The Importance of Flat Characters

It's odd that I find myself this week in the position of defending the flat. Aesthetically I don't particularly like the flat, and in some cases I find it to be opposed to sublime experience. But when I read Flusser's "Line and Surface," a chapter in "Writings," I can't help but be reminded of the flatness of Bartleby as a character. Let's look briefly at several passages from the text and then look at "Bartleby the Scrivener."

Flusser describes the difference between reading a text and reading a picture, and in doing so arrives at a preliminary conclusion that becomes the foundation for his argument. First he suggests that the difference in reading techniques relates to the inherent structure of texts, which demand that the reader's eyes move from left to right or right to left or top to bottom. This codified way of reading is "imposed upon us," while in reading a picture we are free to move about within a structure that has been "proposed to us." (22) This comparison is rhetorical, however, which he indicates in the very next paragraph, saying "this is not a very good answer to our question," and proposing instead that the freedom we experience in reading a picture is only the first step. (23) The second step involves reading a picture systematically, as we would a text, in a system that is imposed on us.  All this leads Flusser to conclude that we must read systematically to gain any meaning from a written text, but we can immediately grasp the meaning in a picture, and our subsequent reading serves to "decompose it." (23) Then drawing a more far-reaching conclusion, he writes:

This points to the difference between the one-dimensional surface and the two-dimensional surface: the one aims at getting somewhere; the other is there already, but may reveal how it got there. This difference is one of temporality, and involves the present, the past, and the future. (23)

Briefly: I'm not sure this characterization of texts as one-dimensional and flat pictorial surfaces as two-dimensional is entirely accurate, though I want to use it in reading Bartleby. Sure when we encounter language written on a page, letters that form words or symbols scrawled in a handwritten script, Flusser's point seems well-conceived. Language speaks meaning in structures imposed on us systematically. But what happens when it doesn't? In the 20th century there were a number of interesting efforts to complicate this notion of reading structure, and unfortunately, most of these have historically fallen under the rubric of "art" instead of "poetry" or "literature," but perhaps it is precisely because these works do not impose a structure on the reader that they exist outside of traditional categories of texts. Here I am thinking of the works of Brion Gysin, Cy Twombley, Alfred Jarry, Morita Shiryu, Henri Michaux and others. 

Brion Gysin, 1963.

When we are confronted by a text like the one above, a page from Brion Gysin's notebook, we are unsure of where to begin. Even the question of how to begin or why seems mysterious, especially in light of the fact that the words on the page are expressly meaningless. When we look at Gysin's work, we perceive a maze of symbols, mysterious calligraphy, one-dimensional lines that fold over onto themselves, forming a barrier that keeps us out of the text. With this distance, the reader is forced to scan the text and the text is transformed into art object. But being composed of symbols and letters,  we may or may not find an initial meaning, when we scan the "picture," and if we move to the next step, the analysis, and we try to read this like a picture, we again face resistance because we move back to looking at it like a text. Let's look at another example:

Cy Twombley, Poems to the Sea, 1959.

Twombley blurs the lines a little more between poetry and art. His work uses pencil, crayons, pastels, and oil paints. It appears to our eyes like a child's drawing. But there is something else going on. The white oil paint looks like whiteout, the marks of correction on a child's homework. So this gives us the hint of a cultural reference, and it also gives us movement off the page, something we might more readily think of as art. But with his title, Twombley moves back to poetry. What effect does this move, from text to art to text have? Is this interpretation right, or are there other possible readings of this work?

In recent times, there has been a curious effort to historicize many of these works and authors and to group them together under the umbrella of "Asemic Writing." A sort of manifesto of for Asemic writing can be found here.

This discussion has led me to another curiosity. In American Hieroglyphics, John Irwin describes the exciting discovery and translation of the Rosetta Stone by the Frenchman Champollion and the effect this had on American writers in the 19th century. One whole section of the book he devotes to Melville and "The Book as Partial Object." This is a really curious connection, and something I hope to return to in subsequent weeks.

