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When literary critic Sven Birkert's The Gutenberg
Elegies appeared last spring, his ruminations on "the fate of
reading in an electronic age" met with very serious appraisal from
the cyberspace community. Birkerts spent much of 1995 engaged in
debate with technology advocates like Kevin Kelly and John Perry
Barlow about the growth of the global information infrastructure and
its potential threat to what Birkerts views as a very particular kind
of literacy.
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RH: Are you surprised at how the book seems to have caught on
within the very community that most people would have thought
you were criticizing most sharply? |
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SB: At first I was, but now I think I understand why that
happened. These people who are the frontline "cyberthinkers" like
nothing more than to talk about [cyberspace] in every sort of way,
especially the larger, visionary ways. |
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the first thing we discovered was that we all agreed on one core
premise, which is that [the Internet] is not a small thing, like CB radio
-- this is big, and deeply transformative, and will change everything
about the way we think. They see that influence as being more
positive, and I am holding out for a more skeptical stance at this
point.
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RH: You champion the act of reading text as fundamentally different
from reading off a screen, focusing a lot on its contemplative
qualities. It occurs to me that there's also a leisurely quality to
reading text. Sitting at a computer seems to me, no matter how
relaxed or entertaining it may be, unable to produce a genuinely
leisurely condition. |
SB: You mean actually, physically, in the chair?...I would hold
on to my argument even in a future where I could imagine
something that looks very much like a book and might even unfold
in your lap as you sat. It would still be generating its text from a
chip. There's still a difference, something about the physical
opaqueness of the page. We know it's a dead end, that the word has
no place else to go or to come from, whereas the potentiality factor of
the screen will always be subliminally present. |
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If you go into one patch of nature, it's wild and undomesticated,
you've just hopped a fence and plunged into the nature, you perceive
it differently than if you go in knowing that it's part of a national
park. You perceive the same bushes or trees, but there's an
underlying knowledge that changes your attitude to your
experience. |
RH: You're saying no matter what the technical format of the
screen, the fundamental premise remains that the information
potentially came out of nowhere and goes back to nowhere when
we're done?
SB: Yes, I think that premise is there, and has to be. And that
nowhere becomes a very important somewhere that we project onto
psychologically. We can't stop ourselves from attributing and
projecting all over the place. At least with a book, the projection goes
into the text itself rather than into the delivery system.
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RH: Has your experience in the last few months modified your
positions in any way?
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SB: I'm probably holding my positions more vigorously than
ever, but the one place where I don't want to be blind and refuse to
see reason is that I'm very much aware that this is a medium
beautifully suited to the storage and transmission of data, and that it
can be enormously transformative for the better in that regard. I
think the functions that are going to be brought forward and refined
as time goes on are going to be editorial and very sophisticated and
going to subdue the impression that people have of suddenly walking
up and facing the ocean -- |
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RH: There was a very interesting comment in the coda, where you
suggested that Wired magazine was a metaphorical "masturbation
aid," in that every issue you read inspires you to think, generates
ideas for you. That seems to be the core of much about what you say
about the printed page in general -- that literature at its best
becomes something in which we are actively involved. We're
thinking about it, we're extrapolating from the issues that are in it.
When we're online, do you get the sense that we're not inspired to
think in that way?
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SB: Yes...the way I field that particular question, which is
experiential and hard to prove, is that when I'm talking about
reading, in the more literary sense, I believe that when it's working,
readers enter a particular relationship to time which I don't think
they are able to enter online... I mean this sort of literally, sort of
metaphorically; it almost has something to do, without being
simplistic, with electricity itself. Circuitry and electricity somehow do
not allow a certain interior switch in the reader to be thrown that
opens us up to "deep time". The "deep time" or "duration state" that
reading opens upon is a time that is not aware of the segmentation of
time, and was pretty much a historical norm until our century, where
we discovered so many different ways of shattering it. |
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Part of our cultural crisis is that most of the things that have
traditionally conferred sensations of value and meaning to an
individual tend to unfold in that time frame. Close relations with
people take place in a situation of presence, as do spiritual
experiences, and those experiences fall apart as soon as you become
aware of the digit or the clock hand. This is true of all aesthetic
immersion as well; if you're standing in front of a painting, so long as
you know you have to meet somebody at the deli in twenty minutes,
you're not experiencing the painting. My intuition is that the whole
larger system of interaction, computer technologies and so on, goes
against that state, blocking us from it, and conditions us in such a
way that it makes it harder for us to get to that state over time.
