In response to Bob’s post on atomisation, Jesse Wilbur talks about how his college-era faith in Great Books seems to have largely given way to the sporadic appreciation of 30-second YouTube snippets.
That started me thinking about the literary canon. All those Great Books. There were huge critical quarrels about their validity, how they came to be great and so on: how bound up its measures of ‘quality’ were with historically-specific class and cultural assumptions. And all that.
Thinking of it as contingent and biased and so on makes it hard to think of the canon with anything like the reverence I felt towards it as a teenager. And yet, you don’t have to be T S Eliot to mourn that reverence, and everything it implied. An agreed-upon body of cultural matter that could (notionally, at least) be shared by all. Cultural cohesion externalised in print form. It’s hard not to find that a seductive idea. Cultural capital, shared frames of reference and implicit association with the elites, all easily communicable to a stranger via a few arch quotations.
And yet, if I know this body of supposedly eternal literature is the product of the collective privilege of a bunch of mostly-heterosexual dead white European males, do I really want a shared body of cultural reference framed by those assumptions? Etc, etc. This is an old debate. The question is very literally academic these days. The literary canon is the hobby of a few; new ‘literary’ books are still produced, but it seems increasingly that we are offered a choice between unacceptable (because obviously stacked in favour of the usual contenders) canonical elitism, ham-fisted revisionism, and deadening lowest-common-denominator populism. Given those options, I for one would rather stick to fooling around on messageboards.
So if the canon is this problematic, either adopted or rejected, then what replaces it? Aimless fooling around on messageboards? This atomised culture in which you cannot ever assume that you have any points of reference in common with anyone? Perhaps. Perhaps ’twas ever thus, and the literary canon was a convenient (body of) fiction papering over the cracks.
But if (and yes, I know this is a big if) the best thing the literary canon did for us was to provide a shared frame of reference for at least some, then are there other ways of achieving the same end? Stultifying elitism, PC revisionism, and drooling populism are all, in different ways, heavily invested in the idea of canon itself, which rests on the assumption that cultural content is produced by others for us to consume. This is a big assumption, and one that Alex Itin , the denizens of YouTube and a zillion other Web fora are busy prodding as we speak. It may be that fooling around on messageboards is not aimless at all.
So what does user-generated content do to enable new shared frames of reference? I’m not convinced that YouTube provides more than, as Jesse says, the occasional giggle, nor am I convinced that the ephemerality of messageboard chat is enough for a culture to chew on. But I think new art forms are beginning to emerge. For example, what I like about Itin’s work is that it moves between online and offline spaces, and involves physical exchanges of objects in real time, between strangers or friends. If (again, this is a big if) the aim of co-creation were to begin to reassemble shared points of reference amid a tundra of media atomisation, then stuff that at least in part actually happens in the physical world is infinitely more powerful than on-screen interaction.
There is huge potential in play, social algorithms, games, creative collaborations and as-yet-undiscovered open-source social codings to enable the creation of shared cultural content that can mitigate media atomisation. Computer games, ARGs and the like are beginning to explore this, but there’s much more to investigate. How might it work in textual form? How do you move between online and offline elements? How can such activity be captured? How archived or communicated? Is there a poetics of social algorithms? I can imagine a future in which the development of social algorithms within which co-creation can fruitfully take place – both on and offline – becomes an art form in its own right. And (perhaps fancifully) I imagine our current state of cultural entropy at least mitigated, if not reversed by such a distributed culture of co-creation.
if:book
A Project of the Institute for the Future of the Book
Jesse Wilbur also criticizes Youtube by saying that its snippets don’t generate more conversation than a “tossed-off ‘Sweet!'”. Is that the fault of Youtube or Jesse’s friends and colleagues?
I’ve had Youtube snippets of stupid celebrity tricks draw several friends and I into long and in-depth discussions of the nature of celebrity and where it’s going (hint: it’s going away). I’ve had bizarre catapault snippets and homemade cannon snippets draw out conversations about physics (which thankfully, Wikipedia was there to verify and/or correct). I could go on.
