What this week’s reading stimulates me to think about is the problem of dualism: what does it really imply? And when do dualisms matter?

“Dualism,” according to the scholar Costall, “is institutionalized within the structure of our academic disciplines. On the one hand, there are the natural and the engineering sciences, and, on the other, the human or social sciences” [1]. In addition to that, he also mentions that interdisciplinary efforts, as a response to this kind of dualism, often fail because “they either fracture along the old divide or else retreat to the side of ‘hard science’” [1], [2].

In this week’s reading, Chuh also tackles this problematic division between “hard sciences” and humanities – a division that has been built into the structure of traditional, educational institutions. As Chuh writes,

“Now, with concerted emphasis on STEM fields deemed necessary to success and national competitiveness in the global workforces, outcomes towards and relevance to those goals serve as primary measures of institutional performance. It is thus that it seems necessary to defend the humanities as a means of resisting the rationality that authorizes and resources certain kinds of knowledge at the expense of others” [3].

As one can see, the structural dualism between “hard sciences” and humanities in the end disconnects what and how we experience the world (i.e., who we are) from what has been taught.

Chuh’s suggested solution to this dualism is kind of pessimistic in the way that she communicates it; as she writes, “we can at the least stop submitting to its demands as we claim the humanities as a ground for bringing forth sensibilities that grapple with rather than cover over its constitutive violence” [3]. To put it in another way, by stopping submitting to this structural dualism that gives more power to one kind of knowledge than to the other kind of knowledge, we can just let humanities be humanities rather than “a means of resisting the authority of sciences” and therefore, sciences can just be sciences rather than something that has been overestimated or underestimated. 

Reference

[1]       A. Costall, “Socializing Affordances,” Theory Psychol., Aug. 2016, doi: 10.1177/0959354395054001.
[2]       C. Kwa, “Representations of Nature Mediating between Ecology and Science Policy: The Case of the International Biological Programme,” Soc. Stud. Sci., vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 413–442, 1987.
[3]       K. Chuh, “Knowledge under Cover,” in The Difference Aesthetics Makes, Durham : Duke University Press, 2019, pp. 26–50.

Please click here to view the actual zine.

In the second section of his essay “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” [1] (entitled “The Flaneur”), Walter Benjamin presents a literature that could not appear in a setting other than the nineteenth century Paris. This panoramic literature, of which “the inconspicuous, paperback, pocket-size volumes called physiologies” are but an instance, is mean to be sold on the street [1]. According to Benjamin, “these works consist of individual sketches which, as it were, reproduce the dynamic foreground of those panoramas with their anecdotal form and the sweeping background of the panoramas with their store of information” [1]. It is when examining the question of what is the flaneur Baudelaire’s relationship with those works of a literature that I wandered into the site “Paris: Capital of the 19th Century” [2] for the purpose of obtaining a better understanding of what panoramic literature really is.  

The website is painted mainly with the colors of brown (#4a2e2b), gallery (#E2D8CC), stonewall (#7B7367), crab apple (#853830) and copper rust (#914d43) according to a color analyzer. On each webpage of the site, a navigation sidebar menu is located on the left column whereas the main content is on the right. 

The page that I browsed while studying about Benjamin’s text presents an essay revised in 2005, entitled “Panoramic Literature in 19th Century Paris: Robert Macaire as a Type of Everyday” [3]. If you scroll down to the very bottom of the page, you would find that this student essay was originally written in partial fulfillment of requirements for a class in 2004. The introduction of the essay provides me enough information to continue to read Benjamin. The author of the essay wants to know what is special about the hybrid panoramic literature, why it could not have existed in any other time or place, and what does its exceptionality tell about the culture of Paris in the nineteenth century [3]. In the introductory paragraphs, what has also been briefly mentioned is that panoramic literature is a product of the mechanical age in which printing technology is prevalent, paper is cheap and new modes of marketing and selling aid the reproduction of a variety of materials from the first daily newspaper to physiologies.

