The Angel and the Algorithm(s)

For this most part this post is about not having posted recently. It'll therefore be largely free of anything approaching in-depth analysis, discussion, quotation, or purposefulness.

Also I want to finish it before Lost comes on.

I've spent the last few weeks bogged down by an examination of Paradise Lost that I now feel fairly certain will end up being thoroughly redundant. A wiser scholar than I might say there's no shame in not having anything new to say about Paradise Lost; few do. A crueler scholar than I might say I was a fool to have stuck my more than postlapsarian nose into Milton's rather fully explicated Eden in the first place. Not that Milton scholarship is a matter of nil dictum quod non dictum prius, as so many seventeenth-century authors insisted was also not true of whatever it was about which they thought they had something more to say. Rather that (in keeping with my larger and no less painfully self-evident arguments) there's so much that has been said that figuring out what hasn't demands more years of dedicated scholarship than I currently possess or can conveniently acquire. This of course is a typical frustration. I'd have been much better off, as we all surely would, by reaching down to the very dregs of the archive for some all-but-lost scrap of sui-generis something-or-other the very discovery of which would garner me the full range of literary prizes and qualify me for high government office. But I didn't do that. I did this instead. May the sin lie heavy on my head.

Ah; I needed that.

My re-reading of Paradise Lost was quite coincidentally paired with a bit of pop-technocultural non-fiction in the form of Randall Stross's interesting (but mostly underwhelming) Planet Google: One Company's Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know. The subtitle is what drew me in--my interest in encyclopedias and encyclopedism made it seem a nice way to wet my feet in that sea of technobabble I will have to navigate in the final chapter of this my self-created Sisyphean nightmare. I'm one of those who has managed to use the internet quite happily and effectively without at all understanding it, and as I'm attempting to take the diachronic view of those genres of Enlightenment that specifically involved themselves in the work of information organization it seemed to me a little pre-google-as-verb history of search engines and other forms of web-based mediation would one day serve me well. I didn't start using the internet with any regularity until well after the first-generation consumer ISPs had gone the way of my Apple IIC and AOL's web-within-the-web had been more or less dismissed as the internet's answer to the kiddie-pool. In other words, I didn't really know what was happening until after everything had already changed.

Stross's book helped to fill in the space around my memories of people sneering at AOL's early services and in so doing I noticed some connections to, of all things, Paradise Lost. Some of these are happy accidents of metaphor; others are, I think, more interesting similarities involving genre, technology, and how the fundamental change in both spheres revolves around the problem of information management.

I'm going to set aside Milton's strident Protestantism for the moment and consider the poem from a more secular epistemological perspective. Recent scholarship has amply covered Milton's Baconian leanings and the presence of a divinely authorized version of experimentalism in his Eden. Like many things that to Milton defined the postlapsarian experience -- division of labor, strife between the sexes, the hunger for knowledge -- it would seem that the empiricism and experimentation that were redefining human learning in seventeenth century England also had some purchase in the garden, albeit in a more refined, more perfect, or otherwise crucially different state. That said, the principal means by which Adam learns what he does not know inherently is through the archangelic mediation of Raphael, whom God sends down to provide about four books' worth of expert tutorials on the creation of the universe, the war in heaven, and celestial mechanics. Raphael articulates the proper boundaries of human learning and determines on our first parents' behalf what counts as the knowledge truly worth having and what they should consider irrelevant.

When Eve gets a bit too peckish and ruins it for the rest of us, the pair are turned out of the garden and we lose that wonderfully supernatural means of mediation. In the ghastly postlapsarian world occupied by Milton, which was busily being peered at, picked apart, set ablaze and vivisected by Bacon's followers in the Royal Society, the way back to a complete understanding of God's Creation -- complete knowledge -- was via the diligent collection of epistemic fragments. Whereas Raphael once told us what was essential to forming a perfect understanding the universe, we now had to take the comprehensive approach -- learning as we went and determining for ourselves as best we could the good from the bad, the true from the false, the relevant from the irrelevant. Progress now depended on mediators of our own making, whether in the form of scientific methods that produced a better class of knowledge, instruments that extended the power of our limited corporeal faculties, or textual compendia that collected the knowledge worth keeping and preserved it for the benefit of posterity.

