art sensation in the digital age.
Utopian models of the world and statistical charts that measure our reality have an appeasing neatness about them. In literature, however, things do not work out that way. Literature is neither wishful thinking nor documentary science, neither Arcadian illusion nor catechistic dogma. — Alberto Manuel, “The Muse of Impossibility,” Threepenny Review, Fall 2010
Three recent essays approach the dematerialization of artistic experience in the digital age. As computational and network power along with gadgets, screens, and electronic communications increasingly dominate the experience of art, these writers ponder what is happening to the ways that art shapes the self. The three authors are particularly attuned to sensation rather than intellect as the crucial aspect of art experience. That is, they are more concerned, by and large, with the feelings that occur in artistic reception than in straightforward meaning-making produced by art.
Gobbling. Your. Foie. Gras.
Sven Birkerts’ “Reading in a Digital Age” (The American Scholar, Spring 2010) is most of all anxious about the ways in which digital technologies threaten concentration and attention. Birkerts is no luddite, but he does fear the effects of information overload on the kind of sensibility that sustained reading of literature can produce. “My real worry,” he writes, “has less to do with the overthrow of human intelligence by Google-powered artificial intelligence and more with the rapid erosion of certain ways of thinking—their demotion, as it were.” For Birkerts, the onslaught of information online threatens “reflection, a contextual understanding of information, imaginative projection. I mean, in my shorthand, intransitive thinking. Contemplation. Thinking for its own sake, non-instrumental, as opposed to transitive thinking, the kind that would depend on a machine-drive harvesting of facts toward some specified end.”
Birkerts makes an important distinction in his essay. The newer modes of reading tend to focus on tidbits of trivia whereas the kind of reading to which he wants to call our attention is less about information than it is about sensation. It is about a certain way of feeling. Birkerts admits that he can rarely remember the plot details of novels, but that these are less important than a kind of absorption of a novel’s infrastructure of perception. “While I am reading a novel,” he explains, “one that reaches me at a certain level, then the work, the whole of it—pitch, tonality, regard of the world—lives inside me as if inside parentheses, and it acts on me, maybe in a way that is analogous to how materials in parenthesis act on the sense of the rest of the sentence.” For Birkerts, “My way of looking at others or my regard for the larger directional meaning of my life is subject to pressure or infiltration. I watch people crossing the street at an intersection and something of the character’s or author’s sense of scale—how he inflects the importance of the daily observation—influences my feeling as I wait at the light.”
For Birkerts it is this kind of reading that the information age threatens. “Imagination must be quickened,” he argues, “and then it must be sustained—it must survive interruption and deflection.” But, he continues, “The reader who reads without directed concentration, who skims, or even just steps hurriedly across the surface, is missing much of the real point of the work; he is gobbling his foie gras.” Among the many intriguing dimensions of Birkerts’ essay is that he writes, at times, as if he were posting a Twitter feed. His sentences shorten. Like this. As he tries. To communicate. Contemplation itself. This makes the essay cut against its own argument in provocative ways. For it implies that the issue may be not be one of delivery technologies—screen versus book—so much as preserving the humanistic goal of developing the self through meditative reading rather than hyper-mediated interactivity. As we trawl the Net, are we, Birkerts wonders, losing an older kind of literary net—one bound together over time, by sustained reading—in which culture could be caught and the self constructed? Does the fragmentation of culture into isolated data threaten this older mode of cultural acquisition? As sustained reading slips into the sea of information, will the self follow too?
Silence!
George Scialabba’s “It’s All Just Talk” (Bookforum, January/February 2011) is far more negative about the effect—and the affect—of online reading. Reviewing a reprint of The Present Age: On the Death of Rebellion by Soren Kierkegaard, published in 1846, Scialabba applies Kierkegaard’s own polemic to our times to bemoan the loss of silent concentration on the self. Among the noise of the digital age, the existential formation of the soul cannot be achieved. Contemporary “talkativeness,” which Scialabba takes to include “celebrity journalism, self-help books, TV, Web-surfing, Facebook, and Twitter” and “perhaps also, less obviously, psychotherapy, novel-reading, and most higher education…keeps us connected and on the surface.”
