Stop Discovering Philology (already)

What follows may have only tandential relevance to "future of the book" type stuff, but I thought I should say it somewhere in case the editors of the PMLA decide not to print it.

8 May 2010

Dear Editors and Readers,

I’ve thought to myself on several occasions that it really is a shame most academic journals do not have  space set aside for readers’ letters.  Perhaps no one thinks to write a letter.  The average “reader” of an academic journal—I prefer to think of myself as a scavenger—is herself an academic, so the appropriate response to an article of concern would be to compose one of one’s own and therein demonstrate through detailed analysis where the article under consideration is deficient and supplement it with a “superior” reading.  When said article is published a year or two later, perhaps people will even remember what the original article was about.  This should serve as a sufficient parody of how scholarly discourse functions.

I write this letter to the PMLA, because it is everything an article ought not to be: hasty, immediate, a gut response, ill-conceived, angry, rash, and perhaps poorly argued.  I finished reading the three articles and introduction in the “Philology Matters” cluster of the March 2010 issue and was left irritated and bewildered.  I was irritated with how often philology has been rediscovered of late, even though philological methods (word study, historical linguistics, and textual criticism, to name a few) have been going strong and progressing with the work of numerous critics, who, perhaps, would never self-identify as philologists, though perhaps some would.  Jerome McGann, Susan Stewart, Anne Carson, Virginia Jackson, and Katherine Hayles spring immediately to mind.  McGann in particular has been at the forefront of theorizing new ways to relate textual criticism/editorial theory to literary interpretation (see especially The Textual Condition and Radiant Textuality) and at the forefront of pulling his hair over why this relationship has yet to catch on more broadly (The Scholar’s Art and The Point is to Change It).

I’m bewildered as to why these “rediscoveries” of philology are so dead set on looking backwards.  What I mean is the critics I mention above represent, to my mind, the foresight of philology and philological methods (e.g. their relevance to the so-called new media or using the materiality of texts to reconsider conceptions of genre), whereas the Romance philologists Warren trots out, Auerbach and Curtius (though, curiously, not Spitzer), represent philological hindsight.  Even the more recent critics Warren invokes, Said and Glissant, understand philology retrospectively, not as a means toward novel modes of investigation and interpretation but to bolster what they (and by a certain logic “we”) are already doing.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the thematic link Warren provides for the articles in the “Philology Matters” cluster, “the ways they excavate and activate silence.”  I had the privilege of sitting in on the dissertation defense of a friend and colleague of mine, Michael Kicey, who expressed the problem with these excavations of silence far more eloquently than I ever could.  If I understood him correctly—and, as you can imagine from the scatter-brained prose contained herein, that I may not have—the “gotcha” tendency in treating discursive silences, be they proper to a text or to criticism, is fundamentally wrong-headed.  “To reconstruct what has been lost,” as Warren says, is indeed prime philological territory, but the additional tendency to supplement those silences with what often (though not always) amounts to rank conjecture simply reproduces the critical blindness for which old school philology so often comes under fire.  Additionally, to merely point to a silence with a cheap “aha!” is not productive.  These silences are almost never (as far as I am aware) grappled with as silences, as irrevocably lost, as lacunae (figurative or literal) never intended to be filled or explained.  To treat silence as silence is ridiculously hard, because it would attempt to understand how meaning is made (and unmade) in a space of absolute indeterminacy, where the only appropriate response is restraint: not to say or only to ever say provisionally.  Carson’s translation of Sappho (If not, winter) is a decent but somewhat flawed example of how to go about doing this.

If what I have said here should strike you, O Benevolent Readers and Editors of our fair PMLA, as absurd, unfair, or irresponsible; remember that I am a nobody, no longer possessed of real academic privileges, unemployed, no one significant in any academic field or critical discourse, whose future career is entirely up in the air.  You may very well never hear from me again (or at all).

Your Scavenger,
Nicholas A. Theisen

Cannot be Digitized #5 and #6: Large and Small

Finishing my second of three years in a dual degree program, I got a little bit overwhelmed at the end of the semester and I apologize for my long absence.

Continuing the practical side of "cannot be digitized" I wanted to submit two examples of things that cannot currently be digitized, or are not currently being digitized, things that are too large and things that are too small.

We'll start with the large.  Birds of America by John James Audubon was the first book to be purchased by the University of Michigan in 1838.  It is the most valuable printed book in the Special Collections library, and one of the largest.  The double-elephant folio (hopefully "elephant" gives a sense of its size) takes two people to carry it, and two people to turn its pages.  Certainly it exists all over the world in copies large and small, but it is the age, giant size, and aura that sends people to the Special Collections library to view it, so many in fact that they recently built an "Audubon Room" in order to display it.  (On the ground floor of the Hatcher Graduate Library). With a few hours notice (though a full day is better), anyone can request to see it, and people are always shocked, awed, and pleased that they have the right to do so.  They feel inspired in its presence, gather around, point, whisper, stand with gaping mouths, and arrange groups to come in just to stand in its presence.  Smaller copies have been digitized, and you can google any print and come up with a digital copy right now.  However, the aura that it has in such a massive size, even if a scanner that large is created, cannot be captured.

Conversely, Google is also not digitizing small items.  Though I was unable to confirm the exact number of centimeters,  small by Google standards includes a large number of books.  Anything about the height of my hand, a fairly common size, particularly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is too small, and is currently skipped.  The example I'd like to discuss also has other unique characteristics that cannot be rendered on a screen.  Pat the Bunny the 1968 book by Dorothy Kunhardt is a book that was specifically created with textures such as a soft bunny and scratchy whiskers.  The tactile experience of interacting with this book has is what makes in an iconic book that stands out in the memories of adults 40 years later, and continues to make it a favorite among children today.  However, if you try to digitize it, currently it would be rejected from the library digitization project for its small size, but also it ends up looking like this:

The only way to tell that this is fuzzy at all is the slight indication near the bunny's tail that some of the 3D fuzz is overhanging the black line.  This particular book has no reason to exist on a screen.