Mind you, I’m not disputing that there is plenty of content on Youtube that doesn’t illicit good conversation. But I am saying that there is plenty content that will. You have to look very hard for it. Let’s not forget that there are a lot of crap books out there too. They’re just not all posted up on Youbook.com
And who’s to say that in thirty or forty years there won’t be a canon of Youtube content that will reflect brilliant uses of the medium (namely, short form film). Popular rock music has certainly developed a canon. Are the people who strive to listen to classic rock less cultured than people who read classic literature?
One more point to boot: if a canon of youtube does evolve, it will very likely be an international one, which is more than can be said for the canon of Western literature.
I think you miss the point with what seems to me a cocktail party conception of literature:
“Cultural capital, shared frames of reference and implicit association with the elites, all easily communicable to a stranger via a few arch quotations.”
If a “shared point of reference” is the best thing we can say for art then its devolution is assured and it doesn’t really matter.
I don’t mean to defend the Western Canon that you stand so far away from in your former reverence, or the stultifying elitism that occurs, for instance, when I meet a man in his 70s who is excited about reading Dante for the first time, but the body of work that is being added to that Canon every day (yet often influenced by it in profound ways, like Jeanette Winterson’s fabulous Weight, a retelling of the myth of Atlas and Heracles). If anything the world of social media opens the opportunity for works that might not exist otherwise, at least in the sense that the non-cultural elite has a chance to decide what’s worth reading (you may call that implicit association with the elites, I call it zealousness for great art to the point of wanting to spend a heck of a lot of time writing about it online). Even though I don’t think the racial or sexual make-up of the people who ‘decided’ that those books should be the canon, I am glad to know that in the future, the Academy, or the NY Times for that matter, does not have to be the arbiter of what gets read.
I think the problem you describe is not the antiquation of Great Books or the idea of a Western Canon, but an issue of time. As Gabriel Zaid said in “So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance,” (I paraphrase) “it is easier today to acquire books than to give them the time they deserve.” Hence 60 second videos can be consumed and assimilated, while it’s hard to understand the psychic benefit of reading a book that may take days weeks or even months to read the first time through.
Bud Parr,
Chekhov’s Mistress
MetaxuCafe
400 Windmills
I think you miss the point with what seems to me a cocktail party conception of literature:
“Cultural capital, shared frames of reference and implicit association with the elites, all easily communicable to a stranger via a few arch quotations.”
I stand at least partially corrected. I’m not sure I could sum up what I actually think of the Western canon in a brief post, least of all at midnight UK time after a glass or two. 🙂 But this ‘cocktail party’ conception, which as you so rightly point out is not the whole thing at all, is certainly part of the former social function of the canon.
I wrote the above not as some reverse intellectual snob bitterly denouncing my former infatuation, but as someone who has read and loved enough of the Western canon to want to see it in context.
What I’m interested in is not denouncing the canon as a failed experiment in covertly elitist social cohesion, but as one historically-specific approach to creating a common culture. In the context of the cultural/media atomisation Bob posted about, I wanted to take the literary canon and (at least some) of its functions as a starting-point for pondering what kinds of activities, both on- and offline, might form the backbone of other approaches to the same.
This post was a Ringmaster’s Pick for the 62nd Carnival of the Infosciences, 7 January 2007. This installment of the Carnival may be found at: http://marklindner.info/blog/2007/01/07/carnival-of-the-infosciences-62/
blogging restructures consciousness?
The following story suggests that it does. Last month, Chris Bowers of the progressive political blog MyDD, underwent a small existential crisis brought on by a ham-fisted report on public television about political blogging that bungled a number of ba…
I’m all for blogging and new forms etc. However I don’t think the so called canonical literature can or should be disregarded. That criticism that it’s the purview of dead white males and that they’re mostly heterosexual should be put in a little context.
The fact that most of the classics were written by men has a lot to do with the patriarchal nature of the past. Whilst we rightly move away from that there’s no reason to discard the quality and standards associated with Eurpides, Dante, Shakespeare etc.
And we shouldn’t forget Saphos, Austen or Woolfe; not all the dead white males where male. The fact that they’re mostly heterosexual can be put down to the fact that most people are heterosexual (half those mentioned above were not). Widening our purview to read good writing from every social corner shouldn’t mean we deploy reverse prejudice.
As for the collectivisation of creativity, I used to dig that idea but I really have doubts. Some people are creative others are not.