The “Paris: Capital of the 19^th Century” site is a project of the Brown University French Studies and Comparative Literature Departments; developed and hosted by Brown’s Center for Digital Scholarship; constructed by PhD students and professors. As it claims in the “About This Site” page, the project aims at offering free access to the full texts and images of selected books and periodicals from the University’s Library collections – mainly, the Anne S. K. Brown Collection and the Starred Books Collection, so that researchers, students and faculty who are interested in history, art, literature of the 19th century Paris can use this site as a visual tool to facilitate their understanding of the complexities of this time-period [2]. Since the site offers a lot of ways to access the texts and images, navigating those paths towards data is just like navigating the streets of a city. Hyperlinks, search engines and filters are the available means of finding materials in which you might have an interest. 

For example, in the “BROWSE” section, navigation buttons would lead you to all images collected by the library. Those images are sorted into categories in two ways; you can browse them either by metadata categories (“creators and contributors”, “subject”, and “title”) or by thematic categories (“historical period” and “thematic category”). Although labelling the last one “thematic category” makes the broader term “thematic categories” sound redundant, the image collection pages themselves are very easy to navigate. 

By using the button next to the label “historical period” and then the button paired with “1852-1870 (The Second Empire)”, the reader is able to get to the page where the first image presented is edited by Geirges Guillain, published in 1925 and titled “Le “bois” de la Salpêtrière et la chapelle”. This image is “a view of the chapel of the hospital, taken from the adjoining woods. The chapel was commissioned in 1669 by Louis XIV” according to the description [4].

Overall, the site is like a huge collaborative notebook; every text or image of the selected material is annotated with explanatory notes. In addition, it also provides researchers a long yet useful annotated bibliography which can be accessed by a content filter. However, some of the contents of the website, just like some of the city paths, are temporarily blocked. You can only access from one side but not from the other. For instance, I am only able to get to the Panoramic Literature essay page by googling the key words “panoramic literature” but cannot work out how to get there through the entrance of the home page.

Reference

[1]       W. Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” in The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2006.
[2]       “Paris: Capital of the 19th Century,” Jun-2011. https://library.brown.edu/cds/paris/about.html (accessed Mar. 20, 2020).
[3]       A. Zevin, “Panoramic Literature in 19th Century Paris: Robert Macaire as a Type of Everyday,” Paris: Captial of the 19th Century. https://library.brown.edu/cds/paris/Zevin.html (accessed Mar. 24, 2020).
[4]       “LE ‘BOIS’ DE LA SALPÊTRIÈRE ET LA CHAPELLE,” Paris: Capital of the 19th Century. https://library.brown.edu/cds/catalog/catalog.php?verb=render&id=1399399202590012&colid=6&view=showmods (accessed Mar. 24, 2020).

It is not just the sense of what is to be edited has transformed from the traditional notion of the literary work to the modern concept of the text (as introduced by Rolland Barthes in his essay “From Work to Text” [1]) as well as to the expanded application of Barthes’s conception of the text to include nonlinguistic codes such as images and music, the field of scholarly editing itself is undergoing a dramatic change. Electronic editions of the texts become a new option for editors. As Kenneth M. Price mentioned in his essay “Electronic Scholarly Editions” [2], these electronic editions (such as the digital archives) get a lot of storage space inside. This means that high-resolution color images become affordable for a digital archive while they are not affordable for the printed edition. In addition, multiple versions of a text can be all displayed in one electronic edition for the users to compare those valuable texts symbol for symbol and to reflect on the meanings of the differences. 

Given this multiple-texts approach to editing, it seems that the possibility of presenting all versions of a text online diminishes the authority of an editorial team partly because this type of editing is not based on finding an authoritative text based on “final intentions” of the author or of an editorial team. Nonetheless, the range of responsibilities for those scholarly editors is in fact broadened. Editors still define objects in space by shaping the materials to be presented in a digital archive. Furthermore, in order to produce a functionable electronic edition of texts, they have to collaborate with others, such as “librarians, archivists, graduate students, undergraduate students, academic administrators, funding agencies, and private donors” (those whom Price briefly mentioned in his essay [2]). 

