Convergence

I took The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts by Richard Lanham with me on my little “vacation.” The issues discussed in this group of essays pivot around the role of “great men” in the future of education. Synchronously, these are the same issues which Loren and Diane have been confronting in Emerson’s American Scholar.

Lanham’s perspective is a positive one. I had been thinking quite a bit during the long drive about the kenosis / plerosis opposition, and have a huge thought bubble about it that I need to write out. Far from the rather ethereal questions of artistic intentionality, these problems are also wrapped up in what “education” really is and does. There will be much more to come on that, but what Lanham’s argument centers upon is the changing ways that the humanist center of “core courses” in university education must shift in order to accommodate the changing demands of technology. There’s a lot to work out, but in the end, the role of so called classics should be strengthened and not eroded by technology.

In brief, Lanham proposes that the center of the university should not be upper level “disciplined” study, but should rather give greater emphasis to an integrative approach which blurs the boundaries of what we normally think of as “education.” He makes two suggestions as to how this might be done: one would be to make first year composition the gateway to upper level study through “writing across the curriculum” efforts (already being done at many major universities) or, by renewing the relevance of library and information science (LIS) and making it a similarly cross-disciplinary emphatic introduction to the world of education. I think these are worthy aims, myself. Though the shift in emphasis in LIS seems to be primarily manifest at the graduate level, Lanham's proposals seem to anticipate a lot of what has happened in the time since the book was written.

One of the most striking images to me was Lanham’s perception of students at a university as “visiting anthropologists” who must negotiate moving from tribe to tribe (academic departments) who are all convinced that they have the answer to the world’s problems, and that their field of study is the only one worthy place to be, that is, if you are a smart person. However, they all speak different languages and have different customs. In Lanham’s model, it is the students that are the “smart ones” because they must learn to cope in ways that the ossified departments themselves are incapable of.

I like that. I notice that Lanham's 1994 book is not listed in the Bedford Bibliography, but his 1983 book, Literacy and the Survival of Humanism, is. The abstract sounds promising:

Nine essays on the place of the humanities in the university curriculum. Unless literature and composition are reconciled, not only will the study of literature perish but our nation will descend into illiteracy and political conflicts among our disparate languages and cultures. Humanities teachers must abandon the notion that language is a neutral medium for exchanging information or expressing oneself. If language were employed only for such rational purposes, humanistic study would be superfluous. A more accurate notion of human motivation is now emerging from interdisciplinary work in the biological and social sciences. This “post-Darwinian synthesis” depicts human beings as motivated by the desire to play games as well as to satisfy appetites. Humanism can offer crucial insight into game- playing motives, particularly as expressed in styles of language use, and into the ways human beings collaboratively construct self and reality. In the final essay, Lanham outlines the UCLA composition program designed to inculcate “post-Darwinian humanism.”

In The Electronic Word Lanham has clearly extended his thesis quite a bit, and sets up what he calls a sort of bistable oscillation between clarity and obscurity which is and should be the core of western thought. This oscillation may be at a higher frequency during the shift to non-codex based texts, but the core vibrations are the same. In the end, it’s been coming to this for a long time. Technology isn’t the death of our old text-based culture so much as it is the flowering of it. I like that idea too. This is big stuff and it will take a while to make sense of it all.