We still operate under this system and take for granted its rules. Books are stored in libraries, taught in schools, carry on learned debate, enshrine the truth, as we have been given to know it. After books have been printed and bound, they are unchangeable. Thus the idea of a single author can be protected. Because books can be physical property, they can be intellectual property, protected by some version of copyright law. Thus the career of authorship becomes possible. And books create a natural authority: you can quarrel with them but only marginally or by writing another book. If you are dealing with the ipsissima verba of God, as in the Bible, you cannot quarrel with the Author at all. (The quarrel about interpretation will continue, presumably, until Doomsday.) Books have always been centered in the word; illustrations can be reproduced but they require a different radical of expression, one which has almost always been much more expensive than setting text; color has always been an expensive ornament, not an essence. Sounds cannot be reproduced at all.
"We are coming to the end of the culture of the book," O. B. Hardison has written. "Books are still produced and read in prodigious numbers, and they will continue to be as far into the future as one can imagine. However, they do not command the center of the cultural stage. Modern culture is taking shapes that are more various and more complicated than the book-centered culture it is succeeding" (Disappearing Through the Skylight: Culture and Technology in the Twentieth Century [Penguin Books, 1989], p. 264). What happens when this occurs, when humanistic knowledge moves from book to screen? The operating system changes fundamentally. Texts are not fixed in print but projected on a phosphor screen in volatile form. They can be amended, emended, rewritten, reformatted, set in another typeface, all with a few keystrokes. The whole system of cultural authority we inherited from Renaissance Humanism thus evaporates, literally, at a stroke. The "Great Book," the authoritative text, was built on the fixity of print technology. That fixity no longer operates. The reader defined by print-the engrossed admiration of the humanist scholar reading Cicero-now becomes quite another person. He can quarrel with the text, and not marginally, or next year in another book, but right now, integrally. The reader thus becomes an author. Author and authority are both transformed.
The possibility of such instantaneous disagreement changes the time-scale of humanistic debate. We can compare the old diastole and systole with the new by juxtaposing the stately pace of humanistic publication-years to write a book, a year at least to publish it, years to review it, more years for it to affect the debate-with online special interest groups, where the interchange happens daily. To change the time-scale of humanistic knowledge affects its essence, not only its pace. It changes, to take the simplest example, the paradigmatic expressive form from the essay (another Renaissance creation) to online conversation (a return, on a faster time scale, of the paradigmatic medieval form, the letter).
And, as we have now all discovered, the protective carapace of copyright law simply cannot apply. Copyright law was created to regulate a market in printed books. Because digital information has physical expression but no physical embodiment, it cannot be owned in the same way as a printed book. You can eat your cake, give it away, and still have it too. A new marketplace must be devised. The new digital bounty, by denying the laws of substance, changes fundamentally both the career and the cultural authority of authorship. For properties in the arts and letters, existing copyright law seeks to focus on a central question-substantial similarity. To make such a distinction, you need a substance. Electronic text, unlike books, has none. Copyright law must have a fixed text, with a fixed order. Such an order is an integral part of a literary text and essential for making the comparisons copyright litigation always involves. Yet a digital electronic text, because of its intrinsic volatility, can leave the order up to the reader.
As a brilliant recent book, Writing Space, by the classical scholar Jay Bolter has made clear, the natural form of electronic expression is not linear but hypertextual. Hypertext leaves the organization up to the user. Beginnings, middles, and ends are what he or she makes them out to be. The final "reading" order represents a do-it-yourself collage, a set of user-selected variations, around a central theme. The idea of beginning-middle-end-the fundamental Aristotelian laws of artistic creation and indeed of rational thought itself-is called into question. Narrative and logical order, in such a world, are not fixed in the text but a boundary-condition which the reader can apply when and how she wants to. This change in the fundamental nature of literary structure, and of the human "reason" a common reader is assumed to possess, subverts utterly the kinds of textual comparisons any copyright jury can be expected to understand.
Electronic information, then, affects the organization of humanistic knowledge and the social basis of its production in some fundamental ways.
The operating system we inherited from the Renaissance, then, undergoes digital metamorphosis: book, author, authoritative text, book market, library, all become something else.
