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CHAPTER 1
Friending the Past
Can we be friends with the past? If so, will the past friend us? What philosophy of history — at root, a "love" in the way we know the past — can make such amity possible in an information age when our craving for instant data binds us to an ever more expansive, yet also vanishingly thin, present — a razor's slice of now big enough for each of us to have a thousand Facebook friends or Twitter followers, so long as all that friendship fits on a few screens of attention before rolling off into oblivion?
My topic is how the digital present might have a love — and a philosophy — of history. Let me start by giving an account of predecessor epochs of media technology and their senses of history. The account will be partial, simplified, almost a fable. But there is some value in establishing a baseline for our current, hyper-mediated sense of history.
The Age of Ancestors
We can begin with so-called primary oral cultures, where, whether or not writing is known, speech and gesture dominate the ensemble of media technologies. Consider prehistorical cultures, for instance, in which (simplifying to one Native American paradigm) the sense of history was a matter of a rock and a voice. The voice sang: Here is Standing Stone, or Split Rock, or Cairn. Here the upper-world spirits came into the world, or the peace of the tribes was made, or Lean Bear had his vision quest. Anchored by rock, the voice that told the history of the world, tribe, or individual had both strong performative presence and an air of permanence. Voice was intensely of the moment. Yet voice was always also — or, perhaps better, always is — the rock of ages, where the copular is, positing the coincidence of voice and rock, spoke the primordial semiotics of presence (being the same as unmediated meaning) from which — much as physicists say supersymmetry broke down after the Big Bang into separate strong-nuclear, weak-nuclear, gravitational, and electromagnetic forces — all subsequent, specialized modes of representation may be said to derive: personification, metaphor, allegory, irony, and others. Following Walter Benjamin, we can call the spirit-medium of such presence aura. If aura is etymologically "air" or "breeze," then we might hear it as the wind that both whistles around the lonely rock and animates the voice of the speaker of the rock. Aura was the original medium — or zero-degree medium — of immediacy. The history it spoke, to use Benjamin's words about auratic cult objects, was "authentically" there in "its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be."
But, therefore, such history had little mobility. Neither rock nor voice carried far, especially together so as to preserve their semiotic bond. The cost of such immobility was almost the entirety of what we would today call history, since the lack of ready or scalable mobility meant that there could be no widespread reproduction effect transmitting the tale beyond individual or tribal mortality into historical permanence. This is the meaning of Rock, a medicine man might say; and legend and ritual would carry on the dictum for generations or leagues. But sooner or later, closer or farther, no one would remember, and the rock — as philosopher Albert Borgmann reflects in his lucid thoughts on the prehistory of information (grounded in part on Native American culture in his state of Montana) would diminish to just one binary bit of data: "'Yes, there is a message here,' while the bare or natural surroundings seem to say, 'No, there is no message elsewhere.'"
Significantly, however, the curtailment of what I called "almost the entirety of what we would today call history" does not mean that oral cultures had no sense of history — far from it, since such cultures were profoundly oriented toward what Walter Ong called the "conservative or traditionalist." Ong writes: "Since in a primary oral culture conceptualized knowledge that is not repeated aloud soon vanishes, oral societies must invest great energy in saying over and over again what has been learned arduously over the ages." In other words (generalizing now to other prehistorical paradigms), whatever was sworn on a rock, a sword, a ring, or any of the other oath-objects that were the surety of oral history — warranting, for example, the conveyance of spirits, identity, or property from one generation to another — bore repeating. The power of such repetition is something that moderns still feel when in the audience of any oral art of the caliber of myth, rite, or chant. Repetition, after all, is the original, unthrottled reproduction effect. If, in the semiotics of pure presence, the spirit binding rock to voice can know no diminution without immediately ceasing to be (it is all or nothing), then the reproduction of that spirit can only be the repetition of presence in undiminished force across seasonal or generational intervals of space and time. Repetition is a percussive punctuation or spacing of uncompromised presence: here, and here again. In short, it is magic, and even today, when the same words are repeated from generation to generation at a birth, wedding, or funeral, we would be lorn without such enchantment.
