The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts

by Richard A. Lanham

Overview

The personal computer has revolutionized communication, and digitized text has introduced a radically new medium of expression. Interactive, volatile, mixing word and image, the electronic word challenges our assumptions about the shape of culture itself.

This highly acclaimed collection of Richard Lanham's witty, provocative, and engaging essays surveys the effects of electronic text on the arts and letters. Lanham explores how electronic text fulfills the expressive agenda of twentieth-century visual art and music, revolutionizes the curriculum, democratizes the instruments of art, and poses anew the cultural accountability of humanism itself.

Persuading us with uncommon grace and power that the move from book to screen gives cause for optimism, not despair, Lanham proclaims that "electronic expression has come not to destroy the Western arts but to fulfill them."

The Electronic Word is also available as a Chicago Expanded Book for your Macintosh®. This hypertext edition allows readers to move freely through the text, marking "pages," annotating passages, searching words and phrases, and immediately accessing annotations, which have been enhanced for this edition. In a special prefatory essay, Lanham introduces the features of this electronic edition and gives a vividly applied critique of this dynamic new edition.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226468853
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	03/01/1995
Edition description:	1
Pages:	302
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Richard A. Lanham is professor emeritus of English at UCLA and President of Rhetorica, Inc. He has written ten books, including A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms and Literacy and the Survival of Humanism.

Read an Excerpt

The Electronic Word

Democracy, Technology, and the Arts

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By Richard A. Lanham

University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 1993 University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-226-46885-2

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Chapter One

The Extraordinary Convergence: Democracy, Technology, Theory, and the University Curriculum

In a mid-September weekend in 1988, a number of scholars met at Duke University and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, for another session of the oldest class in American education, the Seminar on the Future of the Liberal Arts. Our class had, over the decades, featured many distinguished seminarians but a repetitive syllabus: Does the center of liberal education lie in methods or texts? If methods, intuitive or empirical? If texts, ancient or modern? In an age of specialization, how specialized should liberal education be? Should it have a core curriculum common to everyone and, if so, what kind? How democratic can liberal education become without trivializing itself? What, if anything, is a liberal education good for? And why, if we have such a dynamite product, is it often so hard to sell?

This discussion began (if matters so deep can be said to begin) with the Yale Faculty Report of 1828. President Jeremiah Day and his colleagues addressed all these issues, and their answers don't differ much from ours. They argued that students should know a lot, as Professor Hirschhas recommended, and that they should think a lot, as the Association of American Colleges panel has urged. President Day's group stressed the final responsibility of each student for his own education, as did a subsequent Yale panel in 1972. Day's committee argued that a liberal education should not be specialized or preprofessional but broad and humane, and these expansive sentiments have found echo in the Rockefeller Commission's Report of 1980, where we read that "the essence of the humanities is a spirit or an attitude toward humanity." The 1828 group argued that a core curriculum is essential; so have many since, from John Erskine's Great Books course at Columbia after World War I and its descendants at Chicago, Yale, and elsewhere, to recent pronouncements by ex-Education Secretary William Bennett and the Wall Street Journal. And just as Yale in 1828 thought the proper time to move students from general education into their favorite special subject was the junior year, so do we. Like us, they were concerned to democratize access to higher education, and they sought to achieve this goal, as do we, by raising admissions standards. And of course they debated the canon, their Ancients and Moderns differing in language, but not in argument, from ours.

The curricular historian Frederick Rudolph has some harsh words for the 1828 patriarchs: "They embraced the uses of the past, but they withdrew from the uncertainties of the future. Their respect for quality, for standards, for certain enduring definitions of human worth, was class bound. They were blinded to much that was insistent and already out of control in American life." Just so. But here we were debating the same issues 160 years later. Why hadn't we found some answers? Had nothing changed in this endless debate?

I think three things have changed. Three new conditions, or clusters of conditions, have emerged-social, technological, and theoretical-and their convergence suggests a new kind of "core" for the liberal arts.

The social pressures are the easiest to summarize. First, the radical democratization of higher learning. In the early nineteenth century only one or two in a hundred Americans attended college, and they were almost all male, white, leisure-class, native English speakers; now half do, and they are often none of these. This change has been a gradual one but the quantitative change has now become a qualitative one. American minorities hitherto excluded from higher education have demanded access to it, and a new influx of immigrants has joined them. The immigrants who created modern America came in successive waves that left time for assimilation, and they came into an agrarian and then into an industrial society. Today's immigrants come from dozens of cultures and languages all at once, and into an information society that rewards linguistic competence more than willing hands. Over 600,000 immigrants came to this country in 1987-probably more than to all the other countries in the world put together. And we have more in prospect: "In industrial countries the population is growing slowly and aging rapidly; in developing countries-China excepted-the population is growing fast enough to double in less than a generation, and 40% of the people are under age 15." If we want to use that youthful energy, large-scale immigration and the linguistic and cultural adjustments it brings with it will be with us for a long time to come.

