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Personal Identity: Confessions of a Burkean TechnologistAttitudes toward tools, technology in general, and academic technology in particular have histories in individuals. This section considers the personal quandaries and obsessions stemming out of a complex mix of intellectual history, a technical mindset, and personal guilt as the various motives of kairotic technologization meet and jangle in the life of an individual over time. The quandaries and obsessions are presented not so much for their idiosyncratic color, but for their allegorical nature as psycho-social phenomena of the Internet age. Kenneth Burke strikes the keynote: Everywhere I look, I encounter situations that make me feel sick and tired. I still think of life as a pilgrimage. In this respect I am like the mediaeval Christians. But whereas with them it was a pilgrimage towards a somewhere, now it is a pilgrimage towards nowhere. . . . Such was my weaning--for before all, in logical, if not temporal, priority, I define myself as a Kenneth Burke scholar and fan. My involvement in Burkean studies has always been as personal as it was intellectual, and from the beginning his views on technology deeply disturbed me. I really agreed with him. More thoroughly than any other critic of technology that I've encountered, Burke analyzed how the "tools of our own making" alienate us from our natural condition and lead us into all kinds of "unintended by-products"--so thoroughly and inexorably as to threaten our survival in ingenious as well as crude, ugly ways. True, in 1978 "technology" had a different meaning than it does for readers of Kairos, and the quote makes it clear enough that the type of technology Burke feared/despised is industrial in nature (or industrial against nature). But the quote also makes clear that progress (or as Burke puts it in a letter to William Rueckert, "PR*GR*SS," as though it were a dirty word that required the disguises of ablaut) compulsively advances, ironically, to an "ultimate impasse." And of course for Burke the distinction between low and high tech is a distinction without much difference. Both point to the same "end of the line." That line starts out in the way our tools (and Burke was not against tools per se, since he conceived of language itself as a tool) separate us from the state of nature, and carry us on to a new state of affairs that, unnatural though it be, becomes the new "natural" (i.e., reified) order of things. So goes the dialectic. I have sometimes wondered whether it is appropriate for me to characterize my Burkean writings and teachings as "scholarship," since I have experienced such a range and depth of entanglements of my identity with Burke, and I have developed, like many others, such an unabashed enthusiasm and gratitude for his wisdom and efforts. Burke worked some incredible cures for me--psychologically and emotionally as well as intellectually. As a young scholar, and a "believer," being raised among the "cognitive atheists," as E. D. Hirsch called postmodern theorists, and sympathetic to that disheartened characterization, but unable to accept Hirsch's simplistic and flawed remedies, I was ready for Burke, who built a postmodern-savvy philosophy of language wholly committed to the cycle of terms in the "good life"--as though it could really happen, and if not really, at least as an idea, and it's ideas, isn't it, that form so much of our reality, though not totally, as the more dismal postmoderns would have us believe. So you can imagine my discomfort when I started playing with computers. Burke died, and the mainstream Web was born, almost on the same cold November day in 1993. The king is dead, long live the king. And I glimpsed some possibilities. I thought of ways that the Web could represent some "really clean" technology that somehow made amends for industrial technology's evils. For, rather than alienation, the Web was about communication, making connections--and Burke would be the first to acknowledge that every type of communication--all the way down to the most rudimentary, bodily groan--required some type of "technological implementation" or tool or media to materialize the message. By directing my attention to the "spiritual" possibilities (communication being a type of communion) of the Web, I was able to stop thinking a bit about the "ultimate impasse," and focus instead on some really "concrete," happy possibilities for the future. Even so, I never forgot the underlying reality--all the dirty stuff that has led to the Web (a means of production, all of its constituent technologies, fossil fuels, etc.). In this section we're at the "ultimate
impasse" (humankind's "entelechy," after all, "is
technology," Burke explains), so don't expect any solution
from me. But my experience as a geek-scholar-teacher has
produced some surprising reflections--and this topic in
general is worthy of the speculative, indulgent reflection
of all, since the issues of technology reach so deeply into
and across the big questions of identity, modernity,
community, communication, the intellectual responsibilities
of the academy to posterity, and more. The Geek Motive, With an Apology With some trepidation over past offenses, and anxiety at the possibility of new misunderstandings, I plead guilty to the charge of the "geek motive." The Offense: In a campus faculty development presentation soon after bringing the English server online, I made my first public confession of my susceptibility to the geek motive. I commented on how the server project had made me aware of certain "end-of-the-line" compulsions--how the intricacies of a technical problem motivated a type of playful stubbornness (on good days) or obsessive monomania (on the other days). If the symptoms of geekery were a kind of singular focus on the possibilities of technical competence, along with a growing neglect of appearance and social niceties unrelated to the technical task, and a loss of general connectedness to life and conventional pleasures--all of which were replaced by disproportionate joy in finding and mastering systems and techniques--I had undergone such a change, and was there to tell them about it, in boldfaced acknowledgement of that's just the way it is. (I also confessed a pattern of geeky tendencies going back to eighth grade when I built a radio with vacuum tubes and solder, and to my high school career, three years of which were spent in auto shop.) After the talk, however, I was roundly reprimanded by two colleagues in my university's Computer Science Department, the two women whose initiative had built the program from its inception. They explained to me how hard they work with students, a majority of whom are female, to undo the bad effects of cultural stereotypes on this geek issue. For years they had worked on our campus, and with some success, to rehabilitate the image of the computer scientist as someone not necessarily male, socially inept, and geeky. And here I was undoing that work. I felt terrible, and I apologized and promised not to be so playful and cavalier in my characterizations of my forays into server and network technology. Another part of the allure of technology, I should confess, does fall on the slope of the anti-social. As a humanities person throughout my graduate and undergraduate studies, I had been immersed in the perplexities and problems of character and conflict and moral quandary. These studies, if anything, heightened my appreciation of the powerful, unresolvable ambivalences to the drama of human relations. But ambivalence is an inherently stressful condition, and technology began to offer a different set of terms. With technology, I found, if one but possessed sufficient intelligence, information, and stubbornness, one could solve any problem. If you are but patient enough, you can bully the machines around and ultimately prevail in coercing them to conform to your will. In the human arena, on the other hand, intelligence, information, stubbornness, and coerciveness count for very little in successful problem solving, and in fact often exacerbate troubles. So yes, part of the geek problem, does involve, at some level, the gratifications of control.