If the basic mode of cultural expression is moving from the book to some electronic form, what does this form look like? Do not confuse it with broadcast television. This new expressive form that is replacing the book is emerging from a cluster of technologies which people now call, for better or worse, "multimedia." It is a composite of techniques. Start with an electronic screen. This screen can do everything that a computer can do. It can display and manipulate type. Unlike print, it permits the reader to change the display from one typeface to another, for ornamental effect, for expressive effect, or simply to enlarge it for easier reading. Thus type becomes, instead of the famous crystal goblet of Victorian typesetting theory, an expressive parameter in itself, an iconic surface that interacts continually with the words which it bodies forth.
This new self-conscious expressive dimension isn't just a visual joke, like a ransom note assembled from a dozen different typefaces. It introduces a fundamentally different meaning for literacy itself. The late Eric Havelock, the great Hellenist, argued that the Greek alphabet enfranchised modern literacy because it was simple enough to be internalized in early childhood. The reader thus looked through the words on the page to the thoughts expressed. Thought was, thus, unintermediated-or at least made to seem so. This transparent medium was for humanism what Newtonian physics was for science-a fundamental paradigm. Pure conceptual thought, unintermediated by expression, was possible and indeed ideal. The printed page was a transparent window onto the world of thought.
The computer screen constitutes a more opaque surface altogether. We have to decide how we are going to constitute our "reality." Much more self-consciousness enters into the occasion. This self-consciousness affects "the organization of humanistic knowledge" at the most intimate level. Both author and audience, citizen and society in the world of letters, become fundamentally more self-conscious about themselves, about writing, about how social decorum is constituted. We have to do here not with an ornamental elegance but a fundamental state-change in how the social imagination works. A multimedia "page" can manipulate printed text not only in visual scale but in conceptual scale. We can construct a text, using an outlining program, in layers, and the reader can choose which level of generality within which to read. Typographical formatting of books tries this but within very severe limits. Its basic cognitive scale is fixed, and with it the reader's time scale; the reader follows the argument on the level of generality the author has chosen to employ. With the new medium, the scale at which conceptual thought is pursued now becomes a user-selectable parameter. Such a scaled reading is "hypertextual," but in a particularly ordered, top-down way. In the new expressive medium, text can also be in color. We see in magazine formats and advertisements how such a text might look, but we dismiss it for conceptual thought. I don't think we should. It seems far different in the context of, for example, a digital magazine published on a CD-ROM disk. We have proverbialized black and white expression as a guarantee of the truth ("I've got it down here in black-and-white!"), but the proverbs can't hide the technological base of this metaphysical verity. "Black and white," like print technology as a whole, works by sensory exclusion; there is nothing intrinsically truthful about such a technique.
Freedom of the press, the cynical proverb hath it, means owning a printing press. Now, through desktop publishing programs, such ownership has been radically democratized. But desktop publishing brings other changes as well. In a print world, we think of print as fixed, "cold type" even when it has been produced by photography. You set it. In a desktop publishing world, you flow type. The fundamental metaphor shifts from static to dynamic. This "liquidity" of our basic alphabet will affect in profound ways how we think about reading, about literacy itself. What becomes, for example, of the stability of spelling, punctuation, and syntax?
But all these changes, enzymatic though they are, only hint at the fundamental change that screen brings to page: a radical alteration in the alphabet/icon ratio of ordinary discursive prose. In a desktop publishing program, you not only "flow" your text, you usually flow it around pictures. To find the critical machinery needed to analyze such an alphabetic/iconic convention, we have to go to previously marginal expressive conventions like shape poetry. (We might also, if our humanistic respectability didn't forbid it, consider the new genre of "serious" comic book.) Such a mixture of word and image is not utterly new, to be sure, but digital expression poses it with a resurgent force. The new humanistic "page" can reproduce images as easily as text, and it can manipulate them to an equal depth. And the white space is free. The playing field for word and image thus finds a miraculous enlargement.