Liberal arts education has been built on the word, and in America on the English word as spoken by middle-class, white, native speakers. We have thought of ourselves, up to now, as a monolingual country and have always, after each wave of immigration, become one again-notoriously so, in fact. That monolingualism has now been destabilized. We will have to rethink our entire enterprise. If we grow into bilingualism-English and Spanish-as well we may, that will present its own particular problems in the university, as it has for some time done in the schools. It may also present its own unique opportunities, as Greek and Latin once did working against one another in classical culture. If you want a numerical marker for this change, here's one from the place where I earn my living: for several years now, undergraduate enrollment in the University of California at Berkeley and at Los Angeles has been more than 50 percent nonwhite.

To this situation, add a further development. These new immigration patterns, permitting for the first time substantial numbers of entrants from non-Western lands, have brought to America a new citizenry for whom the "Western tradition" that informs our traditional humanities curriculum is alien. Judeo-Christian culture stands now subject to a polite but puzzled reappraisal. And other, very different reappraisals of the liberal arts are being made from very different points of view by women and by blacks.

This linguistic and cultural revolution will force an answer to a major question that has been on our agenda since 1828: How can we democratize the liberal arts without trivializing them? Up to now, our answer has been the 1828 Yale answer: don't really democratize them; it can't be done; proceed as we always have-what else can we do, eternal verities being our principal product?-and let all these "nontraditional" students learn our ways as best they can. Political and economic pressures have now become too insistent for this. We are required to find really new ways to widen access to the liberal arts without trivializing them. Digital technology and rhetorical theory offer the new ways we need.

The second social pressure is for systematic public accountability. Since government, whether federal, state, or local, pays for much of our labors and those of our students, it demands an accountability that Arnoldian sweetness and light were not formerly asked to supply. And students in the private sector have become more discriminating-or at least more price-conscious-consumers of educational services as well. We face now a genuinely new, more searching and quantitative, invigilation. We claim to teach culture, civic virtue, and advanced symbolic processing. When asked to prove it, we have always begged the question: of course we are vitally important, even though, since we do what we do "for its own sake," we can't tell you why. But the issue is now being forced. George Steiner has been pressing it for years, to our stifled embarrassment, juxtaposing the pretensions of Western culture to the hundred million people that same culture has slaughtered in the twentieth century. And now the government, with less elegance and learning, is asking the same question: If the liberal arts do supply these needful qualities, as you claim, let's have some proof; show us some statistics. If we can't or won't comply, then resources now given to us will be allocated elsewhere.

The liberal arts, like higher education as a whole, have operated heretofore on our version of the "General Motors rule" ("What's good for General Motors is good for the country"). What's good for the arts must be good for the country. To doubt this only proves you a Philistine. Now we are asked, shocking though it be, to do some cost accounting. We shouldn't be surprised at this. Every other sector of American professional life is being held accountable in new and detailed ways for its practices. Why not us? With our customary GM complacency and with a conception of costs that would disgrace a child's lemonade stand, we will find this required accounting more than an incidental bureaucratic aggravation. It will force us to rethink the heart of our enterprise, to provide at last a straight answer to another vital question we have been dodging since 1828: What are the liberal arts good for?

Third, educational sequence. Students now often come older to the university, attend in broken times often more than one institution, and take more than four years to graduate; more of them work, and work more. This fragmented, discontinuous pattern is now more norm than exception. To it we may add the conceptual dislocations they feel hourly as they change classes from one disciplinary universe to another. Yet our thinking about the undergraduate curriculum continues to assume the four-year, upper- and lower- division, linear sequence and ignores the conceptual bewilderment it imposes on students. This assumption, as we shall see, blinds us to the only kind of core curriculum-a third key item left over from the 1828 agenda-that is possible today.

None of these social pressures-democratization, accountability, or educational sequence-is unprecedented, but surely we must reckon their intensity and combined force as something really new. The second emergent condition I'll consider, the pressures of electronic digital technology on the liberal arts, is in itself truly a new thing under the sun.

