Accidental Blogger

Weeks ago, Ruchira invited me to post a message along the
lines of the discussion
we had here about the relationship of science
and art. Thank you, Ruchira,
for the generous invitation. The
continuation of that discussion, which was the goal of her invitation, awaits
another day, because I am frankly not very clear about what I meant, except
that the ascendancy of popular science’s meddling in art leaves a bad taste in
my mouth. The invitation to write is
inevitably also an opportunity to fret. Even the fluidity and freedom of association of the blogosphere don’t
cure writer’s block. So, I’ve decided to
take up another of Ruchira’s suggestions to me, the posting of a book review. I’m a librarian, so I am quite amenable to
investing my energies and enthusiams in other folks’ published works, one of
which I recently finished reading: Richard
A. Lanham’s The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the
Age of Information (Univ. of Chicago Press,
2006) ISBN 0226468828.

Richard Lanham is most well-known as a professor of English
at UCLA and elsewhere. He is expert not
only in the history of rhetoric, but also in the very practical matter of
revision of prose. (It is clear that I
haven’t read any of his practical work.) He has also served as an expert witness in cases involving copyright,
trademark, and other issues requiring stylistic judgment (not any court’s
forte, that’s for sure), and he and his wife run a consulting business, Rhetorica,
Inc., whose web site is well worth a visit, if not entirely
intuitively navigable. See his “Stuffy
Biography” there for more details. His
background plainly accounts for two aspects of his new book: his emphasis on the integral value of style
to all kinds of informative expression, and the clear, breezy style of his own
prose.

The commitment to clarity explains why I don’t recall Lanham
even once using the word “dialectic” in his new book, but on reflection I think
that’s what he describes as style’s confrontations with substance, a perpetual
shifting of powers and priorities along a trajectory of historical evolution. At least this is how he urges the reader to
view the relationship. His thesis is
that where once we depended on economics to dwell on the scarcity of “stuff”—material
objects you can drop on your foot, as he puts it—its focus in our new age of
marketing and knowledge management has shifted (or at least ought to shift) to
our scarcity of attention to “fluff,” the plentitude of information propagated
by digital media. So simply stated, the
thesis is perhaps more fun than insightful. And perhaps all told this fairly characterizes the book, which is a real
pleasure to read, but which at the end of the day leaves one wondering what’s
to be done about the economic shift of attention to attention. By this I don’t mean the book is mere fluff,
because I for one find pleasure at least as handy as information.

Lanham’s professional career, however, suggests an obvious response
to such a quandary: we should cultivate
rhetoric, the art of persuasion. We must
learn how to use the language, and now also all competing media with and
through which we communicate messages, to capture the gaze of our intended
audience. (The clashing metaphors sum up
our synaesthetic situation.) Lanham’s
orientation is thus both prospective and retrospective. He’s an old-fashioned emeritus professor of
stuffy literature with his sights set on cutting-edge frontiers of
technological promise, a hip digiphile with a cool web site and references in his
book to, among others, John Cage and Miles Davis, steeped in the minutiae of
classical literary technique. To boot,
he is not an economist, a circumstance he fully discloses. That is, he is not a real economist, the sort
who would write a book titled, The Economics of [something we never imagined to
have an economic aspect, but which on second thought does appear to be suited
for such quasi-scientific modeling, and so something about which we now
desperately want an economist’s take if we’re to grasp its importance and its
essence…something like aging, or art, or—if you’re freakonomists Levitt and
Dubner—everything…or attention]. In a
way, he hedges this confession when he first holds himself out as a scholar of
rhetoric—an indisputable claim—and then identifies rhetoric with the economics
of attention. So he is some kind of an
economist after all, or perhaps he only means to present himself as one who
studies, rather than does, what economists do.

No matter. The point
of his book is not to prescribe rigorous principles of an economics of attention,
but rather to set the stage for one from which to rally enthusiasts to advance,
and to begin to explain why rhetoric is the plunger to wield against the information
back-up. The stage setting has
historical and contemporary furnishings, corresponding to Lanham’s depth of
knowledge of literary history and his genuine excitement with the miscellaneous
mess of so-called information accumulating in digital storehouses around the
world. For example, he describes
evolving formats of script and print. The classical convention of writing without spaces between words or
punctuation gave way to formal rules for indicating the textual correlatives of
bodily and vocal gesture, which succumbed to more experimental, iconoclastic
principles of design that nowadays seem coy after the advent of whoop-de-do,
bells-and-whistles, pull-out-all-the-stops Flash presentations melding images,
sound, and text (well, at least the copyright statement remains as a stable vestige
of print culture).

