March
8-10 2002, University of California Santa Barbara
Clifford
Siskin
English,
University of Glasgow
(all
rights reserved)
[Abstract]
If we
want to change our interfaces, we better change the tales we tell about
them. At present, interface tales do
not constitute a terribly diverse or diverting genre; the limited storylines
only serve to confine our sense of what interfaces are and how they’re
made. We all know, for example, the
story of little Stevie Jobs who stalked into the park one day, stole the seeds
from the lazy giant, and grew a Macintosh. Stanford’s Interface Project website
gives us the longer version. The giant
Xerox had, in fact, itself copied the desktop seeds—including
overlapping windows and mice—from Doug Engelbart’s SRI work for the Air Force
in the early 1960s. Instead of asking
the biz school exam favorite—why the giant waited around for Jobs to grab and
grow the seed—the Interface Project turns the same concern into what they call
the “big question”: why did it take over two decades for Engelbart’s work to be
realized?
The
Project website features many links to interviews and essays speculating as to
why it took so long, but I can give the answer in one just one click: it
didn’t. It didn’t take that long
because it still hasn’t happened: Engelbart’s main work hasn’t been
realized. For him, the central goal was
“augmentation” of what he called the “human system”; Xerox and Jobs
appropriated some of the features of that system, but to a very different
end. Taking as their target users not
human systems but office workers—defined as those interested more in tasks than
technology—they shifted the interface agenda to “invisibility.” Under the mantra of “ease of use,” the
technology had to disappear.
Augmentation gave way to accommodation.
That’s
a tale that I’ve told—but not about computing.
My area of expertise is the long eighteenth century, when the new
technology was what Raymond Williams called “writing”—his shorthand for the
interrelated practices of reading, writing, and print. During that century, I’ve argued, writing
veered from being experienced as a prescriptive and thus threatening technology
to the domesticated and thus safe tool of Literature. To turn to that history is to expand the repertoire of the
interface tale to suggest that it’s more than just a boys’ tale, a series of
heroic vignettes about individual entrepreneurship in particular and human
agency in general, and more than just a Whig history about ease of use. In juxtaposing the old and the new—as I’m
about to do—I’m pointing not to a series of parallels (as writing goeth, so
goeth computing), but to recurrent features of a genre—features out of which, I
hope, other tales can be constructed.
The
first two handouts provide an example of such a feature: [HANDOUTS] take
a look at the protagonists of, on the one hand, Engelbart’s 1962 SRI report on Augmenting
Human Intellect: A Conceptual Approach, and, on the other, An Account of
the Fair Intellectual-Club of Edinburgh, 1719. Neither representation looks
very human—no conventional faces here—but that’s because they’re both meant to
enact the volatility of the category: the place where forms of technology and
human processes meet to transform each other into something other. Both the diagram and the titlepage are mixed
forms that communicate both through design—shapes and lines and fonts—and through
words, words that invoke a further multiplicity of forms: Engelbart’s
H-LAM/T(Human using Language, Artifacts, Methodology, in which he is Trained)
and the eighteenth-century text’s combination of genres—account, letter,
poetry—a combination that, as we shall see, serves not just to describe but to
constitute the Fair Intellectuals.
Engelbart, as noted, insists that his protagonist is a “system” and, I
will now argue, that’s precisely what the Club aspired to be.
Offered
for sale in Edinburgh and London in 1720, the Account purports to be the
first admission in print of the existence of a small secret society of women
formed in 1717 in Edinburgh. Betrayed
by one of their own to a gentleman friend, the group felt compelled to protect itself
against untoward speculations by clarifying its history and purpose. In addition to the history of the formation of the
group, the text includes a description of the “Rules and Constitutions” and
transcriptions of talks given by two different members. One of the most striking moments comes in
rule XV which defines the conditions for terminating membership. The two that are specifically named make for
a particularly telling pair: you left the Club through either “Death” or “Marriage”
(9). These are young women-the age of
admission was between 15 and 20--with only a brief window for intellectual
activity before their “mutual Love and Friendship” for each other gave way to
men or to some other deadening “occurrence” in the “Course of Providence.” Not only is this-to my knowledge-one of the
first, if not the first, club of this type on record at that time in Britain;
the use of the term “intellectual” to describe the Club’s purpose was one of
the earliest uses of that word in its particularly modern sense: as a word designating
a very specific set of personal and social behaviors-behaviors to which these
individuals aspired.
