Literature and Evaluation on the Internet

This is a copy of some stuff that I did over at my other blog. I haven't been keeping up my class blog as well, partly because the stuff over there keeps connecting to what I'm thinking about in class.

==================

Sebastian Mary over at if:book has a new post that takes up some more about the problematics of trying to "do literature" on the web. Among many other things, Mary says the following:

'Literature' here evokes a well-rooted (if not always clearly-defined) ideology. When I say 'literary’ I mean things fitting a loose cluster of – sometimes self-contradictory – ideas including, but not limited to:

the importance of traceable authorship
the value of ‘proper’ language
the idea that some kinds of writing are better than others
that some kinds of publishing are better than others
that there is a hierarchy of literary quality

And so on. If examined too closely, these ideas tend to complicate and undermine one another, always just beyond the grasp. But they endure. And they remain close to the core of why many people write. Write, as an intransitive verb (Barthes), because another component of the ideology of ‘literary’ is that it’s a broadcast-only model. If you don't believe me, check out any writers' community and see how much keener would-be Authors are to post their own work than to critique or review that of others. ‘Literary’ works talk to one another, across generations, but authors talk to readers and readers don’t - or at least have never been expected - to talk back. (Feel free, by the way, to roll your own version of this nexus, or to disagree with mine. One of the reasons it’s so pervasive as a set of ideas is because it’s so damn slippery.)

============

Obviously plenty of print books have no literary value. But the ideology of 'literary' is inseparable from print. Authorship is necessary and value-laden at least partly because with no authorship there’s no copyright, and no-one gets paid. The novel packs a massive cultural punch – but arguably 60,000 words just happens to make a book that is long enough to sell for a decent price but short enough to turn out reasonably cheaply. Challenge authorship, remove formal constraints - or create new ones: as O’Reilly’s guides to creating appealing web content will tell you, your online readership is more likely to lose interest if asked to scroll below the fold. Will the forms stay the same? My money says they won’t. And hence much of what’s reified as ‘literary’, online, ceases to carry much weight.

I like a lot of what Mary is groping after here, but I would offer a few caveats. The notion of the "literary" is not coextensive with the creation of books, but came in to being much later than books came in to being. You could trace the notion of the literary to the development of Gutenberg's press, but even that would be a bit anachronistic. Our current use of the term "literary" doesn't really fully develop until late in the eighteenth, early in the nineteenth century, and only becomes a full-blow ideology in the middle and late nineteenth century. Cf Raymond Williams in Marxism and Literature.

This suggests that simply doing away with our sense of the literary might not do away with our sense of the need to categorize and create hierarchies. Criticism is as inevitable as breathing, said T.S. Eliot, and he's right. Even as you read this blog you are evaluating and criticizing, if only to say that this blog is or is not worth the reading time. Cf Barbara herrnstein Smith in Contingencies of Value. To be sure, the methods and means by which we come to determine what is worth doing is very different on the web than it was in Eliot's London, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Indeed, literary criticism as we know it began with Samuel Johnson and others who were trying to figure out, among other things, what was worth their time to read.

One response to this, typical on the web, is to say "Well, I can read anything I damn well please. And who are you to think differently?" But this kind of attitude doesn't hold up for very long. Of course, anyone CAN read anything they want to read, just as people CAN sit in their barcaloungers and drink beer all day. But we constantly evaluate and imagine human activities in terms of what kinds of social worlds they make possible. To admit this isn't to be an elitist. To do otherwise is to imagine a world where I could care less if Bob down the street never bothers to learn to read a book more difficult than "See Dick Run" since, after all, its his personal preference or part of his culture. That's fine, but if his kids and grandkids imitate him, we've got not a personal preference but a social problem. At least in any society that we are currently living in.

All of this is merely an aside to say criticism happens. And it is and will continue to happen on the web. For instance, this week's New York Review of Books contains an excellent article, a review of John Broughton's Wikipedia, The Missing Manual. The review suggests that Wikipedia is entering a mature middle age. One sign of that middle age is a developing set of rules and hierarchies. Nicholson Baker writes of the chaotic creative destruction--and destructive creativity--that characterized wikipedia in the early days, before going on:

At least, that's how it used to be. Now there's a quicker path to proficiency: John Broughton's Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, part of the Missing Manual series, overseen by The New York Times's cheery electronics expert, David Pogue. "This Missing Manual helps you avoid beginners' blunders and gets you sounding like a pro from your first edit," the book says on the back. In his introduction, Broughton, who has himself made more than 15,000 Wikipedia edits, putting him in the elite top 1,200 of all editors—promises "the information you absolutely need to avoid running afoul of the rules." And it's true: this manual is enlightening, well organized, and full of good sense. Its arrival may mark a new, middle-aged phase in Wikipedia's history; some who read it will probably have wistful longings for the crazy do-it-yourself days when the whole proj-ect was just getting going. In October 2001, the first Wikipedian rule appeared. It was:

Ignore all rules: If rules make you nervous and depressed, and not desirous of participating in the wiki, then ignore them entirely and go about your business.