Back to "Bartleby." There is an odd flattening effect in the repetition of the phrase "I would prefer not to," and as this sentiment grows, it gives a monolithic appearance to the character of Bartleby. With each successive repetition, he seems to become more distant. The phrase is repeated verbatim 14 times throughout the story. By the third time he refuses to comply, saying "I would prefer not to," already the narrator begins to question his humanity:

I looked at him steadfastly. His face was leanly composed; his gray eye dimly calm. Not a wrinkle of agitation rippled him. Had there been the least uneasiness, anger, impatience or impertinence in his manner; in other words, had there been any thing ordinarily human about him, doubtless I should have violently dismissed him from the premises. (25)

This phrase in fact seems to replace him as a character in our modern minds. No one remembers the characteristics of Bartleby as they might remember Oliver Twist. Bartleby seems to become an object, something I have argued before, but in reading "Line and Surface" it's interesting to think of Bartleby as a character who is "already there" in Flusser's words. Indeed, the problem of Bartleby is "how [he] got there." (23)

Line, Surface, and...Emojis?

Flusser asks, "What is the difference between reading line and reading a picture?"

Later, on symbols, he says, "Written lines relate their symbols to their meaning point by point (they "conceive" the fact they mean), while surface relate their symbols to their meanings by two dimensional contexts (they "imagine" the fact they mean--if they truly mean facts and are not empty symbols).  Thus, our situation provides us with two sorts of fiction:  the conceptual and the imaginal:  their relation to fact depends on the structure of the medium" (28).

Well, my friends, I bring to you his challenge of line/surface, conceptual/imaginal with a medium that may or may not combine the two (you tell me!), with my primary text, The People in the Trees (abridged).....Emojis! 

 

Is this, as Flusser suggests, the (dis)topian future where "imaginal thinking will not succeed in incorporating conceptual thinking" and thus leads to "alienation of humankind, to the victory of consumer society, and to the totalitarianism of mass media" and brings "history to an end in any meaningful sense of that term"?! 

Or...will history continue after all?!

Drama as Dataveillance

Raley's "Dataveillance and Countervailance" discusses the effects of modern data-mining on privacy, the economy, and human social interactions. In a dataveillance culture, data is power, and whoever has the best access to the most data is on top. In some ways, Lyly's Gallathea functions as a simply allegory of a world controlled by data: the gods, especially Neptune, fulfill the roles of data-controlling corporations, while Gallathea, Phillida, and the other townspeople are the everyday consumers, knowledgeable about the existence of data-harvesting but clueless to its actual process.  According to Raley, in a dataveillance culture "voluntarily surrendering personal information becomes the means by which social relations are established and collective entities supported" (125). The "voluntarily surrendering" of information brings to mind the voluntary sacrifice "of the fairest and chastest virgin in all the country" that should be brought to the tree so that Neptune's monster, the Agar, may take her (1.1.47). When this voluntary surrender is thwarted by Gallathea's and Phillida's escapes into the forest--the early modern equivalent of going off the grid?--social relations cannot be established, and collective entities are not supported. Eventually, the resolution to this problem is Gallathea and Phillida's marriage, which is only a possibility after each has voluntarily surrendered their secret identity as virgins. Through this action, the social relations and collective entities that have suffered can thrive again.

Raley also discusses data harvesting practices in a manner that brings to mind the cutting and rearranging of Smyth's article from last week. Raley quotes Haggerty and Ericson:

Surveillance technologies do not monitor people qua individuals, but instead operate through processes of disassembling and reassembling. People are broken down into a series of discrete informational flows which are stabilized and captured according to pre-established classificatory criteria. They are then transported to centralized locations to be reassembled and combined in ways that serve institutional agendas. Cumulatively, such information constitutes our “data double,” our virtual/informational profiles that circulate in various computers and contexts of practical application. (127)

As is typical for other depictions of Greek gods, Neptune doesn't care about the townspeople as individuals, rather, he is only concerned with the ways in which these people and their actions can be "transported to centralized locations [. . .] in ways that serve" his agenda. The play's most important centrallized location is the sacrificial tree, at which virgins must wait for the coming of the Agar. What exactly the Agar does with these virgins is unknown, but Tityrus hints at the possibility of consumption--an especially gruesome way of "disassembling."

