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Personal
Preface: From "New Historicism" to Information
Culture
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2
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Information
Culture, "Knowledge Work," and the Cult
of the New
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Postindustrial
Economy and "Innovation"
The restructuring imperative (process reengineering,
quality control, downsizing, flat and decentralized
structure, team work, just-in-time, lifelong learning,
etc.) has been authorized by the dual ideology of
"global competition" and the "new":
-
Michael
Hammer & James Champy, Reengineering the
Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution
(New York: Harper, 1993):
When
someone asks us for a quick definition of business
reengineering, we say it means "starting
over." It doesn't mean tinkering with
what already exists or making incremental changes
that leave basic structures intact" (p. 31).
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Peter
Drucker, Managing in Turbulent Times (New
York: Harper & Row, 1980):
Innovation
means, first, the systematic sloughing off of
yesterday. (p. 60)
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Herman
Bryant Maynard, Jr., and Susan E. Mehrtens, The
Fourth Wave: Business in the 21st Century
(San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1993):
The
First Wave of change, the agricultural revolution,
has essentially ended and will not be of concern
here. The Second Wave, coincidental with industrialization,
has covered much of the Earth and continues to
spread, while a new, postindustrial Third Wave
is gathering force in the modern industrial nations.
We see a Fourth Wave following close upon the
Third. (pp. 5-6)
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Information
is the Allegory of the Postindustrial "New"
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What is "new" about postindustrialism
is that it is "knowledge work" as
opposed to "matter work":
Thomas A. Stewart, Intellectual
Capital: The New Wealth of Organizations
(1997):
"We grew up in the Industrial Age. It
is gone, supplanted by the Information Age.
The economic world we are leaving was one whose
main sources of wealth were physical. The things
we bought and sold were, well, things; you could
touch them, smell them, kick their tires, slam
their doors and hear a satisfying thud. . .
. In this new era, wealth is the product of
knowledge. Knowledge and information–not
just scientific knowledge, but news, advice,
entertainment, communication, service–have
become the economy's primary raw materials and
its most important products. Knowledge is what
we buy and sell. You can't smell it or touch
it. . . . The capital assets that are needed
to create wealth today are not land, not physical
labor, not machine tools and factories: They
are, instead, knowledge assets." (p. x)
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Thus, information technology is the allegory
of the "new":
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Manuel
Castells, The Rise of the Network Community
(1996)
Thus,
informationalism was linked to the expansion
and rejuvenation of capitalism, as industrialism
was linked to its constitution as a mode
of production. (p. 19)
Networks
are the fundamental stuff of which new organizations
are and will be made. And they are able
to form and expand all over the main streets
and back alleys of the global economy because
of their reliance on the information power
provided by the new technological paradigm.
(p. 168)
-
Michael
Dertouzos, What Will Be: How the New
World of Information Will Change Our Lives
(1998)
- Bill
Gates, The Road Ahead, rev. ed. (1996)
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The Ethos of "Creative Destruction"
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Nietzsche,
CEO
It is the"new economy" that fulfills Nietzsche's
notion of a life-giving, creative "unhistorical
forgetting" of history in The Use and Abuse
of History (1874):
- "By
the word 'unhistorical' I mean the power, the art,
of forgetting and of drawing a limited horizon
round oneself." (p. 69)
- " . . .
we must know the right time to forget as well as
the right time to remember, and instinctively see
when it is necessary to feel historically and when
unhistorically. . . . [W]e may hold
the capacity of feeling (to a certain extent) unhistorically
to be the more important and elemental, as providing
the foundation of every sound and real growth, everything
that is truly great and human. The unhistorical
is like the surrounding atmosphere that can alone
create life and in whose annihilation life itself
disappears" (p. 8)
- "The
same life that needs forgetfulness sometimes needs
its destruction. . . . The process
is always dangerous, even for life; and the men
or the times that serve life in this way, by judging
and annihilating the past, are always dangerous
to themselves and others." (p. 21)
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3
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Whither
the Humanities?
Is a sense of history still necessary in information
culture? And if so, what is the role of the humanities
in fostering not just that sense of social and cultural
history but also, more fundamentally, the sense of
its necessity?