Their
aspiration was transformation, and the technology they deployed was
writing. The Club’s explicit
purpose was to rewrite its members-its Secretary, authoress of this
account, emphasizes that the three founders all insisted on a “written scheme”
(5); what they, in fact, wrote down was the imperative to write everything
down: “All the Speeches, Poems, Pictures, &c. done by any Member . .
. are carefully kept” (25). Even the
oral dimensions of Club behavior were grounded in writing: the “harangues” they
delivered had to be “written” (8).
But
why? Why did these young women want to
spend their brief moment of freedom between childhood and men immersed in
writing? To what end did they
write? What did they want out of
writing? What did they think writing
could do? This is, of course, a strange set of questions for an academic to
ask. On the other hand, is there an
academic who hasn’t posed similar ones to herself? Perhaps it’s better, then, to remove all human selves from
the formulation and opt for a Richard Dawkins-like reversal. In his infamous “selfish gene” conceit, you
may remember, human beings are the environment that genes render in order to
survive; we are the means to their end.
So
here’s the reformulation: why did the technology of writing gather humans into
groups? The answer, preposterous as it
may first seem, was to propagate itself: this was writing’s way to ensure its
own ongoing proliferation. Why
groups? Because writing had to solve
the same kind of reproductive problem faced by the most virulent of the rogue
genes we call viruses: what to do when the host population becomes so bedridden
that the virus has no means or place to go-when success, that is, threatens
extinction—as with Ebola. A human
infected by the writing bug spends, as we all know, more and more time alone in
chairs if not in bed, all forms of contact disrupted by the isolating
experiences of immersion in a book or fixation on a blank sheet of paper. For writing to spread-to circulate
extensively and efficiently through entire populations-that tendency must be
counteracted by new forms of sociability and publicity. In eighteenth-century
Britain, the most obvious example was pornography; as the newly public form of
private desire, it helped to incite that century’s rise of writing-a role that
it appears to be reprising for the new technologies of the WEB.
A less
obvious but more pervasive behavior was what David Kaufer and Kathleen Carley
call “reverse vicariousness.” They use
the term to describe how infectious contact with writing was initially and then
repeatedly secured-even over the spatial, temporal, and social distances
that writing itself opened up (12--13).
“Even nonreaders,” they point out,
can
positively register at social gatherings that they “know of” the book without
actually having seen or read it first hand. We might call this phenomenon reverse
vicariousness, because we normally think of immediate viewing or reading as
vicarious experiences for face-to-face interaction. But, in this case, a viewer
or reader uses face-to-face interaction to experience the viewer or reader role
vicariously. (66)
Writing, if you’ll indulge the
“selfish gene” conceit a bit longer, puts us into new forms of
face-to-face interaction in order to maximize its own circulation. The
very technology that threatens to isolate us preserves itself by reinvoking the
social through the workings of reverse vicariousness. Thus the more saturated we are by writing, reading, and print,
the higher the premium we put on an expanding repertoire of face-to-face
encounters, from improvement clubs to tutorials to cocktail parties.
To see
those forms as the invention of writing may seem a bit strange, but doing so
allows us to demystify them, particularly the assumption that face-to-face
interaction is “real life.” The
relationship between the real and any form of human interaction is always
historical because it is always mediated through the dominant technology. Starting in the eighteenth century, writing,
through reverse vicariousness, valorized the face-to-face interface as “real”—a
connection made so effectively that we remain deeply suspicious of anything
else. It’s hard for us even today to accept the possibility that new forms of non-face-to-face
sociability-through networks and on screens-may actually facilitate, in Sadie
Plant’s words, “unprecedented levels of spontaneous affection, intimacy, and
informality.”