But aside from simple plot allegories, the "data double" and the anxious dialectic of biological body vs. body of data reveals parallel structures in the culture of dataveillance and in drama as a genre. Raley argues that our "data doubles" are fragmented "dividuals" of data which are then read onto the biological body. This could be helpful: if your "data double" frequently visits apparel websites, a corporation could use that info to send you coupons to buy apparel at their website. But it could also be harmful: if your "data double" frequently visits websites about building homemade bombs, your biological body could be targeted as a terrorist, even if your biological body has no plans to build said bomb. According to Raley, "Data is in this respect performative: the composition of flecks and bits of data into a profile of a terror suspect, the re-grounding of abstract data in the targeting of an actual life, will have the effect of producing that life, that body, as a terror suspect" (128).

Data functions performatively in drama as well, and as an audience, we often function as data-miners. When viewing a drama, it is common sense to view the biological body acting in front of us as simply an actor: Hamlet is not actually Hamlet, but rather an individual who has trained to recite lines publicly. The lines, costume, and physical motions that this individual expresses on stage are only "the composition of flecks and bits of data," but like data-miners, the audience almost automatically goes about connecting this flecks and bits into a mimetic individual so that they can understand the character's motivation and history, or predict the character's next move. The entire careers of many actors, filmmakers, critics, and scholars have been made by the mimetic move to interpret Hamlet as a drag king (see Sarah Bernhardt) or as a Freudian Oedipus (see everything else). These interpretations rely entirely on connecting flecks of data in order to create elaborate backstories and motivations which may or may not be true.

I do not mean to argue that we shouldn't connect these flecks of data, or that audiences are foolish for viewing dramatic characters as actual individuals. But just as in dataveillance, it is important to remember that a dramatic character/"data double" is not an individual, and to recognize that the process of connecting flecks of data can often be problematic. Maybe the solution to this problem--if it really is a problem at all--can be found in Raley's art-activists who create "mirror worlds" in order to inform the public about dataveillance. After all, many early modern dramatists viewed their own plays as holding up a mirror to mankind, like the art-activists, in hopes of educating the public about their own follies and weaknesses.

Trying to imagine Flusser's utopia

I have to say that I found myself initially amused and dismissive, then irritated, then fascinated, with Flusser’s “Line and Surface.” As Sophia pointed out to me earlier this week, it’s strange to read such an abstract and prophetic text that is not of one’s own time. The referents to which Flusser alludes are all out of order now: which of his predictions are outdated futures-never-to-be, and which are so much already-taken-for-granted that they can no longer be recognized as alternatives to something else? Even amongst the things I thought I recognized, I could never be sure if what I understood was what he actually intended. Flusser and I are from different worlds, it seems, and translation is only impaired by our apparently similar vocabularies.

That said, after I redefined some of his terms for myself I was able to grasp a bit more of what he was arguing (though I still struggle to evaluate its relationship to the “actual” future of the 1970s, i.e. now). As I understood it, Flusser was talking about new visual media (especially the moving image) and how they signify differently (as surfaces) than linear, textual media. In service of this, he sets up a distinction between facts, imaginations, and concepts. Facts are physically-accessible phenomena — rocks are his favorite example. Imaginal thoughts present themselves to the unconscious and require a subjective perspective. Imaginal fictions are associated with images but also with myth and symbolizing facts. In general, it seems like they are meant to be understood as “intuitive” somehow, in that they come with all of this perceptual richness that can’t be broken down into a logical structure but must be grasped whole. Finally, there are conceptual fictions, which he associates (for now) with linear writing, and history. This is because (somehow) anything in linear form has to be organized, symbolized “objectively” (because an alphabet is objective) and is subject to some sort of logos or abstraction that surfaces don’t offer.

I find this such an odd taxonomy! Why would you split “rational, conceptual, abstract” and “immediate, perceptual, subjective” along lines of text versus image/surface? Why would you call individual subjective experiences of things “facts” rather than referring to something like physical objects?

Anyhow, I was intrigued by Flusser’s resultant vision of the future, in which a linear process is replaced by a cyclical one. In the past, images(symbols?) objectified and translated facts(stuff), and concepts objectified/translated images and facts. These were the two forms of mediation between ourselves and the world of facts. But, for various reasons not to be treated here, this is now leading to an increasing disconnect from "reality." How to restore it? Flusser hopes that, soon, "imaginal thought will be a translation from concept to image, and conceptual thought a translation from image to concept. In such a feedback situation, an adequate model can finally be elaborated.” This model can eventually be compared to “facts” in order to determine that model's fitness. This Flusser seems to see as a means to bring about a utopian possibility— a medium in which “structural thought” can objectify concepts. This would render concepts as easy to access as images are for us-- mediating between ourselves and our concepts. Leveling up!

