Subject: An excerpt from The Electronic Word by Richard A. Lanham An excerpt from: The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts by Richard A. Lanham The University of Chicago Press ABOUT THE BOOK: "_The Electronic Word_ is a stunner, an utterly original contribution to the discussion of reading, television, education, democracy, technology, competitiveness, and Theory.... Lanham is more literate than the defenders of literacy, more hip than the defenders of hipdom. He looks forward, not too far, and sees us all pushing computer mice and synthesizing music. The breadth of reference in the book is astonishing.... Who better than such a wordsmith as Lanham to welcome the new age? It is not some computer-mad barbarian but Richard Lanham, the historian of rhetoric, the master teacher of writing, who invites us in."--Donald McCloskey The personal computer has revolutionized the structure of communication, concealing beneath its astonishing versatility and consumer appeal a bold transition to electronic, postmodern culture. Unchecked by the inherent limitations of conventional print, digitized text has introduced a radically new medium of expression. Interactive, volatile, mixing word and image, the electronic word challenges all our assumptions about artistic, educational, and political discourse. _The Electronic Word_, Richard Lanham's collection of witty, provocative, and engaging essays, explores this challenge. With hope and enthusiasm, Lanham surveys the effects of electronic text on the arts and letters and how they might be taught in a newly democratized society. In this excerpt (chapter 4 of the book), Lanham argues that technology, the arts and letters, and the democratization of higher education are converging in ways more profound, and more resistant to categories of Left and Right, than the American academy has yet been prepared to recognize. COPYRIGHT NOTICE: "Chapter 4" from THE ELECTRONIC WORD: DEMOCRACY, TECHNOLOGY, AND THE ARTS, by Richard A. Lanham, published by The University of Chicago Press, (c) 1993 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of US copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice is carried and provided that the University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires both the consent of the author and the University of Chicago Press. TEXT: (The chapter is preceded by an author's headnote. Ordering information for _The Electronic Word_ (which is available both as conventional book and in a hypertext edition for the Macintosh) appears at the end of the excerpt.) The 1988 Duke conference at which I delivered the first version of this paper was described by its appointed summationer as a "pep rally for the New Left." It certainly felt like that. Lynne Cheney, then director of the National Endowment for the Humanities and self-appointed leader of the humanities' New Right, sent advance copies of her report on the state of the humanities in America1 to the conference participants, as if firing a warning shot across the enemy's bow. Several of us read the report and returned her fire in our presentations. My paper was supposed to supply the keynote, but I don't think it did so. It didn't fit the race/gender/class political agenda. Defining the "Great Books" debate in terms of Left and Right proved too much fun for both sides for either to notice the obsolescence of that confrontation. As I have argued in the preceding essays, the real change we must confront and understand is not a new selection of canonical great books but, as our expressive radical moves from print to screen, a new conception of human reason and how Western culture creates and transmits it. There are political implications aplenty in such a switch, but they don't emerge from debates between "Westerns" and "Western culture." It has been discouraging to watch the profound disinclination of the "theory world" to acknowledge its rhetorical roots and branches. Perhaps any new academic movement in a competitive intellectual bureaucracy must exaggerate its newness to inspirit its adherents. But in this case, the failure to recognize the return of the rhetorical paideia for what it is has led to a needless "foundationalist" debate. We could clarify this debate by returning, ad fontes, to that ancient quarrel between the philosophers and the rhetoricians which we are now reincarnating. Equally discouraging have been the efforts to defend the codex book as the bastion of Western culture, as if defending the wrapper would protect what is in the box. In 1977, Congress established the Library of Congress Center for the Book, and the Modern Language Association of America has embraced the subsequent yearly rally-themes, such as "Explore New Worlds-Read," our motto for 1992. I'm not quarreling with these pious exhortations. I wish people would read more; it is good and good for them, and besides that, it makes them more like me, an addictive reader all my life. But these efforts to galvanize the codex book in the face of encroaching electronic expression miss the two basic points that should underlie such a campaign. The first is the "Q" question, which I consider in chapter 7. Before we fix on the book as the center of humanistic culture, shouldn't we have a better idea of _what books do to and for us_? This is, after all, the fundamental issue confronting humanistic inquiry today. We should worry about what is in the box. Then we can better answer the second vital question: Having decided what we want to protect, how do we make sure it survives the movement from book to screen? Books will endure for a long time but, as we shall find several scholars arguing in chapters 8 and 9, a powerful tide is carrying us from printed to electronic expression. To defend the book _just for the form of the codex book_ is to focus on the box and not the contents. America does not lack, after all, for examples of industries and bureaucracies that have trained themselves around a particular technology and perished with it. Why should the American academy share this fate? If we fail to understand the expressive environment of our time, we will have failed in our duty as transmitters of culture, whether we think the culture to be preserved consists of Dead White Males or Live Female Revolutionaries of Color. I continue to think that it is the convergence of technology, the arts and letters, and the democratizing of higher education that poses our paramount cultural and educational _explanandum_. I don't think this convergence either can or should be politicized into the current Left and Right. Its political implications run much deeper than this, and neither side seems predisposed to think much about them. My interest in the