Moderns are distanced, though, from what they often consider the naiveté of oral repetition, which — by comparison with the industrial light and magic of reproduction effects in modern, especially digital, media — seems on a par with nursery rhymes and rote memorization. To overcome this progressivist bias, so as to see oral repetition for what it really is — one of the most advanced repertories of media reproduction effects achieved by civilization — requires desynonymizing technology from technique. I define technique as a method or practice that goes beyond being an application to becoming a play on technology — as when we say there is play in the action of a machine part, not to mention in a musical instrument. Technique is both bound to and free from its technology. As such, it is generative of culture from nature. In oral culture, the available media technologies may thus have been the naked human voice and its chorus of dance, music, costume, decoration, and other arts — all of whose repetitive sounds or visual motifs echo in the last instance the grunted rhythms of love, birth, work, war, and death. But the technique of such culture was always also a play on such technologies that channeled nature's raw demand for repetition (that is, reproduction) into the demand for culture heard in any measured song of love, birth, work, war, and death. Those who have studied oral techniques of repetition point out that they include all the sophisticated additive, aggregative, redundant, agonistic, participatory, and situational modes of discourse that resulted in bardic formulaic poetry (such as the Homeric epic) of the sort once mistakenly identified as high Western literacy.
Now we can come closer to understanding the oral sense of history. Thinking about technique in my Laws of Cool with the aid of Pierre Clastres's eloquent anthropology of the South American Guayaki people, I put it this way: "there is no such thing as the 'exact' slaving of technique to technology. Rather, technique is always also a way to express the archaic interval, lag, play, or 'slack' between a people and their society. "That phrasing of the mission of technique now seems to me even more true. Deep technique, which is comparable to what Clifford Geertz called "deep play," simultaneously satisfies the needs of present nature (or political power) and asserts an "archaic interval, lag, play, or 'slack'" in relation to those needs that is constitutive of culture as such. Modern examples of such archaic techniques — akin to skeuomorphs, or retro-relics created with modern tools to negotiate a cultural comfort zone between the present and the past (as related to digital media by Katherine Hayles and Nicholas Gessler) — are many. Consider, for instance layer or mask techniques in Photoshop that at once take advantage of digital modularity and recall methods of physical media, thus contributing their minute share to the immense cult (or artisanal guild) of cool by which designers today assert that they are culturally both in and out of sync with corporatized media. But moderns have nothing over premoderns in this regard. This is because technical archaism was never more important than in so-called archaic or prehistoric cultures themselves, where — if I may ventriloquize — our bows and baskets, our war cries and funeral cries: these follow the way of our great fathers and mothers. After all, archaism is not the same as regression, which may be the first response when nature or war beats up a people. Instead, archaism is when people play technically on their most needful technologies — sharp spear or mournful voice — to set a beat and a rhythm to the otherwise senseless beating inflicted by nature or war. "Tsia - ton te nion ka ahi, ahi! / S8a ri 8i sta - an - non - k8e ahi, - ahi!" or words set to any other repeating rhythm will do. From such meter there ultimately arises the soul of the archaic sense of history: ancestors. For what is repetitive meter but the retention at the atomistic level of the past? And what is invoked at the spirit-level of such repetition but ancestors, whose presence haunts us with the sense that we ourselves are always only repetition?
The essence of the oral sense of history — the principle that underlies archaic technique and the invoked ancestors themselves — can now be named. That essence, nothing else than the cultural embodiment (which is also to say mediation) of repetition, is sociality. Nothing about the media of oral culture lies outside the relationality of social experience, now and for all time. The living and the dead have a history together because oral media link them in a society whose fellowship of past and present is heard in every beat and rhythm of every technique by which each voice, gesture, dance, and music offered up by each individual in the great chorus makes it meaningful to be us, repeated generation by generation. Earlier, I made Benjamin's aura the figure for the original medium. Now I can be less metaphorical. The primordial medium, which blew windlike not just between rock and voice but from voice to voice, was sociality itself. I heard from him or her; I say to you; listen you to me: these were, and are, the core statements of community that underlie communication media. Jean-François Lyotard imagines it this way in his reflections on the oral culture of a South American indigenous people:
Among the Cashinahua, every interpretation of a miyoi (myth, tale, legend or traditional narrative) begins with a fixed formula: "Here is the story of ..., as I've always heard it told. I am going to tell it to you in my turn, listen to it!" (ellipses in original)
Let there be no mistake: Oral culture was the origin of what we today call network, complete with a data architecture of node and relay built on the proto–digital-network principle of "store and forward." Store and forward, we may say, was the original sense of history, even if such repetition could at first be transmitted only across limited intervals of time and space.