As to how this new development would look, the structural thinker is “no longer interested in history as such, but in the combining of various histories … The structural position stands in that sort of time wherein processes are seen as forms.” What Flusser seems to be imagining is a sort of God’s-eye view, one which sums time and space into unities that become moveable or manipulable parts: “those things that are in opposition for the historical position (matter-energy, entropy-negentropy, positive-negative and so on) are complementary for the structural position.” Whatever could he mean by this? Evidently, it would require “a new kind of media… a new type of thinking, with its own logic and its own kind of codified symbols.” Whether any of the technological changes since Flusser wrote this piece have reproduced any part of this vision is difficult to determine; but I’d like to end by using my primary text, chock full of “thought experiments,” to try to literalize some parts of Flusser’s more abstract reasoning.

Interestingly, “The Heat Death of The Universe” by Pamela Zoline predates Flusser’s chapter by six years. It has a characteristically postmodern form, with a hyper-referential structure that spans time and space and discipline, sweeping from evolutionary history to Shakespeare to Hong Kong to cosmology and systems theory. Mary Papke describes the structure of “Heat Death” as a numbered "series of axioms, hypotheses, definitions, narrative fragments and summaries that instantiate [the story’s] scientific principles” by referring to a kind of inferential or logical form more common to scientific reasoning and reminiscent of a lab notebook. However, an in relation to Flusser’s future vision, the form that many of these numbered entries take is precisely a sort of abstracted visually-rich imagined process, as when protagonist Sarah Boyle imagines allowing entropy to take over. She envisions that

The rooms would fill up with objects, newspapers and magazines would compost, the potatoes in the rack, the canned green beans in the garbage pail would take new heart and come to life again, reaching out green shoots towards the sun. The plants would grow wild and wind into a jungle around the house, splitting plaster, tearing shingles, the garden would enter in at the door… (4-5).

This kind of symbolization of a concept-as-process-as-image is frequent throughout the story, which made me wonder what Flusser would make of Sarah Boyle’s imaginative personalizations of scientific concepts. Presumably this is not the utopian ideal of structural thought he refers to; however, it does raise the possibility that using imagined processes as metaphors for concepts is not as unfamiliar as it seems when Flusser describes it. Like Sarah Boyle, when I think of evolution, I don’t think “descent with modification by way of natural selection.” I picture a fish slowly becoming a fish-monkey and then a monkey and then an ape-person and then a person.

Am I missing something? Perhaps. But as far as utopian visions of interactive, multiform, sweeping and even-handed historical thought goes, I have one name for you (my dear readers): James Burke. A BBC edutainment host for decades in the latter half of the 20th century, he truly brought Flusser's vision of the structuralist historian to life. This is most clear with his television show "Connections: An Alternative View of Change," which (per wikipedia) "rejects the conventional linear and teleological view of historical progress. Burke contends that one cannot consider the development of any particular piece of the modern world in isolation. Rather, the entire gestalt of the modern world is the result of a web of interconnected events, each one consisting of a person or group acting for reasons of their own," with no sense of the whole to which they contribute. The form of the television show is a sort of time-traveling zig-zag through unexpected connections in history-- how nylon was invented because of new petroleum by-products that were the result of the invention of Jeeps, connecting to stocking-machine-slaying luddites in England, who are defended by Lord Byron, who we then follow to Turkey-- and so on. These journeys seem to spatialize history, just as Flusser would have hoped-- history becomes a sort of ecology, a vast block of interconnections and interactions across which you can make many paths. Burke's own utopian vision takes this idea a step further-- though his efforts seem to have stalled out in the early 2000s. He planned to create a vast, history-producing software that would allow schoolchildren worldwide to perform their own research into interconnections, and posit their own historical narratives to stand alongside his.

Check out between minutes 3 and 4!

What is movement anyway?