lower-division curriculum began in 1952 when, as a naive sixteen-year-old Ford Foundation Scholar, I entered the Directed Studies Program at Yale. It hit me so hard I never got over it, and I have spent more years than I want to reckon trying to recreate for my own students the magic that I found there. Some of those years were the ones I spent as director of the UCLA Writing Programs, and it was there that I hoped to create the curriculum I describe at the end of this essay. Alas, it was not to be. CHAPTER 4 In a mid-September weekend in 1988, a number of scholars met at Duke University and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, for another session of the oldest class in American education, the Seminar on the Future of the Liberal Arts. Our class had, over the decades, featured many distinguished seminarians but a repetitive syllabus: Does the center of liberal education lie in methods or texts? If methods, intuitive or empirical? If texts, ancient or modern? In an age of specialization, how specialized should liberal education be? Should it have a core curriculum common to everyone and, if so, what kind? How democratic can liberal education become without trivializing itself? What, if anything, is a liberal education good for? And why, if we have such a dynamite product, is it often so hard to sell? This discussion began (if matters so deep can be said to begin) with the Yale Faculty Report of 1828.2 President Jeremiah Day and his colleagues addressed all these issues, and their answers don't differ much from ours. They argued that students should know a lot, as Professor Hirsch has recommended,3 and that they should think a lot, as the Association of American Colleges panel has urged.4 President Day's group stressed the final responsibility of each student for his own education, as did a subsequent Yale panel in 1972.5 Day's committee argued that a liberal education should not be specialized or preprofessional but broad and humane, and these expansive sentiments have found echo in the Rockefeller Commission's Report of 1980, where we read that "the essence of the humanities is a spirit or an attitude toward humanity."6 The 1828 group argued that a core curriculum is essential; so have many since, from John Erskine's Great Books course at Columbia after World War I and its descendants at Chicago, Yale, and elsewhere, to recent pronouncements by ex-Education Secretary William Bennett and the _Wall Street Journal_. And just as Yale in 1828 thought the proper time to move students from general education into their favorite special subject was the junior year,7 so do we. Like us, they were concerned to democratize access to higher education, and they sought to achieve this goal, as do we, by raising admissions standards. And of course they debated the canon, their Ancients and Moderns differing in language, but not in argument, from ours. The curricular historian Frederick Rudolph has some harsh words for the 1828 patriarchs: "They embraced the uses of the past, but they withdrew from the uncertainties of the future. Their respect for quality, for standards, for certain enduring definitions of human worth, was class bound. They were blinded to much that was insistent and already out of control in American life."8 Just so. But here we were debating the same issues 160 years later. Why hadn't we found some answers? Had nothing changed in this endless debate? I think three things have changed. Three new conditions, or clusters of conditions, have emerged-social, technological, and theoretical-and their convergence suggests a new kind of "core" for the liberal arts. The social pressures are the easiest to summarize. First, the radical democratization of higher learning. In the early nineteenth century only one or two in a hundred Americans attended college, and they were almost all male, white, leisure-class, native English speakers; now half do, and they are often none of these. This change has been a gradual one but the quantitative change has now become a qualitative one. American minorities hitherto excluded from higher education have demanded access to it, and a new influx of immigrants has joined them. The immigrants who created modern America came in successive waves that left time for assimilation, and they came into an agrarian and then into an industrial society. Today's immigrants come from dozens of cultures and languages all at once, and into an information society that rewards linguistic competence more than willing hands. Over 600,000 immigrants came to this country in 1987-probably more than to all the other countries in the world put together.9 And we have more in prospect: "In industrial countries the population is growing slowly and aging rapidly; in developing countries-China excepted-the population is growing fast enough to double in less than a generation, and 40% of the people are under age 15."10 If we want to use that youthful energy, large-scale immigration and the linguistic and cultural adjustments it brings with it will be with us for a long time to come. Liberal arts education has been built on the word, and in America on the English word as spoken by middle-class, white, native speakers. We have thought of ourselves, up to now, as a monolingual country and have always, after each wave of immigration, become one again-notoriously so, in fact. That monolingualism has now been destabilized. We will have to rethink our entire enterprise. If we grow into bilingualism-English and Spanish-as well we may, that will present its own particular problems in the university, as it has for some time done in the schools. It may also present its own unique opportunities, as Greek and Latin once did working against one another in classical culture. If you want a numerical marker for this change, here's one from the place where I earn my living: for several years now, undergraduate enrollment in the University of California at Berkeley and at Los Angeles has been more than 50 percent nonwhite. To this situation, add a further development. These new immigration patterns, permitting for the first time substantial numbers of entrants from non-Western lands, have brought to America a new citizenry for whom the "Western tradition" that informs our traditional humanities curriculum is alien. Judeo-Christian culture stands now subject to a polite but puzzled reappraisal. And other, very different reappraisals of the liberal arts are being made from very different points of view by women and by blacks. This linguistic and cultural revolution will force an answer to a major question that has been on our agenda since 1828: How can we democratize the liberal arts without trivializing them? Up to now, our answer has been the 1828 Yale answer: don't really democratize them; it can't be done; proceed as we always have-what else can we do, eternal verities being our principal product?