Friending the Past: The Sense of History in the Digital Age

By Alan Liu

Can today’s society, increasingly captivated by a constant flow of information, share a sense of history? How did our media-making forebears balance the tension between the present and the absent, the individual and the collective, the static and the dynamic—and how do our current digital networks disrupt these same balances? Can our social media, with its fleeting nature, even be considered social at all?   
          In Friending the Past, Alan Liu proposes fresh answers to these innovative questions of connection. He explores how we can learn from the relationship between past societies whose media forms fostered a communal and self-aware sense of history—such as prehistorical oral societies with robust storytelling cultures, or the great print works of nineteenth-century historicism—and our own instantaneous present. He concludes with a surprising look at how the sense of history exemplified in today’s JavaScript timelines compares to the temporality found in Romantic poetry.
          Interlaced among these inquiries, Liu shows how extensive “network archaeologies” can be constructed as novel ways of thinking about our affiliations with time and with each other. These conceptual architectures of period and age are also always media structures, scaffolded with the outlines of what we mean by history. Thinking about our own time, Liu wonders if the digital, networked future can sustain a similar sense of history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Nov 27, 2018
• ISBN: 9780226452005

Book preview

Friending the Past

Friending the Past

The Sense of History in the Digital Age

ALAN LIU

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2018 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2018

Printed in the United States of America

27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-45181-7 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-45195-4 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-45200-5 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226452005.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Liu, Alan, 1953– author.

Title: Friending the past : the sense of history in the digital age / Alan Liu.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Introduction: the sense of history—Friending the past—Imagining the new media encounter—When was linearity?—Remembering networks—Like a sense of history. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018020207 | ISBN 9780226451817 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226451954 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226452005 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Social media and history. | Communication—Technological innovations—Social aspects. | Digital media—Social aspects.

Classification: LCC PN4560.3 .L58 2018 | DDC 302.23/1—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018020207

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Geoffrey Hartman

In memoriam

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1  Friending the Past

2  Imagining the New Media Encounter

3  When Was Linearity?

4  Remembering Networks

5  Like a Sense of History

Appendix: Hypothetical Machine-Learning Workflow for Studying the Sense of History

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Acknowledgments

Geoffrey Hartman was never my teacher, but I was his student.

As an undergraduate at Yale University from 1971 to 1975, where it wasn’t until my second year that I changed my major from chemistry to English, I did not know enough to take a course from Geoffrey. Later, when I returned to Yale as a junior faculty member in 1979, he gradually became my most formative intellectual influence—though I do not believe he knew it. I remember him taking me to lunch during my first year of teaching at Yale. At one point, he slipped off his glasses, hooked them in a corner of his mouth by a temple piece, and looked at me with the unmediated gaze of the ages. A steely gaze, I would say, but that would be to ignore the immense nuance, subtlety, and fundamental kindness of his rigor. I was being examined. But in the end I knew it was also a self-examination widening out to the acknowledgment that we are all found wanting—not in the sense of being inadequate, but in that of being in a state of intellectual and spiritual desiring.

I did not see Geoffrey often at Yale. Life was busy, and the junior and senior faculty ranks in the Yale system at that time were more separated than in most American university faculties. But in my years there, his intellectual influence became pervasive. Every literary critic, I suspect, identifies, yet also wrestles, with the primary authors to whom he or she first chooses to commit—William Wordsworth, in my case. But now I found myself also identifying with, though seeking space away from, my generation’s major critic of my primary author. I remember being away on leave one year in Madison, Wisconsin, trying to finish my book Wordsworth: The Sense of History (1989). In the University of Wisconsin library, I wrestled day after day, sentence by sentence, with Geoffrey’s Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814 (1964), absorbing the book at the level not just of ideas but of language and sensibility. Sometimes I would step out of the library, where I had left his book lying open in the reading room, to walk up the street a few blocks to a video-game arcade (this was the 1980s, after all). There I played Atari’s Battlezone, a classic first-person-shooter tank warfare game. Battlezone’s simple wire-frame visualizations made its battles representationally abstract, but its excellent game-play made such abstraction visceral. In the game, one maneuvers with agility to fire at an opposing tank, to dodge return fire, and to flee or try to shoot down the sudden, always terrifying missiles with their loud, incoming roar. I became quite good at it. I guess it was an allegory of learning how to be a literary critic, and in particular of finding a way to maneuver against, or with, a master of the field.