Another analogy that I would use is that driving in cars as much as
we do does not make us unable to walk, but our steady reliance on
the car has transformed the way that we walk. It's very difficult to
recapture the spirit of the ambling walk that has no purpose or
destination, that was done simply for the pleasure of the
act. |
RH: What you say about deep time harks back to what you say
much earlier in the book, when you comment that most people only
owned a handful of books, but read them over and over and over
again. It seems to me that they lived in those texts in a way that we
cannot, because we are bombarded by so many texts and so many
other media.
SB: There's another thing that attaches to that idea, which is
that so many people who read in childhood have a very special and
profound set of associations with reading. It's not just that they had
time to read and the whole world of books became a discovery, but
it's also true that children experience deep time in certain ways. The
time of childhood is not a time that understands segmentation. When
you combine inhabiting a durational mode of experience with
encountering works of imagination that accept all your projections
and allow you to move into their world, it's an experience that can
never be reduplicated. Adult reading can, at its best, only catch a
piece of it.
RH: I sometimes feel, as a person in my mid20s, that I'm part of
the last generation that really had that relationship to reading. As if I
was perhaps five years too late to really grow up as thoroughly
absorbed in computer games as people younger than me seem to be.
I play them, but it rarely feels the way they describe it.
SB: Who knows, maybe they're having a deep, intense
experience with those computer games. But it's not an experience
that I've ever had; I don't know what it feels like.
RH: And it appears to be an experience that doesn't offer the same
opportunities for moral, ethical, or metaphysical contemplation that
reading does.
SB: And the nature of those games, because they are pitched
to visual reflexes, really has to be more entertaining...there are some
quest games that may be more contemplative, but never having
played them, I wouldn't know.
RH: How much potential in the academy do you see to reverse the
trends that you talk about? How far down the slippery slope are we,
and can we get back?
SB: That's an enormous question, obviously. In the New
York Times recently, there was an article about a new trend in
academia, especially English and literary studies, a radical turn
against theory and deconstruction that is predicated on ecology and
environmental awareness. It struck me as an interesting symptom of
a pendulum. The pendulum went way over in one direction in the
80s -- I happen to see all those literary trends, of which
deconstruction would be one of the main ones, as in some way
related to (not caused by) the kind of cognitive modes the computer
experience engenders. It's a long argument, and I could make it some
other time, but...basically, it was a decentering, a dethronement of
central power, an exploration of trails and webs and so on, removing
the author from the work, all that stuff.
RH: Deconstruction and similar theories, in the way that they
reduce a text to information, definitely are kindred to what's
happening in computers. That's related to what I think is one of the
most critical points in your book, when you buttress Russell Jacoby's
thesis from The Last Intellectuals about the way in which the
public intellectual withdrew or became obsolete after the Second
World War. The intellectual life retreated into the academy, where
it's being encroached upon even further, so that the influence that
the academy has is shrinking, and the opportunities for intellectuals
seem fairly grim.
SB: I think of "intellectual" in the larger sense of the word, in
the sense that tries to come up with a synthetic critique or vision of
any particular social situation. And the compensation for the
disappearance of that, which I don't find a huge compensation, is
particularization; any given area of study being broken down and
further broken down. This is something that technology is aiding in
an alarming way, in that you can create your whole society of people
interested in a certain bug, because you can contact them all online
and organize your intellectual cell. When that happens, you're less
bound by the cultural responsiblity of standing for the larger world
of ideas.
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