-and let all these "nontraditional" students learn our ways as best they can. Political and economic pressures have now become too insistent for this. We are required to find really new ways to widen access to the liberal arts without trivializing them. Digital technology and rhetorical theory offer the new ways we need. The second social pressure is for systematic public accountability. Since government, whether federal, state, or local, pays for much of our labors and those of our students, it demands an accountability that Arnoldian sweetness and light were not formerly asked to supply. And students in the private sector have become more discriminating-or at least more price-conscious-consumers of educational services as well. We face now a genuinely new, more searching and quantitative, invigilation. We claim to teach culture, civic virtue, and advanced symbolic processing. When asked to prove it, we have always begged the question: of course we are vitally important, even though, since we do what we do "for its own sake," we can't tell you why. But the issue is now being forced. George Steiner has been pressing it for years, to our stifled embarrassment, juxtaposing the pretensions of Western culture to the hundred million people that same culture has slaughtered in the twentieth century. And now the government, with less elegance and learning, is asking the same question: If the liberal arts do supply these needful qualities, as you claim, let's have some proof; show us some statistics. If we can't or won't comply, then resources now given to us will be allocated elsewhere. The liberal arts, like higher education as a whole, have operated heretofore on our version of the "General Motors rule" ("What's good for General Motors is good for the country"). What's good for the arts must be good for the country. To doubt this only proves you a Philistine. Now we are asked, shocking though it be, to do some cost accounting. We shouldn't be surprised at this. Every other sector of American professional life is being held accountable in new and detailed ways for its practices. Why not us? With our customary GM complacency and with a conception of costs that would disgrace a child's lemonade stand, we will find this required accounting more than an incidental bureaucratic aggravation. It will force us to rethink the heart of our enterprise, to provide at last a straight answer to another vital question we have been dodging since 1828: What are the liberal arts good for? Third, educational sequence. Students now often come older to the university, attend in broken times often more than one institution, and take more than four years to graduate; more of them work, and work more. This fragmented, discontinuous pattern is now more norm than exception. To it we may add the conceptual dislocations they feel hourly as they change classes from one disciplinary universe to another. Yet our thinking about the undergraduate curriculum continues to assume the four-year, upper- and lower- division, linear sequence and ignores the conceptual bewilderment it imposes on students. This assumption, as we shall see, blinds us to the only kind of core curriculum-a third key item left over from the 1828 agenda-that is possible today. None of these social pressures-democratization, accountability, or educational sequence-is unprecedented, but surely we must reckon their intensity and combined force as something really new. The second emergent condition I''ll consider, the pressures of electronic digital technology on the liberal arts, is in itself truly a new thing under the sun. * * * Imagine a student brought up on computers interacting with the volatile text I''ve described in earlier chapters. She is used to moving it around, playing games with it, illustrating and animating it. Now let her follow Arnold's advice and sift a dubious classic like, say, _Love's Labor's Lost_. Imagine her charting the rhetorical figures, displaying them in a special type, diagramming and cataloguing them, and then making hypertext animations of how they work. She'll use another program now on the market to make her own production, plotting out action, sight lines, costumes, etc. And then a voice program to suggest how certain lines should be read. Or she can compile her own edition, splicing in illustrations of cheirographia from the contemporary manuals. Or make it into a film. Or simply mess around with it in the irreverent way undergraduates always have, mustaching the _Mona Lisa_ just for the hell of it. All of these machinations upon greatness are pedagogical techniques that open literary texts to people whose talents are not intrinsically "literary," people who want, in all kinds of intuitive ways, to operate upon experience rather than passively receive it. Codex books limit the wisdom of the Great Books to students who are Great Readers-as, to be sure, all of us who debate curricular matters were and are. Electronic text blows that limitation wide open. It offers new ways to democratize the arts, ways of the sort society is asking us to provide. If groups of people newly come to the world of liberal learning cannot unpack the Silenus box of wisdom with the tools they bring, maybe we can redesign the box electronically, so that the tools they have, the talents they already possess, will suffice. We need not necessarily compromise the wisdom therein. I don'on'think that the Great Books, for example, the classical tradition now defended with Luddite determination, will suffer by electronic presentation. Just the opposite, in fact. (And, we might reflect, because they are mostly in the public domain, the great books will be the first to be digitized.) We have, ever since the Newtonian interlude banished rhetoric, sifted out the rhetorical ingredient from our classical texts. Yet all these texts, the Greek and Roman ones entirely, the medieval and Renaissance ones in Christian partnership, were created out of a rhetorical tradition and can be understood only in light of it. We have had so hard a time selling the Great Books partly because we have systematically travestied their greatness, strained out-both in commentary and in translation-half of what makes them great. They weave their spell out of the ancient quarrel between the philosophers and the rhetoricians, and we have cut that quarrel in half and broken the spell. Here, as so often, the humanities have _created_ the "humanities crisis" they have spent the last century maundering on about. The bit-mapped, graphics-based personal computer is, as I have