Neil Kleinman
Dept. of English and The Institute for Language,
Technology and Publications Design
University of Baltimore
At about the same time that Harold Bloom was finishing his recent book, The Western Canon (Harcourt, 1994), Richard Lanham was publishing The Electronic Word. These two books, like tectonic plates, move in different directions, rub against each other, and locate a fault line in the academic community. We can expect aftershocks, and we will, no doubt, witness some internal rumblings.
Harold Bloom argues for a literary tradition based upon a tightly defined set of texts. His is a classic notion of aesthetic tradition, order and value. It recalls the great books curriculum, devised by Adler and Hutchinson in Chicago, considered by Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind (Simon & Schuster, 1987), and re-issued by E. D. Hirsch in Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (Houghton Mifflin, 1987) and more recently by William Bennett in his compendium, The Book of Virtues (Simon & Schuster, 1993). There is unity of knowledge, all of these writers conclude, and its value is both in the fact of its unity and in the knowledge itself.
Richard Lanham sees the world quite differently. There is little room in his curriculum for a list of "authoritative and canonical Great Books": such a list would, according to Lanham, end the inquiry before it began. He takes the side of the argument that, knowledge is dynamic and volatile. It is not "truth" we teach and seek; we teach a method to be used in the search. For him, "Western education has in its essence been rhetorical, has been based . . . not on a set of great ideas, but on a manner of apprehension; it has taught as central not knowledge but how knowledge is held." To Lanham, this rhetorical tradition is playful and reflexive, calling attention to itself and its limits. For him, the printed book is a rather intractable form. It hides from the reader the lack of coherence that is in every argument. The book is, he writes, "static, inelastically linear, sluggish." It is for that reason that he embraces the "electronic word" that is, the word made incarnate through the digital syntax of the computer.
In rejecting a world of fixed points, absolutes, and logical and organized conclusions, Lanham speaks the language of the jester the rhetorician who moves from figure to ground and back again just as the argument is about to become clear. (He calls this process of moving from figure to ground, "bi-stable oscillation.") It is this theatrical play which he takes to be at the core of Western culture. We lost our way with the advent of print, he says. "Print is a 'philosophic' medium," with too much authority left in the hands of the teachers, priests, and gatekeepers. (His attitude towards print and the book is honestly come by. Lanham is first and foremost a man of The Book. He is the author of nine books and has just retired from UCLA where he was a professor of English.)
The new electronic, digital medium is, of course, just right for Lanham's purposes and vision. It allows for easy manipulation of material, for quick jumps and transitions controlled by the reader, for multimedia mixes of word, image and sound, and (above all) for interactivity. At its best or at its imagined best the new electronic writing space creates a theater space in which the reader can "act" and "create" on a plane shared with the "author." It is the perfect space for the play of ideas and intellectual action that Lanham posits.
This electronic medium creates, he observes, "not only a new writing space but a new educational space as well. Not only the humanities curriculum, but school and university structures, administrative and physical, are affected at every point, as of course is the whole cultural repository and information system we call a library." Another way of stating this is that The University is about to undergo a major transformation in what it does and how it does it.
This is pretty absolute, global thinking, a bit out of place coming as it does from someone who believes that the absolute is bound to distort and exaggerate. Intriguing as Lanham's picture of the future is, the reader should be forewarned. Some will find it hard to embrace his thinking, and many will find his prose to be self-indulgent, redundant, and professorial. (Perhaps this is because his book is essentially a collection of essays written originally for a scholarly audience.) Still his vision is compelling; his analysis is right; and he suggests many of the practical questions we shall find hard to avoid over the next decade or two.
Will we need departments based on narrow disciplinary fields? New programs too often now stand on their own "property," with little relationship to their neighbors except for a general education curriculum little more than a street laid down after the curriculum has been constructed. What if, by administrative fiat, every "new" idea or "new" degree program were to be linked like a hypertext to the departments, programs, disciplines already in place? What structure then? What kind of degree programs and general education requirements might we fashion?
The same questions might be asked of the physical and intellectual space we set aside for the learning enterprise. Will we need libraries, ten and twenty stories high, when we can plug into Internet and capture data bases of information sprinkled across a global network of computer webs and electronic spaces? Will we, in fact, need campuses when we can all study at home linked by interactive systems that bring teacher and student and library together on one network? The answer is that, "we will probably not." And if not, how will we forge the sense of community we take as being so central to the academic enterprise?
There are other questions some spoken, some merely suggested. For instance, there remains the too often unthinkable, but necessary, question: Will we need a tenured core faculty, located at one place and one time, when students are everywhere, often attending to discussions that took place in another time and place?