I would guess by now that no one is particularly surprised that I was immediately struck by and caught up in Flusser’s discussion of time and modes of ‘reading’ history. I am very interested in Flusser’s investigation of linear time, “if by history we mean a project toward something,” (24) or "the sense of going somewhere" (23). As I continued reading, I was further struck by his thought that “those who write and read written lines” are part of “a ‘historical’ being-in-the-world,” while “those who make and read surface images” are part of an “‘unhistorical’ being-in-the-world” because “they represent the world by means of static images” (25, 26). I loved Flusser’s choice of the word ‘static,’ because in queer and performance theories when critics discuss biological bodies and/or gender performance, terms like “freeze” and “static” are often used. Beth Freeman in her book, Time Binds, has a nice summary of what it is I am trying to say:

"Judith Butler has shown how the rhythms of gendered performance - specifically, repetitions - accrete to 'freeze' masculinity and femininity into timeless truths of being. Zerubavel's 'hidden rhythms,' Bourdieu's 'habitus,' and Butler's 'gender performativity' all describe how repetition engenders identity, situating the body's supposed truth in what Nietzche calls 'monumental time,' or static existence outside of historical movement." (Freeman, Time Binds, 4). 

I am sure it will come as no surprise that my favorite form of time is queer time, or more specifically monumental time (since we have a few ways to define 'queer time' depending on what it is you seek to relocate or view). Monumental time (originally credited to Nietzche as mentioned above) can be said to render gender performance into timeless modes of being; i.e. as time passes and history continues to write itself/be written, there are certain definitions and expectations that seem to stay more or less the same. In this case that definition and expectation is the male/female gender binary that continues to be privileged by society (I'm making a generalization of course) as the ‘right’ way to live, as well as what and how those bodies are supposed to (re)produce and function. So how does this tie back to Flusser? Whether or not he intended it, his effort to figure images and films as ways of reading history gets at the heart of what it is to look at something and immediately form an impression, and to only later (seconds later in that moment or hours or days later when revisiting the memory of the image) “reveal how [your meaning] got there” (23). In a nutshell, he is (most likely accidentally) probing what it is to read bodies as images and derive meaning from those images. How do we ingest cultural norms and again and again paste them onto an image? And is it possible to translate that image back into written text to once again become part of the linear “‘historical’ being-in-the-world” (and do we want to?).

And so, you might by now be wondering how I am going to tie this to What Maisie Knew. I would like to posit that Maisie’s mother Ida Farange seems so abhorrent to the reader because she has so little regard for the child she birthed that was once part of her body. Though we learn of this secondhand through Sir Claude (Maisie’s step-father), who is rather unreliable, it is still no stretch to believe him when he replies in relation to the question of whether Ida wants children, “Won’t hear of them – simply. But she can’t help the one she has got…She must make the best of her, don’t you see? If only for the look of the thing, don’t you know? One wants one’s wife to take the proper line about her child” (James 48). Part of what makes this book so wonderfully astonishing is the queer space occupied by all of the women in this novel – each is either trying to get rid of or steel the only child visible in the novel, while, despite all the sex that most certainly is going on in the background in these relationships, none seems able or willing to produce another child. There is a bizarre detachment emotionally and physically from the thing that renders womanhood legible in society’s eyes: babies. These women, then, operate in a sort-of static and therefore unhistorical time because their bodies aren’t functioning in the way they’re ‘supposed’ to. So though we are reading them in a text, and therefore according to Flusser being led toward a certain ending, James instead renders any expected outcome topsy-turvy because we cannot figure out what gender role each character is supposed to or wants to inhabit. 

The Obligation to Instruct

It fascinated me, when reading the Raley piece, how much an analysis of the connection between dataveillance and countervailance could end up reading like an article on digital lifehacks. This is especially true if you peruse the endnotes.

“Search engines that allow one to surf anonymously, most of which neither record IP addresses nor use identifying cookies, include Scroogle, Ixquick, DuckDuckGo, and Yauba. Another way to prevent search leakage is to use network routing software like Tor, an ‘infomediary’ that encrypts traffic between the individual user and the Tor network. More simply, encrypted search (HTTPS, or HTTP secure) does not send search terms.” (Raley 139, endnote 1)

Raley not only gives us a historical and technical study of data mining and the complexities of voluntary and involuntary self-identification through data, but also a how-to manual for our own searching needs. It extends beyond current tech knowledge, too—Raley offers us a “letters from the front” kind of view by adding in personal experience (e.g. “my Firefox add-on, Collusion, reminds me…” Raley 129).

