To capture the sun in the crotch of a tree

Shades of the tabula rasa, something’s happening here…an open letter to Alan Liu

An open letter to Alan Liu concerning the notion of a tabula rasa interpretation which he introduced, though not in his own person, in “The Meaning of the Digital Humanities” (PMLA 128, 2013, 409-423).

Hi Alan,

You know, in a way Stanley Fish anticipated the notion of a tabula rasa interpretation way back in his 1973 essay, “What Is Stylistics and Why Are They Saying Such Terrible Things About It? (reprinted in Is There a Text in This Class?, which is where my page numbers come from). Fish takes on an article by the linguist Michael Halliday, remarking that Halliday has a considerable conceptual apparatus – an attribute of many modern linguistic theories, lots of categories and relationships, all tightly defined. After quoting a passage in which Halliday analysis a single sentence from Through the Looking Glass, Fish remarks (p. 80):

When a text is run through Halliday’s machine, it’s parts are first dissembled, then labeled, and finally recombined in their original form. The procedure is a complicated one, and it requires many operations, but the critic who performs them has finally done nothing at all.

Now, though I am familiar with some of Halliday’s work, I’ve not yet read that particular essay. Still, Fish’s characterization seems fair, and would apply to many similar and even not-so-similar models. Note, however, that he frames Halliday’s essay as one of many lured on by “the promise of an automatic interpretive procedure” (p. 78).

That, it seems to me, is the tabula rasa interpretation which you see as the goal of a least some digital critics. To be sure, Halliday did his work manually, but by that time the computer was very much in the air. On the one hand, Chomsky’s linguistics was driven by the notion of an abstract computer, but also computer-based statistical stylistics was fairly well established and Fish also hacks away at some of that work.

But, as far as I can tell, and I’ve been thinking about this for a lllllloooonng time, with one odd exception, there is never going to be any such thing as an automatic interpretive procedure.

From half a billion years ago

The horseshoe crab is half a billion years old, but its existence may be threatened.

The Computer, the Anthropocene, and the End of the World

Near the end of the previous millennium Francis Fukuyama declared history to be at an end. He did not of course mean that time has stopped or even that there would be no more change. He was speaking of history as conceptualized within a certain intellectual tradition. With the worldwide spread of liberal democracies driving large-scale social change had come to equilibrium. History is no more.

More recently, within this the present millennium Timothy Morton has declared an end, not merely to history, but to the world. He means this in a special sense, of course. As the blub to his book, Hyperobjects (which I’ve not read), has it:

The world as we know it has already come to an end.

Having set global warming in irreversible motion, we are facing the possibility of ecological catastrophe. But the environmental emergency is also a crisis for our philosophical habits of thought, confronting us as it does with a problem that seems to defy not only our control but also our understanding.

By way of clarification there is this statement, with which Morton ends an anti-Lovelock blog post: “The end of the world qua neutral backdrop to human whatever has already occurred. This is the afterlife. I am already dead.”

The Anthropocene began in the coal-fired, iron-mongering, carbon-belching industrial age and has become known to us in the silicon-cradled, bit-crunching, internet-clothed information age. It’s not merely that computer technology is with us even as we know of global warming, but that we couldn’t know of global warming without that technology. For that computer tech runs the climate simulations that tell us, yes, our energy-hungry activities have changed the climate so much that, for example, the sea is beginning to consume Bangladesh:

Suburban Arrangement

When I saw it I wondered What could that sign possibly mean? I don't believe that I've ever see such a traffic sign before. But I didn't think much about it. I just snapped my picture and continued on. Now, however, in retrospect, the meaning is obvious: Stop sign ahead. The sign is at the top of a hill facing traffic that is about to go down the hill. Drivers are being warned to get prepared for the stop. However, if the red octagon actually had the word "stop" in it, then the sign would likely be interpreted as a stop sign. And that doesn't make any sense at all at that point.

The human sciences are just getting started

Santo Fortunato published in Nature pointing out that, in physics, the lag between fundamental discover and a Nobel Prize for that discovery is getting longer and longer. Science writer John Horgan comments:

A National Geographic editor asked the letter’s lead author, Santo Fortunato, what the trend meant, and he suggested that science is “scratching the bottom of the barrel in fundamental science” and “running out of fundamental discoveries.” That reminded the editor of my 1996 book The End of Science, so he invited me to riff on the Nature piece, which I did. The Nobel trend in physics, I argued, supports my book’s assertion that further research will yield “no more great revelations or revolutions, but only incremental, diminishing returns.”

The point seems plausible to me. On the other hand, we're just getting started in the human sciences, aka the humanities. Though we've still got to shake off the shackles of the 19th Century.

The Nearness of You

For the last several weeks I've been sitting-in at a Monday evening jam session at the Parkwood in Maplewood, NJ. The repertoire centers on "the Great American Songbook", as it's called. A vocalist named Jay likes to sit in as well, and he likes ballads. He's done "The Nearness of You" several times now. I've heard the song, of course, but it's not in my repertoire. However, after hearing Jay sing it two or three times I find it running around in my mind's ear without any prompting from me. It's just there.

