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Digital Supplement: A Dialogue
BennettIt seems right that the supplementary chapter to the fifth edition of Bennett and Royleshould take the form of an online dialogue.We will use digital technology to 'write' thischapter via Skype and a shared online document; and then it will be published on the Routledge website rather than in the book itself (the ‘codex’, as some call it). It also seems appropriate because the dialogue may in some ways seem to mimic the underlying binary or dyadic structures by which digitization works (on/off, yes/no, one/zero: Bennett/Royle).
Royle Let's come back to that business about the binary later. It would be good, to start off with, to say something about the term ‘digital humanities’.
Bennett Yes, I think that is what Routledge wanted us to talk about.
RoyleI guess everyone knows that ‘digital humanities’has to do with the use of computers, online resources and databases for the study and teaching of arts subjects like English, History and Cultural Studies.
Bennett Yes, there’s already such a wealth of material and new possibilitiesfor study and researchavailable to us. There's thewonderful Blake Archive at for example, where you can viewdifferent versions of Blake’s poems with their illustrations right thereon your computer screen or mobile phone.
RoyleIndeed, or the amazing British Library Shakespeare resources – the1623 First Folio and all the Quarto editions – that you can look at online at I found that invaluable when I was writing my little book How to Read Shakespeare (2005). ‘Digital humanities’ is of course a very fashionable term – and it is also, literally, where the money is at present, at least in the humanities in higher education in the UK. But in spite of my enthusiasm for such resources, there also seems to me to be a troubling discrepancy in the fact that humanities departments in general, at least in the UK, are faced with increasingly squeezed resources for the everyday ‘delivery’ of teaching, while at the same time disproportionately significant amounts of money are being poured into the area of ‘digital humanities’ – even though it is not at all clear what that money is going to produce. ‘Digital humanities’ is also a strange phrase in some ways. As scholars sensitive to the origins and etymologies of words we can hardly ignore the fact that ‘digital’ originally refers to fingers or toes (that is literally what a digit is).
BennettAnd at the same time we should not forget ‘humanity’ or ‘humanities’, which reminds us that we are dealing here with the machine-humaninterface –‘digital humanities’ is an oddly oxymoronic phrase, I've always thought.
RoyleIn some ways it might be more appropriate to talk about the digital inhumanities. After all, despite the anthropomorphism of the fingers and toes, the massive-scale processing of data associated with the digital humanities seems to be in some ways about diminishing or even removing the humanfrom the picture.
Bennett Yes, or we might think about digital technology as augmenting rather than replacing the human – computers as prosthetic devices that seemto give us almost super-human powers (your poor, fallible, human memory is almost infinitely enhanced by GoogleInc, for example). We are all cyborgs now.
RoyleAll of this has a long history, of course. Technology, as Derrida makes clear, is as old as writing. But even in its ‘newest’ manifestations, the lures of technology were already well-recognized by Heidegger who, in his 1957 essay ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, highlights the delusion of mastery - the way in which technology appears to enable ‘man [to] exalt himself to the posture of lord of the earth’ (27). But let’s talk about books. Is there, do you think, a future for the book?
BennettWell, the book as we know it –the ‘traditional’ printed book, the kind of book that has been around since the invention of flat-bed printing in the fifteenth century – is surely not going away any time soon. The really interesting question has to do with the new kinds of writing, the new forms, modes and genres, that digital technology allows and encourages. One example is an ongoing ‘poem’ by Graham Allenthat brilliantly exploits the possibilities of online publishing( Since 23 December 2006, Allen has added a single line to Holeseach day, gradually building up an online epic poem that you can watch being constructed (or written or composed – I’m not sure what the verb is). This wouldn’t have been possible before the internet revolutionized our world because Allen is publishing the poem line-by-line and day-by-day – and every new line changes the poem-in-process that you read the day before.
RoyleThen there are remarkable new collaborative ventures such as the digital humanities research project at Cambridge (CRASSH). What they are trying to do, as I understand it, involves an unthinkably broad and deep mining of databases covering a period of several centuries with the purpose or hope of establishing something like a new grammar, a new history of human consciousness.
