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(Techno)Barbarians
at the Gate? Kevin Swafford Assistant
Professor
In the introduction to her book Hamlet on the Holodeck: the Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, Janet Murray makes the case that the true book lover, the lover of literature and the variable culture of literary life, longs for cyberdrama and hyper/media and text—though often unknowingly. According to Murray, those who profess literature ultimately desire cyber literature, for it promises us the very things and experiences that are essential to print-based literature in intensified and more accessible fashion. For Murray, hypertext, cyberdrama, and the “literature” of new technologies are not something radically at odds with print based texts/culture — but rather an extension. Indeed, the computer itself is viewed as the offspring of print culture. She writes: “I am not among those eager for the death of the book [. . . .] Nor do I fear it as an imminent event. The computer is not the enemy of the book. It is the child of print culture, a result of the five centuries of organized, collective inquiry and invention that the printing press made possible” (8). From this child of print, Murray envisages a kind of literature that does not erase or displace its precursor — but rather carries on what she sees as the universal bardic spirit that has been expressed and disseminated through the technology of print:
The Hacker and timeless bardic work may seem to be a strange pairing — but they are images calculated to ease certain anxieties and open up possibilities of thought concerning the relationship between literature (past, present, and future) and new electronic technologies. In Hamlet on the Holodeck, Murray’s line of argument is significantly different from what we find in the work of scholars like Jay David Bolter, Richard Lanham, and George P. Landow, who have theorized the hyper-mediated text as essentially a different type of writing or textual space that offers us radically new ways of seeing and thinking, particularly in terms of the controlling contingencies and organizational and experiential limitations of print based texts. What is interesting about Murray’s book is the underlying lack of urgency in which she writes and the confidence in which she articulates an essence of literature (inscribed in the image of the bard) that cannot be destroyed through technological change and innovation, for the “spirit of the bard” is inseparable from what it means to be human. Still, one quickly gets the sense through Murray’s rhetoric that all arguments for the revolutionary or transformative nature of computer technology and hypermedia must be a hard sell within a field of study whose very identity is bound to its traditions of analysis and the apparent stability of the objects it configures and consumes. Talk of revolutionary change breeds anxiety in those wedded to tradition. Thus, Murray’s book seeks to reassure a potentially skeptical audience that all is well and that the end of the “culture” of literature is not on the horizon — despite alarming claims to the contrary. And yet, we may ask: does the collapsing of differences between textual mediums (as Murray does in her book) really speak to the source of techno-anxiety that troubles many scholars and teachers of literature? Does the idea of a transhistorical “bardic” or poetic essence within human experience and community guarantee the continuance of what Myron Tuman calls the “culture of print”? Of course, we may also ask: what really are the sources of anxiety concerning the relationship between electronic technologies and literature? Undoubtedly, answers to these questions must be speculative and provisional; but it seems to me that Murray may be onto something in her attempt to universalize the need and pursuit of literature (i.e., if we define literature as highly important symbolic communication and expression); for part of what is feared is a sense of loss of traditions, intellectual integrity and power, and the social relevance or centrality of print based texts. Universalizing an “essence” of literature may in fact guarantee a limited sense of tradition and intellectual processes. However, it may not ultimately preserve the social centrality or significance of print-based texts (for these things are largely shaped and determined by economic factors). In order to get to this provisional answer, we would do well to rehearse and think through some of the most powerful expressions of techno-anxiety and critique. All teachers of literature and language who use new technologies know that for many of our colleagues the infusion and presence of electronic technologies in literature classes, curriculum, and scholarship are often a source of alarm that seems to hint of the end of the “legitimate” pursuit of literature. What gets defined as “legitimate pursuit” and “literature” is highly contentious; but presumably, the culture of literature, whatever we claim it to be, cannot be wedded to something that seems to encourage speed, decentered textuality and textualization, and a more or less consumerist mentality (i.e., simple intellectual gratification through easy acts of consumption). The pursuit of literature (as “deep” pleasure and knowledge) is slow, meditative, and linear — and, so the implicit argument goes, current technology does not accommodate or encourage such realities because of the very nature of its being. We might characterize this as the ontological argument against new technology in literary studies. Furthermore, it would seem that the very “logic of new technology” disrupts the models of exegesis so dear to traditional literary study and thus damages irreparably, if not explodes, the “authentic” experiences of the pursuit of literature. This we could characterize as the phenomenological argument against new technology. Without going too far into the matter, it would be relatively easy to disregard out of hand, as many have done, the arguments of the negative response as reactionary and misinformed. And yet, such confident disregard may be symptomatic of what Stanley Aronowitz describes as the pervasive “postcritical” tendencies of educators who use new technologies[1]. It is much more problematic to address the source of the pathos of such responses, for ultimately there is an emotional charge that is very much a part of the experience of post-industrial (or late-capitalist) culture that cannot be easily dismissed. It is perhaps not for nothing that some of the most vehement critiques of computer technology within the humanities have come from political progressives and not from conservatives. If we follow the line of thought of Neil Postman (apparently no friend to those educators and theorists who sing the praises of new technologies, though he does represent a clear example of a political progressive who sees grave mischief in the explosion of computer technology in the realm of education) we may get a clear sense of what is really at stake for those who would question if not reverse the infusion of new technology within literary studies and the humanities in general. In his book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, Postman describes technology as a “Faustian bargain.” [2] He writes: “Technology giveth and technology taketh away, and not always in equal measure. A new technology sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it destroys more than it creates. But it is never one-sided” (4). The issue straight away for Postman is the non-neutrality of technological innovation. There are ultimately winners and losers in the emergence of new technologies:
Below the surface of all of Postman’s techno-criticism is a simple question: who and what are served by new technologies? Apparently, only a small minority truly benefits — all the rest become the unwilling dupes and implicit victims of an ever-expanding social and technological one-dimensionality. For Postman, discussion concerning the use and function of technology is ideological and the idea that somehow the current new technologies increase freedom and creativity for a majority of people is an illusion in the service of a powerful minority. The allure of increased freedom, utility, and knowledge is part of the overall myth that must be told in order to reify structures of power and to assure the ultimate consent of the losers:
According to Postman, it’s archaic, foolish, or ideologically motivated to believe that all new forms are progressive, whereby the good outweighs the bad and all ultimately win in the end. In fact, for Postman, the explosion of new computer technologies is, at the core, socially and intellectually destructive for in the process of its expansion into nearly all forms of social life it seeks to reify and substitute the idea of technical solutions for “human ones,” establishing itself as a type of transcendent authority. Implicitly in Postman’s critique of new technologies is a notion of power relations, whereby the authority of technology becomes a type of “mechanism” of power, inserting itself into the microcosmic grain of subjectivity and social being [3]. As such, the culture of technology does not invite a close examination of its own negative consequences, but rather seeks to eliminate all alternatives to itself, resulting, at its highest socio-historical level, in what Postman describes as a Technopoly. He writes:
The alternative to Technopoly is the ideal of rational, critical, and humane discourse and action — which are precisely what Postman sees as being threatened by Technopoly. Postman rightly argues that all new technologies “change what we mean by ‘knowing’ and ‘truth’” and in the process they also “alter those deeply embedded habits of thought which give to a culture its sense of what the world is like — a sense of what is the natural order of things, of what is reasonable, of what is necessary, of what is inevitable, of what is real” (12). Postman comes to this conclusion because he considers all technologies as ideological [4]. Shrewdly, Postman writes: “Embedded in every tool is an ideological bias, a predisposition to construct the world as one thing rather than another, to value one thing over another, to amplify one sense or skill or attitude more loudly than another”(13). Ideologies are very much a part of social identifications and social struggles and as such must compete for domination. As ideologies, technologies are no exception:
In many ways, Postman’s critique of new technologies is very much linked to the anxieties of some teachers of literature, who often have the sense that new technologies reshape reality and thus reorder the realm of possible meaning and significance in ways that degrade. In the collision of world- views (between, for example, hyper and print-based texts), there is no guarantee of eventual peaceful-coexistence. This in itself is a profound source of anxiety. We may see the connection between Postman’s critique and the ambivalence of literature teachers perhaps even more clearly in the somewhat controversial work of Myron Tuman. Similarly to Neil Postman, Myron Tuman, in his book Word Perfect: Literacy in the Computer Age, argues that the infusion of new technology into humanist studies, liberal education, and the culture in general is not neutral but rather politically motivated and socially regressive. For Tuman, one’s critical position (assuming one has a conscious critical position) concerning technology determines one’s stance on a host of issues regarding individualism, democracy, the nature of culture, and the purposes of education. Like Postman, Tuman sees technology as unavoidably ideological and our choices put us among warring factions. Furthermore, agreeing with writers like Bolter, Lanham, and Landow, Tuman sees new technologies as changing our understanding of literacy; but whereas others may welcome these changes, Tuman is deeply skeptical and often on the defensive. His analysis and argument concerning new technologies are grounded in a simple, though far reaching, question: what has been achieved through the technology of print and how might such achievements be affected by emerging electronic technologies? Out of this basic question comes a series of others that are directly related to institutions and social structures of power. Tuman writes: “We should recast the question about changing standards of literacy in terms of totalizing forces within society: Are computers likely to decrease or increase totalizing pressures within society? Is the ability to collect, organize, and access vast amounts of information likely to increase or decrease the ability of individuals to make their own way in the world, and just how is this sense of freedom specifically related to ‘standards of literacy’?” (15). For Tuman, part of what is achieved and guaranteed through print is a respect and domain of privacy, introspection, intersubjectivity, and individuality — which are opposed to a mass-mediated, “totalized” consciousness that is overdetermined by techno-culture (Postman’s “Technopoly”). The ability to make “one’s own way in the world” intellectually is the mark of freedom par excellence and with the shift in literacy (or world-views, as Postman would have it) such ability is apparently in doubt. Tuman thus expresses lament regarding the current state of culture and education via the anxiety of the seeming displacement and decentralization of print and it’s intellectual traditions. He argues that the culture of print literacy is under severe attack and that the forces that are overwhelming it are computer technology and the cultural institutions that naturalize its dissemination into all aspects of life. For Tuman, the effective cultural result of the attack upon print literacy is the forging and development of a post-industrial sensibility that no longer respects "the symbolic, transformative power of the literate text" (43). This is very close to Postman’s position. According to Tuman, those who champion electronic literacy (and thus knowingly or inadvertently attack print literacy) ultimately reject "the status of texts as higher or more logical expressions of symbolic knowledge, texts as the embodiment of history, philosophy, literature, science, and other ways of understanding the world not immediately supported by the traditions, often the prejudices, of the status quo" (43). It is through print-based texts that individuals can oppose and remain free of mob mentality and the strictures of rigid institutions of power. Print guarantees this not only because it gives us the sense and appearance of intersubjective expression and dialogue, but also because the physical and cognitive processes of reading print allow for certain forms of consciousness. In the realm of techno-culture there is a shift in possibilities and thus shifts in consciousness. To emphasize the shift from print to electronic literacies, Tuman writes:
For Tuman, the very being and logic of the printed word guarantees a culture characterized by "a serious, introspective, relentlessly psychological [. . .] hermeneutic tradition of interpretation" (62). Online or computer-mediated literacy, by contrast, do not. As a result, there is a degeneration of interpretive abilities and reading itself (which for Tuman means something more than simply one of the grand “techniques” to emerge from the explosion of print based technologies). The capacity to concentrate for long periods of time on language and a singular text (perhaps the one thing heralded by all who profess literature) is undermined by new technologies. Tuman writes: "Our ability or willingness to attend closely and for prolonged periods of time to the narrative experiences of others [. . .] is intimately connected to our broader experience of print culture and the inner consciousness that it both demanded and rewarded” (62). Freud, the master theoretician of anxiety, tells us that anxiety is either a necessary