argued in chapter 2, intrinsically a rhetorical device. In its memory storage and retrieval, in its dynamic interactivity, in the dramatic rehearsal-reality it creates, in the way game and play are built into its motival structure, it expresses the rhetorical tradition just as the codex book embodies the philosophical tradition. The computer's oscillation between reader and writer reintroduces the oscillation between literate and oral coordinates that stands at the center of classical Western literature. The electronic word will allow us to teach the classical canon with more understanding and zest than ever before. We don't need to worry about its impending destruction, or deconstruction. Western Lit is in no danger from Westerns. They are both going interactive. Indeed, by devising new ways to unlock the Western tradition for _nontraditional_ students, we may find out more about what its wisdom is and does, begin to answer that other pressing question, what are the arts and letters good for? Up to now, the liberal arts have always, when pressed, been able to define their essence by appealing to their expressive means. Literary scholars read books and write them. Musicians compose music and play it. Artists paint pictures. Taking away this physical definition of the liberal arts-defining them by pointing to the physical objects they create, or that create them-compels the arts to define their essence in a new way. The powers of digital technology both to teach nontraditional students and to document how they learn are being explored in a world the academic liberal arts have ignored, the world of applied-learning technologies developed for business, government, and the military. The developers of these interactive laserdisc "texts" and computer-managed instructional programs, because they do not share our commitment to the codex book, and because they must document the success of their efforts, have approached digital pedagogy without crippling preconceptions. They are redefining what a textbook is, among other things, and completely renegotiating the traditional ratio of alphabetic to iconographic information upon which it has been based. Their _logos_ has already become bi-stable. They capitalize on another democratizing insight that traditional humanists have ignored. When the arts are digitized, as they all now have been, they become radically interchangeable. A single digital code can be expressed in either sight or sound. Even the most traditional musicians are coming to acknowledge that the basis for the creation, notation, and performance of music has become digitized. It is not simply that notation and printing-the notoriously expensive bottleneck in that art-is now almost a do-it- yourself affair. Musical instruments themselves have been transformed. The clavier keyboard is now a unitary input device for all kinds of musical output. One digital "horn" creates the sounds of every instrument in a wind ensemble. Visual and musical signals are routinely translated into and out of one another for sampling and editing. If you sit down to a weighted-action electronic keyboard, you confront, in addition to the familiar eighty-eight in white and black, wave forms graphically displayed, a library of sounds on disk, and a computer to play, and play with, them. Such instruments, and such a manner of composition and performance, call upon talents quite different from those demanded when our mothers cajoled us into doing our Czerny exercises. The neural mix seems almost totally new, in fact. One software program, cheap and widely available, allows anyone, with no training whatsoever, to compose music by drawing with a mouse and then translating the sketch into its musical equivalent. (No, the music produced isn't horrid.) Digital synthesizers and samplers allow sounds to be created and edited as visual patterns. Musicians can now even choose with a keystroke which temperament (among other performance parameters) they wish to observe, from conventional equal temperament to the just intonation of Harry Partch. Digitization has rendered the world of music- making infinitely more accessible than it was, accessible to people who before had not the talent or the resources to make music and hear how it sounds. The metamorphic pressures on painting are equally Ovidian. Even as pixeling a written text onto an electronic screen radically destabilizes and volatilizes it, so painting on an electronic screen launches the image into an existence forever _in potentia_. Electronic painting exists to be transformed by the viewer. The image you see is but one readout of a digital code that can produce hundreds more. Apply a contrast-enhancement program and you have a different picture; a Fourier transform and you get yet another. The Arnoldian ideal of fixed perfection simply dissolves. Again, as with literature, the entire supporting structure of criticism must be recomputed. This digital revolution offers the most extraordinary opportunities to _teach_ the arts in new ways, from kindergarten to graduate school. The criticism/creation dichotomy automatically becomes, in a digital world, a dynamic oscillation: you simply cannot be a critic without being in turn a creator. This oscillation prompts a new type of teaching in which intuitive skills and conceptual reasoning can reinforce one another directly. The digital interchangeability of the arts through a common code-that old Platonic dream that everything returns to mathematics-allows us to translate one range of human talents into another. Our sense of how teaching _in_ the arts, and _about_ the arts, ought to proceed is metamorphosed, again with truly Ovidian intensity and insouciance, by this convertibility. Academic humanists, so far as I can discover, have hardly begun to think about these opportunities, but they will help us answer the social pressures of the time. Digitization of the arts radically democratizes them. The woman who wrote the program that translates a drawing into music did so because she wanted to open up musical composition to people who had no training in or talent for it, but loved it nevertheless. Digitization makes all the arts interactive, opens them up potentially to the full range of talents that humankind possesses. The people who developed the personal computer considered it a device of radical democratization from its inception. It was a way to open levels of symbolic transformation, and the work and information that went with them, to people hitherto shut out from this world. This democratization is a perfect instance of the new thinking society is demanding of the liberal arts. I have remarked in passing that digitizing the arts requires a new criticism of them. We