Bennett On a rather different scale, perhaps you could say something about the Quick Fictions project that you are involved with.
RoyleIt’s an app that is available through Amazon or the Apple Store. Quick Fictions started out as a way of engaging with the idea that we are living in the age of the short attention span. (Were you listening? Shall I say that again?) Quick fictions are narratives of 300 words or fewer.
Bennett So a bit more generous than tweets, then?
Royle Yes, completely different from tweeting – and also distinct from what is generically termed ‘flash fiction’. The project began in a quite conventional fashion, with a social event at the University of Sussex (students and faculty) where about twentyselected quick fictionswere read aloud. It still runs in that form – it has been going for almost ten years now, I think – and we have taken it to literature festivals as well as different universities in the UK. But the primary ‘home’ for the project is online. The app is where you can read the best of the many pieces that have been submitted over the years, and of course you are invited to submit work of your own. The ‘quick’ of ‘quick fiction’ has to do not only with the idea of speed and short attention span but also with what is alive (the ‘quick’ as opposed to the ‘dead’), and even to the ‘quick’ in the sense of a wound (you know how keen we were to include a new chapter on ‘Wounds’ in the fifth edition). So ‘quick fiction’ is meant to encapsulate a somewhat paradoxical, even contradictory sense of ‘living’ or ‘live’ fiction, that can doubtless be linked to certain ideas of ‘life writing’ and ‘autobiography’, as well as to the idea of a literary text as something wounding (as we discuss in the new chapter). At the same time the Quick Fictions project is very committed, also, to the enduring force and value of storytelling. Every quick fiction on the app tells a story, even if it comprises just a few words.
BennettIt sounds like Quick Fictions raises all sorts of interesting questions about literary form, in the first place, but also about authorship, technology, intertextuality and so on. And that leads to a more general point, I think. In addition to the projects we have been talking about, online digital technologyoffersexciting new opportunities for literary ‘sampling’, for collaborative online writing and publishing, and so on,while at the same time raisinginteresting questions with regard to authorship, originality and intentionality. At least since the Romantic period, the paradigm of authorship has typically involved the model of the ‘solitary genius’as an individual working alone toproducea poem, novel or play. Of course, this has always been something of a myth – indeed, the Romantics themselves were great collaborators (as Jack Stillingershows in Multiple Authorship and the Myth of the Solitary Genius (1991)). Similarly, the ‘sampling’ that is so pervasive in contemporary popular music and that is enabled and enhanced by digitization might be seen as a new version of traditional modes of allusion, echo, quotation, and so on – indeed, as Roland Barthes arguedin 1973,every text can be thoughtof as a‘tissues of citations’ (Barthes 1981, 39). But online digital technology almost seemsdesigned to disrupt anddemand a reconfiguring ofour traditional (or ‘Romantic’) models of authorship. And I guess critical practice and literary criticism are having to take on board these emerging forms of literary production.
RoylePerhaps we could go back briefly to the question of the book, or what is rather ponderously referred to as ‘the future of the book’ (as if we were all suddenly supposed to be prophets and clairvoyants). I think we are living through an extraordinary time, certainly. By way of illustration,on several occasions in the past couple of years(but never, as far as I recall, prior to that), when a student has come into my office for the first time, he or she has remarked with a sort of amazement on how many books there are on my shelves. They seem to find this a bit weird, even unworldly. And just last week I had a similar feeling myself, when I was visiting the marvellous Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford and walking downstairs into the cavernous expanse of the Norrington Room. In a way that Ihave never felt before, it seemed just rather eerie and unreal – all these shelves in every direction, stacked with books for sale – and, I have to add with a sense of somesadness, scarcely anyone apart from myself and bookshop staff in the vicinity. Personally, I love the book as an object. It’s one of the most astonishing objects in the world. Of course it all depends on what’s inside and how it has been produced, and so on, but still it is for me something absolutely precious and also precarious – a bit like the book in Wordsworth’s so-called ‘Arab Dream’at the start of Book 5 of The Prelude (1805).