Our allegiance to the truths of alphabetic expression, in the humanistic world especially, has become so strong that we denigrate iconic communication as "comic book culture." But the power of the visual cortex to organize experience, not to mention the power of visual art to render it joyful, surely indicates that this prejudice must dissipate. We are in for a complete renegotiation of the relationship between verbal and visual thinking. This renegotiation, like the others we have considered, goes deep. The two sides of the brain are being brought into a new-and, perhaps we may find, more balanced-relationship. "Visual thinking" will become much more than an oxymoron, or even a paradox. The growth stock, in such a new humanistic world, will have to be the visual arts and art history, will it not?
So. We have an expressive surface which can mix word, written and spoken, with image and music. A Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk for the common reader. To this rich expressive surface, now add a dynamic digital video signal-that is, mix in movies as well as still photos. The history of film and television dynamic imagery becomes available, part of our new system of humanistic "production and dissemination." The film and television world's treatment of its rich archive has always been a scandal, but a digital universe makes it worse than that-a financial blunder. The VCR democratized the history of film and television, stormed the archival Bastille, as it were. Now a further democratization offers itself: the digitization of filmic record into an archival form where it can be stored more safely and dispensed more widely and at less expense.
At this point, the great cookie monster of humanistic angst, broadcast TV, has entered our new expressive surface. Once we get it on screen, we can manipulate it as easily as we manipulate every other digital signal. We can invert beginnings, middles, and endings to make up new stories. We can use the basic art form of our time, collage, to our heart's content. Talk about zapping the commercials-we can zap the programs! Thus we disarm the monster than threatens to devour us.
The multimedia developers have chosen as their "God-term" the word interactivity, and rightly so. At the deepest level, humanistic expression, and the means which disseminate it, have moved from a static to a dynamic medium. Is this not, as well, a fundamental movement of Western art in our time? A building for us now is not a timeless monument but, like the Centre Pompidou, for example, a structure built to change and interact with its environment and its inhabitants. From the sculpture garden we move to Christo's Running Fence, and to Happenings. From the gallery Madonna we move to Jean Tinguely's interactive junk-machines. From the tranquil landscapes of Poussin and Lorrain, we move to the minimalist paintings and room environments of Robert Irwin, where not only surfaces and walls and colors but the very nature and palpability of light itself change as we watch, and gaze, and ponder, and enter into the surface. And from there, to continually changing, algorithmically-composed computer "paintings."
The multimedia developers keep claiming that they have created a form so new that neither they nor anyone else knows what to make of it. But the aesthetic we need to interpret the new expressive surface that humanism now wields can be found just here, in the history of the visual arts from Futurism and Dada to the present. Scale-change, repetition, collage, chance-based creation, volatility, interchange of reader and writer, creator and perceiver, the radical democratization of signage, etc.-all these and more reveal the extraordinary fact that the visual arts have, once again, miraculously imagined an expressive explosion before it took place, before digital electronic means made it possible.
The arts are "humanistic information" in its most characteristic form. How, in creation, performance, and teaching, have they been digitally transformed? We might find our footing in the performing arts by considering music. Over half of the music performed in America these days has a digital base. Recording and playback are entirely digitized, with the consequences for listener-directed reconfiguration that the CD has made familiar to us all. Musical publication has been vastly democratized by electronic means. The nature of musical instruments has been fundamentally changed. There seem to be only three basic ones: the electronic keyboard, horn, and drum pad. From these, all the effects that carefully tuned brass and magically varnished wood create can now issue. The sound is not yet the same but the transformation has occurred. Musical composition now proceeds as a collage, specific sounds or bits of performed music are "sampled" into a single piece of music. Often the sampling proceeds, as John Cage predicted it would, from the world of ordinary, non-musical sounds. It needs no extraordinary mother-wit to extrapolate from these state-changes to the alterations required in music education.
"Musical talent" in such a world means something quite different from that in the world created by the Renaissance. The physical talents and training necessary for performance have been radically democratized in range and altered in kind. And the "performance" of a piece of music resembles far more the act of writing than the high-wire act of professional concertizing, as Glenn Gould foresaw. The digital performer depends, as does the writer, on a rush of power created by time-scale. As a writer, I work for twenty hours to create what you read in one; the power comes from the compression of effort and design that writing allows. That compression now can occur in musical performance. And the performance, the act of dissemination, now occurs in private as well as in public; since the signal is digitized from the beginning, to replay it at home is as "authentic" as to replay it in a concert hall. All of this sampling, collaging, and replaying creates horrendous copyright confusion, of course.
