Whether you are in the business of Re or not—but especially if you are—the angel of history always faces in (at least) two directions at once. Call them past/future, tragedy/farce, or what you will. In the old/new media workshop where I like to think about different ways of knowing, I keep a little box of anecdotes to play with. I’m tagging a few recent additions to my collection below for what they’re worth. They might point our discussion toward failure as a protocol. (How/has Enlightenment failed?) Or they might point our discussion toward technology as a non-verbal form of knowledge to which we tend to grant a tacit universality. (If your mousetrap “works,” it really works everywhere?) Bacon claimed printing and gunpowder for the Enlightenment—a mixed bag if there ever was one—but they were hardly the Enlightenment’s to claim. As we gather again to worry about the future of knowledge (???), traditional disciplines and institutions seem truly stuck (Re:E 2020), while techno-solutionism tries (and fails)? to sieze the day.
1993: “On the internet nobody knows you’re a dog” (Peter Steiner’s famous New Yorker cartoon)
2021: “I am not a cat” (lawyer at a Zoom hearing that went viral because his children had enabled a camera filter turning him into a cartoon cat)
1844: “What Hath God Wrought” (Samuel F. B. Morse successfully demonstrates electromagnetic telegraphy between Baltimore and Washington, promotes himself and fails to garner additional federal investment)
1946: “What Hath God Wrought” (Margaret Truman’s handwritten note is successfully transmitted by radio facsimile to a receiver/printer aboard a train speeding between Baltimore and Washington, cites national Morse mythology and fails to make a difference)
2020: “Wikipedia has gone from being a punch line about the unreliability of people on the internet to becoming one of the most trusted sites online” (Katherine Maher, exec. dir. Wikimedia)
“I suggest that the Wikimedia movement develop an Abstract Wikipedia, a Wikipedia in which the actual textual content is being represented in a language-independent manner” (Denny Vrandečić, founder of Wikidata)
Wow on the Vrandecic cite. I note that he says: “The multilingual Wikipedia has two main components: Abstract Wikipedia where the content is created and maintained in a language-independent notation, and Wikifunctions, a project to create, catalog, and maintain functions”. I really can’t see a sense in which a notation which could hold all Wikipedia is not a language. (There must be a notation that says that more clearly …).
As soon as I sat down to start my comments, I realized that we should have posted these statements without names: one way to identify an operating system for Re:Enlightenment is to begin by identifying how each one of us operates. When I see technologies juxtaposed historically through startling anecdotes with an often sardonic twist of (inevitably) failed ambitions, my guess is Lisa G. Just as this statement is a recognizable product of her personal “workshop” for knowing, so Re: is a collective Workshop for our decade-old knowledge project. What links the personal and the collective are shifting combinations of features involving methods, materials, styles, etc. I’m amazed by how our very first effort to find commonalities in our combinations has remained so robust. Those three “touchstones” from 2010 (https://www.reenlightening.org/about/ )–Past & Present, Mediating Technologies, Connectivities–inform in irregular ways the workshops not only of long-time colleagues such as Lisa, but also those who have joined us for just this past year. Johanna Drucker and I had never met before last May but soon discovered that our individual workshops over decades have shared (without us knowing it) the same formulation –the “work of writing.” We’re still puzzled by how that work has worked differently for each of us, but it is an operative Re:Enlightenment link even as it points to our personal ways of knowing.
Sorry Cliff- posted before seeing this note about anonymity……
John–I was just speculating on how easily we might identify each other’s statements. No need for us to omit names.
Explain Why You Are Not A Cat
I’m taking as a starting point Lisa’s notion of ‘technology as a non-verbal form of knowledge to which we tend to grant a tacit universality’ and aiming to think through it in terms of Dorian’s question about whether we take explanations seriously enough. In the hilarious viral video Lisa references—of a legal proceeding on Zoom in which a hapless lawyer struggles to remove a cat-face filter from the video image of his face, while a frustrated judge looks on—the judge does his best to address the situation in a staid manner and guide the lawyer through possible ways to remove the filter. ‘I believe you have a filter turned on in the video settings…you might want to take a look…’ The judge’s suggestion is interrupted by a pathetic sigh from the lawyer who seems exasperated and embarrassed. ‘We’re trying to…can you hear me, judge?’ As the lawyer speaks, the cat-filter’s mouth moves with the words, heightening the farce. ‘I’m prepared to go forward with it…I’m here live, it’s not…I’m not a cat.
