From Word To Word

The poem that I posted most recently was actually written several years ago, but it expresses an emotion that I have been feeling very strongly over this Christmas season, an emotion that I usually describe as a desire for the text.  It is for me, at its strongest, a consuming eroticism, a need, not just to read and to write, but to somehow devour the text, to ravish it, or perhaps, to make myself more properly the object of this encounter, it is a desire to be myself devoured and ravished by the text.  It is a desire for more than the physical text itself, for more than what this text might mean, for more even than the act of reading, but for something beyond these things that I do not quite understand.

I have been feeling this desire so strongly over the past month or more because I have been too occupied to satisfy it, even if my occupations were enjoyable.  I have been doing my holiday baking, and I have been cooking for the various family gatherings, and I have been making toys as Christmas presents for my sons, all things I love to do, and yet they have come at the cost of time for any serious writing and for any reading at all.  I want nothing more, at this moment, than a week of solitude, just to read.  I want to be drowned in reading.  I want to be buried in it.  I want to be entombed in it.  This is my desire for the text.

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.

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.

I just recently read a summary of Wendy Chun’s book Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics, and she confirms an argument that I made several weeks ago, that the web is not actually a space at all and is misrepresented by the spatial metaphors that we use to describe it.  She says essentially that a term like ‘cyberspace’ offers only “a metaphor and a mirage, because cyberspace is not spatial,” and she shows how these metaphors have nevertheless become the basis, nor only of everyday language about the web, but also of regulatory legislation for the web, which perhaps explains why this regulation is often constructed so ineffectively.

At the time when I first suggested that the language of spatiality was inappropriate to the web, I saw the implications of this argument primarily in relation to the possibility of being at home on the web.  However, Chun’s recognition of the legal implications of this language has prompted me to think a little more broadly about the effects of misunderstanding the web as a space.

1.  As I have already argued elsewhere, it encourages an inaccurate conception of how we inhabit or make ourselves at home there.

2.  As Chun indicates, it becomes enshrined in the language of the legal system, and this contributes to the difficulty of developing useful and effective laws to govern the web.

3.  It conceals the real physical structure of the web.

4.  It conceals the fact that the web itself is product and that to use it is in fact a consumption, even if this consumption appears as a kind of participation in production.

5.  It promotes the illusion of mobility and activity through the web, concealing how the web essentially immobilizes its users in front of a monitor, even and especially if that monitor is mobile.

6.  It constructs the web as an alternative to the physical world rather than as an extension of it.

I recognize that this list is probably very partial, but I think that it should go some ways to indicating the effects of a language of spatiality being misapplied to the web.  Our whole social conception of the web is at stake in these kinds of metaphors, and it is necessary that we begin to adopt a language about the web that is more aware of its real physical and social structures.

Though I am perhaps biased because of my own academic background, I might suggest that more appropriate metaphors for the web might be found in the figures of reading and writing.  Not only do these concepts reflect much of the activity that is actually conducted through the web, and not only are they used to perform this function in varying degrees already.  They also have the connotations of production and consumption, of a physical and localized structure of communication, and of the immobility imposed by a medium on its consumer.  Might these textual metaphors also permit a more effective legislation of the web?  Might they encourage a more critical and interpretive approach to the web?  I am interested to know what others might think about these possibilities.

I often find that the web moves to quickly for me.  I come across an interesting post or article, something that warrants serious reflection, something to which I would like to respond, but by the time I have formulated my thoughts on the subject, the post is days or weeks old, and the discussion has long since shifted to other things.  I had this experience a few weeks ago when I read James Shelley’s post on his “bulldozed brain“, or on how new media is saturating him with so much information about people that he no longer has time to relate to these people in person.  I thought it was a compelling article at the time, but I am only just now finding the words to respond to it.

The issue that James raises is one that very much concerns me, and I have spent a good deal of the last few weeks reflecting on it, formulating the question, as I often find myself doing, in terms of the books that I am reading, in this case, Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle and Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life.  I am not sure that I have arrived at anything coherent, but there are a few ideas that I think might be helpful in understanding how the web mediates social relationships.

Using Debord’s terminology, I would suggest that the web, especially with the kind of applications that have been labelled as web 2.0, where users create content for one another, has dramatically shifted how spectacle becomes produced in our society.  Spectacle has until recently been the language spoken by the dominant modes of production in order to mediate social relationships in such a way as to create people as consumers.  Now spectacle is increasingly becoming the language that consumers speak to one another as they produce content for one another.  While practices of consumption are and always have been productive of something, the web permits consumers to produce for one another to an unprecedented extent. Consumers have essentially become producers of their own spectacle at precisely the same moment that they are consumers it, though they always do so within limits imposed by the dominant modes of production.  They produce themselves and their relationships as spectacles for others to consume.

This shift in how spectacle is produced has several effects.  First, it ties the language and the production of spectacle much more closely to the social relationships that spectacle mediates, so that the two are now almost indistinguishable.  Traditional media like television and print presented spectacle in ways that appeared fairly distinct from the activity of social relation.  Even if people do gather socially around these media, and even they provide the subject of much social interaction, there is no illusion that people actually relate through them.  With web media, however, especially with many social media sites, but even with less direct means like blogs and emails, there is the illusion that relationships are being actually conducted through them.  Thus, rather than having spectacle mediate social relation as an effect of its consumption, spectacle now mediates relationship as an integral part of its production as well.