have it already in the postmodern aesthetic. The fit is so close that one might call the personal computer the ultimate postmodern work of art. The Italian Futurists at the beginning of the century attacked the codex book and its conventional typography, and in their "Teatro di Variet'" bullied the silent Victorian audience into interactivity. Duchamp and Stella exhibited, or tried to exhibit, their celebrated urinal in order to move the definition of art from the masterpiece to the beholder. John Cage opened music-making to everyone by converting everything into a potential musical instrument. The repetition and variation of motifs drawn from a treasure-house of standard forms (a routine postmodern rhetorical tactic from Andy Warhol to Charles Moore) is done by the electronic arts with ridiculous ease. Electronic interactive fiction finds rehearsals in printed postmodern fiction. One of the computer's most powerful gifts of interactivity is the power to change scale. Absolutely altering one boundary-condition of the visual arts, it has put scaling into continual dynamic play as a choice for both beholder and creator. Scaling is an analytic as well as creative tool of extraordinary power, and it is available to anyone "reading" images on a graphics computer. You just click in the zoom box. Scaling is everywhere in the postmodern arts, from Oldenburg's gigantic Swiss Army Knife Venetian Galley and Rosenquist's gigantic billboard paintings to the music of Philip Glass. Robert Wilson's dramas are extended experiments in the time-scaling of rhetorical gesture, in the revelations of very, very slow motion. Everywhere such experiments strive to make us aware of how scale determines the world we live in, and gives us an unprecedented power to domesticate it, live in it comfortably. A major term in the liberal arts has been factored out of the masterpiece aesthetic and radically democratized, and has found a direct digital counterpart. The most powerful influence of the computer on modern thinking, I would argue, is not statistical or scientific but humanistic. Rhetorical, in fact. Precisely as the rhetorical practice of declamation put dramatic rehearsal at the center of classical thought, the computer has put modeling at the center of ours. It is difficult to overestimate the influence of this across-the-board dramaticality in the world of contemporary affairs. And again we find a counterpart in that range of postmodern art which constitutes itself from self-conscious happenings. My long discussion of Christo's _Running Fence_ in chapter 2 addresses directly the questions first formulated by the 1828 Yale committee: How do we democratize art without trivializing it? How do you factor out the powers of the masterpiece and make them available to an untrained audience? If the liberal arts teach citizenship, how can they do it for every citizen? As with all of Christo's works, the "work" involved not only building the fence itself but turning into self-conscious art, through hearings and publicity and subsequent films and publications, the four years of arrangements and permits and bureaucratic wrangling needed to legalize the administrative structure, and all the engineering efforts needed to design and build it, and the civic efforts needed to control and comfort the crowds who would view it. Christo converted American industrial enterprise, that is, into a gigantic Happening, a live civics lesson. _Running Fence_ was not intended to allegorize the deficiencies of bureaucracy and so reform them, but only to make people visualize large-scale human organization in a clearer and more self-conscious way, as having its own form, justification, and even beauty. It made its art up out of politics. But to act in, and thus to "appreciate" _Running Fence_, no one needed a credential in connoisseurship. They had only to be what they were, do what they did to earn their living and play their social roles-but to look at all this in a new way, to look AT it rather than THROUGH it. Christo too was creating the pedagogical technique society now requires of the liberal arts, a new liberating art that could offer art's defamiliarizing power to a wider audience. It was not intended to be immortal (like all Christo's work, it was soon taken down) but to teach the opposite lesson, a reverence for transitory, _mortal_ enterprise. _Running Fence_ was also extraordinarily beautiful, because the beauty was needed to teach the integral lesson, show the dynamic relation between beauty and purpose that Christo has given his career to illustrating. * * * I have been edging sideways toward the third of my three emergent conditions. To it I have despairingly-like an outfielder throwing his glove at a ball soaring overhead into the stands-given the name of "theory." The ball I'm throwing my glove at represents, if I have drawn its many parts together correctly, the revival of the classical system of education, the rhetorical paideia, of an applied rather than a pure, an interactive rather than a passive, conception of the liberal arts. This system of education prevailed in the West from the Greeks onward, until it was set aside by Newtonian science. It is now returning in the many guises I have described in chapter 3. It includes precisely the emergent social conditions I have been describing, as well as the postmodern digital aesthetic that is replying to them. Indeed, rhetoric itself may be viewed, like them, as an attempt to democratize genius for those not, by nature or society, gifted with it, to explore how far contrivance might supplement talent. A fit between the rhetorical paideia and the social and technological conditions that are helping to revive it makes intrinsic sense. It is not simply an accident. This revival of our traditional paideia includes those parts of contemporary literary criticism and cultural studies which have rediscovered that all arguments are constructed with a purpose, to serve an interest-a rediscovery symbolized by Terry Eagleton's reflection, at the end of his literary-theory survey, that we might as well call the whole subject "Rhetoric."11 And it includes a great deal more. Taken together-wrapped up into that ball soaring above this essay's outstretched glove-these theoretical efforts to make sense of our time amount, as the revival of rhetoric should, to a curricular revolution, a new didacticism. We might call it _experimental humanism_. Rhetoric persuades by taking for its engine our evolutionary heritage as primates-our need for pure play and competitive hierarchy-and slipstreaming behind them some act in the practical world. On this plate lies the main bone of contention over which the philosophers and the rhetoricians have