Now back to AOL. In its earliest days, AOL customers who logged on to the service accessed what technocrats refer to as "the walled garden" model of the internet. AOL employed a staff of people whose job it was to identify the best sources of information online and point users to the relevant sources when search inquiries were made. Ideally, then, all of the information contained within AOL's walled garden would be good--relevant, reliable, what have you. Beyond the wall was chaos--a realm of information good and bad, useful and useless, present but not organized. No sense troubling one's self with that.

The problem, of course, is that human mediation of the kind that made the garden such a safe place is not efficiently scalable. We're no angels; humans can only read so much, and once the amount of information through which AOL's staffers had to crawl in search of good value became too large, they could no longer provide the same quality of service. Users, moreover--in their unending desire for more and better--began to consider the garden more hindrance than haven. It was only a matter of time before the walls came down.

The web, to a greater extent than any other entity in human history, represents the comprehensive--the place where everything can be recorded, transmitted, preserved (preservation is a sticky subject here -- consult your local archivist about the foolhardiness of relying on digital technologies for long-term durability). The amount of knowledge available online far surpasses the ability of any individual to find what's useful. Enter Google and their (in)famous Algorithm, which acts as the digital answer to Milton's Raphael. The algorithm now identifies the essential from within the comprehensive: it mediates the masses of information and returns to users a list of sources theoretically organized by relevance.

Obviously, the algorithm is not as perfect as the angel, though perhaps to most people they're almost equally incomprehensible. I'm not entirely sure how the algorithm works in conjunction with crawlers, loggers, indices, etc., and for the most part Google is happy to keep it that way. I will say that I frequently treat its results with as much innocence as Adam did Raphael--a phenomenon that concerns Google's detractors and competitors in the world of seach engines.
Not everything Google points one to is good -- Wikipedia (another institution that conflates the comprehensive with the complete and has experienced its fair share of credibility concerns) frequently turns up at the top of search results -- and those in the know can work the system to their advantage.

And of course Raphael did not attempt to profit from click-through ads.

I have more to say about all this, but I don't (alas) know enough about it yet to do so.

Lost was excellent tonight, I thought.

Austen hates a know-it-all

In delivering a decidedly off-the-cuff and mercifully perfunctory critique of what I am for the moment referring to as an accidental chapter of my so-called dissertation, one of my directors asked, in so many words, "what about Austen?"

By which she meant, how could I justify my argument that Sterne mocked the encyclopedical (a perilous neologism) projects of the Richardsonian and Fieldian novels with Tristram Shandy because by 1759 the novel was in danger of collapsing under its own weight? Given that--as is certainly the case--we so incontestably have Richardson and Fielding to thank for what did in fact become the novel as we now know it? And further, given that Austen just as incontestably carried forth a great many features of their novels? In short, she asked (thought not with hostility--she seemed rather pleased with the chapter), "are you quite sure you've not done something incredibly stupid? I ask because it's a question you're likely to get in a job talk."

And for the first time while under the lights of this particular examiner, I had a response.

Sterne, I said, declared the end of the encyclopedic novel (the nineteenth centuryists among you are lighting torches and sharpening pitchforks--I should say that "long" does not equal encyclopedic, that Moby Dick did not enjoy tremendous success in its time, and that rather than wipe the form from the face of the earth Sterne merely assisted in highlighting its inadequacies) by writing one that wonderfully fails to achieve what it sets out to accomplish. Certain features of the Richardsonian and Fieldian novels were perfectly valuable and durable--psychological complexity, moral ambiguity, intricate plots, what have you. But systematicity and epistemological comprehensiveness were untenable; complete knowledge was not to be had in any book, be it encyclopedia or novel. Things have to be left out.

Obviously Richardson and Fielding left out a great deal. Their texts weren't comprehensive--but they aspired to a kind of completeness that created a false epistemological totality that I think Sterne thought made them terribly dated and rendered them obsolete rather than immortal. Immortality, Tristram Shandy suggests, is in questions rather than answers; the possibility of further discovery rather than a complete record of the supposedly immutable. Sterne elevates the incomplete and the fragmentary in place of the complete and comprehensive because no work could ever be both comprehensive and complete.