In the visual arts, the movement is complex but clear: from static to dynamic, from the fixed masterpiece to the ever-changing pattern, a new form illustrated perfectly by the well-known screen-darkener program called After Dark. In the literary world, the patterns of postmodern fiction have anticipated electronic display, too. Postmodern narrative patterns are hypertextual rather than linear. But the real revolution in the production and dissemination of fiction has come in participatory forms, in video games, theme parks, and museum simulations. We discount these in the literary academy because, like the novel when it first began, they are an emergent popular art rather than belles lettres. When we talk about "democratizing" literary experience, we usually mean taking our regular seminars and teaching them to audiences which normally don't or can't attend them. This is a fine thing to do, but the real, the radical democratiza tion of literary experience is taking place elsewhere, in the re-creational areas I've just noted and, indeed, in the almost universal use of dramatic simulation for all the processes in the world of work.
And not only in the world of work. We might reflect parenthetically for a moment on the implications of computer simulation for writing history. New powers of data searching and sifting only begin the story. Historical events can be reenacted, with the "reader" acting either as participant-"making" history-or as interpreter-"writing" history by choosing among various possible weightings of character and event. We can, dyslogistically, call this the "fictionalizing" of history or view it eulogistically, as an alternative to Ranke's positivistic history "as it really happened." Again, broad scale democratization.
In a digital universe, word, sound, and image share a common notation. There is an isomorphic representative code for words, images, and sounds. They are, at a fundamental level, convertible into one another. I have a program which traces drawings and makes them into music. You can make music from any imagistic source this way-it has been done with hospital charts, to pluck a pleasingly outré example from the current scene. And you can move the other way, derive images from music. What does this convergence mean? We don't altogether know yet, but certainly the traditional areas of creativity now overlap, with consequences for the democratization of the arts, and for the academic organization within which they are taught. How can we keep apart the practice of arts with common methods of input and a common digital base?
We have seen that digital expression has changed in fundamental ways what art is, how it is created, and how it is disseminated. We have seen that the common digital base brings the arts into a fundamentally new relationship, one that transforms how they are studied and taught. We have seen that, if you wish to study how electronic information affects the sociology of humanistic inquiry, you must start by pondering the enormous changes that have occurred in the arts and letters. It makes no sense to talk about how digitization has transformed our scholarship and teaching about the arts and letters without confronting the massive changes that have come to the arts and letters themselves.
Electronic technology has often prompted a hostile a response from the humanities establishment because it creates a different literacy from our customary print-based one. As we have seen, electronic "text" mixes word, sound, and image in new ways. It thus draws on different areas of the brain, and lays down different neural pathways within it. Jane Healy has argued, in a thoughtful recent book (Endangered Minds: Why Children Don't Think and What We Can Do About It), that we are educating a generation of children whose brains lack the neural networks needed for higher-level cognitive processing. Their brains have not received the social and verbal stimulation needed during the brain's critical periods of development. The villains rounded up for this impoverish ment-broadcast TV, high-decibel rock music, the decline of family nurturance, drugs-also include the new alphabet/image ratio I have been discussing. No one I know thinks the electronic universe will go away. If we are to understand the "literacy" it creates, we will have to school ourselves in the work now being done by behavioral neuroscience, which teaches us how the brain processes the various components that new literacy. Humanist inquiry of all sorts depends on such an understanding. Nothing less than human reason itself stands at risk.
It is apparent, I think, to anyone who has worked in the computer world that the spirit of play and game works there more strongly than it does in the world of print. We have to do here with a fundamental change in motivational balance. The three basic areas of human motivation-game, play, and purpose-are mixed in different ways by different technologies. As more and more of our communications become digitally based, we will more and more need to master a new mix of human motive. The humanities come into vital play because they exist to balance and remix human motive, to infuse the world of purpose with the world of play and game.