Bennett The whole of that opening passage about the power of books is wonderful – you’re probably thinking in particular of those lines about the volume of poetry having ‘voices more than all the winds’ and being ‘a consolation, and a hope’ (lines 108-9).
Royle Yes, that in particular. At the same time I think that this rapport with the book as object is simply – and even quite rapidly – disappearing.
Bennett It’s ironic, in a sense, that, writing in 1804 or 1805, Wordsworth is even then lamenting the fragility of printed books – ‘Tremblings of the heart / it gives’, he says, to think of how ‘frail’ the physical book is (lines 21, 48). But I guess you’re making a slightly different point.
Royle Well, it is a bit more practical than Wordsworth’s quasi-religious concern that the products of his ‘Sovereign intellect’ and ‘soul divine’ might perish (lines 14, 16). In seminars these days,there are fewer and fewer books or ‘hard copies’ of texts in evidence: perhaps half of mystudents are using a digital version of the text that we are discussing – mostly on laptops and tablets, but sometimes on their smartphones. And then it's also quite striking that, the moment a seminar ends, more or less every student in the room looks at their phone. There is, for all of us, something powerfully addictive about the internet. This goes back to the insidious power of the technological prosthesis we were talking about a bit earlier.
Bennett And insidious or not, there are practical questions about books as material objects or as virtual or digital. As you’ll remember,in our little book (an actual thingmade of paper and glue) This Thing Called Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing (2015), we talk at one point (pp.104-5) about how helpful it is, when you are reading, to have a pencil in your hand to underline words and phrases and annotate the text. But of course for many readers it’s not a question of a pencil so much as a keyboard or touchscreen. And if you are reading on a tablet, the opportunities fordistraction are immense. We are hard-wired, apparently, to seek novelty, and the brain gives itself tiny chemical rewards for discovering new things – opening a new tab, following ahyperlink and so on. How is it possible to find the time and focus to read a novel like Middlemarch or a poem likeParadise Lost when there are constant and seemingly infinite distractions tempting you at the touch of a button or screen?Canonical literary works are in competition – perhaps, indeed, in a losing battle – with clickbait. Even serious, scholarly research is being transformed by the endless availability of materials that can be explored and investigated without moving from the comfort of your own home: it’s difficult to keep focus in this respect as well, I think, or indeed to know where to stop!
RoylePerhaps we could bring this conversation to a pause, if not a close, by returning to where we began and saying something about the binary.Oneof the obvious dangers – orat least challenges –ofdigital culture, the digital humanities and so on, has to do with a kind of unthinking tyranny of the binary or dyadic. This tyranny is hardly new: it goes back to at least Plato (with his fundamental distinction between the ‘Forms’, non-material or abstract ideas, as opposed to the material world that is available to human perception). Still, the very explosion of what we call ‘theory’ (from the 1960s onwards) took effect – and continues to take effect – precisely as a questioning of the binary, of dyadic couples and conceptual oppositions. ‘Bennett and Royle’ might look and sound like a binary, but is it? I mean, are we?
Bennett You mean am I me and are you you?
Royle Yes, or vice versa, I suppose.
BennettIt’s a funny question, because people reading or listening to this might get the impression that it is an orderly, turn-taking conversation (you then me then you again...), whereasit has actually been constructed and revised collaboratively by a constant interplay (via Skype and a shared online document), to give the illusionof a binarism, a dialogue or text for two voices that doesn’t in anyclear, simple, oppositional sense exist– and never did.
References
Barthes, Roland. 1981. ‘Theory of the Text’, in Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, ed. Robert Young. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Bennett, Andrew and Nicholas Royle. 2015.This Thing Called Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing. Abingdon: Routledge.
Heidegger, Martin. 1977. ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper and Row.
Royle, Nicholas. 2014. How to Read Shakespeare. 2ndedn. London: Granta.
Stillinger, Jack. 1991. Multiple Authorship and the Myth of the Solitary Genius. New York: Oxford University Press.
Wordsworth, William. 1979. The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth et al. New York: Norton.