But, as Kierkegaard argued, it is not connection but instead “silence” that is “the essence of inwardness, of the inner life.” We must, Scialabba contends, “go inside ourselves and remain there,” for there “we will eventually be confronted, out of our own depths, with choices, decisions, ultimate questions, which can only be resolved by an act, a leap of faith. …To grasp the necessity of this existential decision, or leap of faith, is to live in what Kierkegaard called ‘fear and trembling’ and what he meant by the ‘consciousness of sin.'” For Scialabba, the problem is that, “The present age distracts us from this terrifying but soul-creating awareness. Getting and spending, texting and tweeting, we lay waste our spirits. Amid this carnival of stimuli, the soul, that dense kernel of spiritual gravity, evaporates, leaving behind a light ontological froth….The lightness of modern being is seductive but finally unbearable.”
What is surprising about Scialabba’s interpretation of our contemporary connected society is that many critics worry about precisely the opposite depredations of the digital. Rather than view social media interaction as an evaporation of the self, they view it as an intensification of the self, and fear the loss of an older mode of sociality, intimacy, community, and friendship (Facebook “friends” compared to actual friends). It is the community, many claim, that is under attack by bits and bytes of narcissistic self-display and not, as it is for Scialabba, the self that is overcome by the chatter of others online.
Sound Sensation
Joanna Demers’ “Sensuality Matters” (The Journal of Music, June/July 2010) adopts a very different approach than Birkerts and Scialabba. As a music scholar rather than a literary critic, she already possesses a different relationship to art and sensation. Sound, in her view, is both an object of non-meaning sensation and an art form that tends, inevitably, to acquire interpretation. She wants electronic music, and drone music in particular, to be appreciated as both, as if we could flip a switch between two channels of reception: one in which sound is pure Sontagian sensation and the other in which it is all metaphor and symbol, narrative, and allusion.
As she tracks her own listening experiences to pieces such as Élaine Radigue’s Trilogue de la mort (1998) and Jim O’Rourke’s Long Night (1990), she returns especially to the persistence of the sensual in electronic music. She is relieved that years after Hegel feared the replacement of art as direct experience by the more abstract philosophy of art, sensuality persists in music produced by electronic means. Lurking behind Demers description of her listening, however, is almost the opposite ideal for art than we find in the essays by Scialabba or Birkerts. For Demers, sensuality of sound is under threat from the distantiation of the electronic; the music is so abstract as to lack substance as sound itself. By contrast, for Scialabba and Birkerts, it is the collapse of literary experience into an intensified flow of sensation that marks art in the contemporary world. What they fear is not the loss of sensuality, but rather, in a sense, the loss of distance. The self gets absorbed into the flow of digital sensation, with no space for the autonomy of self-investigation, while for Demers, the issue is that one might not connect to electronic music as pure sound, in which questions of self-meaning are not necessarily of concern.
Soul Power
Is this merely the difference between thinking about (and sensing!) sound as compared to text? Certainly this is part of the story. But the fact that the very same technologies of the digital can produce so many critiques in such contradiction to each other suggests that we do not yet understand their effects (or, to pun once again, their affect). Perhaps when it comes to art, the very qualities of concentration and distraction (one thinks of Benjamin’s theories of the new arts of distraction in the age of mechanical reproduction) must perhaps be understood and grasped more dialectically, as interacting modes of perception. So too, it strikes me that when it comes to culture, sensation and meaning are not simply different tracks of comprehension. Reading a novel, scanning a feed, listening to electronically-reproduced sound, and other modes of reception must be considered relationally and multiphonically.
We need to experience art—and approach the experience of art—by positioning ourselves at the crossed wires of art and information, data and expression, outer and inner subjectivities. These intersecting wires can confuse. They might explode, melt down, or blow up in our faces. But they throw off sparks. They can, perhaps, jumpstart our souls in the expanding machinery of the technium.
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