INXS

First of all, many thanks to Alice for the free press. Her recent entry is the first (and possibly last) demonstration of the relevance of what I'm working on to someone who is neither me nor has been dead for more than two centuries. Generally speaking I prefer a late audience, as I, like so many others, am in the habit of taking by one's silence that he or she agrees; but, as the living go, she is absolutely aces.

Secondly, why have I titled this entry after an Australian rock band that will this very summer be celebrating its twentieth anniversary? For a number of reasons:

1. I am following Alice's use of the word "excess" in her title
2. The band has shown durability beyond both my hopes and expectations and done so in the cyclical fashion enjoyed by many the canonical text
3. The name of said band gets at one of my hobbyhorses--it eliminates "excess" information: that is, a space between words, two "e's", a "c", and an "s".
   
4. I am hopelessly ridiculous.

In reading Alice's post and learning of Gordon Bell's digitally archiving what anyone but the most dedicated voyeur, narcissist, or future anthropologist would likely discard as the excruciating minutiae of a life that had better turn out to be remarkable for more than having digitally archived what anyone but the most dedicated voyeur, narcissist, or future anthropologist...

I'll start again.

It's interesting that Bell is recording everything in a digital archive, as digital technology is precisely that upon which all the archivists whose works I've read suggest an archivist should not rely. It is not, to deploy what I have recently discovered is not "my" buzzword, durable. If you want a durable medium, you're still far better off with analogs--stone, metal, quality paper, etc. If you have anything that's important to you on a 5 1/4 floppy, you know what I'm talking about. I haven't read the Bell (and I don't mean to disparage his character at all; I agree with Alice that he's up to something terribly interesting), so I'm sure he's aware of this.

It does bring up an interesting part of the technology tradeoff, which until I'm better educated I'm going to think about in spatial and temporal terms. Scanning, photodocumenting, etc. -- anything that eliminates the middlemen of analog conservation processes -- enables closer-to-comprehensive documentation by saving both time and space. Space is the easy part. The problem with analog storage is of course that it takes up so much damn real estate. Bell can only do what he's doing because he doesn't have to buy a small moon on which to keep everything he wishes to preserve. As Gabriel Naudé lamented in the seventeenth century, comprehensive knowledge is impossible with respect to space because comprehensive data storage and therefore retrieval are impossible. Or, as comedian Steven Wright put it, "you can't have everything. Where would you put it?" The selection process of survival and canonicity, a librarian will tell you, or might have formerly told you, is driven as much by space as anything else. One wonders to what extent matters of taste came to prominence precisely because proliferation put space at a premium and demanded more stringent and nigh-on metaphysical standards of valuation. "What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed" is nothing if not quantity reduced to quality. The best expression can stand in for (take the space of) the countless iterations of something clogging up everyone's brains and bookshelves. (The entry on "memory," included in the treatise on metaphysics in the first edition Encyclopedia Britannica (1768-1771) and culled -- in another space-saving gesture -- from John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding uses spatial metaphors such as "storehouse" and "repository" to describe the memory. We're hardly out of the habit.) Now, of course, all we have to do is define "best." Plenty of people around willing to do that.

So, the gizmodification of the world buys us space. The library without walls envisioned by frustrated Enlightenment types can finally exist; total storage and total retrieval are theoretically possible; we can put everything everywhere (of course, this doesn't mean that we can just get rid of the analog "originals." Book historians now weep over the countless manuscripts cast aside when their contents were brought out in print, and as this article suggests, space remains a huge problem. Also interesting and having to do with space, storage, and digital technology is this article).

Tech also buys you time, but the relationship of proliferation to time is a bit more complicated. The proliferation of print is indeed all about time--as Polydore Vergil wrote in 1499 (and as Thomas Langley translated half a century or so later): "one man may print more in one day, than many men in many years could write." You're going to run out of space one way or another, but with high rates of production and increased distribution you're going to run out of more space faster. So in that respect time is the primary concern, but the advantage of speed was one of the most highly praised with respect to the printing press. I'm guessing that it's similarly the temporal advantage of technology even more than the storage concern that makes Bell's project feasible. You certainly can't write to the moment, as Tristram Shandy laments (Fielding's take on this in Shamela is, by the way, one of my favorite things in literature), but with the right gadgets you could perhaps nearly digitize to the moment -- one man may scan more in a day, etc. This I think is the point of Twitter. Limiting the time it takes to make a record (twitter restricts you to 140 characters per message) makes it possible to make more records. As one friend tells me, you send these little missives "all day long." Assuming you can find the right medium between doing things and recording things done, you've got a much more detailed picture of a life to be viewed by you and your posterity at some point down the line.