Of course, given the brilliant lightness, deftness, and elliptical range of his thought (skipping along no known trajectory from poem to penetrating insight), Geoffrey was no tank. One would not think Wordsworth was, either. Except there is that boat-stealing episode in The Prelude with its huge cliff that strode after me as if on treads; and in Geoffrey’s Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814, there is a similar, sublime inexorability. Geoffrey’s main argument about nature leading beyond nature, and the poet’s final return (some would say, capitulation) to nature, was resistless. I do not know of a more powerful argument about the Romantics—or, for that matter, about the cultural moment of the 1970s and 1980s when, in the movement between so-called Yale deconstruction and the New Historicism, I came of intellectual age. I like to think that if influence could run in reverse, then both William and Geoffrey would have loved video games of the sort I played—ones where an implacable enemy, like a force of nature, could ultimately be defeated by jumping to a different level, and where that jump had to be earned not through brute tactics but by deft, quick intelligence of spirit, mind, hands, and words.

During the late years, when he was focused on Holocaust studies, Geoffrey asked me once, after I had begun focusing on the digital humanities, Will you return to Wordsworth? He asked that on October 23, 2007. On the evening of that day, he was to lecture at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in relation to Holocaust studies—an event co-organized by my insitution, the University of California, Santa Barbara. The lecture drew an enormous, engaged audience from both the community and the academy. But before, in the afternoon, he sat alone with me in my little office on campus in the chair my students usually take—an uncanny reversal of teacher/student positions. That is when he asked, Will you return to Wordsworth? I do not remember my exact answer (likely some careful blur between yes and no that protected all my options), but I do remember my thought at the time, which I believe, but am not sure, I shared with him: that I could ask him the same. We were lovers of Wordsworth who went on to other scholarly and cultural areas of study. Prodigal sons, both.

At the end of my present book, in a section of chapter 5 titled The Lucy Algorithm, I do return to Wordsworth, but only in a light way that breaks no new ground in Romantic studies. Instead, the freshness there lies in juxtaposing well-known understandings of Romantic, and specifically Wordsworthian, temporality with the sense of history seen in digital timelines. I use memory and time in Wordsworth’s Lucy poems, The Prelude, and some other well-studied works to think about the particular kind of dynamic, ultimately nonlinear temporality experienced in digital web or social-media timelines today. Reciprocally, I use the code of JavaScript timelines in particular to resee the Lucy algorithm, as I call it, of Wordsworthian temporality—the poetic timeline of go, stop, and (in memory or imagination) restart that is existential for Wordsworth. I use Wordsworth to hack digital time, and digital time to hack Wordsworth.

Readers familiar with Romantic studies will recognize that my reading of Wordsworth in this late section of my book is recognizably in the spirit of Hartman’s. Nature leading us beyond or against nature, only then, generously, to allow the poet to return to nature; and time doing the same against time, only then to give us a usable timeline or calendar at the end of the day: This was the essential course from Geoffrey that I never had a chance in real life to enroll in. But I guess I crashed the course, as students say.

This book is dedicated to Geoffrey. I am sorry I was too slow in writing books to dedicate this one to him before his death in 2016.

Two chapters in this book were previously published. Chapter 1 first appeared in New Literary History 42.1 (2011): 1–30; chapter 2 appeared as the introduction to A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, edited by Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman (Blackwell, 2007). These have been revised here. Chapter 3 appeared in draft form on the Digital History Project website of the History Department of the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.

