A Mysterious Affair of Style (with apologies to Gilbert Adair)

I decided to write Digimodernism in a very particular style, and alluded to this in the Introduction, where I wrote:

I’ve tried to address here a hybrid audience, and for an important reason: on one side, it seemed hardly worth discussing such a near-universal issue without trying to reach out to the general reader; on the other, it seemed equally pointless to analyze such a complex, multifaceted and shifting phenomenon without a level of scholarly precision. Whatever the result may be, this approach is justified, even necessitated, by the status and nature of the theme.

With this in mind, I tried to phrase my points as if writing for two kinds of people: academic specialists on the one hand and the intelligent general reader on the other. So I looked for interesting ways into subjects, and tried to maximise references to actual cultural examples and to minimize allusions to theorists. At the same time, I also aimed to be as judicious, exact and analytical as possible. There's an obvious danger in such a double-barrelled approach, which is that you wind up pleasing no one: the general reader finds it too offputtingly abstract and rarefied, and the specialist finds it shallow and argumentative.

There was, however, an ulterior motive at work behind my choice of style. One of the few books I talked about at length was Terry Eagleton's After Theory, and while I was fairly critical of its intellectual content, I felt that its style suggested the possible emergence of a new approach to writing about cultural issues. If it was true that postmodernism was over, what would become of the jargon-clogged prose most wonderfully (ahem) exemplified by Homi Bhabha? It was already no longer possible to believe, as the likes of Gayatri Spivak seem once to have imagined, that world justice and liberty could be measurably advanced by a better critique of Heart of Darkness. If cultural criticism's day of messianic delusion was over, so surely was its use of jargon for its own sake.

This is not to be confused with populism. Philosophy and cultural analysis should be hard to understand if they are to have any sophistication to them. People who jeer at the prose of theorists have usually never tried to read any other philosophy; you can in truth only mock Derrida's style if you can honestly say that you have worked through the Critique of Pure Reason and you find it more lucid. A friend of mine who works as a postdoctoral researcher in genetics recently showed me a paper he had contributed to; its title composed 7 or 8 words, of which I knew only "the" and "of". Why then should abstract reasoning, thought about thought, be simple to understand?

[As postmodernism has been the dominant theoretical trend for several decades now, and its influence has crossed many disciplines, it tends frequently to be the only form of abstract thought people are familiar with. Consequently, it is often confused with philosophy itself, as witness complaints about how tough it is to understand. Another instance of this is when people describe postmodernism as casting doubt on all our systems of thought and values. No; it's philosophy that does that; and postmodernism is a form of philosophy (among much else).]

What I mean is slightly different: it is an abandonment of deliberate obfuscation. My objective was to write prose that was precisely as difficult as its subject matter. It is to my mind shameful that there are today academics writing no more than criticism of novels in prose that is harder to grasp than the philosophical writings of Wittgenstein; the chances that the former are saying something more profound or original than the latter are zero. This may be partially attributable to the popularity on campus of French-language theorists, whose writings translate uneasily into English: Freud and Nietzsche are far easier to read (though not necessarily to understand) than Lacan and Derrida. But this should not be overstated: some French theorists, like Foucault and Barthes, are very lucid indeed, The Postmodern Condition is a very accessible text, and most of Baudrillard is, though peculiarly expressed, not actually that difficult to figure out. The real demon is the Anglo-American academic who wants to work with this stuff but lacks the intellectual equipment or training to get inside it. S/he therefore dons its outward form, its linguistic "noise", which shrouds an absence of any real philosophical engagement.

There are issues too regarding deliberate obfuscation, which I don't want to talk about for now, that relate to the role and place of the university in the digimodernist society. These are socio-economic and political questions, too.

Electric Literature

Yet more news of digimodernism in literature. Why so much recently? Maybe because literature has hitherto been so far behind the digimodernist game. There were digimodernist films (well, one anyway) in 1993 already. Two New Yorkers have created Electric Literature, a fascinating and entirely positive venture. This comes from their website:

Electric Literature’s mission is to use new media and innovative distribution to return the short story to a place of prominence in popular culture.

As A.O. Scott wrote recently in the New York Times:The blog post and the tweet may be ephemeral... but the culture in which they thrive is fed by a craving for more narrative.”
Fiction transports us. It uniquely captures the experience of human consciousness like no other art form, revealing underlying truth and opening us to life’s possibilities. Like any creative act, writing fiction carries within it an implicit belief in the future. Electric Literature was created by people who believe in the future of writing.

We're tired of hearing that literary fiction is doomed. Everywhere we look, people are reading—whether it be paperbooks, eBooks, blogs, tweets, or text messages. So, before we write the epitaph for the literary age, we thought, let’s try it this way first: select stories with a strong voice that capture our readers and lead them somewhere exciting, unexpected, and meaningful. Publish everywhere, every way: paperbacks, Kindles, iPhones, eBooks, and audiobooks. Make it inexpensive and accessible. Streamline it: just five great stories in each issue. Be entertaining without sacrificing depth. In short, create the thing we wish existed.

Here's how our model works: To publish the paperback version of Electric Literature, we use print-on-demand; the eBook, Kindle, iPhone, and audio versions are digital. This eliminates our up-front printing bill. Rather than paying $5,000 to one printer, we pay $1,000 to five writers, ensuring that our writers are paid fairly. Our anthology is available anywhere in the world, overruns aren’t pulped, and our back issues are perpetually in print. We hope that this model can set a precedent: more access for readers, and fairness for writers.

