From Word To Word

Some time ago, I discovered an online essay by Lev Manovich, called “Database as a Symbolic Form“. It is a condensed version of a chapter in his book, The Language of New Media, which has been sitting on my shelf for almost a year, one of the many books that I am always intending but never quite managing to read. The essay’s central argument assumes that, where the age of the novel and film privileged narrative as “the key form of cultural expression,” the computer age privileges the database in its stead. It argues that new media objects often lack stories as such, being comprised of many equally significant elements that have no essential beginning or ending and no form or development of any kind. In my opinion, however, the assumption that a database does not function narratively is highly suspect for several reasons.

First, from a technical perspective, the elements in a database are never actually equal in significance. They are always entered in a sequence, and they are assigned their position in a sequence. Some element will always occupy the first position (1,1) and will function as a beginning. Some element will always occupy the final position (x,x) and will function as an ending. Other elements will always occupy the positions between them and will function as a development. This beginning, this ending, and this development will always combine to form a narrative, even if this narrative is only of the simplest kind, even if it only says, “Look, though there are only seemingly random numbers, here is the highest number and here is the lowest, and here is the one that is repeated most,” even if it only says, “Look, though there are only unrepeated and seemingly meaningless symbols, this one looks something like this one that came before it, and there seem to be many symbols that have curves, while only a few have angles.”

No matter how random and meaningless the elements of the database might seem to be, these narrative functions are always operative, because of the conventions that govern reading and writing, whether these are the coded conventions of a machine reader or the social conventions of a human reader. Even if the writers or the readers do not in fact follow the established conventions of the code or of the culture, they must nevertheless follow some convention, must produce some sort of narrative, and must always do so in the context of what the established convention is, even if only through opposition to these conventions. It will never be possible for them to write or read without a narrativity, and it will never be possible for this narrativity to be entirely dissociated from the established narrative conventions.

Second, every element in the database is itself the function of one or more narratives. It is always artificially isolated from a story that is ongoing in the world beyond the database, even and especially if the elements are random numbers chosen for their randomness, even and especially if they are only meaningless symbols created for the purpose of meaninglessness, even and especially if they are only natural elements chosen for their naturalness. In every case they will be the products, the signs, the representations of at least one and probably many narratives.

To ignore the role of these source narratives in determining the data in the database is to ignore their physicality, their historicity, their locality. These sources are not always visible through the data that they produce, but they are nevertheless essential to the production of the data as such. In this sense, the database might even be said to be more narrative even than a traditional narrative, because it combines all of its source narratives into a single master narrative while still maintaining these sources as separate narrative elements in ways that are difficult for traditional narratives to accomplish.

Third, it is obvious, particularly in light of the kind of work that Jacques Derrida and others have done on the function of the archive, that it is impossible to understand the database apart from the narrative of its own production. In every case, the database is constructed by a particular producer for a particular purpose, even if that purpose chooses to take a form that appears random or purposeless. The database is therefore always and entirely implicated in the narrative of its own production and creation, in the narrative of its own purpose, whether political or aesthetic or functional or whatever, and in the narrative of what it may in fact produce in those who read it.

There is no escaping these narrative aspects of the database, and there is no separating them from the social, political, cultural, and economic implications that such narratives entail. To pass over the narrative function of the database is to impose on narrativity an artificial limit and an illusory exteriority. The only database that could actually occupy this position would be one that was neither written nor read, one that was neither populated nor empty, one that was neither ordered nor random, one that could be defined only by a language so paradoxical as to have become a theology.

I try to read promiscuously, to read attentively, to read continually.  This means, often, that the books I read in proximity to each other are not otherwise alike in any substantial way.  This is not to say that they are unrelated, but that they relate to each other differently, not just cumulatively to create a sense of an author’s corpus or a culture’s ethos, but also contrastingly to create a sense of the broader range of literary possibility.  This kind of reading functions as a sort of oppositional practice, calling into question the kinds of narrow and pseudo-scientific reading that are too often practiced by the professional readers of our culture, the professors and the critics and the theorists. This broader approach to reading permits different kinds of connections to appear, and also prevents particular kinds of connections from becoming overemphasized at the expense of others.