I am thankful for comments on the book from my readers for the University of Chicago Press. Since he identified himself as a reader, I am able thank Martin Paul Eve in particular. His insightful and detailed suggestions, which I followed up on in correspondence with him, have helped me to evolve my book. In regard to particular parts of the book, I owe debts of gratitude to several people. I am grateful to James F. English and Rita Felski for patiently encouraging me to write chapter 1, Friending the Past, which I was not able to shape properly in time for the New Literary History special issue, New Sociologies of Literature, in 2010 that Jim and Rita co-edited, but which Rita, as editor of NLH, later generously invited me to finish and publish. My thanks to William Thomas III for incisive early suggestions about chapter 3, When Was Linearity?—an early version of which he solicited for the Digital History Project website at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, after the conference there that he organized in 2016. In regard to chapter 4, Remembering Networks, I am very grateful to Matthew Burton for resources and ideas about what I call in that chapter network archaeology. He generously gave me links, references, and notes he had made on the archiving of networks, and I followed up on those with zest. My thanks also to Thomas Padilla, who provided additional ideas regarding the curation of networks. I am also grateful for a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies in 2012–13 that assisted me in moving forward with research and writing. Finally, this is the occasion to thank my excellent copyeditor, Lys Ann Weiss, who previously copyedited my Laws of Cool and now has deftly helped me through the final stages of this book.

Beyond those acknowledged above, there are always others in an author’s network—ever more so today in the age of digital networks—who cannot easily be acknowledged. I am fortunate to have a far-flung network, and I wish I could thank by name all the individuals, ranging from beginning students to star scholars, with whom I have traded insights in seminars, at conferences, online, or over a coffee or drink. But my network, and everyone else’s today, is too distributed to do so without unintended omission. Really, from this time forward, computational distant reading (such as social network analysis or citation and co-citation study) will be needed to generate a book’s acknowledgments. Specific individuals are mentioned as appropriate in my notes. Beyond that, I want especially to thank my Twitter community as the proxy for all my network of distributed help. The digital humanities Twitter research community is robust, and I have learned from it time and again. Thank @you all for ideas and resources that have helped me learn.

It is fitting that I close these acknowledgments by quoting these posts I made on Twitter on September 20, 2017:

For some reason, I missed the obit for Geoffrey H. Hartman by @margalitfox in NY Times last year:

It’s really wonderful. The definition of deconstruction in ¶ 8 is one of the best in journalism.

So, H. in Geoffrey’s name stood for nothing. I think it stood for human, and humanist.

Can’t help seeing H. as the ur-word (Hillis Miller’s term) of the unknown tongue, / Which yet I understood

speaking from the shell in the dream of the Arab/Quixote in book 5 of Wordsworth’s The Prelude, the book On Books.

Geoffrey on books defines humanism for me. Didn’t know enough when I was an undergrad at Yale to take his class. But I am still his student.

INTRODUCTION

The Sense of History

We are the sense of history.

For just this moment—this magical now suspended between our speaking in writing and your hearing through reading—don’t doubt us. Don’t ask how we descended from past into present being. Don’t ask how we can be a being amid today’s plural clamor of social experience. Don’t ask whether our status as merely a sense of history in this time of 24/7 sensational news makes us a poor, pale being—a specter in need of screens to claim attention.

Such questions of doubt—and of not a little wonder, too—were once asked by those like Augustine, Herder, Hegel, Ranke, Nietzsche, Dilthey, Collingwood, Heidegger, Benjamin, Arendt, Braudel, Raymond Williams, Foucault, and others who thought about intellectual history, philosophy of time, and philosophy of history. Memoirists, biographers, novelists, filmmakers, and poets have evoked the same wonder and doubt. And so have hoarser crowds who lived and died in the vanguard, Zeitgeist, or wake of the sense of history: French revolutionary mobs, huddled immigrant masses, modern mass audiences, twentieth- and twenty-first-century refugees, and others of history from below or from the margins. Not in philosophical ways but in their rhythms and forms of work, celebration, flight, death, murder, suffering, grief, and amusement, the many questioned and quested for a sense of history. They doubted any sense of history scripted for them from above. They wondered if they could make a sense of history—joyful, bloody, mournful, wry, and wise all at once—that was theirs. This is our time, they said in their character as plural, modern humanity. As personal as a sick day taken to care for oneself or one’s family, or as collective as July 14, September 11, and other dates of shared commemoration, our time was when the modern many restored itself to a larger, fuller sense of history. It was the curative, if sometimes also wounding, pause in the teeming life of history that revealed the sense of history.

