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.

Literature and Non-literature, Truth and Stories

In “The English Apparatus,” Robert Scholes questions the hierarchy of “literature” and “non-literature” that has been established and reinforced by the institution of the English department and literary studies. He urges us to rebuild the English apparatus by reconceptualizing what the “truth” of literature is, by acknowledging that the lines dividing texts within this hierarchy are not fixed but overlapping: “There is a difference between practice and earnest, which we must acknowledge. We err only when we make the gesture of erecting this difference into two ‘worlds,’ one of which is held to be all practice, the other all earnest” (Scholes 10). He compares the English apparatus’s reverence for literature to a reverence for religious scripture but argues against this, saying that “the varieties of literature must be seen as temporal rather than eternal. If literature is not scripture, then it cannot be outside of human time” (Scholes 13).

By the Sea does not deal with the exact same hierarchy of literature vs. non-literature, but its characters do reveal a common bias for knowledge and truth over stories, only to undermine this distinction in the telling of their own stories. My blog posts have yet to mention the character of Latif Mahmud, which reveals my own subconscious bias in interpreting the novel as primarily Saleh’s story. To clarify and fill in some of the gaps that I’ve left open: The novel is composed of six chapters, the first and last two narrated by Saleh, but the middle two narrated by Latif, the expatriate Zanzibari professor called in to help translate for Saleh. It turns out that Latif and Saleh come from the same town and that their personal histories are deeply intertwined: Because of a loan to a third party that was never repaid, Saleh took possession of Latif’s childhood house; in the present tense of the novel, Saleh has entered England using Latif’s deceased father’s passport (and hence his name). A central question is whether Saleh was in the right when he took the house — whose inheritance was it? And although I’ve told you only about Saleh so far, we readers of By the Sea do get to hear both sides.

Scholes writes, “If wisdom, or some less grandiose notion such as heightened awareness, is to be the end of our endeavors, we shall have to see it not as something transmitted from the text to the student but as something developed in the student by questioning the text” (14). By the Sea, as a text, is very aware of how it makes its readers question the truth in the stories it tells, and this interplay must be central to any interpretation of the novel.

Latif is an English professor, and within the first few pages of his section, he has this outburst, disconnected from and interruptive of the narrative that he is telling: 

I abhor poems. I read them and teach them and abhor them. I even write some. I teach them to students (of course not my own bits of offal, for God’s sake) and squeeze what I can out of them, make them laconic where they are verbose and posturing, wise and prophetic where they are clumsily speculative. They say nothing so elaborately, they reveal nothing, they lead to nothing. Worse than wall-paper or a notice outside the departmental secretary’s office. Give me a lucid bit of prose any day. (Gurnah 74)

Not only does he set up a hierarchy of prose over poetry, but he reinforces the idea that truth and clarity are the aim of literature, that obfuscatory stories are of less value. (And here we need to keep in mind: Saleh and Latif’s flashbacks in the novel themselves operate on the level of legend, a mixture of timeless cultural (Islamic/Zanzibari) tropes and local gossip.) Even though Latif claims a preference for the lucid truth, he can’t help reading the world in myths and stories. When Latif is asked to help a refugee named Rajab Shaaban, his father’s name, he suspects that it must be the man who claimed his parents’ house, but he only confirms his suspicions upon finally visiting Saleh:

I knew this man, had seen his eyes on the streets, had seen the way they looked at Hassan years ago, and had even taken a letter from him to deliver to my brother. And if it wasn’t him I had taken the letter from, then it was a man very like him. And if those weren’t his eyes from years ago, then they were very like them. That secret smile made me shudder. (Gurnah 100)

Saleh, while also privileging knowledge over stories, makes the reader aware of his precarious position as a storyteller: “I feel that I am an involuntary instrument of another’s design, a figure in a story told by someone else. Not I. Can an I ever speak of itself without making itself heroic, without making itself seem hemmed in, arguing against an unarguable, rancouring with an implacable?” (Gurnah 69). At the same time that Saleh is being read/written as an archetypical asylum seeker, he is telling us his “true” story, which strips away the first-person “I” from any other character and does not allow for Latif’s version of the events. (The reverse of course goes for Latif’s telling, as well.) Yet Saleh is wary of making himself out to be heroic — or maybe not, but he is at least warning the reader that, just like the British officials spinning him into a yarn about refugees, he may not be trusted to tell the real “truth.”

These thoughts are themselves resistant to concise summation, so I’m going to end with some questions. Should we read stories that seem clear and “truthful” as legends, as poems? Does the first-person narrator ever not make him/herself out as a hero? Can this tell us anything about the arbitrariness of the literature/non-literature hierarchy? Am I right to extend Scholes’s prescription for teaching writing/literature to the idea of reading how texts situate, undermine, and question themselves?