been fighting all these 2,500 years. The philosophers believe that human motive is purpose-driven, and play and game derivative functions; the rhetoricians-forced to get results in the world of affairs-have always inverted this pattern. Sensible use, commonsensical reason, took charge, when these rarities could take charge, because the evolutionary deities of game and play, or the politicians and rhetoricians who manipulate them, had prepared the way. We now find ourselves in yet another rehearsal of this ancient quarrel between the philosophers and the rhetoricians. We pit sacred texts against topical ones, ultimately meaningful ones against ultimately meaningless ones, Plato against Isocrates, finally-you can fill in the other contrasted pairs of proper names yourself-pitting Almighty God against what one eminent theorist has called "the pleasures of the bottomless." The history of Western thought suggests that if we wait until this dispute is resolved before devising a responsive liberal arts curriculum, we shall wait a right good while. But Western education has never had the leisure to wait. Henri Marrou argued that, in this historic quarrel, although Plato won the battle, rhetoric won the war, actually formed the curriculum. I must disagree. The rhetorical paideia did not resolve this struggle, or simply teach the rhetorical side of it, but built the debate itself into Western education as its operating principle. Rhetoric as a theory has proved so exasperating and unsatisfactory precisely because it oscillated from one world view to the other. Rhetorical man was a dramatic game-player but he was always claiming that the ground he presently stood upon was more than a stage. Rhetoric's central decorum enshrined this bi-stable oscillation: the great art of art was the art of hiding art, but you had better start out with some art to hide. In behavior, you should always be sincere, whether you mean it or not. This root self-contradiction, as Baldesare Castiglione saw when he gave it the Renaissance name _sprezzatura_, causes trouble only when you take it out of time. _In_ time, as a perpetual oscillation, it works fine. Generations of thinkers have bemused themselves, as we do today, by taking the oscillation out of time, stopping it to point out how immiscible the two ingredients are, how moral and formal judgments can never mix. This is how Peter Ramus, in the middle of the sixteenth century, started our humanities crisis. The rhetorical paideia that is now returning puts the oscillation back into time, handles the problem the Renaissance way. Experimental humanism, with its often outrageous didactic, seeks to reanimate that oscillation. It represents not a nihilistic repudiation of the Western intellectual tradition but a self-conscious return to it. The primary social pressure on the liberal arts-this at least has not changed-has always been a deep hunger for secular wisdom, for some cybernetic control of the forces that threaten to destroy us. This the rhetorical paideia, in the bi-stable form I have described, has always tried to supply. An educational system of this sort does not deny our need for absolutes; it domesticates and controls that need. In its natural oscillation, the rhetorical paideia is deeply irenic, would keep the peace by preventing us from filtering the self-interest and self-consciousness out of our most profoundly disinterested convictions and then committing atrocities in their name. It would control purpose, as Gregory Bateson counseled in his landmark article on the Treaty of Versailles, by showing us its roots in play and game.12 A rhetorical education, while reminding us of the inevitable circumstantiality of all human judgment, shows us how we can control and offset that circumstantiality. G. B. Kerferd remarks, in his book on the Greek Sophists, that it is not two-sided argument per se that distinguishes rhetorical education but the insistence that the _same person_ take both sides, first one then the other.13 Civility requires the acceptance of imposture. That necessary lesson in toleration and self-understanding undergirds civic education in a secular democracy. It is the lesson that Americans are asking us once again to teach them. How, using the technological and theoretical resources we have just been pondering, might we do so? What would a liberal arts curriculum responsive to these emergent conditions look like? Let me briefly sketch a possible pattern. It would depart, in my view, from a reversal of the basic structural polarity of the undergraduate curriculum. Undergraduate education has systematically separated the first two years and the last, the upper and lower divisions. Ever since the upper division coalesced around the disciplinary major, it has predominated. The lower division has languished, a low-rent dumping ground without a rationale of its own. If I am correct that the convergence of social, technological, and theoretical emergent conditions constitutes a return to the classical rhetorical paideia, then this dominance is about to reverse itself. Rhetoric has always been a _general_ theory. That is its reason for being. It is centripetal, not centrifugal. It draws all subjects into its political and social center rather than spinning them out into separate, apolitical integers, as the modern curriculum has done. Rhetoric's natural home is the lower division not the upper. If we are in the midst of a systemic change from specialized inquiry to general thinking, then the felt seriousness of the curriculum will shift from the upper division to the lower. Our educational history is littered with the corpses of lower-division programs. Because the lower division occupied a crucial position as climax of secondary preparation and necessary basis for the major, its conceptual vacuum has proved chronically painful, and we have filled it with one program after another, but never with real success. These usually Edenic programs have seldom outlasted their original visionary creators and they have rarely proved popular with either students or teachers. Both groups always knew that the "serious" world lay in specialized inquiry and hastened to join it. General programs in the liberal arts have failed because they have been, for the last hundred years and more, working against the intellectual orientation of higher education, an orientation built upon the reductive specialized inquiry inspired by Newtonian science and the complexities of the modern world. In that scheme of things no core curriculum could be found because none, by design, could exist. Because that orientation is now changing, we may be able to build a lower-division program which, since it no longer stands at variance