So, as today’s sense of history, we ask you to give us the benefit of your doubt. For now—this suspended, shared time of our speaking and your hearing—do not question that we are. Instead, just ask one question that for our time may well condense all the wonder and doubt of earlier existential questions: How are we speaking to you, and you listening to us, at all?

This is the media question, though really media is just one especially enchanting member of a litany of terms we will soon need to chant. Today, the media question affects the sense of history to the core. After all, since everything you now know of us comes from our speaking in writing to you, and what we know of you comes from our imagining your listening, through reading, to us, the possible modes of our common speaking and listening are central to what we seem, even to ourselves, to be. This is not just an abstract existential issue. It’s ethical, political, and in other ways critical, too. Have we chosen the best way to speak the sense of history today, and if so, for the benefit of whom? Did we even choose, or are we just channeling some natural, social, economic, political, corporate, or (God knows) transcendental agency that chose for us according to its own interests?

Just choosing the right terminology for discussing how we are speaking to you, and you listening to us, is an absorbing problem. What should we even call our present shared act of speaking and listening (or, if you prefer, writing and reading), since these are clearly just metaphors for whatever is happening in today’s messy remediation of oral, audio, written, printed, graphic, filmic, electronic, and digital media? Or, to raise the question to its general level (here comes the chant of terms we promised): shall we call our speaking and listening rhetoric, representation, interpretation, communication, information, or (already cued up) media? It is worth pausing on these vocabulary choices, since the historical shifts in meaning and weight among them capture so well the fragility we feel about ourselves as a sense of history. Frankly, we have lost confidence in the ability of any of these terms to sustain, let alone spread, the sense of history. Each of these six terms differs from, yet shades into, the others, and each applies to all eras. Yet they might grossly be classed into two regimes based on the epoch when their concepts had the broadest socio-political and socio-economic impact. The earlier regime can be referred to as rhetoric-representation-interpretation. The later we will speak of as communication-information-media.

Rhetoric-representation-interpretation is today weak in helping us understand current events, let alone historical ones. Of course, these terms didn’t necessarily have firm understandings in the past. But at least, once, they marked out zones of play (as in the play of a rope) where realized practices tested themselves against ideal rules in generally understood, roped-off arenas of intellectual and social contest. Rhetoric in former times, for example, functioned like that. It was a convention for playing off serious sense against pleasing or forceful sensation (figures of thought and sound, for instance). That was the arena in which governing elites learned the art of using words to sway society. In recent times, representations of culture, as studied by such intellectual elites as the New Historicists, stood for a crypto-rhetorical concept that faintly echoed the older rhetoric, if with a subversive slant. Consider, for example, how the journal Representations, the signature forum of the New Historicism when it began in the early 1980s, championed the belief that literary, artistic, and other representations of culture mattered in society. For that generation of New Historicist thinkers, fashioned in the wake of May 1968, it mattered that social and intellectual revolutions, for example, could be seen as representationally (in the older idiom, rhetorically) significant, even if, from a more functionalist viewpoint, they seemed nullities.

What has shaken up the older family of terms is communication-information-media, which, whatever the origins of its individual terms, has ascended in importance in the last century. This is the vocabulary whose chant—often in seemingly random combinatory permutations, such as communication media, information media, and media communications—has bewitched modernity.

Of course, data and technology belong in this semantic coven, too, especially in late modernity. But data and technology might best be treated as infrastructural. If communication-information-media were animals, then data and technology would be their nerves and muscles. That is, ideas of data and technology lie at the foundation of higher level ideas of communication, information, and media, even if sometimes they uncannily transcend to the meta-level (as when we speak of technological society or data culture.) This is not to slight the independent significance of data and technology as infrastructure, nor to undervalue the complexly interwoven conceptual and functional roles of critical infrastructure in general. Rather, the unstable infra-/meta- ideas associated with these terms are embedded in today’s communication-information-media in ways that explain how this regime has destabilized the older rhetoric-representation-interpretation. Think, for example, about how data since the time of Claude Shannon’s communication and information theory has worked like a termite of bits and bytes to hollow out rhetoric-representation-interpretation from the inside. At first glance, it seems easy to force the notion of data—and the communications, information, and media it drives—into an approximate fit with the older ideas. After all, any release of data today seems to have rhetorical-representational-interpretive purpose—as witnessed in how immediately demographic or climate-change data can incite political controversy. There is no data point that is not a rhetorical point. Yet it’s also easy to see that the data idea doesn’t fully line up with rhetoric-representation-interpretation. Except for intentionally falsified data (and fake news) created as propagandistic rhetoric, data retains a robust notional remainder—triangulated somewhere between today’s unstable notions of objective, big (big data), collective (crowd-sourced), open (open access), and secret (as in encrypted or classified archives)—that leaks past the margins of the older concepts.