Or do you? Do 100 140-character notes add up to one 1400-word document? If we don't know what you thought of that bottle of Romanee Conti the label of which you've scanned, or that you barely had space enough to tell us you drank, we might think the more important part of your history has been left out. How do we define ephemera? Dictionaries define it as referring to written or printed documents intended to have a brief lifetime (remarkable how long the concept of "life" has been wrapped up in that of writing. Writing doesn't just exist, or remain--it lives). Ephemera is something you read, and immediately discard. So are my friends' 140-character messages ephemera? What happens to them if I keep them, collect them, string them together, reconstitute them as some sort of narrative? Are they still ephemera? In choosing to record a life 140 characters at a time rather than burden yourself or your friends with "long" entries, could you end up producing an ephemeral 140,000 word document?

What's happened here is an important switch in perspective. So far I've been mostly writing about production. The other side of that coin is of course consumption, and it's on this side that the temporal and spatial advantages of technology meet the limitations of being human. Technology may have allowed you to record twenty years of minutiae and given you a convenient way of carrying it about, but it hasn't given me twenty extra years in which to review it. And if Monsieur Naudé had managed to secure, oh, let's say the entire Left Bank for his Master Library I'm not entirely sure how much time he'd have left to poke about in it. I've written about this problem before -- you can't read everything, and depending on why you're reading, it's possible that you oughtn't to read too much in the first place. Technology doesn't buy the consumer more time; rather, in the context of an increasing and increasingly available body of knowledge contained in print, it makes the same amount of time "worth" less. It's all perfectly well and good if a couple of friends want to send me or make otherwise available ten, twenty, thirty messages a day. I'll be very up-to-date. But if five friends do the same, one wonders if it will start being more trouble than it's worth. And if ten friends do the same, that gives me up to 300 X 140 characters, or 42,000 characters, to read per day. That's just under 30 double-spaced pages of notes. Thank God I'm antisocial. Even so, I can imagine that with much material, I would find myself making decisions about my friends that I would otherwise not have made. "Terribly sorry, old man, but I simply haven't time for any more friends than I can read on the subway. I'm afraid you shall either have to start doing more interesting things with your life, edit yourself down to a reasonable amount, or shove off."

I'm fairly certain that these were roughly the same options readers and/or booksellers gave authors in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Welcome my friends to the show that never ends.

So--on the production side, tech buys time and space. On the consumption side, it makes the process of selection ever more narrowing, and time matters more when space matters less. The only way to combat the time problem caused by proliferation in the absence of spacial inhibitors is a new line in research--a method of knowledge production that reduces time spent in consuming. Though this of course presumes that you're interesting in knowing everything. Or aspiring to knowing everything. Or deluding yourself into thinking you can aspire to know everything. But then, that's what Enlightenment is all about -- with one important distinction. Enlightenment was always about the future. All the mysteries would not be solved in a single lifetime. It would take an untold number to map the mind of the God through the close examination of his works. That meant handing things down, passing them along, securing some sort of continuity that would enable posterity to both understand and carry on the work.

This is why the encyclopedists -- Chambers, at least -- imagined the Cyclopaedia as that work with which humanity could start over if all other works were destroyed. Not start over in a complete sense, of course, but start over from where it left off: in the midst of Enlightenment. So, if you had to save one thing from a world on fire...

Hm. Speaking of proliferation and reduction, this entry has had too much of the former and not enough of the latter. Anything to avoid real work.

There's what we know, there's what we don't know...

~or, Sometimes you write your dissertation with the body of knowledge you have, not the body of knowledge you want.

I have started the real research phase of the dissertation, and I don't know about you but for me that means picking a secondary source almost at random and hoping it points me in the right direction. There are a series of questions I'd like answered, and at this point it's as though I'm just issuing subpoenas to everyone in the field of English literature in order to define the scope of the inquiry. I'm not entirely certain what's out there. So far, I've seen my buzzwords in quite a few places, but they're being deployed without, I think, careful attention, and no one I've yet read (SO early to say this with confidence) has yet referred to "durability" in quite the way I think they need to. This gives me hope.

First things first: if you're in this field, you should read David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery's The Book History Reader. The 2nd edition is available new in paperback for under $50. It's simply no longer reasonable to participate in literary studies without at least a smattering of book history. As always, I'm coming a bit late to the game, and while I've read a number of the works excerpted in the reader, I have also encountered a number of perspectives hitherto unfamiliar to me. As an eighteenth-century person, I've also gotten into the bad habit of undervaluing periods not my own, which has left me a bit ignorant regarding manuscript production and oral culture. This in turn has left me unable to appreciate fully the impact of print, which has in turn left me a blithering idiot. Thus do I blither on, but to a lesser extent for the survey this book provides.

I was struck today by what I'm calling the Myth of Knowledge until someone tells me what proper scholars call it. The shorthand for it is my frustration at not being able to know everything, and the suspicion that short of my possessing total knowledge, I'm really just making things up. In reading Elizabeth Eisenstein's important The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, I was uncomfortable with what I perceived as a number of abstractions and assessments supported by individual examples. I don't accuse her of shoddy scholarship--leagues and leagues from that; honestly, it's quite the book. But I began to wonder at what point it is -- how much knowledge we have to possess -- in order to draw a conclusion.