It's about to enter my repertoire. To that end I've been listening to versions on Youtube. Here's one by Sinatra, whose repertoire all but defined the Great American Songbook:

Here's a version by Sarah Vaughn, also known as The Voice. Notice that she sings the opening verse, which is generally dropped by most performers:

Lest we forget, some irises (they're coming!)

The economy of six-gun experts in the Old West

The Six-Shooter Marketplace: 19th-Century Gunfighting as Violence Expertise

Jonathan Obert (2014).
Studies in American Political Development, Volume 28, Issue01, April 2014 pp 49-79

Abstract: How are new forms of violence expertise organized and exploited? Most scholars view this as primarily a question of state-building; that is, violence experts use their skills in an attempt to regulate economic transactions or to extract and redistribute resources via protection rents either for themselves or at the behest of political elites. In an alternative view, this article demonstrates that historical gunfighters active in the late 19th-century American Southwest were actually market actors—the possessors of valuable skills cultivated through participation in the Civil War and diffused through gunfighting and reputation building in key market entrepôts. Neither solely state-builders nor state-resisters, as they have traditionally been interpreted, gunfighters composed a professional class that emerged in the 1870s and 1880s and who moved frequently between wage-paying jobs, seizing economic opportunities on both sides of the law and often serving at the behest of powerful economic, rather than political, actors. I establish this claim by examining a dataset of over 250 individuals active in the “gunfighting system” of the post-bellum West, demonstrating that the social connections forged through fighting, and diffused through social networks, helped generate a form of organized violence that helped bring “law and order” to the frontier but as a byproduct of market formation rather than as state-building.

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?aid=9224130

Origami Cranes, a Window, Light, Reflections, and a Problem

The problem comes from the dirt that's on the window. It's not grimy dirt, and you'd hardly notice it if you were in the room looking at or through the window. But it's clearly visible in these photos.

So, what's the problem? Does the presence of dirt on the windows reduce the value of the photos, or eliminate it altogether? Is the presence of that dirt a good reason not to display the pictures? Of course, they're small on the screen (you could click through to my Flickr site and see larger versions). The dirt would be more prominent in 8 by 12 prints.

The Fate of Reading and Theory

This is one part of a longer piece. That longer piece may not, however, actually get written. So I’m posting this now. In this post I treat word use – reading, theory – not as mere terminology, but as telltale clues about the nature of the underlying conceptual matrix (aka paradigm or episteme).

For as long as I can remember I’ve at least noticed, and have often been irritated by, the practice of literary critics to use the word “reading” to cover two somewhat different though related practices. There is the ordinary business of reading, familiar to any literate person. And there is more or less professionalized activity of creating written interpretations of literary and sometimes non-literary texts. There is no difficulty in using “interpret” in the second instance – and talking of an interpretation rather than a reading – and we do this often enough. But we don’t do so always and consistently.

It has always seemed to me that there is a bit of willfulness in using that one word, “reading”, in those two ways where that willfulness is insisting that the two things are the same, rather than one word being used in two different ways. But then Geoffrey Hartman, who seemed almost tortured by the strain of that insistence (cf. Geoffrey Hartman on Reading) did once draw a line in the sand (The Fate of Reading, 1975, p. 271):

I wonder, finally, whether the very concept of reading is not in jeopardy. Pedagogically, of course, we still respond to those who call for improved reading skills; but to describe most semiological or structural analyses of poetry as a "reading" extends the term almost beyond recognition.

He went on to observe, “modern ‘rithmatics’—semiotics, linguistics, and technical structuralism—are not the solution. They widen, if anything, the rift between reading and writing” (p. 272).

Quite so. But what would Hartman say to distant reading, which places an obtrusive computer-mediated apparatus between the critic and the text/s? Whatever it is, it is not reading in the sense over which Hartman agonized.

The Prospero Project

Now that I'm immersed myself in thinking about digital criticism (aka machinic reading) it makes sense to make this post current. I've just made a few revisions to the Prospero doc, most minor, one a bit more substantial (a new paragraph on how Prospero changes in the course of operation).

I've uploaded a thought experiment to Scribd. It's about a computer that can read literature and talk about it.  It's called, naturally, Prospero. An abstract's below, followed by the introduction.

Abstract: Prospero is a thought experiment, a computer program powerful enough to simulate, in an interesting way, the reading of a literary text. To do that it must simulate a reader. Which reader? Prospero would also simulate literary criticism, and controversies among critics. The point of Prospero, if we could build it, is the knowledge required to build it. If we had it, we could examine its activities as it reads and comments on texts. But our knowledge of Prospero is of a different kind and order from our knowledge of the world and of life, though those things are central to literary texts. The point of this thought experiment is to clarify that difference, for that is what we will have to do to build a naturalist literary criticism grounded in the neuro-, cognitive, and evolutionary psychologies.

