Abstract
Antje Kley considers how contemporary fiction in the medium of the printed book may offer its readers a critical perspective on the politics of statistical data acquisition, specifically in the domains of personal quantification and self-optimization. She reads Steve Tomasula’s formal experiments with typeface, page layout, and other elements of book design in his multimodal novel VAS as a literary intervention into a culture whose decision-making processes increasingly rely on probabilistic predictions based on statistical data analytics rather than on ethical deliberation. Kley locates the subversive potential of literature in its ability to subjectify and sensorially refract knowledge production and communication, offering its readers conceptual alternatives to the detached abstracting perspective often privileged in scientific knowledge cultures, here represented by biomedicine.
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Notes
- 1.
O’Reilly Media, Big Data Now, 2nd ed. (O’Reilly Media 2012).
- 2.
See Abend, Pablo and Mathias Fuchs, eds, “Quantified Selves and Statistical Bodies,” special issue, Digital Culture and Society 2, no. 1 (2016), 5–194; esp. the essay “Theorizing the Quantified Self and Posthumanist Agency: Self-Knowledge and Posthumanist Agency in Contemporary US-American Literature” by Stefan Danter, Ulfried Reichardt, and Regina Schober (53–67).
- 3.
See Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: Norton, 2016); Stefanie Duttweiler, et al., eds, Leben nach Zahlen: Self-Tracking als Optimierungsprojekt? (Bielefeld: transcript 2016).
- 4.
See Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (New York: Crown, 2016).
- 5.
Ted Striphas, The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control. (New York: Columbia UP, 2009), 179–86. Striphas associates “controlled consumption” with Foucault’s notion of neoliberal governmentality: “The phrase refers to a particular form of post-welfare politics in which the state outsources the responsibility of ensuring the population’s well-being to individuals, who are expected to look after themselves. It further refers to the subordination of state-power to the dictates of the marketplace, so that solutions to ‘political’ problems are increasingly posed in market terms” (184). Striphas stresses both the liberal and the coercive qualities of these social environments.
- 6.
Striphas, Late Age, 1–18.
- 7.
See Antje Kley, Ethik medialer Repräsentation im englischen und US-amerikanischen Roman, 1743–2000 (Heidelberg: Winter, 2009). See also Heike Schaefer, American Literature and Immediacy: Literary Innovation and the Emergence of Photography, Film, and Television (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming); Alexander Starre, Metamedia: American Book Fictions and Literary Print Culture after Digitization (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2015).
- 8.
The German media scholar S.J. Schmidt identifies three so-called modernization syndromes: (1) the revolution of print culture in the eighteenth century, (2) industrialization of visual culture beginning in the nineteenth century with visual instruments from the stereoscope to diorama, daguerreotype, photography, and film, (3) the digital integration of the media since the 1970s. See S.J. Schmidt, “Modernisierung, Kontingenz, Medien: Hybride Beobachtungen,” in Medien – Welten – Wirklichkeiten, ed. Gianni Vattimo und Wolfgang Welsch (München: Fink, 1998), 173–86.
- 9.
The two projects are the Research training group on “Presence and Tacit Knowledge” and a collaborative project concerned with “Literary Studies and the Natural Sciences.”
- 10.
See Antje Kley, “Literary Knowledge Production and the Natural Sciences in the US,” Knowledge Landscapes North America, ed. Simone Knewitz, Christian Klöckner, Sabine Sielke (Heidelberg: Winter, 2016), 153–77; Antje Kley and Karin Hoepker, “Beyond the Laboratory: Biotechnology and Literary Knowledge Production in Contemporary Science Novels,” LWU. Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 48, no. 3 (2017): 195–212.
- 11.
See Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). Cf. also Kley, “Literary Knowledge.”
- 12.
The way the counselor is sketched here in a few lines is interesting: She is clearly differentiated from the mad scientist stereotype marked by monocle and scar and thus introduced as an explicitly friendly person. The “variety of salad dressings” she is seen as a user of is an ironic code in the novel for the wealth of options offered in the land of free choice.
- 13.
As we will see, the counselor may convincingly present herself as professionally “neutral” here because the information her testing procedure provides already contains the counsel, she may refrain herself from giving. She may encourage, as she does in the next three lines, the couple’s “free choice,” because the prediction her testing procedure generates on the basis of statistical evaluation is so strongly determining.
- 14.
And here we move into an attack on the notion of the information’s “neutrality”; into an elucidation of its implicit weight.
- 15.
Steve Tomasula, VAS: An Opera in Flatland, illus. Stephen Farrell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 197–98. Further references in the text.
- 16.