This dovetails pretty interestingly with the Scholes article and his claims about the privileging of certain kinds of work. He also mentions toward the end that we (or students in general) “need both knowledge and skill,” and that the two cannot exist independently of each other (Scholes 16). It’s telling, I think, that Scholes argued for a rebuilding of our academic structure “with the consumption and production of texts thoroughly integrated” in 1985, and by the Raley article in 2013 that kind of tangled up work system almost doesn’t warrant a second glance.

If we think of “production” work as Scholes does—his diagram puts creative writing and composition in that category—it’s possible to deal with privacy as part of that category (i.e. the production of privacy, especially in a non-private environment like the data clouds). What Raley does, then, is combine the “consumption” work of reading and interpreting current data structures with the insistent production of privacy via the sharing of tips and tricks from someone in the know. It’s “teaching literature” and “studying texts” (Scholes 16).

I’d like to look briefly at this phenomenon on the level of genre as well. Scholes calls genre a “network of codes that can be inferred from a set of related texts. A genre is as real as a language and exerts similar pressures through its network of codes, meeting similar instances of stolid conformity and playful challenge” (Scholes 2).

My text, Woman on the Edge of Time, wouldn’t meet a lot of contest being marketed as science fiction, which indicates to me that there are certain aspects of the book that unequivocally code it as part of the genre. In reading the Raley, however, and reading in it the way Scholes’ arguments have by that time become a kind of ingrained impulse to teach and study simultaneously, it occurs to me that when we establish a genre we’re actually entering into a production-consumption loop. For example, if I call Woman science fiction, I’m marking it out as part of a network based on something immanent in the content or form. I can only accomplish this consumption work of genre-marking, however, because the text is somehow producing science fiction. Because science fiction is a deeply ambiguous genre and a lot of its constitutive elements depend on the person defining it, I am also producing Woman as science fiction by consuming it as such. In labeling Woman on the Edge of Time “science fiction” in interpretations and criticism, I am in effect teaching the concept and parameters of the genre. I am including this data point in the literature of science fiction at the same time that I am studying the text as a point already in that generic network.

Thus, the problem. Scholes sets up the production/consumption binary as something that should not be an opposition, and claims we need to let them integrate into a “rebuilt apparatus” in order for literary criticism to survive (Scholes 16). I’m not sure I’m convinced it’s possible to not do that in some way. The Raley article is a fairly distinct example (how do you talk about the impossibility of privacy without talking about the software designed to asymptotically approach privacy?) but it seems to me that, at least in criticism like genre studies that involves “coded” texts, we can’t separate production and consumption into any kind of binary, let alone the false one Scholes thinks we use. The integration is crucial for the categorization of texts (or possibly even movements, periods of social history, etc.), so much so that we’re almost obligated to “teach literature” while “studying texts.” There’s no pause or hiccup in the Raley article between analyzing data and offering privacy tips because there’s really no other way to accomplish the overall task.

Bytes and Boundaries and Zombies

My first inclination this week was to discuss Rita Raley’s article and our current historical moment in terms of fear and distrust of the new, especially where machines and technology are concerned. ‘Just because we can, that doesn’t mean we should’ and ‘how do we articulate and enforce ethics in this new environment’—these omnipresent problems of techno-paranoia simmer under the surface of Raley’s discussion of dataveillance, and they certainly exemplify some of the concerns about the dangers of scientific materialisms that many people read into Frankenstein. [Raley’s mention of “zombie cookies,” which “respawn” upon deletion and cannot be contained by the usual methods, also seemed a promising in-road (122).]

I’m more interested, however, in what all of this paranoia can tell us about the anxiety that surrounds boundaries in a broader sense. Techno-fear (many thanks to Eddie Izzard for that term) often seems to relate to an issue of possible boundary-crossing: Raley’s article touches on the lines between public vs. private, identity vs. behavior; Frankenstein raises questions about the lines between nature and technology, human tissue and humanity, life and animation, understanding the laws of nature and violating them. Innovative technologies, and even new knowledge in general, necessarily introduce the danger of boundaries being crossed and beloved taxonomies crumbling. Mutable boundaries present a challenge to static notions of selfhood. They are monstrous. Visible changes in the ways that we as humans interact with and manipulate our environments shake up the comforting sense of structure and logic we project onto the world.

