Arts of Transmission: An Introduction

James Chandler, Arnold I. Davidson, and Adrian Johns

The essays collected in this issue of Critical Inquiry range widely in both approach and subject. Some mount theoretical arguments about how best to conceive of the role of media in shaping human history. Others delve into the practices devoted to the creation, distribution, and preservation of knowledge, from the singing of songs in archaic Greece to the production of secrets by todays U.S. government. All, however, address what we call arts of transmission. That odd but resonant phrase derives from Francis Bacon, yet its descent to us from the seventeenth century is peculiarly indirect. As John Guillory notes below, Bacons original Latin expression is perhaps closer to arts of tradition or handing down to posterity. The specic phrasing we chose for our title is a Victorian translation of Bacons ars tradendi. Not exactly original nor yet quite an imposition, the phrase nicely exemplies a point that Bacon himself was making in coining it: that what we know depends on the practices of communication by which the knowledge comes to us. The point of this issue is to explore how, historically and theoretically, that conjunction has operated in the past and continues to operate today. This is a subject that eludes disciplinary denition. Bacons own arts ranged from apparently basic activities like speaking and listening to the complex modalities of logic and dialectic. They also included what we think of as modes of communication or mediaorality, writing, and printing though we would nowadays add digital systems to the list; nevertheless, all of Bacons arts remain pertinent. They embrace now, as they did then, the principal ways of organizing, arguing for, and expressing new claims. The phrase is useful because it indicates that we may do well to consider these practices collectively: in a spirit of Baconian experimentation, as it were, to
Critical Inquiry 31 (Autumn 2004) 2004 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/04/3101-0002$10.00. All rights reserved.

James Chandler, Arnold Davidson, and Adrian Johns / Arts of Transmission

make the attempt and then to see what results. Moreover, in Bacons view the arts of transmission of the late Renaissance were deeply problematic, and their problems substantially constrained the thought of his age. And that insight, too, may prove pertinent to the present situation. Many of the concerns that most exercise todays academic worldand for that matter the intellectual culture beyond academiarelate centrally to the descendents of Bacons arts. In this light the variety exhibited by these papers is, in part, the point. What we are trying to do is to begin to chart not a new disciplinethat word would imply an enterprise with its boundaries too sharply and irrevocably denedbut a novel program of study. Its focus is on the ways in which knowledge has been, is, and will be shaped by the transmissive means through which it is developed, organized, and passed on. Those means are technical, both in the restricted modern sense and in the broader, classical sense. That is, they rest not only on devices like the printing press and the internet but on practices: on skills and crafts that must be learned and transmitted from generation to generation. Much current intellectual energy is being spent on trying to characterize dierent cultures of communication: print culture, oral culture, manuscript culture, and now digital or information culture. Yet it is increasingly apparentas it was for Baconthat such cultures are rarely, if ever, discrete. Print, manuscript, and oral arts are mutually dening through complex historical processes. The same now holds true of the digital realm. While some scholarly work has been done to demonstrate the essential reJ a m e s C h a n d l e r is Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke Professor in the department of English language and literature, the Committee on Cinema and Media Studies, and the Committee on the History of Culture at the University of Chicago, where he is also director of the Franke Institute for the Humanities. His books include England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (1998) and Romantic Metropolis: The Urban Scene of British Romanticism, 17801840 (2004), coedited with Kevin Gilmartin. A r n o l d I . D a v i d s o n , executive editor of Critical Inquiry, is professor of philosophy, divinity, and comparative literature and member of the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Emergence of Sexuality (2001) and coeditor of Michel Foucault: Philosophie (2004), an anthology drawn from all of Foucaults writings. A d r i a n J o h n s is associate professor in the department of history and chair of the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (1998) and is currently working on a history of intellectual piracy.

