Arts of Transmission

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Critical Inquiry31 (Autumn 2004)

2004 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/04/3101-0002$10.00.All rights reserved.

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Arts of Transmission: An Introduction

James Chandler, Arnold I. Davidson, and Adrian Johns

The essays collected in this issue ofCritical Inquiryrange widely in bothapproach and subject. Some mount theoretical arguments about how best

to conceive of the role of mediain shaping human history. Others delve into

the practices devoted to the creation, distribution, and preservation of

knowledge, from the singing of songs in archaic Greece to the production

of secrets by todays U.S. government. All, however, address what we call

arts of transmission.

That odd but resonant phrase derives from Francis Bacon,yet its descent

to us from the seventeenth century is peculiarly indirect. As John Guillory

notes below, Bacons original Latin expression is perhaps closer to arts of

tradition or handing down to posterity. The specific phrasing we chose for

our title is a Victorian translation of Bacons ars tradendi. Not exactly

original nor yet quite an imposition, the phrase nicely exemplifies a pointthat Bacon himself was making in coining it: that what we know depends

on the practices of communication by which the knowledge comes to us.

The point of this issue is to explore how, historically and theoretically,that

conjunction has operated in the past and continues to operate today.

This is a subject that eludes disciplinary definition. Bacons own arts

ranged from apparently basic activities like speaking and listening to the

complex modalities of logic and dialectic.They alsoincluded what we think

of as modes of communication or mediaorality, writing, and printing

though we would nowadays add digital systems to the list; nevertheless, all

of Bacons arts remain pertinent. They embrace now, as they did then, the

principal ways of organizing, arguing for, and expressing new claims. The

phrase is useful because it indicates that we may do well to consider thesepractices collectively: in a spirit of Baconian experimentation, as it were, to


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2 James Chandler, Arnold Davidson, and Adrian Johns / Arts of Transmission

make the attempt and then to see what results. Moreover, in Bacons view

the arts of transmission of the late Renaissance were deeply problematic,

and their problems substantially constrained the thought of his age. And

that insight, too, may prove pertinent to the present situation. Many of the

concerns that most exercise todays academic worldand for that matter

the intellectual culture beyond academiarelate centrally to the descen-

dents of Bacons arts.

In this light the variety exhibited by these papers is, in part, the point.

What we are trying to do is to begin to chart not a new disciplinethat

word would imply an enterprise with its boundaries too sharply and irrev-

ocably definedbut a novel program of study. Its focus is on the ways in

which knowledge has been, is, and will be shaped by the transmissive means

through which it is developed, organized, and passed on. Those means are

technical, both in the restricted modern sense and in the broader, classical

sense. That is, they rest not only on devices like the printing press and the

internet but on practices:on skills andcrafts that must be learnedand trans-mitted from generation to generation.

Much current intellectual energy is being spent on trying to characterize

different cultures of communication: print culture, oral culture, manu-

script culture, and now digital or information culture. Yet it is increasingly

apparentas it was for Baconthat such cultures are rarely, if ever, dis-

crete. Print, manuscript, and oral arts are mutually defining through com-

plex historical processes. The same now holds true of the digital realm.

While some scholarly work has been done to demonstrate the essential re-

J a m e s C h a n d l e r is Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke Professor in the

department of English language and literature, the Committee on Cinema and

Media Studies, and the Committee on the History of Culture at the University of

Chicago, where he is also director of the Franke Institute for the Humanities. His

books include England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of

Romantic Historicism (1998) and Romantic Metropolis: The Urban Scene of British

Romanticism, 17801840 (2004), coedited with Kevin Gilmartin. A r n o l d I .

D a v i d s o n , executive editor ofCritical Inquiry, is professor of philosophy,

divinity, and comparative literature and member of the Committee on

Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science at the University of Chicago. He is

the author ofThe Emergence of Sexuality(2001) and coeditor ofMichel Foucault:

Philosophie(2004), an anthology drawn from all of Foucaults writings. A d r i a n

J o h n s is associate professor in the department of history and chair of the

Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science at the University of

Chicago. He is the author ofThe Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in theMaking(1998) and is currently working on a history of intellectual piracy.


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Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2004 3

lations among such cultures, these relations have not yet been articulated

with sufficient force and cogency. In bringing together diverse approaches

to the arts of transmission, we hope to signpost the path toward a possible

new field.