This evolution points out an important thread of the book, Lanham’s
elaboration of the complementary notions of “at” and “through” reading. We tend to read text by seeing through it to
the underlying abstract concepts, until the text (or some prescribed reading
convention) prompts us to attend directly to the material text, to look
directly at it and its design on the page or screen. In other words, we think of substance as what
the text means and style as how it means it, and we generally have little
trouble distinguishing the two. The Web and
digital media facilitate the “at” approach, just as rhetoric has purported to
do so since its inception. “If you can’t
dazzle ‘em with brilliance, baffle ‘em with bullshit” pretty well, if
cynically, reflects this power of rhetoric to focus attention on style rather
than substance, and Lanham is justifiably at pains to rescue rhetoric from its
almost exclusive identification these days with the latter derogatory clause.

The constant interplay between style and substance (others
might say form and content) recounted in the book has a counterpart in the
perennial engagement between new and old. Lanham coins a new rhetorical device, oscillatio,
to describe the interplay. Where before
we could casually look through and then at a text, now greater demands are made
upon our attention by new media, and we must learn to oscillate more quickly,
even tacitly between these modes. Here’s
where I detect an unresolved ambivalence, not merely a willing embrace of
oscillation, on Lanham’s part. Despite
his eager cheerleading on behalf of new technological possibilities, he’s never
perfectly clear about their newness, and so the likely disappointing outcome of
their possibilities is perhaps already in the cards. Digital media emphasize the “at” view of
textual reception, but so did manuscript illumination and early typographical
design. Digital media comprise a
democratizing force, but so was the printing press. (To his credit, and without so much as
mentioning Elizabeth Eisenstein or Adrian Johns, Lanham mildly pooh-poohs all
the attention Gutenberg garners, preferring instead to credit the development
of space between words written entirely in capital letters as signifying the
radical shift from oral to literate culture.) So on the one hand, digital media pose a challenge to our cognitive and
social faculties that a healthy exercise of oscillation might help us to
surmount, while on the other there’s little really new about new media. We’ve seen it all before, including the relentless
acceleration from one stage to the next, so let’s just get back to reading old
books about litotes and chiasmus. (Lanham is evidently fond of the figure of chiasmus, by the way, and yet
I suspect he is not especially attracted to the literary critical monsters of
the ‘70s, the evil deconstruction mongers who also often succumbed to the
figure’s charms. See, for instance, Paul
de Man’s stunning, apt, and almost impenetrable essay on Pascal’s
Allegory of Persuasion.).

I also wonder whether Lanham’s premise is sound. He relies throughout on the principle
underlying this remark he attributes to Viktor Weisskopf: “We cannot at the same time experience the
artistic content of a Beethoven sonata and also worry about the
neurophysiological processes in our brains…. But we can shift from one to the
other.” Lanham’s citation for this quote
is a miserable bit of e-mail hearsay, but what really disturbs me about it is
its brazen wrong-headedness. Of course
we can “experience” the one and “worry” about the other. No, we can’t simultaneously and literally think,
“I’m enjoying Beethoven’s work” and “Which synapses are firing now?,” but I
gather this isn’t what Weisskopf and Lanham intend. Enjoying the music surely includes a
self-conscious component of wonder (about, what have you, neurophysiology or
shopping lists or the decline of rhetoric) that contributes to the
experience. The purpose this principle
serves, however, is to analyze the phenomenon of hearing good music into
measurable components, the amplitudes of a sine wave. Perhaps Lanham really is an economist. If Weisskopf and Lanham are wrong, then an
economics of attention should restrict its field from modeling the vast, fungible
quantum we call information to, say, optimizing billboards, television
commercials, and Google, but in any case staying away from Beethoven’s sonatas.