The "ignore all rules" rule was written by co-founder Larry Sanger and signed by co-founder Jimbo Wales, along with WojPob, AyeSpy, OprgaG, Invictus, Koyaanis Qatsi, Pinkunicorn, sjc, mike dill, Taw, GWO, and Enchanter. There were two dissenters listed, tbc and AxelBoldt.

Nowadays there are rules and policy banners at every turn—there are strongly urged warnings and required tasks and normal procedures and notability guidelines and complex criteria for various decisions—a symptom of something called instruction creep: defined in Wikipedia as something that happens "when instructions increase in number and size over time until they are unmanageable." John Broughton's book, at a mere 477 pages, cuts through the creep. He's got a whole chapter on how to make better articles ("Don't Suppress or Separate Controversy") and one on "Handling Incivility and Personal Attacks."

To be sure, these rules and hierarchies function differently than they did elsewhere, but they function nonetheless. Among the consequences of these rules and hierarchies is that some things that are written endure in ways that some other things do not. If not forever, then at least for a while.

I think, then, that we might say that we just haven't developed our understanding yet of what might be possible with the net, and so we haven't developed aesthetic categories appropriate to writing literature on the net.

The other thing to say here is that Sebastian Mary seems to assume that the inherent and necessary character of the net is the interactive elements of Web 2.0. I'm not sure why we need to make this leap. It is like saying that because something can be done, then doing that thing is the only appropriate thing to do. I kind of buy Mary's assertion that the literary is about the completed object. But it's not clear why we can't imagine the web as a space that has both completed objects and never completed interactive spaces.

Indeed, blogs function in some respects as aspects of both, and I'm intrigued by how this could be a clue to a literature of the future. A blog post is, in some respects a completed object. Admittedly, i go back and rewrite and change things here and there, but at somepoint that kind of revision comes to an end. And in some ways it's no different than the kind of endless revision that Whitman did, but eventually stopped doing on leaves of grass.

Commentary, however, doesn't have to come to an end. I'm still getting responses to some of the first blog posts I wrote. Theoretically, these posts could remain objects for commentary for...well...forever. I'm not so vain as to believe that these posts are worth that, but it's possible to imagine creating a literature that would be more or less permanent and fixed that is accompanied by a commentary that is endless. In this sense, the text would be both fixed and endlessly changing to the degree that people would read not only my fantasized literary post, but also the months, years, decades, centuries...who knows...of commentary that would accompany it.

Thus, I think I disagree with mary's assumption that the web is inherently interactive and thus opposed to the literary for a variety of reasons, even while I agree that we haven't quite figured out how to bridge the gap between what's been in place related to that term, and what may be coming in to being.

Foucault Example

This post is really intended to show some of you how to post video to your blog. I'll elaborate on this example in class. Emily Powell has a very nice post on Chomsky and Foucault, so I thought I'd post that youtube video here for your perusal, and to just show you how to put some of these things in your blog.



You can also add pictures of folks like Foucault if you choose:

On Emerson and other things

I haven't been specifically at my own page in a while, too busy commenting on students blogs and trying to keep up my own post. I did write an extended thing on the relationship of Emerson to blogging and reading that's posted over on my personal blog, and that will go up over at teleread sometime soon.

An extended clip from my thoughts on the relationship between Emerson and blogging:

I think this kind of thing, along with Emerson’s deeply felt sense of the interconnections of the immediate world with a world beyond—and with everything else in the world–is where people get the idea that Emerson was some kind of ancient God of the blogosphere. Indeed, Christopher Lydon a few years back said just this thing in an extended blog post called “A God for Bloggers.” The post at its original site is long gone, but is copied in full here . In part, Lydon argues:

Here’s my point. When we talk about this Internet and this blogging software, this techno-magic that encourages each of us to be expressive voices in an open, universal network of across-the-board conversation, we are speaking of an essentially Emersonian device for an essentially Emersonian exercise. Starting with the electronics. “Invent a better mousetrap,” as Emerson wrote, “and the world will beat a path to your door.”

There’s a part of me that thinks Emerson would have loved the fact that Lydon’s post had disappeared, or almost disappeared. This is the perfect condition of reading as far as Emerson is concerned: let the book/blog have its say and go away.

To Lydon’s actual content, I want to say….yeah, kind of….but not really. In the first place, there’s a way in which the technology of blogging and reading blogs tethers us to society—Emerson’s worst dirty word—in a way that books did not, this despite the aura of freedom that surrounds computerworld.