Or, rather, there is one distinguishing feature of oral store-and-forward networks that we should remark before moving on. Adopting the vocabulary of communication studies, we can say that oral cultures integrated one-to-many, many-to-one, and many-to-many communication. What a leader said to all, what all chorused back, and what everyone repeated to each other were a single social action. Thus, if oral social media in principle featured store-and-forward networking, which routes information through intermediate relays, the design of such networking was still that of the original local area network (LAN): a tribe, village, or family. The relays channeling the information flows were less intermediate than immediate: They were someone's grandfather, grandmother, father, or mother. We might honor them with the name keepers of the transmission. It was the keepers of the transmission who embodied the social network for one and all. It was the keepers of the transmission who were ultimately responsible for the oral sense of history in the root sense of responding, for example, when asked, Grandmother, where do the animals come from? The keepers of the transmission could do so because they once shared a here and now with the ancestors, from whose twilight land of storage they bring the eternal living transmission, just as they now share space and time with us, who in turn will become keepers of the transmission once our original keepers join the ancestral message store.
Such keepers of the transmission will not be there in later media ages, with enormous effect on the sense of history.
The Age of Authors
Next we can consider cultures in which writing became dominant. Of course, there is more complexity, surviving record, and recent research than I can compass here, even before considering remediation effects by which literacy did not so much supplant as co-evolve with orality (as in classical rhetoric and drama). I will thus speculate just on the aspect of the history of writing most germane in my context: the relation between writing and the sense of history.
From a modern perspective, history seems by definition an act of writing. The great boundary in the historical record is not between major religions or civilizations but between before-writing and after-writing — that is, the emergence of the historical record itself. Or, to look for the moment from the origin to the zenith, we can jump in medias res to the era roughly from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century when the modern sense of history not only dominated in the West but became philosophically self-aware. I refer to the century of high print culture that witnessed the triple birth of modern historiography, historicism (Historismus, the Germans called it), and, among other cultural forms that might be instanced, the mature novel. Critically rigorous in its approach to historical documents, historiography — for example, from Gibbon and Niebuhr through Michelet and Ranke — became writing to the second degree about writings; it not only collected or anthologized but submitted documents to selection, analysis, and metacommentary. Correlatively, Historismus — for instance, from Ranke and Burckhardt through Dilthey — was historiography to the third degree: the self-aware or philosophical practice of critical historiography. And novels at the time, including historical and realist novels, chimed with Historismus in their experiments with psychological characterization, limited omniscience, and (alike in Historismus and Tolstoy) the construction of sprawling, complex historical worlds rooted in national sensibilities. ("History is a novel and the People are its author," Alfred de Vigny wrote in the wake of the French Revolution.) A similar historicism characterized other disciplines at the time — for example, philology. As a technology, we might thus say, writing was ultimately a history machine whose highest level technical effect, just before the advent of newer electromagnetic and other postliterate media, was the manufacture of the sense of history. If the other master effect often accounted to writing was the progress of knowledge (for instance, scientific knowledge, one of the proof cases in the history of the book field), that is simply to say that historical knowledge and epistemic knowledge converged in the nineteenth century in what Foucault calls "a profound historicity" penetrating "into the heart of things."
How did the sense of history thus "effected" by writing technologies compare with the oral sense of history? Looked at one way, the sense of history suffered a loss in its technological conditions of possibility (in today's design-speak: its underlying "affordances" and "constraints"). Written history did not have the same range of action. First, it had far less of the performative presence — the intensity of the here and now — that I called the voice of the rock. Consider Ranke's famous motto for history in the preface to his 1824 History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations from 1494 to 1514: "wie es eigentlich gewesen" ("as it really was" or "how it really was"). On the one hand, this credo seems to return us to the bedrock of immediate historical experience. It is of a piece with Ranke's "participation and joy in the particular in and for itself" and his often novelistic, you-are-there history-telling — as in his vivid narratives of events throughout the History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations and the limited omniscience of paragraph openings from his later essay "The Great Powers" (1833), such as these:
(Continues…)
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