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lations among such cultures, these relations have not yet been articulated with sucient force and cogency. In bringing together diverse approaches to the arts of transmission, we hope to signpost the path toward a possible new eld. Rather than approaching the arts of transmission atomistically, as if one could write separately a history of material culture, a history of practices and skills, and a history of forms of thought, the papers in this volume emphasize the interconnectedness of what are too often conceived of as independent realms. Media, practice, and thought form a kind of cultural ensemble that needs to be examined with one eye focused on historical variability and the other on epistemological constancy. The papers collected here do not so much apply ready-made methodological and conceptual schemes to familiar objects of study as attempt, if read together, to bring into existence a new domain of culture with its still evolving requirements of method and analysis. The papers that follow highlight this dimension of our project as much as they concentrate on the various arts themselves. A good example of the comprehensive approach can be found in the sociological argumentsinformed by systems theory and a subtle sense of the practices of transmissionin Elena Espositos essay. Though he broaches the issues by way of two of Borgess fables, Roger Chartier oers a broad overview as well, but in an avowedly historical mode. Friedrich Kittlers essay then oers a fable in its own right, a neo-Hegelian history of the university over eight centuries: its primordial scriptural unity, its fall into print fragmentation, and its eventual reunication in digital media. All of these arguments pose the question of what counts as an epoch in the history of transmission practices. Is there a template for recognizing a new epoch when it happens, and do the epochs of transmission correspond to the epochs of technical change? It remains the case that much media theory, for instance, radically innovative and challenging as it may be, incorporates an overarching narrative of historical change that is surprisingly familiar. Its junctures lie at moments of undeniably major technological change: the inventions of writing, of printing, of electronic media, and of the internet. To identify arts of transmission as a subject is to ask whether other schemes may be conceivable and that is to verge on reconceiving the very stu of history itself. At an apparently more prosaic level, these studies address how changes in the arts of transmission aect what gets transmitted: texts and images, narratives and skills, memories of things and imperatives to forget them. But this is only at rst glance more prosaic. We nd ourselves discovering how institutions, disciplines, and individuals have been forced repeatedly to revise every element of their engagement with the practices of commu-

James Chandler, Arnold Davidson, and Adrian Johns / Arts of Transmission

nication, distribution, reception, and archiving. We see that what it is to be a good reader changes at least as fast as what it is to be a good author or publisher. To understand these kinds of implications and to show how different arts of transmission may enable or even require dierent practices of knowledge making, we have to use both a broad brush and a ne point. We need to reassess our approach to everything from institutions to forms and genres to intellectual content and structures. Problems of publishing are of course much lamented in contemporary academia. We wanted, however, to take a longer and broader look at the issue of transmission. We wanted to see the current issues facing universities and publishingeven those related to new forms of information technologyas elements of a bigger story. We wanted to design a project that would extend in scope to modern, early modern, and ancient forms of transmission practices and hence to help us see where these issues come from. This would also make possible the comparison of transmission practices in different modes, dierent ages, and dierent cultures, thereby engendering fresh historical and theoretical perspectives on the current moment in what is here identied as a crucial phase in the history of transmission itself. We wanted to do all this not so that we could dissolve contemporary developments into a story in which novelty was structurally impossible but rather so that we could better see just what was and was not new in the current critical situation. We hoped to situate, as Matthew Arnold said, the function of criticismcriticism in the broadest senseat the present time. Such ambition cannot easily accommodate itself, of course, to a single journal issue or conference. At the very least, we knew from the outset that we had to nd contributors who could both address with authority the broad sweep of the subject and yet maintain the close attention to detail that the topic absolutely demands. That is, we knew we needed to recruit colleagues who were both deeply erudite and widely conversant, both intensive and extensive in their reading and thinking. For these colleagues we did not try to stipulate the scope of their contributions too closely nor to ne-tune their assignments. Nor, above all, did we prescribe the approach, method, or terminology to be employed by any one of them. We hoped that the interplay between their often very dierent perspectives would be fruitful. And, in short, we think that this proved to be the case. Our contributors responded with great generosity of spirit as well as real creative imagination. On 2122 May 2004, the contributors met at the University of Chicago for a discussion conference. The conference was based on papers that had already been submitted, vetted, and posted on Critical Inquirys new Rough Cut website. At the meeting itself, respondents presented critical readings of these papers, and the authors replied, before the discussion was opened