Even with the magnificence of access, I am struck by how physically limited I am in terms of my mode of access. My computer needs a proximate cord and electricity and connections—electricity even if I have a wireless connection, and reliable wireless connections are still hard to come by. Because I know next to nothing about the workings of this machine I’m writing on, because I can do nothing to control my internet connection, because I have to have access to various levels of anonymous administrators and their vast electronic resources, I am in some sense even more dependent, more inescapably tethered to society and its mores and its conventions than Emerson could have ever imagined.

We have the lovely illusion of independent creativity in our isolation, in our loggorhea of the keyboard, in our incessant speech. It’s a little like cocaine makes the addict think he’s an all powerful sex machine. The real power is the man who provides the fix. Or doesn’t. In this case, my internet administrator, or more dumbly, the squirrel that gets itself electrocuted in the router box or powerline.

By comparison, a book is a model of self-reliance, even compared to e-books with megabatteries. I can drop my copy of Ulysses in a lake, and if I’m quick enough I can probably set it by a fire, let it dry for a while, and be just fine. Then again, if not I have a new and ready supply of toilet paper, Kleenex, and firestarter.

By comparison my daughter’s ipod died irreparably after sitting next to a sweating water bottle for thirty minutes. Sitting in the sauna today, I was wondering—can an e-book stand the heat, stand those rivers of sweat that dripped off my nose into the creases of the cheap newsprint I was perusing. Could be, but I would be afraid to try. If I ruin my newspaper I’m out three bucks. If I ruin my dedicated e-reader—the one I will supposedly buy someday—I would be out 400 plus however many hundreds of dollars of books I stored up. Emerson might well look at bloggers and e-books and the like and see not evidence of infinite expressibility, but of cows in a pen.

Well, enough about that. Today I'm also interested in Wimsatt and Beardsley and am wondering about the following question: Do we have a responsibility to appreciate things that we don't like? Or even do we have a responsibility to expand our repetoire of pleasures? In our culture today, we tend to think not. Students get offended when they hear Flannery O'Connor's quotation that undergraduates are having their tastes educated--that is, they are being taught what to like and how to like it. Nothing offends our relativistic and basically consumerist spirit more. Indeed, I suspect that far from literature and art as the great undergirding ideologies of capitalism, capitalism might fall apart in the contemporary world if we dared to assume that there were some things that people ought to seek to appreciate or even like, even if they don't like them natively. I think of opera in my own experience, which was first a vague appreciation, then a mild interest, until it finally became a passion and a practice. But I also think of literature. At the least we ask students to appreciate the significance of certain achievements, the first doorway to actually enjoying those achievements. This strikes many folks as oppressive. What right do I have to tell other people they ought to work at appreciating something? Still, I think there's something to the notion that we have an ethical responsibility to expand our repetoire of likes and dislikes. Maybe more on this later.

Emerson and the Gods of Reading

I thoroughly enjoyed today's class on Emerson's "The Poet." Except for the fact that it was supposed to be about Shelley and Arnold. Oh Well. There's always next time. Until there isn't.

I'm struck with the peculiar combination of Emerson's archaism and his continued relevance. His style and his concerns are so much not our concerns. On the other hand, Emerson's proclamations about authenticity, the irrelevance of traditions and books and histories and authorities, all this sounds positively contemporary in a way. Think of how the culture of the internet proclaims that we don't really need teachers any more. We can all teach ourselves if we only will. The internet is the portal to an ideal world of total knowledge that exists everywhere and nowhere, disembodied in the electric and magnetic shimmer of CPUs that think faster than we can. What matters are not authorities but experience. What matters is not tradition but ever more expansive interconnection. I am, in some sense, the world I link to, ever expanding, without boundaries. In my blog I sound my barbaric yawp across the housetops of the word.

Ok Whitman, not emerson, but you get the picture.

Along these lines, I think there's a way in which Emerson's notions of creative reading is embodied in the way we read now. For Emerson, reading was a threatening activity precisely because we were always tending toward submission and passivity, always on the brink of substituting someone else's creativity or knowledge for our own. This would mean we had failed to be "The Poet" we were meant to be and in fact are if we would only realize it. Instead, reading only exist to a purpose if it inspires us to more writing of our own. Reading must always give forth in to new and different expression, or it is worthless. Reading that absorbs and doesn't give forth in new creativity, reading that doesn't come to an end in writing is destructive to rather than an enhancement of our humanity.

What is this if not the reading ethic of blogging. Emerson, the familiar spirit of Facebook culture. REading for us now is only meaningful if it gives forth in self expression. Indeed, texts become primarily a means of further self-expression. I read other texts or find other materials on the internet in order to "blog" them. The verb in this sense means partly to write about them, but blogging something also connotes making it one's own, making it an opportunity for self-expression, an opportunity to speak.