We've pondered how the alphabet/icon ratio has changed in the arts. May it not be the case that the nature of scholarly communication, of how we write and read about the arts, as well as create and socialize them, will be similarly altered? That our scholarly communication will mix words, images, and sounds in the same way that digital "artistic" texts do? Might scholarly communication become iconic in ways never seen before?
Let me turn now to humanistic teaching. What will change under the new operating system? Let's start with the idea of a "class." I'll use an example close to home, my Shakespeare class. I give it twice a year. I always recommend additional reading which the students never do. Partly they are lazy, but partly they can't get to the library, for they work at outside jobs for 20-30 hours a week and commute from pillar to post. Each year's class exists in a temporal, conceptual, and social vacuum. They do not know what previous classes have done before them. They don't know how other instructors teach their sections of the same class. They seldom know each other before they take the class. They never read each other's work-though sometimes they appropriate it in felonious ways. I read all their work myself, and mark it up extensively, often to their dismay. A few of them take me up on my rewrite options but most don't, and hence don't learn anything much from my revisions, since they are not made to take them into account. They thus have an audience they know, but it is a desperately narrow one.
Imagine what would happen were I to add an electronic library to this class. Students access it by modem or through a CD-ROM or whatever. On it, they read papers-good, bad, and indifferent-submitted in earlier sections on the topics I suggest. They read scholarly articles-good, bad, and indifferent-on these same topics. They read before-and-after examples of prose style revision. A revision program is available for them to use-licensed by me to UCLA, since it depends on my own textbooks! They can do searches of the Shakespearean texts, also available online, when they study patterns of imagery, rhetorical figuration, etc. They can make Quicktime© movie excerpts from the videos of the plays and use them to illustrate their papers. (The papers will not be "papers," of course, but "texts" of a different sort.) They needn't go to the campus library to do any of this. They can access this library wherever and whenever they find time to do their academic work. All their work-papers, exams, stylistic analyses-is "published" in the electronic library. You got a "C" and feel robbed? Read some "A" papers to see what went wrong. Read some other papers, just to see what kind of work your competitors are producing. Lots of other neat things happen in such a universe. But you can fill in the blanks yourself.
Such a course-here is the vital point-now has a history. Students join a tradition. It is easy to imagine how quickly the internets between such courses would develop. We can see a pattern in the hypertextual literary curriculum developed by George Landow and his colleagues at Brown University. The isolation of the course, not only in time, but in discipline, is broken. The course constitutes a society, and it is a continuing one. The students become citizens of a commonwealth and act like citizens-they publish their work for their fellow scholars. The mesmeric fixation on the instructor as the only reader and grader is broken.
Now, the classroom itself. The "electronic classrooms" in use now, at least the ones which give each student a computer, have generated some reliable generalizations. Just as "author" and "authority" change meaning in electronic text, they change meaning in the classroom. The professor ceases to be the cynosure of every eye: some authority passes to the group constituted by the electronic network. You can of course use such a configuration for self-paced learning, but I would use it for verbal analysis. Multimedia environments allow you to anatomize what "reading" a literary text really means. This pedagogy would revolutionize how I teach Shakespeare. (Again, in suggesting how, I run up against the difficulties of discussing a broadband medium with the narrowband one of print.)
Now the textbook. Let me take another example from my backyard. Let us consider the dreariest textbook of all, the Freshman Composition Handbook. You all know them. Heavy. Shiny coated paper. Pyroxylin, peanut-butter-sandwich-proof cover. Imagine instead an online program available to everyone who teaches, and everyone who takes, the course. The apoplexy that comp handbooks always generate now finds more than marginal expression. Stupid examples are critiqued as such; better ones are found. Teachers contribute their experience on how the book works, or doesn't work, in action. The textbook, rather than fixed in an edition, is a continually changing, evolutionary document. It is fed by all the people who use it, and continually made and remade by them.