defensive response to a real threat or a symptomatic response to an imagined threat that screens (or masks) a deeper, more problematic, and frightening reality. The ideas and work of Neil Postman and Myron Tuman are at least partially rooted in anxiety and may be thought of as paradigmatic expressions of all of those “nay-sayers” within literary studies that sense decline and loss in the arrival and preeminence of new technologies within our schools. Sven Birkets, in his book The Gutenberg Elegies, O. D. Hardison in Disappearing Through the Skylight: Culture and Technology in the Twentieth Century, and Alvin Kernan in The Death of Literature have all made similarly anxious arguments. It is hard to determine if their expressions of anxiety are symptomatic of larger fears (perhaps the cultural reality of late-capitalism itself) or the real-deal healthy response of those who acknowledge and face imminent danger. I am inclined to believe that their anxiety is at least in part of the second order in the Freudian scheme — a symptomatic response that is very real and yet masks other fears and problems. We could speculate on what that big Other might be that drives the particularity of their negative response to new technology, but in the end such speculation resolves nothing, really, and does not allow us to think through what might be reasonable and right in the urgency of their negation. Critical self-reflexivity and a negation of the exclusive authority of technological rationality are needed — writers such as Postman and Tuman are correct on that front. Those who say “yes” must thoughtfully contend with and answer those who say “no” if there is to be a truly informed use and understanding. Yet even this perhaps cannot eliminate what broods behind the negation. Surely something else is needed to settle accounts within the field of literary studies. Indeed, if computer technology is to be seen as something more and other than simply a tool or a threat by teachers and scholars of literature, it must do and mean something other than what has been offered thus far. As I see it, that “something other” is this: computer technology must be theorized, configured, and used in ways that improve how we explore and explain literary texts — or rather, print based texts. Indeed, until new technologies, and computer technology in particular, can expand and help to enlighten our interpretational procedures (as opposed to the mere gathering and transmission of information) — it will remain a secondary tool or a threat [5]. Furthermore, new technologies must be shown to be able to peacefully coexist with older technologies (e.g. print) — without the rhetoric or institutionalization of radical displacement. Theorists, critics, scholars, and students of literature must bridge the apparent chasm between technologies in order to show and secure, as Janet Murray has attempted to do, how both may usefully serve longstanding humanistic concerns. The issue becomes one of critical praxis and revision. It is crucial to foster new knowledge concerning the paths in which literary meaning and understanding are produced via a rethinking and revisionary use of computer technology that does not (re)produce or continue an ideological culture war. In doing this, the apparently displacing threat of technology might be greatly reduced; but in any case, the coexistence of the two (new technologies and print based mediums) might be more productive. Perhaps the first step toward that end is to seek substantive common ground and forget about the new as exclusively new. In other words, we may do well to locate or theorize a bardic essence (or some similarly necessary illusion) that links the future, present, and past of literature in ways that make textual mediums and (and perhaps even interpretive processes) of secondary significance and thus reveal what is lasting.
Notes
Works Cited Aronowitz, Stanley. “Looking Out: The Impact of Computers on the Lives of Professionals.” Literacy Online: The Promise and Peril of Reading and Writing Online. Ed. Myron C. Tuman. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1992. 119-137. Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies. London: Faber and Faber, 1994. Bolter, J. D. Turing's Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1984. -----. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991. Freud, Sigmund. Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety (1926). Trans. James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1961. Hardison, O. B. Disappearing Through the Skylight: Culture and Technology in the Twentieth Century. New York: Viking, 1989. Kernan, A. The Death of Literature. New Haven: Yale UP, 1990. Landow, George. P. Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992. Lanham, Richard. The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts. Chicago, U of Chicago P, 1993. Murray, Janet H. Hamlet On The Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York: The Free Press, 1997. Postman, N. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. Selfe, Cynthia L. "Redefining Literacy." Critical Perspectives on Computers and Composition Instruction. Eds. G. Hawisher and C. Selfe. New York: Teachers College, 1989. 3-15. Tuman,
Myron C. Word Perfect: Literacy in the Computer Age. Pittsburgh:
U of Pittsburgh P, 1992. |