"Here it can be seen that solipsism, when its implications are followed out strictly, coincides with pure realism. The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension, and there remains the reality coordinated with it." (Ludwig Wittgenstein, T5.64)
This is not a book. But it is a collection of pages filled with prose. I'm working on a secret project these days (all will soon be revealed) that is teaching me something about the changing nature of writing and, perhaps, what phrases like "the end of the book" and "the death of the author" really mean.
Do you remember I said I spent a few days in the Alps with Oliver Reichenstein and his staff at Information Architects? It was a transformative experience for me. Or at least, I suspect, the beginning of one; the process continues. I was especially grateful (hi Chris!) for an opportunity to revisit my views on Zen and the nature of the ego. For a brief moment, sitting there in the most literal of alpine meadows, I had a glimpse of my literary utopia. I imagined building a website out of my ideas, consisting mainly of prose paragraphs, not in a sequence, but hyperlinked through individual words. A site not a book.
Writing stops being "between covers". Every page takes up a position equidistant to the reality it is a part of. A book is a thing. A site, by contrast, is a place. We construct that place and invite our "readers" (now, in fact, visitors) to come. They can make themselves at home. Enjoy the grounds.
And what then of "the writer"? Well, the Buddhists have that useful notion of "ego death", a liberation from the illusion that we are something other than a body implicated practically in the living world, that our existence amounts to more than the space we occupy in the universe. That is my literary utopia, then: each of us working on a site that is the articulation of our selves. Once the basic structure has been built, and the machinery of the hypertext is up and running, nothing remains but maintenance and upkeep. There is no need for a "second edition", nor even a "next book". The self of the author, we might say, shrinks to a point without extension, and there remains the prose coordinated with it.
7 comments:
Would the site be like a conference center, where you can help yourself to attending various lectures and debates? Like a hotel, which can accommodate and service you in various rooms (at differential rates)? Or like a training ground, where you could do running laps and perhaps have a virgin cocktail by the pool before you take your next swim?
Isn't it Goethe who invented the image of the Nanny State in which society is a big hospital, and each of us each other's nurses and patients? When I first heard that, I immediately thought of Leonard Cohen's "I Am a Hotel". It's a much better image. I'd say it's a sort of luxury resort where you have all kinds of options, and where you could, of course, also choose to host a conference. Except it's free. It's my home(page). You come as a guest. It's a big mansion. I am large. I contain multitudes. &c.
One more thing: I guess I do have to "monetize" the thing somehow. So there might a few rooms you can rent, Airbnb style. That is, it'll be possible to come at your own invitation also.
I wonder if organizing academic knowledge in this way, in a more general sense, would make it easier or harder to understand a field of knowledge, given increasing specialization. You might say that it would harder, because there would be fewer, single authoritative texts and many snippets (some of which would constantly get referred to). Or easier, because you'd be structuring your ideas in the kind of networked way that people anyway build their arguments? I'll be interested to follow this, including your freemium business model for the academic book...
Isn't this an (uncomfortably) more postmodern way to represent knowledge than what you would otherwise argue for? Just a thought...
Thomas:
A few days in the Alps, huh? You didn't get lost, by any chance? If so, did you have any maps available? I've heard that any will do. Perhaps you could write a poem about it, or you could at least publish a bunch of articles about it in journals on sensemaking?
I did go on a nice hike on trails that were so well-marked that it felt more like walking on a golf course. One marker, with a little map on it, was a little misleading, and I went off in the wrong direction for about five minutes. (Any old map wouldn't actually do.) But I didn't fall off a cliff or anything, so I guess no harm no foul. I don't know, Andy. It sounds pretty hard to write a compelling story about something like that. Maybe I could just find a poem about someone who wandered in the Hungarian Alps, and who had something more exciting happen to him, like maybe putting out a forest fire, and then say the incident really happened in Switzerland? Would that be okay?
@Rasmus: You bring up a lot of very good points. In many ways (and I guess ideally) I'm not contradicting but radicalizing my standard advice. This is a way of making our writing about the facts (or thoughts) themselves, not about our authority, our position and status as authors. But then again, there is a sense in which the allegedly post-modern thesis of "the death of the author" is actual a radicalization of the entirely modern practice of "new criticism", focusing on the "what is actually there on the page", and eschewing the intentional fallacy.
Earlier this year, I tried to make an argument for a utopia in which most academic communication happened through blogs and wikis, entirely free of charge, and with no publishers, peer review or other editorial oversight. There's still room in this utopia for a "curator" function (see Jerry Davis's editorial in ASQ, which I'll blog about soon, maybe already today), which would be made of up premium journals, with editors and publishers. But since they would mainly present results that are already known (through the free network), these journals would need to guarantee a very high standard of writing and reliability. Also, they would need to take post-publication criticism very seriously. That is, it would really say something about a paper that it was published in, say, ASQ, and has not been retracted for ten or twenty years.
That is, there'd be lots of researchers out there, but only a few "scholars", i.e., proper "authors". They'd have their "names on the line", just as the journals who published them would have their reputations at stake.
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