And what about the literary texts themselves? It is easy to imagine (copyright problems aside) the classic literary texts all put on a single CD-ROM, and a device to display them which the student carries with her. What we don't often remark is the manipulative power such a student now possesses. Textual searching power, obviously. But also power to reconfigure. Imagine for a moment students brought up on the multimedia electronic "texts" I have been discussing. They are accustomed to interacting with texts, playing games with them. Won't they want to do this with Paradise Lost? And what will happen if they do? Will poems written in a print-based world be compromised? Will poems which emerged from an oral world, as with so much Greek and Latin literature, be rejuvenated and re-presented in a more historically correct way? And what about the student's license to re-create as well as read? If Marcel Duchamp can mustache the Mona Lisa, why can't they? Once again, questions of cultural authority.
Now the "major." If electronic text threatens the present disciplinary boundaries in the arts and letters, it threatens the major in the same way. I don't have space to discuss this question now, but perhaps we will want to do so when we meet. The "major" is constructed, at least when it retains any disciplinary integrity, on a hierarchical and historical basis. Such means of organization and dissemination, as we have seen, do not last long in a digital domain.
Now the curriculum, or at least two words about it. First, the debate about the university curriculum has centered, in the last century, on what to do about a "core" curriculum in a fragmented and disciplinary world. Various "core curricula" have been devised and, in some times and places, taken over the first two-or even, at St. John's, all four-undergraduate years. We have, in all these programs, hearkened back to a linear course of study. For all kinds of reasons, practical and theoretical, such a pre-planned program has rarely worked. What digital networks suggest is a new core constituted hypertextually, on a non-linear basis. None of the obstacles to the traditional core curriculum apply. Again, perhaps we might discuss this at greater length when we meet.
Second, the current streetfight about the undergraduate curriculum-Great Books or Politically Correct Books-ignores the probability that our "texts" won't be books at all. Both sides base their arguments on the fixity of print, and the assumptions that fixity induces in us. Thus they both, and the curricular debate they generate, depart from obsolete, indeed otiose, operating principles.
If the arguments I have been developing hold true, in our graduate education we are, to borrow Charles Horton Cooley's wonderful phrase for ossified instruction, educating "clerks of a forgotten mood." I cannot help thinking that the same thing is happening in other fields of humanistic inquiry. It certainly seems to be so in music and the fine arts.
The matrix of cultural grasp represented by the arts and letters, is now dominated by three convergent forces: technology, theory, and democracy. Technology-digital communications technology-we have now considered. "Theory"-by which I mean the postmodern critique, whether pursued in literary studies, art history, linguistics, or the law-lies outside our present discussion, though it informs it at every point. (I have, after all, argued that the aesthetics of electronic expression were laid out by twentieth-century visual art before the computer was invented.) What of democracy? Clearly higher education has been democratized in the United States since World War II. We need not debate that. Does electronic technology constitute an exclusionary force, as many people now argue? Certainly in some ways it does. Inner-city schools have fewer computers than Andover and Exeter. But in the long run, indeed in the short run too, I would argue, digital technology democratizes the arts and letters, rather than the reverse. Simply by opening discourse out from a strictly verbal base, it enfranchises not only the left-handed but the right-brained of all sorts. It will have, in my field, an extraordinary impact on what we still call "remedial" training. It opens out both artistic composition and performance to people formerly excluded from it, and it has enormously expanded the audience for artistic expression of all sorts. Our discussion of the "access" question has been far too narrowly based, and far too unimaginative.
But how, you may well ask, does such theorizing as I have been doing affect our daily decision-making life in this time of deep financial crisis for the arts and letters in America? Here is a quick list of some decisions which, according to the arguments posed in this paper, are affected by the digitization of the arts and letters. The fundamental change in operating system which the humanities are now undergoing:
When you talk about digital technology, someone will always dismiss it as "futuristic." None of the technology I have talked about is futuristic. It all exists now, and we must decide what to do with it. Let me suggest a way to begin thinking about it. Put aside all the institutions I've just listed-they are mostly the creatures of the book and of Western culture's concentration on alphabetic information-and start with a fresh question altogether. What kinds of institutions follow logically from the rich multimedia digital signal and its electronic means of dissemination and display? What kinds of social hardware do we need for the humanties' new operating system?
For a fuller development of these arguments, see Richard A. Lanham, The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology and the Arts, The University of Chicago Pres, 1993.