What on earth has this to do with Jane Austen?

From a letter dated Tuesday 9 February, 1813:

Ladies who read those enormous great stupid thick Quarto Volumes, which one always sees in the Breakfast parlour there, must be acquainted with everything in the World.--I detest a Quarto. --Capt. Paisely's Book is too good for their Society. They will not understand a Man who condenses his Thoughts into an Octavo.

Austen is not commenting here on novels, of course--but she is remarking upon a taste for comprehensive knowledge. She had been applied to for information on the oath of Bell Book and Candle, and had none to give (the oath turns out to be part of an archaic excommunication ceremony of the Catholic church--this makes me think of the excommunication that takes place in Tristram Shandy, but of course there's nothing more there than coincidence). There's no need to be acquainted with everything in the world, Austen suggests, and I see no reason why that philosophy shouldn't have been carried over into the composition of her own works.

One might call this a stretch, but when one considers (as I asked my interrogator to do) the sheer tonnage of scholarship done on the significance of what Austen leaves out of her novels, taking this part of her letter for a statement of resistance against epistemological comprehensiveness might make a bit more sense. Austen's novels are very particularly about what they're about, and they're very consciously and, I think, comfortably not about everything. That time in the novel's history had passed; one could have one's sensibility without having to make sense of the Siege of Namur, a trip to Europe, a cyclopedia, or a treatise on the importance of names and noses.

Why my prof. didn't seem to think I should make this part of the chapter, I don't know; maybe it's part of the book that comes later. At least for now I have an answer to what she thought would definitely be a question.

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.

Compiled upon a New Plan

This is a plate from my latest acquisition -- a facsimile of the first edition Encyclopaedia Britannica (1768-1771). I first became fascinated by early encyclopedias in the autumn of 2005. The professor of my "Genres of Enlightenment" course kindly permitted me to borrow his, and I found it absolutely enthralling, both materially and conceptually. I wrote about the durability of knowledge and the function of the encyclopedia with respect to that durability at the level of individual edition and genre (those of you interested in encyclopedias -- that poor genre too often overlooked by eighteenth-centuryists in favor of the novel and periodical -- should absolutely thumb through Richard Yeo's Encyclopaedic Visions).

The image to the left is that of a dial, described by William Smellie (the compiler of the first edition) thusly:

An universal dial, shewing the hours of the day by a terrestrial globe, and by the shadows of several gnomons, at the same time: together with all the places of the earth which are then enlightened by the sun; and those to which the sun is then rising, or on the meridian, or setting.

The description is followed by instructions on how to build one and how to use it. Naturally, I rather want one.

The plates throughout the edition are wonderful: there are astronomical charts explaining retrograde motion that look as though they were done by spirograph; intricate drawings of various machines and engines; charts of eighteenth-century shorthand symbols; examples of sheet music, bookkeeping records, anatomical sketches. It is not difficult to imagine myself actually reading the whole thing cover-to-cover. What is difficult to imagine is why the people at Britannica decided to reproduce the thing and offer it for sale. It can be purchased directly from their website for $195. They say it "lends an unmistakable air of prestige to any home or office." That rather smacks of buying books by the yard, I think, and I don't imagine anyone who has $200 lying around would purchase the thing for the prestige of it (for the record, I received it as a gift, but if I hadn't I absolutely would have bought it eventually).

I shall be consulting the three volumes of the edition severally over the course of my dissertation. Indeed, the temptation to use the thing as an encyclopedia of the eighteenth century is nearly overwhelming. Will I go to Locke when I need Locke, or will I go to Smellie's entry on Metaphysics -- which he lifted from Locke wholesale? What epistemological traps do I risking falling into? Are they the same as those fallen into by the original users?

At any rate -- anyone who wishes to know about any part of knowledge as it stood in the last quarter or so of the eighteenth century, please let me know. I'll look it up for you.