Imagine a student brought up on computers interacting with the volatile text I've described in earlier chapters. She is used to moving it around, playing games with it, illustrating and animating it. Now let her follow Arnold's advice and sift a dubious classic like, say, Love's Labor's Lost. Imagine her charting the rhetorical figures, displaying them in a special type, diagramming and cataloguing them, and then making hypertext animations of how they work. She'll use another program now on the market to make her own production, plotting out action, sight lines, costumes, etc. And then a voice program to suggest how certain lines should be read. Or she can compile her own edition, splicing in illustrations of cheirographia from the contemporary manuals. Or make it into a film. Or simply mess around with it in the irreverent way undergraduates always have, mustaching the Mona Lisa just for the hell of it.

All of these machinations upon greatness are pedagogical techniques that open literary texts to people whose talents are not intrinsically "literary," people who want, in all kinds of intuitive ways, to operate upon experience rather than passively receive it. Codex books limit the wisdom of the Great Books to students who are Great Readers-as, to be sure, all of us who debate curricular matters were and are. Electronic text blows that limitation wide open. It offers new ways to democratize the arts, ways of the sort society is asking us to provide. If groups of people newly come to the world of liberal learning cannot unpack the Silenus box of wisdom with the tools they bring, maybe we can redesign the box electronically, so that the tools they have, the talents they already possess, will suffice. We need not necessarily compromise the wisdom therein.

I don'on'think that the Great Books, for example, the classical tradition now defended with Luddite determination, will suffer by electronic presentation. Just the opposite, in fact. (And, we might reflect, because they are mostly in the public domain, the great books will be the first to be digitized.) We have, ever since the Newtonian interlude banished rhetoric, sifted out the rhetorical ingredient from our classical texts. Yet all these texts, the Greek and Roman ones entirely, the medieval and Renaissance ones in Christian partnership, were created out of a rhetorical tradition and can be understood only in light of it. We have had so hard a time selling the Great Books partly because we have systematically travestied their greatness, strained out-both in commentary and in translation-half of what makes them great. They weave their spell out of the ancient quarrel between the philosophers and the rhetoricians, and we have cut that quarrel in half and broken the spell.

Here, as so often, the humanities have created the "humanities crisis" they have spent the last century maundering on about. The bit-mapped, graphics-based personal computer is, as I have argued in chapter 2, intrinsically a rhetorical device. In its memory storage and retrieval, in its dynamic interactivity, in the dramatic rehearsal-reality it creates, in the way game and play are built into its motival structure, it expresses the rhetorical tradition just as the codex book embodies the philosophical tradition. The computer's oscillation between reader and writer reintroduces the oscillation between literate and oral coordinates that stands at the center of classical Western literature. The electronic word will allow us to teach the classical canon with more understanding and zest than ever before. We don't need to worry about its impending destruction, or deconstruction. Western Lit is in no danger from Westerns. They are both going interactive.

Indeed, by devising new ways to unlock the Western tradition for nontraditional students, we may find out more about what its wisdom is and does, begin to answer that other pressing question, what are the arts and letters good for? Up to now, the liberal arts have always, when pressed, been able to define their essence by appealing to their expressive means. Literary scholars read books and write them. Musicians compose music and play it. Artists paint pictures. Taking away this physical definition of the liberal arts-defining them by pointing to the physical objects they create, or that create them-compels the arts to define their essence in a new way.

The powers of digital technology both to teach nontraditional students and to document how they learn are being explored in a world the academic liberal arts have ignored, the world of applied-learning technologies developed for business, government, and the military. The developers of these interactive laserdisc "texts" and computer-managed instructional programs, because they do not share our commitment to the codex book, and because they must document the success of their efforts, have approached digital pedagogy without crippling preconceptions. They are redefining what a textbook is, among other things, and completely renegotiating the traditional ratio of alphabetic to iconographic information upon which it has been based. Their logos has already become bi-stable.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Electronic Word by Richard A. Lanham Copyright © 1993 by University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
1: The Electronic Word: Literary Study and the Digital Revolution
2: Digital Rhetoric and the Digital Arts
3: Twenty Years After: Digital Decorum and Bi-stable Allusions
4: The Extraordinary Convergence: Democracy, Technology, Theory, and the University Curriculum
5: Electronic Textbooks and University Structures
6: Strange Lands, Strange Languages, and Useful Miracles
7: The "Q" Question
8: Elegies for the Book
9: Operating Systems, Attention Structures, and the Edge of Chaos
10: Conversation with a Curmudgeon
Index