with the felt center of its time, will endure. The structure for this program is already in place and funded: the _infra dig_ freshman composition program. We need only expand from that base. I am now going to vex sophisticated souls by saying a word about my former line of work, freshman comp, because it bears directly upon our agenda. The way we have trivialized the teaching of composition is precisely the way we have trivialized the liberal arts themselves. We teach comp only as the art of transparent expression of pure, apolitical, extrahuman truth. We remove the rhetoric, the human interest, from it. As with our typography, the ideal is a crystal goblet. The utopian world implied by this Edenic view of human communication is precisely the world of unchanging and nonnegotiable secular truths that Thomas More enshrined in his _Utopia_ and that the liberal arts have used as a lodestone ever since. In it, the basic rhetorical impulses of competition and play are outlawed in favor of plain Edenic purpose. Style gives way to an insubstantial something we have learned to call "substance." In this fashion the liberal arts deny their own reason for being. They conceive themselves as teaching a utopian, Socratic lesson about the primacy of substance over style, and yet their own substance, their words and sounds and shapes, are denied and repudiated by such primacy. The liberal arts have for four hundred years been trying to pull the rug out from under their own feet, and more often than not they have succeeded. The liberal arts have made their own problems. That crucial oscillation between play and purpose which constitutes their creative center has been taken out of time and shut down. No wonder we academic humanists have a hard time explaining what we do. Rhetorical education works in the opposite way. Stylistic decorum measures how we look alternately AT and THROUGH a text (or a painting), first accept it as referential and then refer it to a reality beyond. This same measurement is then mapped onto behavior as a social decorum. Every stylistic balance models a social one. In the rhetorical scheme of things, formal and moral judgments, though immiscible, are held in manageable alternation. A system of education like this spins out from its center in bi-stable decorum a stylistic-behavioral allegory. As I argue in "The 'Q' Question" (chapter 7), here is where we must look if we are to answer that long-standing question about what the arts are good for, about how moral and formal truths can be related to one another in human life. This bi- stable conceptual core, and its lessons, ought to stand at the center of the composition course, as they should at the center of the liberal arts more largely conceived. The logical course to follow this composition course will build upon the digital interchangeability of the arts. It should develop what for the first time we now can develop, a genuine rhetoric of the arts, a comprehensive discussion of their means and ends. Such a discussion will not distinguish between the fine and applied arts, because digitization has intermixed them beyond recall. It will assume the digital presentation of the arts as a second norm and contrast its dynamic genius with masterpieces of fixed presentation, in this way reflecting the oral/literate axis around which the Western liberal arts have always circled. Such a course should provide students of the humanities with a general framework within which they can locate all their further work in the liberal arts-and, I should say, not only in the liberal arts. It will embody, that is, a genuine core for this core curriculum. The third course in this sequence would aim to teach the discipline of two-sided argument I spoke of earlier. The real way to open the American mind would be to show it that democratic government requires allegiance to genuine two- sided argument, to the psychological and social discipline required when you learn to speak on both sides of any question, put yourself in your opponent's shoes. This discipline is no mystery; it forms the secular basis of individual tolerance and humane understanding. And, obviously enough, it enfranchises our public system of justice, of a trial by jury in which competing dramatic reenactments are staged and one is determined to be referential, and in case-law becomes so. This moment of determination, when the contingent becomes the absolute, is the moment of that oscillation we have found again and again in the emergent conditions we now face-the oscillation from a "reality" to the circumstances that have created it and back again. We can study it in an infinity of manifestations, theoretical and historical. Surely, for example, it has created the pivotal oscillation of English constitutional history, wherein the monarchy, that needful absolute, has had to be repeatedly reinvented and reabsolutized by the most preposterous myths, only to be repeatedly compromised and qualified by good sense or violence. And we have, in the legislative and executive branches, built this same oscillation into the center of our own American constitution. If you want to teach citizenship in American democracy, you don't build your educational system on Hirsch's collection of canonical facts, or Bennett's collection of canonical texts-or on Allan Bloom's collection of Platonic pieties either. You build it, as the educational system that was invented to sustain democracy built it in the first place, upon a bi-stable alternation between the contingent and the absolute. The only true absolute, in a secular democratic education, is the obligation to keep that oscillation going, preserving a bi-stable core for the Western tradition that is not timeless but forever in time. The ways to do this are as infinite as the particular courses such a curriculum would create but the center remains the same. A sequence of this kind, a new core curriculum in language, the arts, and democratic politics, is doable right now. It needs no further study. The electronic technology required is for sale in the marketplace, and cheap. Is, in fact, pixelating around looking for its natural home. The administrative structure is there. We could do it right now. How would it affect the upper division of specialized inquiry? Our thinking about the core curriculum has been based on the conventional upper-division, lower-division separation, the linear four-year progression, and the common faculty, that were assumed by the Yale Report of 1828. Because times are different now, that _way of thinking_ will no longer work. We need a new _conception_ of a "core" for the entire four years. Let me borrow one from an original book by the architect Robert Venturi and his