In other words, while data by definition does not coincide with reality but reports on reality in some offset way (inferred, derived, sampled, or reduced), its ways of being offset are themselves shifted from, and thus unlike, the older offsets from reality involved in rhetoric-representation-interpretation. In the root sense, data is a parameter of how reality can be addressed, represented, or interpreted—that is, a measure to the side (para-) of rhetorical measures, representational frames, and interpretive paradigms. At the present time, that sideways shift in the data concept still bucks older ways of speaking about, representing, and interpreting reality, spurring us to try to tame the data bronco—a swarm-beast of barely understood statistical chaos—with gerunds themselves still too wild to settle into either normal nouns or verbs: data crunching, mining, hacking, wrangling, munging, remixing, or feeding. Ultimately, the data notion mutates beyond rhetoric-representation-interpretation into a new register of meaning-making indicated by such terms as model, pattern, cluster, network, and matrix. By comparison with such more familiar sense-making forms as narratives, anecdotes, or metaphors (gussied up in data only to the extent of limited tables, two-dimensional diagrams, and one-axis timelines that tame the complexity of underlying data so that it can be easily told as a story or example), these latter forms do not yet make common sense. Take the instance of a model.¹ Among other things, a model is a data construct of selected or reduced information that can be experimented with using what-if parameters, validated through testing, and then applied for prediction or simulation. From the standpoint of both general society and intellectuals accustomed to such what-ifs as imagination or fiction, a model is not exactly like any of the concepts in the regime of rhetoric-representation-interpretation. Models, uncannily, are all, and none, of the above.

Still, we hesitate to give up entirely on the older rhetoric-representation-interpretation—as shaky and hollowed out as its regime is—to commit totally to the more modern brood of terms. That’s because the regime of communication-information-media is infirm in its own way. Its embedded notion of data, especially when leagued with that of technology, is today’s deconstructive pharmakon. Data technology at once makes and unmakes communication-information-media, acquiring such autonomy that it rapidly cores out the concepts of communication-information-media, making them just façades or interfaces. Given the often unfathomable complexity of contemporary data structures and technologies, in other words, communication-information-media is ever less meaningful as a description for what is happening in the transformation of sense into knowledge and vice versa needed for imparting a sense of history or, for that matter, anything else. Such transformation is now encoded in operational data technology—for example, a modem. Abstract terms like communication, information, and media thus increasingly mask the fact that we don’t really know what we are doing, let alone signifying, when speaking and listening, writing and reading, and so on. We just trust that the opacity of the data-technological acts underlying communication-information-media can always be restored to enough transparency—or at least such personifications of transparency as an interface (personification, from prosopopoeia, Greek: making a face)—that modern communication-information-media will at least fulfill some of the functions of the older rhetoric-representation-interpretation.

So, in trying to share with you our sense of history, we are today left suspended in doubt and wonder between, on the one hand, shaken belief in the old superstitions of rhetoric-representation-interpretation and, on the other hand, unconfident trust in the new coven of communication-information-media. On which of these magics or faiths can we now stake the sense of history? Which kind of historical sense-making can be a covenant for history today? Scheherazade had a thousand and one tales to tell in her act of suspended narrative. The siren of contemporary media has instead a googol of digital tales to tell—tracks, clips, photos, posts, comments, tweets, and, as appears in our present act of speaking to you, digitally produced text imprinted on paper (or, if you are reading electronically, pixelated text activated on a screen). And in all these new Arabian Nights tales of our time, the quality of the suspensive now that allows us to share a sense of history grows ever more fragile. The sense of history we pass on to you is like the flickering signifier of the cursor blinking on and off right here and now on our word-processor screen where we are imprinting/pixelating our speaking-in-writing.²