- The
historical approach of the humanities
- One
experiment: the Transcriptions
Project:
- But
it's a hard sell:
- Overcoming
the public's incomprehension and disinterest
(e.g., undergraduates, donors, university development
officers)
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Resisting the functionalist temptation: selling
the humanities only as "useful" to
information culture (the "critical skills"
argument updated to mean "content management")
- The
need for a fuller, multifaceted rationale that justifies
the contemporary humanities and its primary method,
the study of the history of society and culture,
on its own grounds of "humanity."
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The
"Critical Thought" and "New Historicist"
Rationales for the Humanities
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The
"Critical Thought" Rationale
Michael
E. Hobart and Zachary S. Schiffman, Information
Ages: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Computer Revolution
(1998)
"The
fundamental fact of information's historicity
liberates us from the conceit that ours is the
information age. . . . It allows
us to stand outside our contemporary information
idiom, to see where it comes from, what it does,
and how it shapes our thought. Likewise, the
historical viewpoint enables us to step inside
other idioms, to see how they functioned in
their respective ages. It enables us to move
between and among idioms in ways the idioms
themselves do not permit. In so doing we see
ourselves and our world from a critical perspective,
from a vantage point that reveals an unprecedented
opportunity for healing with historical thinking
the historically rooted rift between the sciences
and the humanities. . . ."
(p. 264)
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The
New Historicist (Neo-Antiquarian/Neo-Materialist)
Rationale
David
Simpson, "Is Literary History the History
of Everything? The Case for 'Antiquarian' History,"
SubStance no. 88 (1999): 14:
"We
cannot fetishize 'antiquarian' history as a
solution to our problems, but it is a restraint
upon despair or chaos. It is the more intellectually
fertile the more resistant it remains to appropriation
within monumental or critical histories. At
a time when history in general is increasingly
deemed irrelevant, the explicitly conservationist
mission of antiquarian history may be our best
hope for having something to work with should
history ever again become a matter of urgent
concern. . . .
Faced
with a generation inclined to believe in an
end to history, the task of historians of all
kinds is first of all one of preservation."
Matthew
G. Kirschenbaum, "Materiality and Virtuality . . .
and a History Lesson: The Rise and Fall of VRML"
(2001):
"Such
an approach, which would have something in common
with what historian Peter Burke calls 'the history
of events,' seemed ideally suited to reconciling
the rapid pace of technical innovation that
characterizes digital culture with the material
and documentary records of the new medium—for
these, it seemed to me, were being largely ignored
by critics and theorists. Where, I wondered,
were the Carlo Ginzburg's of the Web? . . .
A history of events, coupled with the recognition
of the materiality of so-called 'virtual' phenomena
has the potential to radically redefine the
nascent methodologies of new media studies and
cultural informatics, focusing and intensifying
the purview of these fields. Therefore . . .
two self-styled 'polemical' assertions:
- Digital
objects have material histories. . . .
- New
media studies, as a field, has not yet shown
that it appreciates the importance of material
history. . . ."
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4
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The
Ethical Rationale: The Example of Albert Borgmann
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A
Rousseauistic Fable: The Ancestral Environment of
Information
Presenting Borgmann to undergraduates: an episode
at Lake
Nakuru, Kenya (photos of Lake Nakuru: 1
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Borgmann on the "ancestral environment"
of information:
| "Information
about reality exhibits its pristine form in a
natural setting. An expanse of smooth gravel is
a sign that you are close to a river. Cottonwoods
tell you where the river bank is. An assembly
of twigs in a tree points to ospreys. The presence
of ospreys shows that there are trout in the river.
In the original economy of signs, one thing refers
to another in a settled order of reference and
presence. A gravel bar seen from a distance refers
you to the river. It is a sign. When you have
reached and begun to walk on the smooth and colored
stones, the gravel has become present in its own
right. It is a thing. And so with the trees, the
nest, the raptors, and the fish." (p. 1) |
| "The
ancestral environment is the ground state of information
and reality. Human beings evolved in it, and so
did their ability to read its signs." (p.
24) |
Borgmann's history of information:
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The
Historical Typology of Signs
Natural
- Conventional - Technological
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Borgmann's
Version of Modern Semiotic Theory
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Intelligence
— Person — Sign — Thing — Context
"The
central structure of information is a relation
of a sign, a thing, and a person: A PERSON
is informed by a SIGN
about some THING"
(p. 18).
"INTELLIGENCE
provided,a PERSON
is informed by a SIGN
about some THING
within a certain CONTEXT."
