question might be to ask how "technology" can be broken up--are there subtechnologies, the way there are subgenres. Is genre itself a subtechnology? If genre is a way in which we organize information, and if organizing information is fundamental to the self, and if technology is an extension of the self, is not then genre a form of technology? If language is technology, as McLuhan says, and if language organizes (and perhaps restricts) thought (as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis very problematically suggests), then why shouldn't genre be thought of the same way, if our understanding and communication of information is at least in part and perhaps significantly determined by genre conventions? As it was with Arabella until she got some new tools?

Here's another question with respect to language and technology. Language, let us say, is a technology. That's the thing itself--language, the capacity, the organ, the phenomenon, however you think of it. What then, is French, or English, or Latin? Each has its own rules, permits or proscribes different constructions. It's not enough to say that English is a kind of language. Is format the appropriate term? A way to convert data to information for observation and interpretation? Should I be thinking of genre in terms of format, rather than technology?


*It's worth mentioning that there's reason to interpret Arabella's initial technogeneric (you should absolutely throw rotten vegetables at me for that not-long-for-this-world neologism) recalcitrance as ironic. Her memory for the romances she reads is beyond belief, and her deployment of romantic tropes is such that it may be (has to be?) Lennox satirizing via exaggeration the establishment's concern that this is precisely the effect romances and novel-reading would have on young women. If girls really went about thinking that romances were real, they wouldn't last terribly long because we'd lock them up as lunatics. Arabella is ridiculous; we know she's ridiculous, and that ridiculousness is Lennox telling men that whatever the dangers of bad novels and romances might be, women aren't that ridiculous because that kind of ridiculousness just isn't possible.

Scriblerus Detecting Agency

My dissertation, as I have now severally said, will explore the problematic of posterity in British Literature of the long eighteenth-century. While life-in-and-after-text has been the concern of authors for millenia, the futurity of writing changed under the pressure of print proliferation in this period. Print widens an author's reachable audience, allows mass production, etc. Do that for enough people and the promise of print is undercut by an unfortunate (from the perspective of the egomaniac) democratization. So how the hell do you manage to get to the top of the field? That's really the question I'm setting out to answer. I imagine you do a number of things. Trod on other authors. Offer more bang for the buck. Create hierarchies based on taste, or wealth, or morals. But you've heard all this before.

In my attempting to put forth an argument, I have apparently skewed too far towards the System. I have cowered behind emergences and mechanisms. Genres emerged to do this or that; some could or couldn't; some lasted or didn't. Where, a couple of my professors asked, is the human agency? You can't simply go around barking about how this or that occurred, because, as one rather poignantly put it, you end up with a dissertation written entirely in passive constructions. Everything is acted upon and nothing (or no one) acts. And this won't win you any friends at parties.

I never intended to leave out the human element. Despite the influence from certain quarters that would have had me taking the human out of the humanities, I never imagined ceding that ground. When we say human, of course, I think what we usually mean is "unpredictable." Samuel Johnson manages to get himself into a position to make pronouncements about the quality of literature. Who on earth could know what he would say? How does the system account for that? The Licensing Act drives Fielding from the stage, so he takes up novel writing. Who's to say he couldn't have gone to law school, like a normal person? If the human didn't matter, then you'd have to conclude that even without Fielding Tom Jones, or something very much like it, would have been written anyway, and done the same work. And to some extent, this is what Foucault has been said to have said. Though I think his position on the matter has been largely overstated.

So I have encountered skepticism in one person, bewilderment in another, and encouragement in the last. And here's me thinking about law school.

Genre is where agency meets system. It's the mediator between the forces at work and the worked upon; it is also what enables the worked upon to work upon the forces at work. The power flows both ways through the gate. This, as I understand it, is feedback. So what I want to do is figure out is the role of genre in organizing literature with respect to time. And when I say genre, I do it with the understanding that human agency is implicit. How do you tweak the genre you've chosen to position yourself at the top of the temporal hierarchy? Ensure you'll reach the future? And how do those genres become durable in themselves? Do genres become disciplines? I think they do. Maybe. Possibly. Who knows.

I have felt utterly stupid now for a year.

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.

The Candidate

In the fabled words of Henry V: let there be sung Non Nobis and Te Deum. I realize that the comprehensive exams are the Harfleur rather than the Agincourt of the doctoral process, but I am determined to enjoy this victory nonetheless. Please help yourself to a cigar.

In retrospect, I over-prepared. I read all but 10 or so items on my lists. I can't speak to how much I remember. The orals component did not go quite so smoothly as did the written, for which part I enjoyed a full week of remarkable lucidity, but nor did they bring down heaps of criticism on my head. After a minor but somewhat mortifying scheduling mishap that delayed the start by 45 minutes, we were underway.

Et sic per gradus, ad mia tenditur.

I believe my best answers in orals were in response to questions about the development of poetic authority in the Early Modern period. In the essay, I started with Sidney's Defence of Poesy and managed to incorporate, in order, Spenser, Shakespeare, Marvell, Donne, and Milton -- not quite chronological, but not bad for 2988 words. Questions were mostly directed towards my reading of Milton as a dis-integrated author in Paradise Lost. Milton , I claimed, deliberately put recognizable elements of his personal and political identities in the mouths of multiple and oppositional characters in the poem in an effort to prevent a unified "Milton" emerging from the text -- a Milton whose reputation would yoke the epic to the limiting context of his role as a Cromwellian. In order to maximize his poetic authority -- something that, keeping in line with notions of sola scriptura, had to derive from the poem rather than the poet -- he had to rise above the personal and political.

My best essay explored the relationship of generic durability with respect to The Dunciad, Chambers' Cyclopaedia, and Tristram Shandy. As I have already written, my thoughts in this area are at the foundation of my nascent dissertation proposal, so it was nice to hear that they were very well received. My answers in orals, however, were not as well delivered. I did not fare so well in responding to a change in the angle of attack. I dithered over questions of technodeterminism and its relation to the durability of knowledge despite having spent ample time with the texts or actual persons of Marshall McLuhan and Cliff Siskin. My interviewer distinguished between technodeterminism and the generic or classificatory approach I took in the essay, and I did not make the transition gracefully. I think I too well convinced myself of the merits of my own agument, and resisted alternate approaches. A bad habit, to be sure.

At any rate, I was congratulated, told that it sounded like I was well on my way to a dissertation proposal, and advised to take a week or two off before I returned to tackle it properly.

So -- smoke if you got'em.