My first publication ever, lo these many years ago, was a review of Sven Birkerts’s The Gutenberg Elegies in the electronic journal Postmodern Culture. I called it “The Cult of Print” and boy, did I let him have it:
Here there is no room left for compromise — one either embraces this worldview or one sees in it a black hole of anxieties and essentialisms. The utter insolubility of Birkerts’s position, combined with his blatant unfamiliarity with the electronic media he discusses, is the reason why reading The Gutenberg Elegies so failed to move me.
Yep, that was me. Summer of 1995. And it felt great. (You can go and dig the rest out of the PMC archive if you really want to, but I’m not going to inflict the actual link on you.) I mention this because Nick, over at GrandTextAuto, has linked to an essay Birkerts recently wrote for the online literary journal AGNI re-assessing his own views:
How do I now justify using and promoting a technology which, just a few years ago, I deplored? Do I no longer deplore it? What can I offer to explain myself? I would say—short answer—that the digital age has arrived and that, at least in immediate retrospect, it has the feel of inevitability about it. Who knew? Well, clearly some people did. They read the signs, trusted that it was our collective will to move forward into connectedness and the radically changed private and public space that connectedness makes inevitable. I’ll admit it took me a while to accept this—not the fact of the technology, but the zeal of people everywhere to embrace it. But I have made my correction; I have accepted that there is now a new way of things.
What I will not concede is that with this the game is over. To the contrary: We have only just begun to orient ourselves to the new, its possibilities as well as its liabilities.
It’s a thoughtful piece and, as Nick points out, Birkerts is putting his money where his mouse is as AGNI’s new online editor. Still, he hedges his bets—he tells us, for instance, in the same brusque tone he once reserved for email, that he still doesn’t own a cell phone (though does do email now). Well that’s okay, lots of people still don’t have a cell phone. I get the sense, though, that for Birkerts the phone is still just a phone, i.e. a nuisance waiting to happen. I get the sense that he still doesn’t get it. He has no idea of the way the phone can be used to make art or make text or organize and empower people in the way Howard Rheingold (his old antagonist) describes in Smart Mobs.
Well, maybe that’s okay too. My PMC review doesn’t stand up any better than the Gutenberg Elegies. But you heard it here first: be on the lookout for a Birkerts blog.
Posted by mgk at November 21, 2003 09:30 PMMatt, as usual, your analysis is far more subtle and generous than mine, from a while back: http://www.plannedobsolescence.net/po/archive/000102.php
Posted by: KF at November 22, 2003 01:30 PM | Link to CommentSo it's old news. Well, the more of us keeping tabs on Sven the better. ;-)
Posted by: MGK at November 22, 2003 03:31 PM | Link to CommentHaving spent 20 years in academia--all of it in English departments--it no longer surprises me when PhDs in English use words such as "empower" and phrases such as "make text." The word "empower" means nothing. Writers and speakers do not "make text," they write and speak. Or should we now call writers "texters"? But then people don't talk to each other, they have a dialogue or participate in discourse.
One writer suffering from Dorothy Parker syndrome, also known as Parkerson's Disease, once referred to an MLA conference as a Jargonaut. Jason would have trouble navigating, without a doubt, through the muck and quaqmire of modern English as spoken and written by those who teach the language and its literature. The very same crowd who will jump with both feet on the head of any freshman or woman who dares use abstract language--especially language meant to impress rather than to speak or write clearly.
Ah, ye olde jargon debate. What fun. Let me suggest that English departments, the humanities, and the university as an institution all have bigger things on their plates these days than the jargon debate. While we're at it though, are droll references to Greek mythology really any less obfuscating than a word like "empower"? Or is Jason and the Argonauts just part of cultural literacy?
Posted by: MGK at November 23, 2003 10:46 AM | Link to CommentIn a 1979 article about the prevalence of the conduit metaphor (a closely-linked set of terms that describes an act of communiation as a coding, transference, and decoding), Michael Reddy poked fun at the alternative: Instead of walking into a classroom and asking, Did you get anything out of that article?, I have to say, Were you able to construct anything of interest ? (Reddy, Michael J. The Conduit Metaphor A Case of Frame Conflict in Our Language about Language. In Andrew Ortony, Ed., Metaphor and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. 284-324). Of course, that is precisely the language that dominates contemporary literary and cultural criticism. Maybe poets are more elegant when they go about pushing the vanguards of language, but every so often a scholar/theorist/linguist gets it right.
Posted by: Dennis G. Jerz at November 25, 2003 03:29 PM | Link to Comment