It’s worth taking note of several aspects of this situation as they pertain the how the people involved behave:
1) No one involved is experiencing any ontological confusion about whether the lawyer is a man or a cat.
2) The reason the judge won’t proceed until the problem is solved, even though he understands he’s talking with a man and not a cat, is that the cat filter is nevertheless distracting in the real world of the scenario.
3) The reason the lawyer says ‘I’m not a cat’—sheepishly and out of desperation—is to call attention to item (1) as if it were sufficient to obviate item (2). Of course it is not sufficient, and this is one reason the video is funny: a desperate appeal to some technical reality everyone already understands (this man behind the video image is not actually a cat) as primary to a secondary reality that’s more like burlesque, this is an official legal proceeding with centuries of customary behavioral codes behind it and one party appears as a giant, talking cat head.
I don’t know what exactly to do with the technological mediation in this scenario, but I’d venture there’s something more to it than as analogous to a lawyer walking into a brick-and-mortar courtroom wearing a giant cat head mask and insisting during proceedings ‘I am not a cat.’ The expectation in both cases is facility with a universal technology or set of technologies, whether those that mediate courtroom proceedings in person or on Zoom. The lawyer’s faux pas in the example at hand is indeed that he’s insufficiently fluent with Zoom, a technology for which the circumstances of the pandemic demanded a steep learning curve for legal professionals (among others), hence for which customary behavioral norms swiftly coalesced. Nine months ago ‘I can’t find the raise hand feature’ or sitting in a meeting ‘unmuted’ with construction in the background were more generously tolerated than they are now. I think of the cat lawyer video is existing on that spectrum of where custom and technology mutually define each other’s boundaries.
The cat lawyer video reminds me of a (hackneyed) example I often give when teaching aspects of Claude Shannon’s interventions for the history of data. I show an image of a rainy day viewed from the inside of a skyscraper offie window, next to an image of a couple holding hands and sharing an umbrella while they walk in the rain. I tell students to imagine the statement ‘It’s raining outside’ uttered in both scenarios. Perhaps in the former it’s a thoughtful colleague witnessing an unexpected rainstorm through their office window and stopping by an office that has no windows to say ‘It’s raining outside,’ to give notice. Whereas in the other scenario, a person turning to their partner as they walk together in the rain and saying ‘It’s raining outside’ might be understood as a wry or ironic statement. The information is the same in both scenarios but means different because of the context. And the only way we can venture an interpretation (what it means) is to start with some kind of explanation (why this?). ‘I’m not a cat’ can mean all sorts of ways, but interpretation aside, what’s frequently undervalued is how we explain the scenario itself.
This is where I pick up (and heartily agree with) Dorian’s suggestion that perhaps explanation is undervalued, even (or especially) when an explanation is quite possibly wrong but nevertheless the best explanation anyone’s prepared to put forward. In my view explanation is at the heart of knowledge.
Hello all. Perhaps the connection has already been made or is so obvious as to be hardly worth making explicit, but there seems a loud echo of Frege’s theory of sense and denotation in the conception of explanation being articulated here – mianly in Aaron’s piece above. The Stanford Encyclopedia gives a more succinct account of this than I can, so i’ll just quote it:
‘[…] Frege suggested (1892a) that in addition to having a denotation, names and descriptions also express a sense.[5] The sense of an expression accounts for its cognitive significance—it is the way by which one conceives of the denotation of the term. The expressions ‘4’ and ‘8/2’ have the same denotation but express different senses, different ways of conceiving the same number. The descriptions ‘the morning star’ and ‘the evening star’ denote the same planet, namely Venus, but express different ways of conceiving of Venus and so have different senses. The name ‘Pegasus’ and the description ‘the most powerful Greek god’ both have a sense (and their senses are distinct), but neither has a denotation. However, even though the names ‘Mark Twain’ and ‘Samuel Clemens’ denote the same individual, they express different senses.’
This conception of ‘sense’ resonates with the above: what could be called the ‘wrong but valid’ or ‘wrong but useful’ or ‘somewhat mistaken but agential’ concept of explanation. In both cases, the ‘sense’ and ‘explanation’ are doing real cognitive work. There is no intended epistemological insecurity, and indeed all actors possessing and using these senses and explanations may be doing so under the assumption of absolute validity, but they may nonetheless be wrong in some ways. This does not blunt the usefulness of of the sense or explanation in given contexts.