* * * * *

Back in the mid-1970s a journal then called Computers and Humanities invited my teacher, David Hays, to write a review of recent work in computational linguistics. Hays was a natural for the job. He’d been involved in computational linguistics from the beginning, was then the editor of the leading journal in the field, American Journal of Computational Linguistics (AJCL), and had recently written about “Language and Interpersonal Relationships” for Dædalus.

Hays asked me to draft the article. I was his student at the time and, perhaps more directly germane to the task at hand, I was in charge of abstracting the current literature for AJCL. I was of course pleased and flattered to do so.

We began the article by defining computational linguistics and concluded it with a fantasy, a computer program so powerful that it was capable of reading Shakespeare texts in a way that was interesting but not human. We called it Prospero. It was a reasonable fantasy at the time. I figured that we might have such a Prospero system in twenty years. Hays knew better and refused to put dates on such fantasies.

Lowfat Cooking for Dummies, and a doll

The Dutch on Water: Let It Flow

The New York Times, How to Think Like the Dutch in a Post-Sandy World:

In the Netherlands, a man named Henk Ovink offered to be Donovan’s guide. Ovink was the director of the office of Spatial Planning and Water Management, meaning, essentially, that it was his job to keep the famously waterlogged country dry. As he learned about various Dutch innovations, Donovan was struck by the fact that Ovink looked at water as much in cultural as in engineering terms, which was a function of the centuries-old need of the Dutch to act together for protection.

Think like a community:

Beyond that, Ovink feared that politics might undermine any chance to encourage new thinking about water management. “When I mentioned climate change to one official,” he said, “she almost hit me.” He characterized some of the wishful thinking he believed he would be dealing with as: “Don’t hire a Dutchman — believe in angels.”

Dutch battles against water led his country to develop a communal society. To this day, Water Boards, which date to the Middle Ages, are a feature of every region, and they guide long-term infrastructural planning. American individualism, on the other hand, has yielded a system in which each municipality has a great deal of autonomy, making regional cooperation difficult.

Pacific Avenue in Jersey City, the day after Sandy

Geoffrey Hartman on Reading

While I’m working on a long post on reading, theory, and the machinic critic I thought I’d post some passages from Geoffrey Hartman’s 1975 – those were they days, weren’t they? – collection The Fate of Reading (University of Chicago Press. In the title essay Hartman is grappling with the fact that, no matter how intensely critics are oriented toward the texts of which they write, that very act of writing requires distance from those texts. One cannot write about the text if and while one is immersed in reading it. Complaining that contemporary theorists—mostly French or under French influence—have come to privilege such writing over reading, Hartman asks (p. 272): “To what can we turn now to restore reading, or that conscious and scrupulous form of it we call literary criticism?”

Hartman then observes: “modern ‘rithmatics’—semiotics, linguistics, and technical structuralism—are not the solution. They widen, if anything, the rift between reading and writing.” I believe that Hartman is correct and that his list of modern “rithmatics” should be extended to include the newer psychologies, and to many of the analytic techniques of the digital humanities.

These methodologies are not going to restore the critic to that intimacy with the text which Hartman so earnestly desires. That is a loss. But the loss is not so much that of textual communion, but of the nostalgic rhetorical stance that such textual communion is the proper and possible end of literary criticism.

Here, without further comment, are some further passages from two of the essays in that book.

“The Interpreter: A Self-Analysis”

Confession. I have a superiority complex vis-à-vis other critics, and an inferiority complex vis-à-vis art. The interpreter, molded on me, is an overgoer with pen-envy strong enough to compel him into the foolishness of print. His self-disgust is merely that of the artist, intensified. "Joe, throw my book away." Sometimes his discontent with the "secondary" act of writing—with living in the reflective or imitative sphere—makes him privilege some primary act at the expense of art or commentary on art. He turns into Mystic or Vitalist. But, more often, he compromises by establishing a special relationship to what transcends him. Having discounted other critics, and reduced art to its greatest exemplars, he feels naked enough to say: "Myself and Art." Like Emerson, who said that ultimately there was "I and the Abyss." (p. 3)

Famous artists in the home: Picasso, O'Keeffe, Chagall

There at the lower left, his signature: Picasso. At the lower right, a pair of light switches; notice the glow on the right hand switch. The picture frame bisects the image just right of center and the protective glass reflects the adjacent room – see the windows and the lamp?

The picture itself, framed in narrow wood strips, runs down the photo's center. In the reflection, notice the bathroom tiles, the mirror along the left edge of the picture, the faucet below. The picture itself is a bit difficult to make out, but it's an O'Keeffe flower. Notice the yellow patch, the flower's center.

Here again the famous artist is all but swamped by scene reflected in the protective glass. It's a Chagall print, with angels swirling in red. The glass protecting the picture reflects another protective glass, a window. Note the origami cranes suspended in front of the window.

If you look carefully you'll see that they're flying out of the home, not into it. That could easily be changed by re-hanging them.