For example: say I'm writing about the usage of a particular term in a given period. The word "widget" is used in this context, in these genres, to mean this, applied to that, etc. In how many texts does it have to occur before I can fairly assess what was at work? If I find it in 1000 texts, and there are 10,0000 to look through, is that enough? What if there are 100,000 texts to search? As if I could ever look through that many? If I don't discover the term and what I think is a telling usage in 51% of extant works from the period, am I not fooling myself? And what happens when I discover the single example of a text in which the term is used in a way that does not come into general use for another century? Just because one guy thought about the same thing a bit differently than everyone else, to what extent is my argument unraveled? What is the value of the individual counterexample?

And here's another question, which stems from D. F. McKenzie's reading of the punctuation in the epigraph opening Congreve's authorized version of "The Way of the World" (1710). He compares it to a slight misquotation of the epigraph by Wimsatt and Beardsley in "The Intentional Fallacy." A comma here, a comma there, and you get a whole different interpretation. I'm reminded here of an episode of The West Wing, in which Toby discovers a potential typo in the U.S. Constitution. Could be a comma, could be a smudge; if a comma, a substantive difference results. If a smudge, a smudge. Now then. To understand Congreve, I have to understand his times, what it meant to write, what it meant to write as a dramatist, what it meant to bring out a version of your play in print or manuscript, and therefore what the differences between print and manuscript were, how those differences affected his position as author and playwright, and so on and so forth. One must historicize. What did it mean to "toil" in 1710? What connotations did the word "wrought" carry? And once I know that, can I even be certain that punctuation worked the same way in the early 18th century? McKenzie suggests that the commas isolate and emphasize a particular phrase. I think he's probably correct, and I don't mean to challenge him on this particular point. Rather, I'm using it as an example to demonstrate the impossible depth and breadth of knowledge required to understand what we might think of as the simplest thing about a text. Commas probably did serve the same function as they do now, though based on some of my students' writing, there's no reason to think that the use of the comma and other syntactical devices hasn't changed dramatically over the years. (Some of my students seem to just write a paper and then sprinkle punctuation marks over it like glitter. But that's for a different day.)

Texts, like people, emerge out of ridiculously complex systems that are scarcely understood in their own times much less hundreds or thousands of years later. If I don't fully comprehend everything that went in to the creation of a text, how can I make an argument about it that isn't some discrediting percentage of rubbish? I'm trying to recreate dinosaurs and I have to use frog DNA to fill in the gaps. We all know what happens when you do that. Raptors try to eat you.

Which brings me to yet another problem I've had with some of the criticism I've been reading. These very clever fellows go back and do the research and present pictures of the past that are utterly contradictory. That's fine, you say; that's the nature of the beast. Some people are going to claim that the printing press was better than scribal culture because it cut down on errors and texts didn't have to get more and more out of whack with every generation. Others are going to remind you that a shoddy printer who was in it for the money would have made things worse precisely because he could work faster without carefully checking his work. That's how you get your "Wicked Bible" of 1631. Sheesh, says the poor printer, you leave one "not" out of the seventh commandment, and everyone goes nuts. (The following lovely moment occurs in Walter Ong's contribution to the Book History Reader: a paragraph ends with, "The printing press simply represented a handy means of multiplying indispensable texts even more rapidly and accurately than was possible under the pecia system." Three sentences later, we get: "more than 2,000 copies of Aristotle's works have come down to us from the and 14th centuries" (151). Accuracy, ha!) But fair enough; different research turns out different results, that's no problem. What we're going to discover is that everything was far more complicated, that everything was going on at once, and that unless you do read everything you can you're going to leave out some nuance, some exception, some thing or other that would have given you "truth" at the expense of clarity.

And this is not to mention the somewhat disturbing tendency a few of these scholars have to treat what they have found in history as though it were available to those alive at the time. Did Pope have the understanding of literacy rates and manuscript v. print production that we have now? I sincerely doubt it. In order to better understand the system of literature at any given period, I should think we'd have to synthesize what was with what was perceived. To which side of the equation you give more weight depends, I suppose, on the sort of work you're trying to write. I scarcely understand how one can write anything that doesn't need to wrangle with both, particularly in the eighteenth century, which I associate with almost staggering self-awareness. There is a system; there are agents within it that can, at best, merely think they know that system. Mmm, dense!

I imagine that those outside the humanities must look at these problems and wonder what on earth we imagine to be the point of these tomes we write -- these theories we offer that can never amount to much more than hopeful essays and well-intentioned approximations. If we're not going to get at the thing as it is, I wonder if we shouldn't construct from the pieces of history whatever we think is useful to us now and for the futures we wish to design. Or more properly, because we already do this by default, why we shouldn't do it without hiding behind the skirts of science. I suppose, though, that that way lies a kind of fascism.

Or Enlightenment.

*addendum
In thinking more about this, as I will, I think a large part of the question is weighing the benefits of sampling against those of an actual census. We're fine with polling data, too, but I don't think anyone would want an election decided by it. If you want real credibility you have to count the votes. Most of them, anyway.