See also Paul A. Lombardo, ed. A Century of Eugenics: From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011).
- 17.
Haiselden was Chief Surgeon at the German-American Hospital in Chicago. Almost exactly 100 years ago, he allowed, despite public protest, the syphilitic child John Bollinger to die on November 17, 1915. Haiselden had previously convinced the child’s parents that their son John would have grown up to be a miserable outcast and that death was the child’s best option as well as in the best interest of society. See Martin S. Pernick, The Black Stork (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
- 18.
Duttweiler et al., Leben, 14–17; Kenneth Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Big Data: A Revolution that will Transform How We Live, Work and Think (London: John Murray, 2013) 19–31.
- 19.
Dan Bouk, How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), xviii.
- 20.
Bouk, How Our Days, xxv.
- 21.
See also Cukier and Mayer-Schönberger.
- 22.
Lorraine Daston, “Objectivity and the Escape from Perspective,” Social Studies of Science 22, no. 4 (1992): 597.
- 23.
Daston, “Objectivity,” 592.
- 24.
Daston, “Objectivity,” 597.
- 25.
Daston, “Objectivity,” 608. Daston traces aperspectival objectivity from Shaftsbury, Hume and Adam Smith, and she distinguishes it from mechanical and ontological notions of objectivity. A mechanical notion of objectivity “forbids judgement and interpretation in reporting and picturing scientific results,” an ontological notion of objectivity “pursues the ultimate structure of reality” (599). “Aperspectival objectivity became a scientific value when science came to consist in large part of communications that crossed boundaries of nationality, training and skill. Indeed, the essence of aperspectival objectivity is communicability, narrowing the range of genuine knowledge to coincide with that of public knowledge. In the extreme case, aperspectival objectivity may even sacrifice deeper or more accurate knowledge to the demands of communicability” (600). Daston adds that “by the mid-nineteenth century, the contraction of nature to the communicable had become standard practice among scientists. It would be an exaggeration, but not a distortion, to claim that it was scientific communication that was the precondition for the uniformity of nature rather than the reverse” (609).
- 26.
Even if we might argue, with David Livingstone, that “scientific inquiry takes place in highly specialized sites—high-tech labs, remote field stations, museum archives, astronomical observatories … in coffee shops and cathedrals, in public houses and stock farms, on ships’ decks and exhibition stages,” these cultural locations are systematically factored out of the scientific production of truth. “[T]he knowledge that is acquired in these places is taken to have ubiquitous qualities …, local experience is transformed into shared generalization.” David Livingstone, Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), xi.
- 27.
Lorraine Daston, “On Scientific Observation,” Isis 99, no. 1 (2008): 107.
- 28.
“Sure, swift, and silent, … observation is grounded in long familiarity with the phenomena in question, be they curlews or streptococcus bacteria” (Daston , “On Scientific Observation,” 101).
- 29.
Ronald E. Martin, American Literature and the Destruction of Knowledge: Innovative Writing in the Age of Epistemology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), xv.
- 30.
See Kley, “Literary Knowledge.”
- 31.
Rita Felski, Uses of Literature (Malden: Blackwell, 2008), 104, my emphasis.
- 32.
Bourdieu’s phrase “genesis amnesia” refers to the transformation of culturally established modes of operation into the second nature of habitus. See Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 79; For a discussion of this concept see also Richard Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 59–64.
- 33.
Starre, Metamedia 25, 58–63. These echoes include slippages between writing and DNA sequencing (178–79, 340–47, 352), reference to the painter and naturalist Charles Willson Peale’s Museum on the second floor of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, and a rewriting of Lord Byron’s poem “She walks in Beauty” through science (348–55) in the first two acts of an opera. The opera’s third act subsequently confronts the opera as an institution and an experience (which, in Circle’s mother’s mind, will ease her daughter’s apprehension of becoming pregnant again but doesn’t) with the operating theater (in which Square finally undergoes the sterilization procedure) (356–67).
- 34.
As Alison Gibbons has shown, the reading process is from the first pages of the novel marked as an embodied process which foregrounds the materiality of the book. The reader is actually encouraged to move the book around. See Alison Gibbons, “Embodiment and the Book that Bleeds: VAS: An Opera in Flatland by Steve Tomasula with Stephen Farrell,” Multimodality, Cognition, and Experimental Literature (New York: Routledge, 2012), 86–126.
- 35.
See Kley, Ethik.
- 36.
Striphas, Late Age, 184.
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Kley, A. (2019). US Print Culture, Literary Narrative, and Slow Reading in the Age of Big Data: Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland. In: Schaefer, H., Starre, A. (eds) The Printed Book in Contemporary American Culture. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22545-2_3
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