(p. 22)
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Important features of Borgmann's semiotics of information
(and its implicit ethics of information):
- Expansive:
| "An object is not a sign or a thing
simply; it depends on the context whether
it is one or the other. The context is proximally
shaped by our playfulness, our needs, our
standpoints. Our purposes, however, respond
finally to the ultimate context, reality itself,
whose cosmic or divine meaning is disclosed
by things like landmarks. It is the consonance
of cosmic context and focal things that makes
the world semantically coherent and allows
references to emerge and submerge." (p.
20) |
- Symmetrical:
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Intelligence
- Person - Sign
- Thing - Context
"There is a pleasing symmetry to this
relation. At its center is the sign, the fulcrum
of the economy of information, and on it revolves
the relation that mirrors the symmetry of
humanity and reality, of intelligence and
context, that undergirds every kind of epistemology
and was first noted by Aristotle in his celebrated
formula: 'The soul is somehow everything.'
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- "Orderly"
and "Coherent":
"Natural
signs disclose the more distant environment,
yet they do not get in the way of things.
A natural sign, having served as a point of
reference, turns back into a thing. . . .
Thus the ancestral environment, however and
wherever humans moved in it, maintained a
focal area of presence with a penumbra of
signs referring to the wider world.
The ancestral
environment of the Salish was well-ordered
as well as coherent. . . ."
(p. 25)
"Thus, we may conjecture, monumental
signs contributed to an environment that at
its normative best constituted a coherent,
well-ordered, and eloquent world." (p.
34)
" . . . the good life
requires an adjustment among the three kinds
of information and a balance of signs and
things." (p. 6) |
Contrast the usual experience of contemporary information:
- Reductive
rather than expansive (concentration on the
transmission of "bits," "packets,"
"pages" )
- Asymmetrical
(focus on the "virtual" realm of Person-Sign
at the expense of Thing-Context)
- Disorderly
and Incoherent ("random access")
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The
Moral: History and a Normative Sense of the Ethos
of Information
History of information as a non-essentialist
foundation for an ethics of information
"Cool" as the aesthetics of the ethical
lag (and historical lag) between "new" technology
and "old" technique.
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An
Application: The "Ancestral Environment of Information"
and Riven
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5
References
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- Albert
Borgmann, Holding On to Reality: The Nature
Of Information at the Turn of the Millennium
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999)
- Business
Week, Special Double Issue on "The 21st
Century Corporation" with lead article titled
"The Creative Economy," 21-28 Aug. 2000
- Manuel
Castells, The Rise of the Network Community,
vol. 1 of The Information Age: Economy, Society
and Culture, 3 vols. (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell,
1996-97)
- Michael
Dertouzos, What Will Be: How the New World
of Information Will Change Our Lives (New York:
HarperCollins, 1998)
- Peter
Drucker, Innovation and Entrepreneurship:
Practice and Principles (New York: Harper &
Row, 1985):
- Michael
Hammer & James Champy, Reengineering
the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution
(New York: Harper, 1993)
- Bill
Gates, The Road Ahead, rev. ed. (New
York: Penguin, 1996)
- Michael
E. Hobart and Zachary S. Schiffman, Information
Ages: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Computer Revolution
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1998)
- Matthew
G. Kirschenbaum, "Materiality and Virtuality . . .
and a History Lesson: The Rise and Fall of VRML"
(2001), manuscript, courtesy of the author
- Alan
Liu (profile)
- Herman
Bryant Maynard, Jr., and Susan E. Mehrtens,
The Fourth Wave: Business in the 21st Century
(San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1993)
- John
Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Witch
Doctors: Making Sense of the Management Gurus
(New York: Random House, 1996)
- Rand
and Robyn Miller, Riven (computer game)
- Friedrich
Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History,
trans. Adrian Collins (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill,
1949)
- Joseph
A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and
Democracy (New York: Harper, 1975) [orig. pub.
1942]
- David
Simpson, "Is Literary History the History
of Everything? The Case for 'Antiquarian' History,"
Substance no. 88 (1999): 5-16
- Thomas A. Stewart, Intellectual Capital:
The New Wealth of Organizations (New York: Doubleday,
1997)
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 ©2000,
Alan
Liu, English Dept., Univ. of California, Santa Barbara
(e-mail)
This page last revised 7/25/01
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