Perhaps it's not a geek motive so much as a tool fetish. But it's more complicated than that. For further exploration, consult Robert De Niro's performance in The Score--a film that should be required viewing for all promoters of academic technology. De Niro plays the role of a night club owner, who leads an elegant, sophisticated life. His home is beautiful, his club is a Jazz club, and he has a girlfriend who is caring and sweet, and happens to look just like Angela Bassett. Atop this life, he has "this other thing"--safe cracking--an avocation he is trying to kick because, among other things, his girlfriend disapproves. He's not in it for the money, though; as ridiculous as it may sound, he's in it, I say, (this is never stated explicitly in the film) for the tools--and the perfecting of his craft. De Niro is the consummate professional, a systems' thinker par excellence, one who inhabits the life of a problem so deeply and completely and creatively that the solution comes to him as though unbidden, metaphorically, in the spirit of poetic invention first identified by Aristotle, who equated genius with the ability to make metaphors. For he solves the ultimate safe-cracking problem by watching a beer keg fall off the truck and roll down the alley. The movie opens with a poignant presentation of the two-edged problem of the tool lover. First is the full inhabitation of the tool fetish, the lush enjoyment of watching sophisticated, shiny and exotic tools methodically do their work, regardless of the nature of that work. Second is the moral danger into which the compulsions of tool fixation lead, as De Niro is almost discovered in the act, and thus to complete the job and escape, this moral, professional, perfectionist craftsman is forced to menace a defenseless woman. Though he doesn't threaten death or crude bodily harm, his terrorizing of her shows how terribly wrong things had gone; and we see how illusory is his control and the neat precision of his tools and craft. As a parody to the perfectionism of De Niro's craft, the film portrays a computer hacker character to whom De Niro outsources his cyber work. The hacker is a caricature drawn to specs of the Perfect Geek in the mold of the stereotype so disapproved of by my colleagues (the hacker lives in his mother's basement; he is manic and obsessed; he has no connection to any reality other than his fiefdom of games and hacking). Though a comic figure, the geek is also a consummate professional, a picture of the "end-of-the-line" compulsiveness in inhabiting technical problems--and doing so as an aesthetic, "moral," and total involvement. In the portrayal, however, the hacker depicts nothing of nerdiness. To the contrary, we get a counterpart to De Niro's professionalism, drivenness, and artistry. In stark contrast to the conventional view of the geek as socially inept and hooked on computers because he can't make friends, we see the hacker as pursuing a superior life, the life of the artist, the life of the perfectionist. The hacker very well may be socially inept, but he is so by his choice, on his terms, because of an Ahab-style pursuit of "God." This film is a moral fable to all techies. I see the hacker and the De Niro character in me and the process I went through in building the server. And I see these characters elsewhere, notably on the TechRhet listserv. I do regret my gendered characterization of the geek motive, for I have seen plenty of cases of female geekery. But as for the motive itself--the compulsive inhabitation of technical problems to their perfectionist extremes--that's out there and thriving. This geek motive is a relatively new threat to academics, at least at its current scale. It can overtake anyone, but it is particularly perilous to junior members susceptible to this kind of perfectionism. There are so many ways for untenured faculty to mess up, and this mode of locking ourselves in our mother's basement is more threatening than ever, since the needs of technology in higher education are so great and pervasive. This is all part of the "ultimate
impasse," so I have no easy solution. But I would like to
end here by sharing a representative anecdote of what I
would call "the geek motive as redeemed through
balance." At the same time, I would like to make a
public compliment to one of the collaborators on the English
server project. That person is Daniel Anderson of the
University of North Carolina, who got me started in the
server building process by responding to my original
listserv query for help in hosting some kind of courseware.
Dan's
response is a virtual "poem"
in my eyes for the way it so efficiently and succinctly
addresses nearly all the issues I have so sprawlingly
laid out in this hypertext article. Dan's letter points out
a way, in short, of containing the excesses of the geek
motive, and keeping the focus on the academic substance of
teaching, scholarship, and service--all in the context of
practical institutional politics, and realistic constraints
and limits. The practical help Dan offered is quite
important; it includes attention to hardware
incompatibilities, a recommended Linux distribution, a
perspective on costs, advice on nurturing a relationship
with support staff, ways to contain costs, and direct
download links to two sets of free, open source academic
courseware packages. More than anything Dan's simple letter
exudes a comprehensive "can do" attitude about the project,
despite the more "sensible" attitude that might have acted
to abort such an ambitious project before it got off the
ground. Dan's balance and control (not to mention
generosity), evident here, and representative of the
community of cyber-rhetors to which we belong, promises hope
for scholars faced with the impasses and excesses of
technology in general and the geek motive in particular.
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