Rather than approaching the arts of transmission atomistically, as if one

could write separately a history of material culture, a history of practices

and skills, and a history of forms of thought, the papers in this volume em-

phasize the interconnectedness of what are too often conceived of as in-

dependent realms. Media, practice, and thought form a kind of cultural

ensemble that needs to be examinedwith one eye focusedon historicalvari-

ability and the other on epistemological constancy. The papers collected

here do not so much apply ready-made methodological and conceptual

schemes to familiar objects of study as attempt, if read together, to bring

into existence a new domain of culture with its still evolving requirements

of method and analysis.

The papers that follow highlight this dimension of our project as muchas they concentrate on the various arts themselves. A good example of the

comprehensive approach can be found in the sociological argumentsin-

formed by systems theory and a subtle sense of the practices of transmis-

sionin Elena Espositos essay. Though he broaches the issues by way of

two of Borgess fables, Roger Chartier offers a broad overview as well, but

in an avowedly historical mode. Friedrich Kittlers essay then offers a fable

in its own right, a neo-Hegelian history of the university over eight cen-

turies: its primordial scriptural unity, its fall into print fragmentation, and

its eventual reunification in digital media. All of these arguments pose the

question of what counts as an epoch in the history oftransmissionpractices.

Is there a template for recognizing a new epoch when it happens, and do

the epochs of transmission correspond to the epochs of technical change?It remains the case that much media theory, for instance, radically inno-

vative and challenging as it may be, incorporates an overarching narrative

of historical change that is surprisinglyfamiliar. Itsjunctures lieat moments

of undeniably major technological change: the inventions of writing, of

printing, of electronic media, and of the internet. To identify arts of trans-

mission as a subject is to ask whether other schemes may be conceivable

and that is to verge on reconceiving the very stuff of history itself.

At an apparently more prosaic level, these studies address how changes

in the arts of transmission affect what gets transmitted: texts and images,

narratives and skills, memories of things and imperatives to forget them.

But this is only at first glance more prosaic. We find ourselves discovering

how institutions, disciplines, and individuals have been forced repeatedlyto revise every element of their engagement with the practices of commu-


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nication, distribution, reception, and archiving. We see that what it is to be

a good reader changes at least as fast as what it is to be a good author or

publisher. To understand these kinds of implications and to show how dif-

ferent arts of transmission may enable or even require different practices

of knowledge making, we have to use both a broad brush and a fine point.

We need to reassess our approach to everything from institutions to forms

and genres to intellectual content and structures.

Problems of publishing are of course much lamented in contemporary

academia. We wanted, however, to take a longer and broader look at the

issue of transmission.We wanted to see the currentissues facinguniversities

and publishingeven those related to new forms of information technol-

ogyas elements of a bigger story. We wantedto designa projectthatwould

extend in scope to modern, early modern, and ancient forms of transmis-

sion practices and hence to help us see where these issues come from. This

would also make possible the comparison of transmission practices in dif-

ferent modes, different ages, and different cultures, thereby engenderingfresh historical and theoretical perspectives on the current moment in what

is here identified as a crucial phase in the history of transmission itself. We

wanted to do all this not so that we could dissolve contemporary devel-

opments into a story in which novelty wasstructurallyimpossiblebutrather

so that we could better see just what was and was not new in the current

critical situation. We hoped to situate, as MatthewArnoldsaid,the function

of criticismcriticism in the broadest senseat the present time.

Such ambition cannot easily accommodate itself, of course, to a single

journal issue or conference. At the very least, we knew from the outset that

we had to find contributors who could both address with authority the

broad sweep of the subject and yet maintain the close attention to detail

that the topic absolutely demands. That is, we knew we needed to recruitcolleagues who were both deeply erudite and widely conversant, both in-

tensive and extensive in their reading and thinking. For these colleagues we

did not try to stipulate the scope of their contributions too closely nor to

fine-tune their assignments. Nor, above all, did we prescribe the approach,

method, or terminology to be employed by any one of them. We hoped that

the interplay between their often very different perspectives would be fruit-

ful. And, in short, we thinkthatthis proved to be the case.Our contributors

responded with great generosityof spirit as wellas real creativeimagination.

On 2122 May 2004, the contributors met at the University of Chicago

for a discussion conference. The conference was based on papers that had

already been submitted, vetted, and posted on Critical Inquirys new Rough

Cut website. At the meeting itself, respondents presented critical readingsof these papers, and the authors replied, before the discussion was opened


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Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2004 5

up to the audience. The meeting ended with a screening and discussion of

Photo Wallahs, a documentary film by the Australian filmmakers David and

Judith MacDougall. The film, which examines the culture of commercial

photography in a northern Indian hill station, proved a superbly pointed

conclusion to the conference.