Far
from having a special relationship to the real, she contends, “face-to-face
communication-the missionary position so beloved of Western man-is not at all
the most direct of all possible ways to communicate” (143-144). Scholarship on the so-called “public sphere”
has certainly shared this predilection for the missionary. Much of it is shot through with a nostalgia for
the face-to-face that idealizes eighteenth-century social forms as lost models
of democratic, civil society, forcing them to bear the suffocating weight of
Habermasian desire.
Whatever our own desires, if we wish to understand the Fair
Intellectual-Club, it’s time to try a new position; as we shall see, what they
saw when they were face-to-face was not each other’s faces, and their
behavior was far from civil. By taking their lead and centering writing, we can
also resist the siren calls of psychology that have seduced so many efforts at
historical inquiry. These women didn’t
want to feel better; they wanted to be better.
The
word they used was the same one that Engelbart uses again and again to explain
his project: “improvement.” The Fair Intellectuals came together not just for
individual improvement, but for the “Improvement of one another”-a concept
repeated throughout the text. The Club
was their interface with the technology of writing for the purpose of improvement. This mutual improvement was necessary, they
argued, because of the “Disadvantages that our Sex in General . . . labour
under, for want of an established Order and Method in our Conversation” (6).
Pleasure
was a secondary issue-an effect of the methodizing power of
writing. Thus the object that elicits
the greatest pleasure in the Account is neither a text nor a painting nor a
song, but the rewritten bodies of the Club members themselves:
You
cannot imagine, Sir, the Joy we had when we found our selves conveened in the
Character of Members of the Fair
Intellectual-Club. For my part I
thought my soul should have leapt out of my mouth, when I saw nine Ladies, like
the nine Muses, so advantagiously posed. If ever I had a sensible Taste and Relish of true Pleasure in my
Life, it was then. (11)
This is
augmentation: improvement through interfacing with a technology. The women clearly understood writing
to be the tool that transformed them—that gave to them the “Character of
Members.” But for us to understand how
writing accomplished this feat, we need to be more specific, for writing can
take other guises and do other kinds of work.
What kind of writing are we talking about here? What genre
informs and contains all of the other genres of this written account and of the
activities it describes, from letter to verse to scheme to constitution to
harangue?
The
formal feature that gives away the genre of the Fair Intellectual-Club is the
one I’ve already cited: the insistence, in the very first sentence of its Rules
and Constitutions, on “Order and Method.”
These are the keywords of system in the eighteenth century—not
system as an idea but as a genre, the genre central to Enlightenment. Quoting
Boyle’s preference-“I treat of the usefulness of writing books of essay, in
comparison of that of writing systematically”-Samuel Johnson distinguished
between systems and essays as the major forms of knowledge production, defining
“system” as the “reduc[tion]” of “many things” into a “regular” and “uni[ted]”
“combination” and “order, while an “essay” is a more fragmentary attempt-a
“loose sally”-that subordinates method to the accumulation of things.
The
method and order characteristic of system not only describe but configure all
of the desirable behaviors articulated by the Club. The Account itself is structured by them. [HANDOUT] Take a look at the third handout: this is one of the written
faces of system in the eighteenth century.
The sketch of the Club’s history is a preface to the list of constitutional
rules, and those rules clarify the need for and nature of the transcribed
harangues that make up the rest of the Account: the inaugural speech by the
first Speaker of the Club and an admissions address given by a new member. The former, in its own words, is about the
need for “Order and Regularity” (13); the latter is framed by the Secretary as
an example of “Method” (25).
If we
read them ahistorically-that is, without these generic features in
mind-neither the speeches nor their frames seem particularly conducive to
intellectual or sisterly harmony. In
fact, they come close to confounding them.
Far from encouraging reading and writing about the sister arts, “Mrs. Speaker,”
as she’s called in the Account, spends most of her time warning against the
dangers and hazards of such activity-the threat of disorder that they
pose. The Secretary’s written response
after the transcription is, to say the least, surprisingly tart: “I leave you
to judge, whether or not the Author of it deserv’d the Chair.”
