The Other Shore. Michael Jackson

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      Yet ours is, undeniably, an information society. We move about with our heads in clouds of data. E-mail, Skype, Facebook, and LinkedIn keep us in touch with scattered friends, family, colleagues, and collaborators. We cross streets with cell phones pressed to our ears, or stand on the sidewalk using earphones and microphone to talk unselfconsciously to an invisible other, oblivious to those around us. Though ethereally elsewhere, we can always be located. No one has to guess where we are, where we have come from, or where we are going; the details are relentlessly tweeted, twittered, blogged or e-mailed. We pass the time playing interactive games alone, unsurprised by this apparent contradiction in terms. Our most banal opinions can be accessed by all and sundry. Our perverse yearnings, romantic longings, and wild imaginings are disseminated without a moment’s thought. Hardly a month passes without some new App or device promising still faster and more fantastic means of making connections. The safe storage of personal files is no longer entrusted to memory, which is fallible, but to cryptic facilities with multiple backups. Our computers are not simply extensions of our brains, they have minds of their own, and dictate the terms on which we comprehend our own psychology. As books morph into e-books, read on iPads, Nooks, and Kindles rather than printed pages, machines translate our spoken words into visible signs. In The Idea of the Holy, Rudolph Otto used the phrase mysterium tremendum to capture the awe, humility, and fascination we feel in the overpowering presence of “the wholly other.”⁶ Technology now inspires the mixture of rapture and dread once associated with the divine. The critical tension in our lives is no longer between the sacred and the secular, but between the divine and the digital. When Nicholas Negroponte, cofounder of the MIT Media Lab, retired in May 2011, he spoke of the “digital revolution” that had occurred during the previous 25 years, as “a revolution that is now over. We are a digital culture.”⁷ But perhaps our infatuation with the new blinds us to our continuities with the old. To what extent are we dealing with “digital affordances”⁸—new ways of doing old things? Which among the new technologies (biogenetic, prosthetic, robotic) can be said to utterly transform our sense of who we are and what life means? This question has always been asked about novel technologies, from the knotted cord to the hieroglyph, from the manuscript to movable type, from the typewriter to the word processor, from the telephone to the cell phone. There is a long tradition in scholarship of seeing oral and literate technologies of communication as betokening essentially different sensibilities and essentially different ontologies. It is argued that the transition from orality to literacy entails a dramatic transformation in consciousness in which words cease to sing,⁹ intellectuality becomes divorced from feeling, the arts of memory atrophy, vision is privileged over all other senses, thought becomes independent of conventional wisdom, and the reader is alienated from his or her community.¹⁰ These arguments are often informed by a romantic view that oral cultures enshrine a more ecologically balanced and socially attuned mode of existence in which the life of the community takes precedence over the life of the mind—as in Walter Benjamin’s lament that modernity prefers information processing to storytelling, data to wisdom,¹¹ an echo of Socrates’ conviction that writing is a phantom, undermining memory, poisoning/drugging the mind, and leading us astray.¹²

      The shock of the new leads us to confuse means and ends. We assume that a technology of communication actually determines the character of what is communicated. The medium is the message. Yet, before the digital revolution there was always more than met the eye—subliminal signals, nonverbal nuances, ambiguities, unspoken intentions. There was always a cloud of unknowing in the ether that surrounded us and obscured the space between us. There was always a gap between a speaker and his or her interlocutor. The monk hesitated over his manuscript as the student now panics at the sight of a blank page. Some small betrayal was implicated in every attempt to speak one’s mind, recount an event, or faithfully pass on a piece of news. Convinced that history is marked by radical discontinuities, one worldview giving ground to another, we fall into thinking that every new invention fundamentally alters our lives when, in fact, it may simply enable old goals to be met in new ways. Is a story written with a quill pen basically different from a story written on a typewriter or word processor? Is the life of a reader so very different from the life of someone listening to an oral tale? Did literacy bring about the atrophy of face-to-face social life? Does text messaging diminish the quality of a teenager’s life? In this book, I am interested in the rite in writing. My argument is that writing is like any other technology of self-expression and social communication, and that in exploring the lifeworlds of writing and writers we discover the same existential imperatives that have always preoccupied human beings, regardless of their cultural or historical circumstances—the need to belong to lifeworlds wider than their own, to feel that they can act on the world rather than merely suffer its actions upon them, and to express what seems peculiar and problematic about their own experiences in ways that resonate with the experiences of others.

      ONE

      The Other Shore¹

      WALTER BENJAMIN ONCE OBSERVED THAT our human gift for seeing resemblances “is nothing other than a rudiment of the powerful compulsion . . . to become and behave like someone else.”² But our capacity for recognizing what we have in common with others, let alone connecting with them, appears to be as limited as our capacity for putting experience into words. The blank page confronts the writer like the face of a stranger. Though we cling to the belief that we can read one another’s minds or mimic reality in art, the gaps between us, like the gaps between words and the world, can never be closed. “Always it is not what I say but something else.”³ “All is not as it seems.”⁴ Anyone who lectures for a living will recognize this experience. No matter how painstakingly one prepares a talk, it will draw comments that bear no relationship to what one thought one was saying and attract questions that preclude any response.

      But lecture halls and classrooms aren’t the only places where we pass each other like ships in the night, and should an alien anthropologist visit earth he or she would undoubtedly be struck by our extraordinary capacity for talking past each other and not catching each other’s drift. At the same time, our imaginary anthropologist would surely be baffled by the different meanings that attach to the same gestures in different cultures—a nod signaling negation in Greece but affirmation in England, direct eye contact conveying sincerity of interest in America but antagonism in Polynesia and Africa, touching taken as an unwanted invasion of a person’s private space in some societies but in others communicating empathy. Not only would our alien anthropologist wonder at the mutual misunderstanding and downright misery that spring from the inherent ambiguity of everything human beings say and do in the presence of one another, he or she would also be astonished by the energy devoted to reducing this ambiguity and dealing with the fallout from never knowing exactly what others are feeling, thinking, or intending.

      If our alien strayed into a university, he or she might be amazed at the industry generated by the passion for rational, systematic, unambiguous knowledge of others and of ourselves, and he or she might wonder how human beings have managed to succeed in the Darwinian struggle for survival, given their Babel of mutually incomprehensible languages, dialectics, and argots, not to mention their capacity for misreading one another’s gestures and minds. But our visiting ethnographer might ask a more fundamental question: Why would well-educated earthlings set such store by the idea of knowing the other, or knowing themselves, when social existence is manifestly not predicated upon theoretical understanding, any more than meaningful speech is predicated upon a formal knowledge of grammar. Indeed, theories, like prejudices, would seem to be one of the principal causes of misrecognition, since they tend to make the other an object whose only value is to confirm our suspicions or prove our point of view. As long as mutually congenial outcomes occur, our alien anthropologist might argue, it does not matter whether one begins, or ends, with a clear understanding of what one is doing, an empathic understanding of the other, or even knowledge of oneself.

      Is writing also a matter of working in the dark? Of trying to cross the wide Sargasso Sea that separates us from what we call the wider world? One thing is sure: regardless of what we write, the very act of writing СКАЧАТЬ