I think it might be possible to state Frege’s distinction in Shannon’s terms, in that it is the surprising *lack* of added information in the “I am not a cat” or “it is raining outside” (in the case where the couple are outside) that alerts the message’s receiver that something other than simple denotation is intended by the sender. Grice’s maxims outline these norms for ordinary communication (be as informative as needed and not more informative) and the violation of this maxim is itself the added information that makes up the difference. If the explanations we have seem too simple, maybe the simplicity itself is the clue to where to look for better explanations.
*A hasty response in no way improved by the baby’s molars having spent the weekend evermore about to be*
Several of the provocations speak to each other in unexpected ways. Lisa asks about “failure” as a protocol, Dorian asks about holding on to incomplete or imperfect explanations until better ones emerge, and Helge notes that the alternative ways of interaction the project has undertaken “often…didn’t work. Maybe even mostly. But we tried again.” Lisa and Dorian’s likewise both note the Janus/”Angel of History” aspect of knowledge/ways of knowing, and Helge speaks to the “now of knowledge” as an event. I’d be tempted to say that ours seems a particularly unstable and/or dysfunctional inflection point in the history of how systems, technologies, etc., break down or reshape themselves and therefore “knowledge” if I wasn’t sure someone smarter would point out how many times this has happened before, and with more turmoil or consequence.
In any case, I find “failure as a protocol” compelling at multiple levels, with respect to large initiatives and ideas (how/has “Enlightenment” failed) and individual components (unfinished or abandoned projects, theories–I’m reading Stranded Encyclopedias just now-https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030642990). Failure too, it seems to me, has a complex temporality. In 2019, I clarified on Twitter that I hadn’t failed, I was rather in the process of failing. Only got 9 likes, but it remains as true today as it was when it was written. I’m reminded too of Edison’s insistence that he didn’t fail but instead successfully found x number of ways the lightbulb didn’t work (where X = 999, 1k, 2k, or 10k, depending on which site you check that’s obviously less worried about accuracy or consensus than I am).
What’s the difference between failure and obsolescence? Or being superseded? How many times must something be tried, how much time must pass, before an idea, a movement, a project, etc., can be judged to have failed, and how completely? How long must a “better” explanation percolate, develop, compete before the conservative framework, the function of which must be resistance to the new, adopts and adapts, or declares the new a failure? One 18th-century version of what Dorian writes about relativity and quantum mechanics might be the debate over phlogiston, with which there were known problems long before it gave up the ghost, or whatever else it was supposed to be made of. As an explanation, though–even a wrong one–phlogiston wasn’t, I suppose, really hurting anyone, and insofar as the problem drove further inquiry it was usefully wrong. It was also clearly and determinably wrong: some things measurably gained weight after combustion, which they weren’t meant to do if the phlogiston had been absorbed by the surrounding air. The same can’t be attributed all Enlightenment explanations–as Lisa writes, “a mixed bag if ever there was one.”
Humanistic knowledge (broadly construed) is even more difficult if not sometimes impossible to assess as having “failed” because it is or was, generally speaking, more process than outcome-oriented. Perhaps the balance will continue to shift with new methodologies and attitudes about the sociopolitical role of academia/academics. If so, then the protocols of failure seem even more important to consider.
If our present is particularly one of reckoning with past and future (even if it’s not, intrinsically–I suppose it could be if “we,” whoever we are, make it one, though who constitutes “we” has always been an issue of Enlightenment and Re:Enlightenment), and if, as Helge writes, “Re: has always tried…to create the conditions for new knowledge to happen, under the temporal conditions of a certain immediacy and urgency,” then any account of the Project and its outcomes or processes we produce should include a record and assessment of its “failures”: the conditions we created in which new knowledge (or to allow for the Edison framework, the knowledge we thought we were looking for) did not happen.
I’m noticing a certain evaluative tendency that is latent among many of the prompts and responses–failed, good, good enough. In a way it seems that we are getting at the question of how we view the Enlightenment itself: yay or nay? My instinct is to think that we can analyze the Enlightenment’s failures while acknowledging its successes; moreover, I don’t think we can keep the latter without doing the former. But this would be unlikely to lead to a wholesale assessment of whether the Enlightenment itself had failed or succeeded.