Lanham prepares us for these questions by pointing out that a lot of what we think is new is really pretty old stuff. Thus Lanham, a rhetorician by trade, shows that the electronic way of thinking merely rediscovers the playfulness and craft of the rhetorical tradition. Both are interactive, both are open-ended forms of discourse, and both are participatory. In classical rhetoric, one cannot tell the actor from the audience, and in electronic media one cannot tell the "author" from the "reader." The roles are quickly interchanged.
As a way of illustrating his points, Lanham also provides a hypertext version of his book. The electronic edition is modest in what it does but instructive in what it shows. The "user," or sometime reader, can play. There are "animations" that demonstrate the ideas Lanham is working out in the text. We can replace and exchange words, use new type fonts, highlight grammatical structures, watch dynamic charts, hear the author read his text, and more. It is, for a while, just plain fun. And the points made are useful.
The technology allows us to do other things, which from a critical point of view, engaged me more. One can search for a word, for its occurrence, and its context. For example, I was curious about what Lanham thought of Technology as leading to "democratization." With ease, I found the 17 times he used the expression and the context for each entry. We learn that he believes the electronic word will lead to a "radical democratization" (in textbooks, originality, higher education, and society). Similarly, I could follow the thread of his discussions on rhetoric, technology, management, curriculum, or the status of the book and canon, with equal ease. At one point, I could not find in my written notes his definition of "paideia" a word he uses so often it became a refrain. He uses it sixty-six times and only defines it once and, then, late in the book. (It is a "discipline of discourse.") The technology has its uses, and we shall find more of them as we become more skilled as "authors" and "readers." As Lanham himself admits, "no one knows what electronic 'textbooks' will look like; we can hope that great inventions yet impend."
In a fully developed electronic discourse, we may imagine that both authors and readers will get to play with ideas and threads of discussion. The author will present multiple narrative tracks, leaving the reader to pursue them in her own time. The reader will also play, adding her comments, parallel text, and ideas as she moves through the material. Writing and reading will become highly collaborative ventures, interwoven in ways we have not seen since the printed book became the dominant vehicle for information. It will, quite likely, stimulate a new wave of creativity and art in the same way the Elizabethan stage opened up the imagination of a generation of playwrights.
The digital text is subversive because it is dynamic. If we can read a text in a number of ways, if we can "write over" the author's conclusions and add our own, every truth is subject to a reconsideration. That is as it should be in a university. Still, there are political implications we must be careful not to overlook.
William Bennett's debate with Stanford over its core curriculum, for example, found public support because so much of a university's credibility depends upon the belief that its curriculum articulates an organized and structured approach to learning. Bennett argued that Stanford's curriculum had no coherence. The public listened and believed. When ideas are presented in a way that undermine the ideas themselves, as hypermedia and rhetorical strategies sometimes do, everything gets a bit unstable, and we end up having altered the credibility of the curriculum we are offering at least what the public takes to be our credibility. If Lanham is right about the structure and substance of what and how we shall be teaching in the future, as I suspect he is, universities will be in for increasingly tougher times. Faculty member and administrator alike will have to think of ways to re-assert The University's credibility and value in the destabilized environment the "electronic word" will produce.
The "electronic word" will affect managers and administrators directly, too. What is called for will be a structure equally unstable when judged by hierarchical values. Decisions will be arrived at, we are told, from the "bottom-up" instead of from the "top-down." To make his point, Lanham evokes what has now become conventional management theory, describing the electronic universe as filled with "third wave" organizations in place of "second wave" companies. The University, perhaps its divisions and departments, will of necessity become third wave organizations flexibly networked, collaborative, entrepreneurial ventures which may then replace the hierarchical, stable, second wave organizations that we have become used to. And managers like faculty will have to learn how to accommodate themselves to that world.
Lanham preaches the virtues of electronically bred instability and uncertainty. He argues that digital technology will bring this instability to us all and that university structures, curriculum, and text books will simply have to become unstable and adaptive too. Many planners and administrators will not find that happy news. But then too, neither will many faculty. Nevertheless, if Lanham is right, there is good news. We can take charge. We can lead technology so it reflects us, our values, and our mixed motives and contradictory purposes. It need not define us. Lanham argues, in fact, that the electronic medium is exactly suited to help us undertake the task.
1This review first appeared in Planning for Higher Education, Volume 23
(Winter 1994- 95). It appears here, in somewhat different form, with permission of the publisher.
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