But precisely because we are the sense of history, of course, we cannot remain forever in suspension. Instead, we must at last commit forward even while remembering backward. We must let the experiential sense of what is happening take us with the flow of time into the future and wait for the historical knowledge retained in that sense to follow. So, although we are hesitant to demote the role of rhetoric-representation-interpretation in grasping the sense of history, and although we are as suspicious of communication-information-media as of spam, we will now promote the latter, more modern notions. Committing in this way is essential for us to be able to speak convincingly to you in the voice of the contemporary sense of history.

We can best signal such commitment by staking our being on an even newer term appended to communication-information-media: network. The idea of the network extends and refocuses the modern regime of concepts. In the network, it’s not just about us speaking to you and your listening to us. It’s about the fact that we communicate, inform, and mediate many-to-many in a social graph giving a new view of collective identity and agency. Did you know, for example, that you don’t just have to listen to us passively? Individually or together, you can speak back in the network. (Try it by emailing us at [e-mail].)

So now we can re-ask all our previous questions of wonder and doubt in the following way: How strong will the sense of history be in the digitally networked age? We worry that the value we offer to you as the sense of history is in peril. We worry that in an age when communication-information-media converges in all-consuming networks, you will forget the sense of history in the thrill of the instant click, get, post, comment, like, tweet, and other ephemera of creative destruction, disruption, or innovation that accumulate value mainly for entities, such as corporations, with the least stake in a sense of history.

But it is time to stop speaking abstractly. We cannot keep pretending to be a free-floating chorus chanting in the background of the drama of today’s communication-information-media-network even while in reality, as you see here, we are inhabiting specific forms of text on a page or screen. A demiurge calls us to descend to lower registers of our speaking—into the substrates of matter, energy, agency, and process (actual infrastructures of apparatuses, channels, instruments, devices, operations, practices, protocols, and formats) through which the regime communication-information-media-network today surges and may, or may not, carry—as a signal on top of its carrier wave—a sense of history. Now, therefore, begins our attempt to make a claim for a continuing sense of history in the history of communication, information, media, and networks themselves—that is, in the mediated, and media-historical, sense of history that is today’s surrogate for yesterday’s intellectual or philosophical sense of history.

Sometimes we dream we can have full freedom to choose the specific form of our speaking, as if our expression as the sense of history were not itself conditioned by history. To make the biggest impact on you today as a sense of history, what kind of communication, information, media, and network would we elect to be? For pure contrast to the digital, would we be a rock monument like those of prehistorical times, or perhaps one of today’s powerful sunken or negative versions of such monuments (such as the Vietnam War Memorial or the visually bottomless twin cavities at the 9/11 Memorial)? Would we instead split the difference between the far past and the hyper-contemporary by being print or film, or—advancing the footage a bit—a digital facsimile or remediation of those? Advancing beyond facsimile remediation, would we instead make full use of the dynamic opportunities of the new digital media? For example, would we create an electronic literature work enacting the sense of history in the lineage that runs from yesterday’s interactive fictions and hypertext to today’s remarkable algorithmic, networked, and other works practiced by members of the Electronic Literature Organization? Or would we have more impact if we went all the way to become fully a creature of the network—not a voice of the shuttle like that with which Philomela mythically told her tragic history by weaving it into the literal fabric of an ancient medium, but instead one of today’s voices of the worldwide web and social networks?