The
new member’s harangue is presented in a much more positive light, but it, too,
has a surprising twist. Asking from the
start why she has been chosen, the initiate dismisses any explanation that has
to do with content-her particular virtues or their opinions of them-and focuses
instead on the structure of the “Occasion”: “Your Goodness and Charity have
put you on a Method to try my Respect and Gratitude” (emphasis mine).
When I
found An Account of the Fair Intellectual-Club, I expected a tale of aesthetic
pleasures, intellectual freedom, sisterly goodwill, and, quite frankly, a good
time, but what I found was order and method-an insistence on “Regulation” (5)
that curbs pleasures, demarcates proper subjects, and invites criticism. It’s tempting today to attribute those
findings to individual psychology and politics or the disciplinary nature of
Western institutions, but both of those explanations would miss a crucial
historical point. New technologies
transform social relations; how they do so depends on the forms the technology
assumes. In the eighteenth century in
Britain, writing, as I’ve been insisting, was the new technology and system was
one of its hierarchically dominant forms.
Eighteenth-century clubs, I am arguing, were the social incarnations
of the genre of system, sharing with that genre the informing features of
method and order.
If that pairing seems strange to you, then just consider Kevin Kelley’s
famous definition of “system”: a system is “anything that talks to itself”-a
thermostat system, for example, has an endless conversation about whether to
turn the furnace on or off. But that is
precisely what a club does; you join it because you want to be part of
something that talks to itself. Just as the self-regulating power of a thermostat
systematically optimizes the physical environment, so systematic interfacing in
clubs optimizes the social; temperature is maintained in the former, while
conversation is sustained in the latter. Improvement, as Engelbart puts it, is
a “system-engineering problem,” one with comprehensive consequences: “the whole
interface thing,” he observes, “can change the very language and the very
structure and the very modes [in which] we portray our symbols and communicate
and think.”
The
Club was the Fair Intellectuals’ “thing” because it was where the need of the
technology to propagate itself met the need of these women to change. They turned to it with the “thought” that
women “who excell a great many others in Birth and Fortune,
should also be more eminent in Virtue and good Sense” (3). One of the Club’s social functions was thus
to provide the privileged with new markers of privilege at the moment
that the old ones were losing their efficacy.
As established forms of identity eroded, these women took on a new
character-the “character of Members.”
Our
“thing” today is, of course, in many ways different, but there’s also a
historical link: we also belong. All of
us, that is, are members or products of the disciplinary departments that
emerged from the methodizing intellectual clubs of the eighteenth century. Although many of us come to conferences like
this to escape those aging groupings, I think it still behooves us to listen to
the Voice of the Club. Its tale of
interfacing offers features that may enhance our own efforts at the genre:
·
First, the transformation of the Fair Intellectuals, as
a pattern for the many powerful transformations of Enlightenment, arose not by
suiting the technology to the user—making humans comfortable with writing—but
by having the user perform the work of writing.
·
Second, the work of writing they performed was hard
work—contra Jobs, Xerox, and the Big Question—augmentation is not realized
in accommodation. What writing did to
them and what they did with writing was not easy but it was useful.
·
Third, that hard work was politically charged and not
just market-driven—at stake were inclusive issues of social and economic status
rather than rarified contests of entrepreneurial acumen.
·
Fourth, the status of women was a critical factor in
writing’s rise; the absence of issues of gender from most of our interface
tales is not only wrong—it’s wrong.
So,
too, is the focus on the individual user, whether the office worker or
the HLAM/T. In the Account, “improvement” is always “mutual.” Perhaps it doesn’t always have to be. But perhaps the reason that Engelbart’s
vision of augmentation is still to be realized is his own focus on—and he uses
the word repeatedly—the “individual.”
If that’s the case, then this weekend’s gathering of the Digital Culture
Club may be a step in the right direction.