This is what creates the compulsion that James describes, the compulsion to consume more of the web, because there is the illusion that this activity is in fact relational. The relationship, however, is not between me and my friends, but between me and the spectacle that my friends have created themselves to be, a spectacle that functions precisely like a tabloid, only with the added personal interest that comes with actually knowing the celebrities involved.  I learn much useless information about these celebrity friends, these friends who are spectacles of themselves, but I come to know them very little.  Because spectacle appears on the web as indistinguishable from the relationships that it mediates, the consumption and production of this spectacle takes on a significance that other spectacle lacks, and people feel a compulsion to consume and produce it for one another.

The shift in how spectacle is produced also has the effect of extending exponentially the saturation of society by spectacle.  While the language of spectacle was mostly the domain of the producer, the necessity to profit from spectacle always placed limitations on how completely this language could be spoken.  There was only so much television and so much radio and so much live entertainment that couls be made profitable, and there remained large, though certainly diminishing, portions of social interaction that escaped the direct mediation of spectacle.  As soon as consumers begin to produce their own spectacle, however, the necessity of making a profit no longer limits this production, or limits it in only very indirect ways.  In fact, the only effective limits for this kind of production become the  constantly expanding limitations of the technologies themselves.  Users of web media, therefore, are saturated with spectacle to a much greater degree than users of traditional media, particularly as the web becomes increasingly portable via cellphones and and other handheld technologies.  There are no longer any spaces that remain absolutely beyond the reach of media spectacle, and there remain very few that are practically beyond this reach.  It is now possible to conduct our relationships in entirely mediated ways, entirely through the mediation of the spectacle.  Indeed, the sheer volume and reach of spectacle produced through the web compells users in this very direction.

This, then, is the effect that James describes in his post, where the web produces far more information about people than he can possibly assimilate.  As opposed to traditional media, which could only produce so much spectacle and tailor it to our interests only so closely, the web permits us to produce immense amounts of current information that is tailored just for us and that is at least superficially connected with people to whom we feel some sort of obligation.  What is more, as soon as I begin to respond to this information, I begin creating it for others also, and I only increase the immensity of the social spectacle available to myself and to others.

Now, this shift in the production of spectacle to the consumer of spectacle is not necessarily bad.  It does, in effect, within very set limitations, permit the consumer to take the role of the producer.  I use the word ‘role’ here very specifically, because the consumer never has real control over how this production takes place, but there is nevertheless an opportunity here, I believe, for people to produce in ways that were unforeseen and are even resistant to the applications that they use.  There is the possibility, not to change society, or to change the mode of production, or to change the web, but to operate within these structures in ways that are tactically resistant to them, in ways that change only ourselves and perhaps those who we influence directly.

Shifting now to the terminology of Michel de Certeau, whose book I have not yet finished, and whose ideas I therefore reference with a certain amount of hesitation, I would say that the web, by permitting the consumer to take the role of the producer in even limited ways, becomes an interesting tactical space.  De Certeau recognizes, what is true, that all practices of consumption are productive of something, and he is interested in the tactics that consumers use in order to produce effects that are unintended and by producers and even resistant to them.  It seems to me that, if this is true of a system in which consumers have little access to the role of the producer, it becomes much more true in a system where consumers also play the role of producers, even in limited ways.  Though this new role may only serve to tie consumers more tightly to the spectacle that defines them as consumers in the first place, it may offer more opportunity for the kind of tactics that de Certeau is describing.

For me, the logic of this move would look something like this:

1.  The web permits the saturation of society and the mediation of social relationship by spectacle to a degree that was completely unattainable through traditional media, simply because it employs consumers themselves to produce their own spectacle.

2.  The web permits tactical interventions by consumers to a degree that was completely unattainable through traditional media, simply because it allows the consumer to play the role of producer within certain limitations.

3.  Therefore, we must approach the web tactically, in order that its spectacular effect might be exposed, and in order that its resistant opportunities be exploited.

4.  Therefore, we must also develop and disseminate tactics that are useful to this end, employing them here and there, now and again, where they might do most good, in the spaces that are opened by the kinds of freedom that the web permits to consumers as producers, to you and I.

This is, I believe, the challenge to all of us who would do the web justice and who would use it to do justly.

I sometimes have a moment when I first pick up a book, maybe just after I have heard someone describe it, maybe just after I have read the back cover, maybe just after I have scanned the first few pages of the introduction, and I have the sensation, clear and terrifying, that it will change me. I find myself looking at the thing in my hand, the lump of ink and glue and paper, horrified and elated, transfixed by the possibility that it might overturn me, that it might transform how I think or live. Jean Luc Marion’s God Without Being caused this in me. So too did Ivan Illich’s Rivers North of the Future. In a different way, a way I cannot quite qualify, so did George MacDonald’s Lilith. Of course, these sensations do not always prove true.  In this moment, however, with Michel de Certeau’s The Practise of Everyday Life beside me, I do not think that I will be disappointed. I feel an expectancy, an assurance that it holds for me a transformation. I take it up with a certain joy and a certain terror.