The Scholar

I have ceded the opening of this book to the sense of history in the digital age speaking in propria persona because I reserve for my concluding chapter a more scholarly attempt at defining such a digital sense of history, which is my topic. It will take four intervening chapters to get to that point. These preliminary chapters are designed to explore some of the richness of the idea, and experience, of the sense of history as it weighs on or is reciprocally pressured by the digital age. Chapter 1 studies the change from the historicism of the age of high print (Historismus) to the real time sense of history—meaning instant sense of community—of social networks. Chapter 2 focuses on how narratives of new media encounter frame such transitions between historical ages as also media transitions. Chapter 3 qualifies that linear logics of transition in such narratives themselves depend on ideas of linearity, and accompanying graphical knowledge systems and ideologies, that change across eras and media. And Chapter 4, which begins on the paradigmatic instance of a hybrid print/digital work at the onset of the digital networked era, proposes an extension of the method of media archaeology that I will call network archaeology—one that might help us grasp the sense of history of our current, postlinear networked age.

Then my concluding chapter 5 attempts the digitally adapted definition of the sense of history I have indicated—one whose parameters, as I call them, could give a measure of the sense of history not just in any age or culture but specifically in the digital age. The case study in that chapter is JavaScript digital timelines, whose code I take as an exemplar of a dynamically networked rather than linearly structured sense of history.

Together, these chapters traverse anew while extending the trajectory of my previous work, including Wordsworth: The Sense of History (1989), The Laws of Cool (2004), and Local Transcendence (2008). Each of those books reflects on the encounter between the sense of history and modern experience. But along the way of their writing, I increasingly shifted the scene of this encounter from Romantic imagination to information media, the digital romanticism of our time. It’s the same seduction, really. Wordsworth’s nature or Keats’s La Belle Dame sans Merci have nothing on the Internet in all its soul-uplifting yet at times dark power. I also began making projects that variously enacted or reflected on our time of communication-information-media-network—beginning with my Voice of the Shuttle: Web Site for Humanities Research (started in 1994).

The present book pursues further my questions about the relation between past societies that possessed a self-aware sense of history (for example, nineteenth-century historicism) and today’s instant information society. Can the contemporary regime of communication-information-media-network provide the epistemological, formal, social, economic, political, and cultural ground for a continuing, if mutated, experience of history? How can that be, if the negotiation between sense and knowledge in the information age seems on its face to know no history? Might we wager instead that the network effects empowered by today’s new media are capable of sustaining a contemporary equivalent of the sense of history? Can such a sense of the network, as it might be called, correspond—or at least be accountable—to the older sense of history? Might it even ameliorate that older sense of history—the partner, we remember, of cruel nation- and empire-building projects conducted through the past worldwide web of trade, military, religious, transportation, and other networks? In the end, what can the sense of history be for us now?

The main audience I hope to reach is a general scholarly one interested in how a bridge might be made between the humanities and the information age. But, especially in chapters 4 and 5, I also include research and discussion that speaks specifically to scholars of the digital humanities, new media studies, and media archaeology who are among the bridge builders. As a result, while my primary voice is generalist, philosophical, and meta-, I at times also move from theory and reflection into technically precise explorations of information media. The studs and blueprints—which is to say, circuit boards and software—show through as part of the texture of ideas in this book. Much as in the nineteenth century one needed to feel the heft of the tomes of Historismus written by the original historicists to sense the weight of ages, so today in the digital age one needs to handle the apparatus and the code to gain a feel for the future of the sense of history.

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Friending the Past

Can we be friends with the past? If so, will the past friend us? What philosophy of history—at root, a love in the way we know the past—can make such amity possible in an information age when our craving for instant data binds us to an ever more expansive, yet also vanishingly thin, present—a razor’s slice of now big enough for each of us to have a thousand Facebook friends or Twitter followers, so long as all that friendship fits on a few screens of attention before rolling off into oblivion?¹

My topic is how the digital present might have a love—and a philosophy—of history. Let me start by giving an account of predecessor epochs of media technology and their senses of history.² The account will be partial, simplified, almost a fable. But there is some value in establishing a baseline for our current, hyper-mediated sense of history.