Publishing is going through a revolution. There's opportunity and danger. The danger lies in ignoring or resisting the transformation in media. New platforms present an opportunity to adapt. We believe the short story is particularly well-suited to our hectic age, and certainly for digital devices. A quick, satisfying read can be welcome anywhere, and while you might forget a book, you’ll always have your phone.

To us, literature is what is important, not the medium. If eBooks, Kindles, or iPhone apps help literature survive, then we’re all for them.

People of our generation—with one foot in the past and one in the future—must make sure that the media gap is bridged in a way that preserves and honors literature. We don’t want to be sentimental old folks in a world where literary fiction is only read by an esoteric few.
Andy Hunter & Scott LindenbaumEditorseditors@electricliterature.com

Well, what do you know

Two new-ish things:

An article in the Guardian on "twitterfiction", where authors experiment with narratives in 140 characters. I fear they haven't thought this through: Twitter isn't some OULIPO-esque kind of arbitrarily constrained writing (i.e. limited in scope) but another way of defining authorship itself, among much else. Still, it's interestingly digimodernist:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/oct/23/authors-experiment-twitterfiction

And Edexcel, the exam board, have sent out their new 2010 GCSE specifications, which include - in the field of "English" - three options: English; English Language and Literature; and English Studies: Digital Literacy. Tellingly, the digital now ranks twice as heavily as the literary. It is also, perplexingly, defined against the literary. Hm.

The "digi-novel" and digimodernism

This is fascinating:

'Digi-novel' combines book, movie and website
Reuters
Wednesday, 2 September 2009

Is it a book? Is it a movie? Is it a website? Actually it's all three.
Anthony Zuiker, creator of the "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" U.S. television series, is releasing what he calls a "digi-novel" combining all three media -- and giving a jolt to traditional book publishing.
Zuiker has created "Level 26," a crime novel that also invites readers to log on to a website about every 20 pages using a special code to watch a "cyber-bridge" -- a three-minute film clip tied to the story.
Starting next Tuesday, readers can buy the book, visit the website, log in to watch the "cyber-bridges," read, discuss and contribute to the story.
"Just doing one thing great is not going to sustain business," he said. "The future of business in terms of entertainment will have to be the convergence of different mediums. So we did that -- publishing, movies and a website."
He said he did not believe the digi-novel would ever replace traditional publishing, but said the business did need a shot in the arm.
"They need content creators like myself to come in the industry and say, 'Hey, let's try things this way,'" he said.
Zuiker put together a 60-page outline for the novel, which was written by Duane Swierczynski, and wrote and directed the "cyber-bridges." He said the book could be read without watching the "cyber-bridges."
Zuiker said the United States was infatuated with technology and it had become such a permanent part of people's lives that more entertainment choices were needed.
Increasingly, people are reading books on electronic readers like Amazon.com's Kindle and Sony Corp's Reader.
Those devices don't play videos, so "Level 26" readers still need to log on to the Internet on a different device. Apple Inc is said to be developing a touchscreen tablet, which some analysts envision as a multimedia device that could play videos.
Zuiker said people's attention span was becoming shorter and shorter and that it was important to give people more options on how they consumed entertainment and books.
"Every TV show in the next five, 10 years will have a comprehensive microsite or website that continue the experience beyond the one-hour television to keep engaging viewers 24/7," he said. "Just watching television for one specific hour a week ... that's not going to be a sustainable model going forward."
"I wanted to bring all the best in publishing, in a motion picture, in a website and converge all three into one experience," he said.
"And when the book finished and the bridges finished, I wanted the experience to continue online and in a social community."
Zuiker said he came up with the idea for the "digi-novel" during a three-month TV writers strike in 2007/08.

Journalism versus literature

Nick Cohen wrote about contemporary shifts in journalism in yesterday's Observer. Trenchantly and memorably put, as always:

Professional journalists in the age of the internet look as doomed as blacksmiths in the age the combustion engine. Local newspapers are disappearing. National newspapers and commercial TV stations are seeing the web take their advertisers.

Even the gloomiest forecasters expect there will still be a few reporters around in 2025, but as with blacksmiths, we will be curiosities.

There is no point arguing against the inevitable and many optimists believe that the destruction of the old order should be welcomed. In Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky celebrates the switch to a democratic world where publishing costs next to nothing and anyone with access to a computer can write for an audience which in theory extends to everyone with a computer on the planet.

These changes have been widely discussed, and although I think the fabulously-named Shirky is simplistic in his enthusiasm, the question that came to my mind when I read this is: if journalism is being turned upside down and inside out by digitization, why not literature?

For me this has something to do with the characteristics of the digimodernist text: favouring onwardness, haphazardness, evanescence and fluid-boundedness, it plays into the hands of the nature of journalism. Literature, however, is stuck with the traditional form of textuality, finished, set, frozen in its scope and extent. Consequently, there are no digimodernist novels and poems (yet).

As for "feet of" Clay Shirky, he needs to consider what will happen to the prestige that historically has attached to "publication" when everyone can publish, and when text distributed to the entire planet to read becomes as ignorant, fanatical, biased, unreliable, and even loathsome as so much UGC is. That prestige will go; or, more probably, things will restructure in ways we can't yet see.