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up to the audience. The meeting ended with a screening and discussion of Photo Wallahs, a documentary lm by the Australian lmmakers David and Judith MacDougall. The lm, which examines the culture of commercial photography in a northern Indian hill station, proved a superbly pointed conclusion to the conference. The essays published here are those that formed the basis for discussion at the May conference. Themes and issues emerged from their juxtaposition that were often unanticipated. Alan Liu and Mary Poovey, for example, approached similar questions in rather dierent terms. Liu and Poovey took up the basic concepts of form and medium discussed by Esposito and addressed their relation through the practical application of particular transmissive technologies. In Lius case, this meant exploring the networks of modern digital media and assessing the status of their claims to transcendence. In Pooveys case, it meant charting the ships of the East India Company and registering problems they posed for the universal knowledge project back in Britain. Unexpectedly, Lorraine Daston also addressed issues of transmission and transportation in the context of an aspiration to objectivity and a certain kind of universality, in this case a universal language for botanical classication. Unlike Pooveys ships, however, the vehicles of transmission in Dastons essaythe originary botanic specimensremain xed in place and scientists must travel to consult them. Some of the papers discuss ways in which arts of transmission have related to the emergence of modernity. For the humanities, Janice Radway describes the way in which the modern conventions of academic authorship, publishing, and reading came to be fatally divorced from middlebrow culture in the years between the American Civil War and World War II this divorce being a key component in the current crisis of the monograph. And John Guillory traces the emergence of memos in the business world during the same period, dislocating our understanding of literary modernity in an account of how the memo eliminated rhetoric from the commercial realm and established the norm of exposition in our contemporary sense of the word. Memos, of course, contain what must be remembered (memorandum est). Another group of papers takes up this theme, looking not at transmission and modernity but at transmission and memory. Gregory Nagys discussion of the ways in which songs were performed in archaic Greece provides an intriguing counterpoint to Dastons emphasis on the preservative role of specimens. Here was a world in which authorship was clearly prized, at least by some, and in which a certain kind of authenticity about the songs themselves mattered and yet where the preservation of authorship and authenticity was a matter of reperformance, and often of reloca-

James Chandler, Arnold Davidson, and Adrian Johns / Arts of Transmission

tion, rather than the preservation of artifacts. Nagys argument concerns the practice of repeating the recital of poetic works in distant locationsa practice that, he maintains, made memory into the eective medium, such that the context of works could be shifted even before writing came into existence. Ann Blairs examination of Renaissance reading practices then provides a triangulation point between these two chronologically distant extremes. Blairs paper is about the ways in which annotation could supplement memory or, perhaps, replace it at what suddenly looks like a pivotal moment. Finally, Peter Galisons paper brings us up to date with shocking immediacy. Galison reveals the arts of interdicting transmission. It turns out that, as best we can tell, the amount of classied or downright secret information in todays United States far exceeds the amount that is accessible through institutions like the Library of Congress, and, generally speaking, the classied realm is expanding far more quickly than the unclassied. The assumption that the secret world is a small appendage to the vast inheritance that we think of as our civilizations knowledge is turned upside down. Galison, very much in the spirit of this project, wants not just to decry this trend but to ask, How is classication practiced? On what epistemic assumptions does it rest? And what are its consequences? To be sure, these are academic questions. But as with those raised in each of these searching papers, they are not merely academic questions. Galisons argument about classifying knowledge ought to persuade us of something else: not only that the arts of transmission are hugely consequential but that, when they are impeded, some of our most basic assumptions about the culture in which we all live can simply dissolve. Not that any of these essays, Galisons included, treats transmission as a purely mechanical aair, as if quantitative measures of volume and velocity told us all that we needed to know. In christening this project Arts of Transmission, we have been mindful that arts have historically called for criticism, and criticism of these arts, if it is to have a continued role in our contemporary life, must broach questions of quality. It must confront that cultural ensemble of media, practice, and thought with judgments of valuejudgments that are inextricably aesthetic, ethical, and political. Such a confrontation is what we hope, in the end, to have staged in this project, and such critical judgments, we are happy to say, are everywhere on oer in what follows here.