Little of the above fairly gives Lanham’s delightful book
its due. For instance, my rant doesn’t
really convey the delight I had in reading the book, but Lanham truly is an
informative, amusing, personable writer. Nor have I provided a chapter by chapter account. A real review—but then blogs like AB may find
themselves accountable for having altered our conceptions of what is both real
and review-like in such a form—would spend quality time summarizing his
engaging remarks about Christo and his illuminating reading of a passage from
the California Highway Code.  I would like merely to highlight a couple of the chapters, and
point out a clever format conceit deployed by Lanham. One chapter formerly published as a law
review article is presented as a transcript of a television talk show
discussion between a number of conversants, Mattel’s Barbie among them, whose
topic is another actual law review article by a real practitioner and scholar
of copyright law. I suspect Lanham
achieves much of what he set out to do, although he will not likely have
changed many legal minds about the weirdness of copyright in a time of everything-is-a-copy-of-everything-else. Nevertheless, if it’s not the ideal source for copyright doctrine, it’s
a good account depicting the importance of attention in “the cultural
conversation.”

Another chapter sets forth a matrix for evaluating texts or
digital objects in terms of their style and substance. With style at one pole of a horizontal axis
and substance at the other, Lanham aligns parallel spectra for situating the
signal, the perceiver, the motive, and the reality according to which a message
is delivered. So, for example, the
message’s signal itself may fall closer to the style side (entailing an “at”
view) than the substance side (a “through” view). Lanham’s ideological leanings show through in
this chapter, particularly in his discussion of the motive spectrum, which
ranges from “game” through “purpose” to “play.” If the middling motive for human expression is its purpose—we draw a
map, say, to get where we want to go—there are also highly competitive sorts
who are absorbed in the business of crafting the optimal map at one pole, and
others who are perfectly satisfied with merely engaging in the pleasures of
map-making at the other. Lanham locates
the paradox of the style/substance divide here, for the spectrum wraps around
like a Möbius strip, the competitive motive becoming a source of pure pleasure
or, vice versa, the achievement of pleasure becoming an impulse for heightened
competition.

I think this is not the only way or even the best way to
view the matter, but Lanham wants to incorporate competition in the mix because
he is a strong proponent of a pure free market approach to human expression. This is what urges him to welcome the exploding
plethora of digital media and digitized messages, even in the face of the chaos
and wasted time they entail, given the present state of technological affairs. I’m less sanguine about competition, so I
would have the spectrum run from purposive to playful expression (perhaps in
the reverse order), and treat competition as one of the modes of engagement of
any of the degrees of expression along the range. We may be competitively purposive or
competitively playful, but we also may avoid the agony of competition
altogether.

Being a rhetorician with a taste for style as well as
substance, Lanham not surprisingly introduces a stylistic component designed to
add depth to his discussion in the fashion of digitized hypertextual
links. But since the “fixity” of books
(as Adrian Johns puts it, albeit antithetically) discourages transparent links
of the sort afforded by the web, Lanham appends pages of “background
conversations” to each of his chapters. These amount really to glorified reading lists fleshed out with Lanham’s
assorted remarks about the sources on which he relied to build his argument—and
he certainly turned to a wide range of sources, from works dealing with
typography to economics to the Internet to law to the history of aircraft… I confess that, being a librarian, I
love this kind of apparatus, and I often turn first to the bibliography of a
text before I head for the preliminaries. Here again Lanham’s reluctant conservatism shows through, his unyielding
admiration for plain old books, despite his eagerness to advocate for the
inevitability of technology’s successful upturning of our assurances of
authority in endurance. Yet this tension
is no more paradoxical than the one Lanham highlights throughout the book
between style and substance, because he wants to assure the reader that attention-grabbing
authority will come in many flavors, old and new, fixed and fluid, conservative
and progressive, floridly stylish and pithily substantial.

The Economics of Attention bests
the run-of-the-mill preachy tomes about intellectual property in the age of
global networks that are so prevalent these days, those soapbox-borne “code is law,”
sanctimonious diatribes that take such a pinched perspective of culture. Whether he says so or not, it is Lanham’s stylishly
substantial dialectics of information.

And I will say, again, thank you, Ruchira, for this opportunity, and thank you, reader, for your attention.