I don't think I want to deride this outright. NPR had someone--maybe the founder of Facebook-?!-on today with a little piece on the glories of connectivity available through self-exposure. It seemed a little facile--by exposing my darkest secrets on the net I'll be able to develop authentic relationships with people I've never met. Umm, maybe. If this were true, why not go expose yourself to your next door neighbor. Still, it is the case that kinds of connections are built through this incessant speaking. Ultimately, for Emerson, our seeking expression at the expense of reading was not a form of self-aggrandizement, though it's often taken for that. It was ultimately a way of connecting to a broader world. In Emerson's view, if all people would become The Poet they were meant to be, all the world would be saved and we would all be one. It's ultimately a platonic evangelical Christian vision without Christ in some sense. If we'll all individually get right with Jesus, we'll all be one. The internet says something vaguely similar. If we would all just keep looking for ways of expressing ourselves through the texts of others, we will all be connected through what is, after all, the World Wide Web.

Emerson and the Umpires of Taste

It's not particular fashionable to admit that I love Emerson. Indeed, for as long as I've been in literary studies, Emerson and the other Romantics have been the arch-enemies that others have sought to dismiss, disparage, demote, decenter, damn, and deconstruct. Among other things. As an undergraduate this had a religious and an aesthetic cast. On a religious scale, Emerson was a heretic who could say in all seriousness that poets are liberating gods, that we are part and parcel of God, and that he was a transcendatal eyeball (or something like that) creating the universe through his imagination. And we all thought Mormonism was just a little bit odd. What need the consolations of Christ when the advent of the world came through the exercise of the individual imagination, consort of the Oversoul?

On an aesthetic scale, Emerson and the romantics were merely gauche, optimistic naifs willing to blather on about the state of their own souls when what was really needed was the hard and broken nose of modernism, which viewed the soul of the poet with only a little less scepticism than the machinations of the modern world. Both strains of anti-Romnticism came together in the aesthetic pieties and the pious aesthetics of T.S. Eliot. Odd mix for me, but I'd still rather read Eliot's Waste Land than Emerson's Poetry. But, too, I'd rather read any one of Emerson's essays than any essay that Eliot ever wrote. They are a poetry of their own, and by that I mean they move me and change the way i see the world in some of the same ways that Eliot's poetry moves and changes me.

(I admit to the perversity of liking equally and in different ways the long, engorged, and lusty lines of breathy Walt Whitman and the Puritan and technical severity of Eliot's poetry that exist only on the page. The belief that you can only like one kind of thing, that we can't like poetries that are polar opposites is, in the words of Emerson, a contradiction that is the hobgoblin on little minds. Read much. Love much. Contain multitudes.)

Which brings me to the "umpires of taste" who are the target of the first line of Emerson's essay "The Poet." Obviously Emerson has in mind the critics of his age, but my general interest is the way that Emerson looks at and understands reading. The umpires of reading are seeking to create rules for reading and writing, to arrive at a proper reading. What is the right thing to like, what is the best thing to read, what is the best way to read, what is the proper understanding of a text. This is the kind of reading that Emerson derides when he priviledges writing over reading, when he dismisses the reading of books for the making of books. He is, of course, suspicious of reading in general, as "The American Scholar" makes plain. However, there is a kind of reading that is a kind of poetry. Indeed, it's not to much to say that writing is a kind of reading, and that reading is a kind of writing, if we understand that both can require the agency of the imagination.

There is, of course, a kind of reading that is purely instrumental. The gaining, processing, and storing of information. Too often, this is the kind of reading that we encourage in school, and the kind of reading that we think is the primary and first point of reading. Any other kind of reading only comes later, or is suspect if it doesn't subject itself to this. The umpires of taste sniff at the inspiration, the personal connections, the new insights that readers bring to a text, sniff and subject such readings to the rules and requirements of reading properly.

Emerson reverses this academic privileging of analysis under reposed and quieted emotion.

"An imaginative book renders us much more service at first, by stimulating us through its tropes, than afterward when we arrive at the precise sense of the author. I think nothing is of any value in books excepting the transcendental and extraordinary. If a man is inflamed and carried away by his thought, to that degree that he forgets the authors and the public and heeds only this one dream that holds him like an insanity, let me read his paper, and you may have all the arguments and histories and criticism."

Amen and Amen. The Discipline of English is often not ill-named a discipline, since it's goal can often end up being to transform these wild and boggy responses to the chant of the universe to automatic responsa, with criticism as dull as memorized prayers.

Ok, I'll be more composed and analytical tomorrow. But first I had to say that Emerson does a service by getting at why we chose to read in the first place. Before we had to read in order to write a disseration, or publish an essay, or teach a class. When we were lovers plain and simple.

[A slightly longer version of this entry is posted at my personal blog, Read,Write, Now]

I love this class

Isn't it great to talk about theory