Technical experts and knowledge of technical issues are also indispensable in the editorial decision-making [2]. For instance, besides the standard tasks of investigating the history of texts, making critical judgements about them by identifying the works and applying bibliographical findings in the editing process [3], scholarly editors who choose to work in digital medium have to get familiar with the role that the database played in editing [2]. In contrast to any form or mode of narrative (which assigns variant values to variant objects), the database collects individual items without discriminating between different cultural values [4]. To effectively deal with the neutral data, editors still have to make the data accessible to the general individuals through a multimedia narrative. As Price quotes from Horton’s Designing and Writing Online Documentation for reflecting on the relationship between an editorial team and the readers in the digital age, “[The users] may not like being controlled or manipulated, but they do expect the writer to blaze trails for them [2].” 

Reference

[1]       R. Barthes, The rustle of language, 1st ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 1986.
[2]       K. M. Price, “Electronic Scholarly Editions,” in A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2013, pp. 434–450.
[3]       W. P. Williams and C. S. Abbott, An introduction to bibliographical and textual studies, 4th ed. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2009.
[4]       L. Manovich, “Database as a Genre of New Media.” [Online]. Available: http://time.arts.ucla.edu/AI_Society/manovich.html. [Accessed: 10-Mar-2020].

When I think about drawing, I think it as a way to make things practical reality, yet drawing itself is also a process of letting reality show you what it is like. Nick Sousanis’s Unflattening [1], a dissertation in comics form, invites the readers to examine the relation between thinking, image, and text. In his commentary, “Behind the Scenes of a Dissertation in Comics Form” [2], (as well as on his website [3]), Sousanis reconnects us to the process of creating these comics pages and the ideas that once generated each image-text entity. That is to say, he invites the readers who have already read the comics to read it again differently – specifically, by seeing how those comics pages respond to the practical issues and scholarly concepts in the field of education. As he recollected in the commentary, that the terms, “education”, “schooling”, “discipline”, and “interdisciplinary”, had never been used by him while creating the comics because he does not want to create a work that “turn the reader away with specialized or politicized language”; rather, he hopes that they can “find their own way of connecting to the material” [2]. In addition to that commentary, he also mentioned this intention to reach people who are not in academia in a podcast on “Revolutionizing Thought in Comics” [4].

To me, Sousanis’s way of challenging traditional scholarship successfully revives a viewpoint that has been frequently overlooked: the picture theory of language. Through his own explanation of the beginning part of the third chapter entitled “The Shape of Our Thoughts”, Sousanis emphasizes that the picture representation itself embodies the content just as the written text does. His use of both verbal and visual metaphors in communicating mental concepts confirms this idea – that is, the two kinds of metaphors are, in his words, “equally integral to making meaning” [2]. For him, comics are more like architecture; it invites the visitors to move through the organized spatial experiences [2].  

Reference

[1]       N. Sousanis, Unflattening. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2015.
[2]       N. Sousanis, “Behind the Scenes of a Dissertation in Comics Form,” Digit. Humanit. Q., vol. 009, no. 4, Dec. 2015.
[3]       N. Sousanis, “Spin Weave and Cut.” [Online]. Available: http://spinweaveandcut.com/. [Accessed: 01-Mar-2020].
[4]       “Unflattening: Revolutionizing Thought in Comics.” [Online]. Available: https://www.nga.gov/audio-video/audio/sousanis-unflattening.html. [Accessed: 26-Feb-2020].

In Andrew Robinson’s “Writing Systems”, he suggests that it does not seem likely that writing evolved from the counting system of clay ‘tokens’ (which served as an extension of human memory already in the late 4^th millennium BC) – despite of the fact that many hold the belief that writing grew out of the counting system; rather, the emergence of writing was accompanied by the ‘tokens [1]. 

Jerry Eugene Pournelle’s cost-benefit analysis of writing, as recorded by Kirschenbaum in the first history of word processing, not only evokes the primeval conditions that give rise to writing but also suggests the new definition of writing in a digital age [2]. To Pournelle writing equals to, in his own words, “the business of making a living” [2]. What his motto “writing is hard work” reflects is not the divinity of the writing process but “the actual labor of being an author”, the idea that “anyone can learn to do it” and the idea that one’s writing is one’s work.