There is the temptation, however, when reading in this way, to impose on texts a unifying structure that they cannot actually sustain.  Even when there is no textual justification for it, there remains in the reader, or, at least, there remains in me as a reader, a strong drive to manufacture points of relationship between the books that I am reading.  It is precisely this temptation to which I found myself succumbing as I was thinking about the books that I have been reading and about the things that I would like to say about them.  So, in order to resist this tendency in me, here are some notes on what I have been reading, kept as distinct as possible and organized only in the order that I read them.  This is a false representation of my experience also, of course, but perhaps it can stand as a correction to my usual practice.

Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion – I was forced during my undergraduate to read another of Winterson’s novels, Sexing the Cherry, and, perhaps merely because I was forced, I did not enjoy it very much.  I appreciated the mode of humour that Winterson was employing, but it had too sharp an edge for me to laugh along with it.  I felt somehow that even Winterson was not really laughing, that she was only wielding humour as the weapon of a deeper anger or frustration.

The Passion, however, seems to employ a gentler kind of laughter, a laughter that is mixed very closely with the kind of love that has become a passion, the kind of love that needs laughter as its perspective and as its release.  Winterson says in various ways throughout the text that passion is what lies between fear and sex, and I think that the humour of the novel finds a similar place, between the wholly earnest and the wholly cynical, between the wholly naive and the wholly bawdy.  Though it has at times the same sharpness, it is not often used to wound, and the book is more subtle and more effective because of it.

Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall – This was my first experience of Waugh, and I found myself mostly ambivalent about it.  It is certainly very funny at times, and it is also very deft in its satire, but it lacks a sense of gravity and purpose.  Its irony falls closer to the flippancy of P. G. Wodehouse than to the commentary of Oscar Wilde, and its appeal, at least for me, suffers for it.  It is, as a confection, quite tasty, but only because it has so much sugar, and I prefer even my pastries to have a little more substance.

Malcom Bradbury’s Eating People is Wrong -This book reminds me strongly of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin, another story about a socially and culturally confused professor.  Bradbury’s book may suffer a little through this comparison, his characterization leaning closer to caricature than Nabokov’s, but I think that the connection is justified by the similarities in sensibility between the two books.  There is in them both a genuine sympathy for the uniquely awkward position of academics who discover themselves to be socially and morally irrelevant to the cultures around them, and this commonality interests me very much.

The role of the academic, particularly in the humanities, is a problem that is carelessly posed far more frequently than it is seriously confronted.  Academics themselves seem to take an almost perverse pride in decrying their increasing cultural irrelevance, all the while doing everything possible to ensure that this irrelevance remains entirely undisturbed.  There is, after all, no real necessity for them to be relevant, not so long as they are necessary to grant degrees, and not so long as they are content to have academic careers rather than to have educational vocations.  Those who are not content with this situation, those who feel that they should in fact be having a moral and social influence on their students and their surrounding cultures, find themselves in an uncomfortable position.

Bradbury and Nabokov both explore this situation in different ways, and Bradbury’s most significant contribution is to show how academic irrelevance functions to alienate academics from themselves as well as from their social contexts.  The central character, a professor named Stuart Treece, is constantly noting how his vaguely liberal ideals are no longer capable of definition or application, and this situation is always forcing him either to act according to social norms that he does not accept or to be entirely passive.  This representation of the academic’s role is incisive, I think.  At least in my own experience, it is to one degree or another the fate of any academic who is unwilling merely to have a career but who is also unable to abandon the academic institution.

Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth – This was one of the many novels that I have suggested to students in my novel course without actually having read it.  It is much less and much more than I expected.  It is less as a cultural and historical depiction of pre-revolutionary China, not because it represents these things inaccurately, which I do not have the knowledge to judge in any case, but because these things are not essential to the story and are mentioned only in passing to provide a context for the story.  It is also less as a traditional novel, its characterization and its plot often feeling closer to the mode of a parable than a novel strictly speaking.  It is more, however, precisely as a kind of parable, as the stylized representation of a life that will be recognizable to anyone, despite the story’s historical and cultural remove.  It is also more as an argument for the significance of the relationship between people and the earth, affirming the goodness of being on the land and of tending the land and of making the land fruitful.