Extending this framework to the Re:Enlightenment Project, some of the concern around “failure” seems to be related to the traditional markers of academic success: peer-reviewed publications, citations, etc. Certainly, there have been prominent works connected to the Project that have succeeded in these ways, but we have continually returned to the question of “outputs.” Like Helge, I have always understood the work of the Project in the network of people it brings together rather than in any particular institutional statement or consensus about what we are doing. I hope we can use the conference we’re planning to expand that network one more time–emphasizing the Re:Enlightenment umbrella.
I was in an elevator in Charlotte, NC last week and noticed that the elevator buttons were completely different from the last time I was in an elevator (or a hotel), and I found myself thinking that elevator buttons have to be one of the very last technologies that need to be changed — even the close-elevator button which I know doesn’t really work but I still push it (I can’t remember the name of the television show but there is an episode in which two Scottish guys are in an elevator that uses voice command rather than buttons (again, why?) but the voice recognition doesn’t recognize their Scottish accents when they say “eleven” so they remain stuck in the elevator, going nowhere).
But thinking of Lisa’s interesting point about failure as a protocol, and also about what Aaron says about context and Seth about failure as a condition that can lead to something (such as knowledge), I wondered what the dividing line between failure and practice is? Or is there one? When I teach literary theory, my students usually start out (in their papers) by failing to use it correctly, as I also started out. And then they do use it correctly, or they do find that it works in the way they think it works. Because of failing first. Now I think about this failure as necessary to learning literary theory; I think of it as practice, that is. I can think of lots of other examples, from playing a guitar solo to hitting a seven iron to making a perfect roux. My question is probably a pretty obvious one. But given that Enlightenment is often talked about in terms of its institutions and practices, I like the idea of failure as an Enlightenment practice and of failure as a form of practice. I guess the difference with playing the guitar or cooking or whatever (maybe not lit crit) is that you have a clear idea of what your end is supposed to look or feel or sound or taste like.
PS: I seriously have no idea why my name appears next to a little Hazlitt face in the comments. I am not a Hazlitt.
Thinking with Lisa Gitelman on the failure of Enlightenment in our own time. We had assumed that free speech had been invented and permanently institutionalized during the Enlightenment (First Amendment, Article 11 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen). But there are strong signs that free speech as failing in our time. (c.f. hate speech as censored by Critical Race Theory; Twitter emergencies; canceling; etc.) Many books have been published in the past 10 years to describe and deplore the threat to free speech on campus. But these defenses of free speech have failed. Liberal defenses of free speech read as symptoms of the failure of liberalism. Restraints on campus speech keep expanding. Were the Enlightenment thinkers and actors wrong about the normative value of free speech?
Thinking with Dorian Bandy: maybe knowledge as a better explanation has a necessarily conservative dimension. One doesn’t reject the existing explanations until you have a better one. Liberalism of the long Enlightenment developed robust systems for mediating disagreement and conflict in three domains: the ‘free’ market economy; the democratic public sphere; and the competitive explanations offered within liberal science (Popper, Rauch, Deutsche). Is there a better way—perhaps a more just way–to organize the economy, politics and knowledge? Should those who think they have found that better way be pressed to explain it?
Thinking with Helge Jordheim on the now of k(now)ledge as an event: can we attempt focused, Enlightenment-informed interventions in the debates unfolding in our own time? [For example, concerning the failure of free speech as a normative value.] For our research projects, the question becomes, how can I/we turn our knowledge into an event in the history of (RE:)Enlightenment?
Thinking with Bill Blake’s keen provocations regarding what we might build together: I would like our ‘operating system’ site to provide the infrastructure that would enable us to intervene in current debates in our field. So for example, since canceling of academics, media celebrities, and many others have resulted from saying words deemed harmful, would it be useful to assemble those words on one site? Would it be useful to other researchers? Or, would it trigger censorious Twitter storms? Would this be an event in the advancement of knowledge?
Thanks Lisa, I like format of the anecdote box and find myself imagining lines going in lots of directions between them. That kind of geometry is the same one I think about for the Re. project in general. So yes, absolutely: “printing and gunpowder for the Enlightenment—a mixed bag if there ever was one.” And even more provocatively, for me: “they were hardly the Enlightenment’s to claim.” I think this is because “the” Enlightenment is many more than one, and like your anecdotes, its many-ness is taking us in new and useful directions, success w/in failure, or at least that’s what interests me about Re.
Having a protocol for failure, would be useful I think to spell out the failure-success combination. I’m interested in seeing the Protocols developed and linked with other things, as per Bill B.’s suggestions in reference to the Lab. I’ll comment more there.