Even though modern technologies, such as microcomputer or the word processor, free human beings from the tedious aspect of editing and rewriting, the real relationship between writing and society still does not change that much; it is only the awareness of the divine (but not necessarily religious) origin of writing is lost. To twist a bit what William Blake wrote to his reader in the preface to the first chapter of his longest illuminated book Jerusalem, “[Human civilizations] are destroy’d or flourish, in proportion as their Poetry, Painting, and Music are destroy’d or flourish. The Primeval State of Man was Wisdom, Art, and Science” [3]. 

Reference

[1]       M. F. Suarez and H. R. Woudhuysen, Eds., The book: a global history, First edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
[2]       M. G. Kirschenbaum, Track changes: a literary history of word processing. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016.
[3]       “To the Public. Selections from ‘Jerusalem’. William Blake. 1908. The Poetical Works.” [Online]. Available: https://www.bartleby.com/235/304.html. [Accessed: 25-Feb-2020].

“THE quality of mercy …
is twice bless’d;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes;
‘Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown.”
– Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare

When the prints were about to come to the world in the late-medieval Europe, paper and paint oil had already been invented. So did the manuscripts, the wine-press and jeweler’s punches or punches used at the mint. But when Johannes Gutenberg was about to actualize his scheme of putting printing to work during his self-imposed exile, he was in need of several things. As Keith Houston, the author of The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time, pointed out, what Gutenberg needed are a set of mixed “skilled goldsmiths”, “a wealth church”, “a pious population” and “an injection of capital from a willing investor” (Houston, 2016). In 1448 Gutenberg’s returning to his howntown Mainz allowed him to secure the first three. Two years later, Johann Fust, a Mainzer goldsmith and guildsman, loaned Gutenberg 800 Rheingulden (at 6 percent interest), a large amount of money that allowed Gutenberg to run his printing workshop. In 1452, another 800 Rheingulden from Fust was invested in this new workshop. However, Gutenberg “defaulted upon the interest payments” (Houston, 2016). In the end, he had to give his finished system of moving types and the final products (i.e., the 42-line Bibles) away to Fust in order to “repay” the large debt.  

Despite of that, while explicitly drawing an analogy between the story of Gutenberg and Mark Twain’s historical fiction, The Prince and the Pauper, it is not Fust who borrowed Gutenberg money at least twice but the prints themselves that are compared to the prince in Mark Twain’s tale by Houston. Gutenberg is as the pauper even though he is “of respectable if not noble birth” and had a disposable income before coming back to the city of Mainz (Houston, 2016). In a way, the anthropomorphic prints stress the holiness of the books – both those made through printing by means of the movable types and those that we are reading today. The analogy between the two stories signifies the complementarity or mutuality of the prints and the pauper, as well as the duality of the identity of a book. For instance, the Gutenberg Bible embodies not only the life of the text or data but also how this text or data is distributed. 

While composing the novel of The Prince and the Pauper, Mark Twain once wrote to another American writer William Dean Howells,

“My idea is to afford a realizing sense of the exceeding severity of the laws of that day by inflicting some of their penalties upon the King himself and allowing him a chance to see the rest of them applied to others—all of which is to account for a certain mildness which distinguished Edward VI’s reign from those that preceded and followed it”.

(Cope & Cope, 1996)

Similarly, Houston’s narrative of the prints and Gutenberg in part also provides us a realizing sense of the severity of the laws that regulated the making of books of Gutenberg’s day. When the penalties are imposed both upon the prints and the man who made “movable print” work in the fifteenth century Europe, Houston makes the reciprocal relationship between the prints and the commoner conspicuous. We see how the prints and Gutenberg suffered the consequences together and how both are transformed in the process. In a word, this reciprocity between the prints and Gutenberg mildens the suffering of humanity as a whole through its reinforcement of “the quality of mercy” that is shared by both. This quality of mercy, according to Shakespeare, “is not strained”. “It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven / Upon the place beneath” and, in the end, it was injected into a printing press that had changed and is still influencing the way in which information is distributed. 

Reference

Cope, W. P., & Cope, W. P. (1996). A teacher’s guide to the Signet Classic edition of Mark Twain’s The Prince and the pauper. Penguin USA.

Houston, K. (2016). The book: A cover-to-cover exploration of the most powerful object of our time (First edition). W.W. Norton & Company.