Considering that I teach courses in documentary film, I should probably not admit that I just this morning watched Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera for the first time.  I have read quite a lot about the film, of course.  It is impossible to pick up a book on the subject of documentary without reading about its significance to the development of the genre through its experimentation with various filming and editing techniques, its use of montage, and its self-reflexive treatment of the cameraman, the director, the editor, and the machinery of film.  I have even lectured on all of this, more than once, but I have never seemed to find the time to actually watch the film.

As is almost always the case, the experience of the film surprised the expectations that my reading had formed for me.  What impressed me most about the film was its attention to the everyday.  It takes for its subject the people of the city in their daily activities. but it attends to these things in ways that make them strange and beautiful and fearful and compelling.  It shows their rhythm, not only the natural rhythms of day and night, of waking and sleeping, but the artificial rhythms and  repetitions of the worker and the machine, of the cog and the wheel and the engine and the piston.  It is this labour that the film valourizes, this repetition that is a vitality and a strength rather than a tedium.

Vertov is very concerned to show that the film and the filmmaker are also a part of this rhythmic labour and this driving vitality.  The camera or the cameraman or the editor appear in every scene, and they are always engaged in the same kinds of activity that are being filmed.  As the town wakes, the filmmaker leaves his house and leaps aboard the open car from which many of the shots are taken.  As the trolleys carry the crowds to work, the camera is riding aboard them as well, or it is placed closely among them and among the throng.  As the people begin their labour in the factories, the film stock is whirled on its spools, sliced and joined, labeled and arranged in neat rows for the eye of the editor.  As the town retires to the beach in the afternoon, the camera is shown in the water also, the cameraman bathing beside it.  The clear and insistent argument is that the camera is a significant part of the vital and productive city, that its artistic function is not distinct from the labour that drives the city and the nation.

Interestingly, this vision of the working city and of the working camera remain compelling, even if its valourization of the industrial landscape and the automated existence now seem somewhat idealistic and naive.  Despite ninety years of increasing disillusionment with the industrial enterprise, whatever its politics, the film still manages to make the worker and the factory and the worker and the machine seem things worth romanticizing. Its propagandist function remains effective even at this far a remove.

Of course, there are other reasons to see the film also.  There are some truly beautiful scenes, like the images of a sleeping woman’s arm as it lies on the coverlet, or like the flames of a foundry’s furnace that remind me of Werner Herzog’s Lessons of Darkness.  There are also some charmingly flippant moments, like the scene where the camera seems to assemble itself for an audience, or the one that captures the interaction between a couple filing divorce papers.  My version of the film also has a beautifully apt musical score composed by Michael Nyman, music that captures perfectly the rhythmic drives of the film.  All of which is to say that I should now have a better vantage from which to discuss the film the next time I teach a documentary course, and I should also have more credibility when I recommend it tp you, as I very strongly do.

I have just had again the odd experience of reading a book for what I knew would be its last time, feeling it fall to pieces even as I read it. I found it in the free section at the local public library booksale, and it was free for good reason. It lacked any spine whatsoever. Its covers had been reattached with scotch tape. It was missing several of the first and last pages, making do without the publication information or a dedication or the list of the other exciting offerings that would have been available from the same publisher at my local bookstore forty years ago. It was, as I knew even when I took it home with me, fit only to be read one last time.

This is not the first time that I have read a book into oblivion, and I always find it a singular sensation, as if I am somehow attending to a death bed, not with the intimacy of a friend or a family member, but with the distance of a priest reading the last rites, or maybe of a doctor offering palliative care. It is as if I am just coming to know these texts as they are preparing to die, as if my coming to know them is in fact an essential part of this preparation. My knowing them will only bring about their passing. When I have finished with them, they will be finished indeed. There will never be anyone who will know them again.

I recognize, of course, that these sensations fail to understand these dying texts as the reproductions that they are. I am wilfully passing over the fact that they exist in other copies and other editions and other translations and other adaptations, that their deaths are less the deaths of organisms than the deaths of singular and replaceable cells. Even so, it is only through these cells that I come to know the organisms as such. They are the places where I discover what the organisms are and what they might come to be, so it is perhaps not entirely romantic of me to feel a sense of loss as I read them, knowing that my reading will bring them to their end. The abstract texts that they represent can never care about what they were, but I will always know that it was they who took me for a friend as they lay dying.