The Age of Ancestors

We can begin with so-called primary oral cultures, where, whether or not writing is known, speech and gesture dominate the ensemble of media technologies. Consider prehistorical cultures, for instance, in which (simplifying to one Native American paradigm) the sense of history was a matter of a rock and a voice. The voice sang: Here is Standing Stone, or Split Rock, or Cairn. Here the upper-world spirits came into the world, or the peace of the tribes was made, or Lean Bear had his vision quest.³ Anchored by rock, the voice that told the history of the world, tribe, or individual had both strong performative presence and an air of permanence. Voice was intensely of the moment. Yet voice was always also—or, perhaps better, always is—the rock of ages, where the copular is, positing the coincidence of voice and rock, spoke the primordial semiotics of presence (being the same as unmediated meaning) from which—much as physicists say supersymmetry broke down after the Big Bang into separate strong-nuclear, weak-nuclear, gravitational, and electromagnetic forces—all subsequent, specialized modes of representation may be said to derive: personification, metaphor, allegory, irony, and others. Following Walter Benjamin, we can call the spirit-medium of such presence aura.⁴ If aura is etymologically air or breeze, then we might hear it as the wind that both whistles around the lonely rock and animates the voice of the speaker of the rock. Aura was the original medium—or zero-degree medium—of immediacy. The history it spoke, to use Benjamin’s words about auratic cult objects, was authentically there in its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.⁵

But, therefore, such history had little mobility. Neither rock nor voice carried far, especially together so as to preserve their semiotic bond. The cost of such immobility was almost the entirety of what we would today call history, since the lack of ready or scalable mobility meant that there could be no widespread reproduction effect transmitting the tale beyond individual or tribal mortality into historical permanence. This is the meaning of Rock, a medicine man might say; and legend and ritual would carry on the dictum for generations or leagues. But sooner or later, closer or farther, no one would remember, and the rock—as philosopher Albert Borgmann reflects in his lucid thoughts on the prehistory of information (grounded in part on Native American culture in his state of Montana) would diminish to just one binary bit of data: ‘Yes, there is a message here,’ while the bare or natural surroundings seem to say, ‘No, there is no message elsewhere.’⁶

Significantly, however, the curtailment of what I called almost the entirety of what we would today call history does not mean that oral cultures had no sense of history—far from it, since such cultures were profoundly oriented toward what Walter Ong called the conservative or traditionalist. Ong writes: Since in a primary oral culture conceptualized knowledge that is not repeated aloud soon vanishes, oral societies must invest great energy in saying over and over again what has been learned arduously over the ages.⁷ In other words (generalizing now to other prehistorical paradigms), whatever was sworn on a rock, a sword, a ring, or any of the other oath-objects that were the surety of oral history—warranting, for example, the conveyance of spirits, identity, or property from one generation to another—bore repeating. The power of such repetition is something that moderns still feel when in the audience of any oral art of the caliber of myth, rite, or chant. Repetition, after all, is the original, unthrottled reproduction effect. If, in the semiotics of pure presence, the spirit binding rock to voice can know no diminution without immediately ceasing to be (it is all or nothing), then the reproduction of that spirit can only be the repetition of presence in undiminished force across seasonal or generational intervals of space and time. Repetition is a percussive punctuation or spacing of uncompromised presence: here, and here again. In short, it is magic, and even today, when the same words are repeated from generation to generation at a birth, wedding, or funeral, we would be lorn without such enchantment.

Moderns are distanced, though, from what they often consider the naiveté of oral repetition, which—by comparison with the industrial light and magic of reproduction effects in modern, especially digital, media—seems on a par with nursery rhymes and rote memorization. To overcome this progressivist bias, so as to see oral repetition for what it really is—one of the most advanced repertories of media reproduction effects achieved by civilization—requires desynonymizing technology from technique. I define technique as a method or practice that goes beyond being an application to becoming a play on technology—as when we say there is play in the action of a machine part, not to mention in a musical instrument. Technique is both bound to and free from its technology. As such, it is generative of culture from nature. In oral culture, the available media technologies may thus have been the naked human voice and its chorus of dance, music, costume, decoration, and other arts—all of whose repetitive sounds or visual motifs echo in the last instance the grunted rhythms of love, birth, work, war, and death. But the technique of such culture was always also a play on such technologies that channeled nature’s raw demand for repetition (that is, reproduction) into the demand for culture heard in any measured song of love, birth, work, war, and death. Those who have studied oral techniques of repetition point out that they include all the sophisticated additive, aggregative, redundant, agonistic, participatory, and situational