The essays published here are those that formed the basis for discussion

at the May conference. Themes andissues emergedfromtheir juxtaposition

that were often unanticipated. Alan Liu and Mary Poovey, for example, ap-

proached similar questions in rather different terms. Liu and Poovey took

up the basic concepts of form and medium discussed by Esposito and ad-

dressed their relation through the practical application of particular trans-

missive technologies. In Lius case, this meant exploring the networks of

modern digital media and assessing the status of their claims to transcen-

dence. In Pooveys case, it meant charting the ships of the East India Com-

pany and registering problems they posed for the universal knowledge

project back in Britain. Unexpectedly, Lorraine Daston also addressed is-sues of transmission and transportation in the context of an aspiration to

objectivity anda certainkind of universality, in this case a universallanguage

for botanical classification. Unlike Pooveys ships, however, the vehicles of

transmission in Dastons essaythe originary botanic specimensremain

fixed in place and scientists must travel to consult them.

Some of the papers discuss ways in which arts of transmission have re-

lated to the emergence of modernity. For the humanities, Janice Radway

describes the way in which the modern conventions of academic author-

ship, publishing, and reading came to be fatally divorced from middlebrow

culture in the years between the American Civil War and World War II

this divorce being a key component in the current crisis of the monograph.

And John Guillory traces the emergence of memos in the business worldduring the same period, dislocating our understanding of literary moder-

nity in an account of how the memo eliminated rhetoric from the com-

mercial realm and established the norm of exposition in our contemporary

sense of the word.

Memos, of course, contain what must be remembered (memorandum

est). Another group of papers takes up this theme, looking not at trans-

mission and modernity but at transmission and memory. Gregory Nagys

discussion of the ways in which songs were performed in archaic Greece

provides an intriguing counterpoint to Dastons emphasis on the preser-

vative role of specimens. Here was a world in which authorship was clearly

prized, at least by some, and in which a certain kind of authenticity about

the songs themselves mattered andyet where the preservation of authorshipand authenticity was a matter of reperformance, and often of reloca-


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tion, rather than the preservation of artifacts. Nagys argument concerns

the practice of repeating the recital of poetic works in distant locationsa

practice that, he maintains, made memory into the effective medium, such

that the context of works could be shifted even before writing came into

existence. Ann Blairs examination of Renaissance reading practices then

provides a triangulation point between these two chronologically distant

extremes. Blairs paper is about the ways in which annotation could sup-

plement memory or, perhaps, replace it at what suddenly looks like a pivotal

moment.

Finally, Peter Galisons paper brings us up to date with shocking im-

mediacy. Galison reveals the arts of interdicting transmission. It turns out

that, as best we can tell, the amount of classified or downright secret infor-

mation in todays United States far exceeds the amount that is accessible

through institutions like the Library of Congress, and, generally speaking,

the classified realm is expanding far more quickly than the unclassified.The

assumption that thesecretworld is a small appendageto thevastinheritancethat we think of as our civilizations knowledge is turned upside down.Gal-

ison, very much in the spirit of this project, wants not just to decry this

trend but to ask, How is classification practiced? On what epistemic as-

sumptions does it rest? And what are its consequences? To be sure, these

are academic questions. But as with those raised in each of these searching

papers, they are not merely academic questions. Galisons argument about

classifying knowledge ought to persuade us of something else: not only that

the arts of transmission are hugely consequential but that, when they are

impeded, some of our most basic assumptions about the culture in which

we all live can simply dissolve.

Not that any of these essays, Galisons included, treats transmission as a

purely mechanical affair, as if quantitative measures of volume and velocitytold us all that we needed to know. In christening this project Arts of Trans-

mission, we have been mindful that artshave historically calledfor criticism,

and criticism ofthesearts, if it is to have a continued role in our contem-

porary life, must broach questions of quality. It must confront that cultural

ensemble of media, practice, and thought with judgments of valuejudg-

ments that are inextricably aesthetic, ethical, and political. Such a confron-

tation is what we hope, in the end, to have staged in this project, and such

critical judgments, we are happy to say, are everywhere on offer in what

follows here.

Documents

Arts of Transmission