This brings us to “The English Apparatus.” Scholes maps out the discipline of English in terms of discrete categories and approaches, according to a number of binary pairs: literature/non-literature; production/consumption; real world/academy (8-9). Within this matrix, Scholes argues, some categories enjoy a privileged status over their counterparts, and the discipline’s typical approach to each varies according to these assumptions. Scholes prescribes a combination of changes to this approach, including a restructuring of the categories according to a different hierarchy. However, he gestures toward something more radically boundary-challenging when he notes, “seeing these oppositions as problems to be resolved, rather than as an unassailable assumption, is a step in the direction of a new practice” (10). Certainly now, thirty years after this was published, many scholars have trodden heavily over the boundaries Scholes discusses here, but while a recognition of the textuality of non-literary works seems now to be a commonplace of literary criticism, the language of “non-canonical” and “secondary materials” still pervades the discourse. (And, as Desiree pointed out during our first class, people still hesitate over where to shelve Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands.)

To bring Scholes’ binaries into dialogue with Raley’s article, it might be an interesting thought exercise to try to work out where, in the matrix of consumption/production/interpretation, we might position all those petabytes of dataveillance. Surely that’s a text. In this model, we are neither true producers nor consumers; we are reduced to nothing but text. We are the consumed. And the datavore is, naturally, a monster of our own creation.

Literature + Sacred = Canons?

Literature, according to Robert Scholes in “The English Apparatus” (1985), “has a much higher standing in our language and culture than the word ‘art’” (12). His arguments about the division between production of literature and consumption of it are something I hope we dive into during class. (Homeboy also loves his Derrida. And Barthes. And Foucault. It’s like a 1980s theorist party! Woo!). For this post, though, I just want to look at what literature means to Scholes and then dig into John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure as a way to look deeper at this definition.

Literature isn’t just higher than art in Scholes’ article. He says that “we mark those texts labeled literature as good or important and dismiss those non-literary texts as beneath our notice” (5). His work as breaking down the division between literary/non-literary, he admits, is well underway at the time of writing this article, but he privileges the “great books” idea of literature almost as a straw man (7-8). He then goes on to state that:

in our culture literature has been positioned in much the same place as scripture. We have a canon; we have exegetes who produce commentary; and, above all, we have believed that these texts contain treasures of wisdom and truth that justify the process of canonization and exegesis.(12)

Literature has become “secular scripture” and those who profess it its clergy (12).

Now, this article is almost as old as I am. And the literary field has changed, moving away from all the male-authored canonical idea of “great books” (though they still lurk there in the background) and making a wider variety of texts studied as literature, or at least under the literature umbrella. Take Cleland’s Memoirs, which has become itself canonical in studies of erotica. Peter Sabor’s introduction to the Oxford edition – also published in 1985 – ends with the call that Memoirs “deserves a permanent place not only in libertine literature but in the canon of the English novel” (xxvi).

But I want to push the idea of literature further, drawing on Vilém Flusser’s “Line and Surface” (1973) that we also read for this week. He creates a distinction between mass and elite media forms, saying that mass culture deals with “surface fiction” (like images) and elite with “linear fiction” (like written texts) (29). But engravings, a popular practice in ye olde eighteenth century, starts to potentially blur these divisions of mass/elite, literary/non-literary. Check it out:

There’s a 1766 edition of Memoirs with engravings by Hubert-François Gravelot, a respected and famous artist of the period. He also engravings for a 1742 edition of Richardson’s Pamela. Can you guess which one is full of graphic smut?

(ok, so the headers tell you. But still, there's not much difference stylistically is there?)

There are much more graphic engravings from Gravelot’s collection for this edition, but along with the textual markings, the ease with which these images could be swapped for both Pamela and Memoirs shows yet another way that the difference between Richardson’s work as canonical and Cleland’s as porn is tied to something beyond content.

So what changes have occurred in the field of literary studies since 1985? What’s stayed the same? I find it troubling that Scholes cites no women in his text (please correct me if I’m wrong); the feminist recovery movement seems to have helped trouble his idea of literature as sacred object as well. In any case, I’m glad that the definition of literature has seemingly expanded to let folks like me explore popular fiction, not just canonical works by dead white men.

Pamela image via Wikipedia. More here if you're interested. Memoirs image via Eighteenth-Century Erotica.