associates, called _Learning from Las Vegas_.14 Venturi took his Yale seminar out to Vegas for a design exercise. From the ordinary judgmental point of view of a modern city planner, there was only one ideal solution: level the place and start over. So too for Hutchins and his associates at Chicago, and "core curriculum" planners ever since, there was only one solution to the marketplace curriculum: abolish it and establish a new, ordered, linear sequence in its place. Ideally, a St. John's College, four years of lock-step courses teaching the classics the way the classics, by Zeus, used to be taught. Venturi suggested, instead, that the seminar suspend judgment and look at Las Vegas, since it consisted largely of signs, as a system of signs. What did it do? How did it do it? Could a semiotic compass of some sort be devised to find one's way around in such a world? Perhaps, having mapped it, to enjoy it? From similar thinking emerged the eclectic aesthetic of postmodern architecture. This aesthetic sought not to tear the city down and "renew" it but to teach us how to see it and-at our own pace and in our own way, by ourselves and in small groups-to mend it. It taught this lesson by designing eclectic buildings as self-consciously didactic exercises in how to look at the stylistic repertoire found in American cities. I suggest we use this interactive aesthetic, based on beholder as well as beheld, as an educational pattern. Imagine the lower-division sequence I have sketched as a building like this, a continually remodeled and adaptive self-conscious work of art. The sequence ought to provide for an undergraduate a way to view the educational city as it is, a curricular compass for navigating in the academic marketplace and constructing a personal order there. We are not going to change, probably we _should_ not change, the way disciplinary inquiry proceeds or teaches. Humankind is naturally specialist. But we can set up an _integrative_ pattern with which specialization can alternate, a lower- division program that can help students find their way in the specialized lands through which they must voyage. Here, too, a lowly structure lies ready to hand as a place to begin, the "writing across the curriculum" courses so common now in American universities. These courses can examine the "rhetoric" of the specialized disciplines, show students the boundary-conditions within which "absolute" disciplinary truths are created, map them on a basic rhetoric of the arts and sciences.15 Renew, that is, the vital oscillation between absolute and contingent which disciplinary specialization has all but shut down. (I discuss these curricular possibilities at greater length in chapters 5 and 6.) Such a pattern of courses, such a new "core curriculum," would once again put the lower division and the upper division into fruitful oscillation, bring this dead administrative sequence back into time, into a generative bi-stability that reflects its theoretical premise. Our present disciplinary structure, as Gerald Graff's _Professing Literature_ makes clear,16 is built upon defusing conflict by separating the opposing parties, if they bicker long enough, into separate departments so they no longer have to talk to each other. Built, that is, upon shutting down the root oscillation of the liberal arts. We must start it going again, and if we cannot do so in the separate disciplines, we can show our students how to do it for themselves. If art can lie in the beholder, why not the liberal arts curriculum that studies it? This lower-division program ought to be organized not as an academic department but as an "intrapreneuring" unit, a quasi-independent division that pioneers changes in a large bureaucracy. It should, for a start, experiment with different patterns and terms of faculty hiring. If our theoretical thinking blurs the distinction between critic and creator, perhaps our hiring policies should follow suit. Not all the creative thinking in the liberal arts is taking place in university seminars. The primary intellectual contracts for the next century-between word and image, between page and screen, between goods and information, between high art and low, between the society's need for symbolic processing and who is to supply that need-are all, in fact, being negotiated off-campus. It might be a good idea for us to get to know those folks, maybe even hire one or two of them. This intrapreneuring unit also should experiment with new administrative patterns. If our present labor practices in the liberal arts are a scandal, the poverty of our organizational thinking is even worse. Along with enrichment of this thinking should go-another first-some real cost accounting. This unit might train a new kind of academic administrator as well, one whose skills at refereeing the career game are complemented by a larger strategic vision. And, finally, it should foster _systemic_ thinking. Education by discipline sets up every discouragement possible, for both student and teacher, to systemic thinking. The massive bureaucratization of learning that has taken place in America since World War II has intensified this discouragement. Attempting a large view of _anything_ is automatically suspect. Implicit in the argument of this essay, and in every development in the arts I've alluded to, is a return to systemic thinking for liberal education. The classical rhetorical paideia was the original training in systemic thinking: it treated liberal arts education as a system, from early childhood to the forum and law court. We must recover that systemic view and the responsibilities that go with it. We now can recognize the infrastructure of literacy upon which the liberal arts depend as a social construct; there is nothing inevitable about it and we can no longer depend on middle-class customs to sustain it. The intrapreneuring lower division ought to think of this entire system as within its charge. It will have, for openers, the world of electronic "text" and "textbook" to redefine and recreate, and the liberal arts curriculum with it. The arts and letters cannot be taught by means of a technology that stands at variance with the technology that creates and sustains the general literacy of its society. To make sure that a technological gap does not open ought to be a primary charge to this new academic unit. Such an endeavor contravenes what many feel to be the true center of the liberal arts-their "purity," their distance in time and place from the ordinary world of human work and pleasure. But the "humanities crisis" that has been our routine cry for a century and more is one we have manufactured ourselves by distancing ourselves from the world. Claim to be above the struggle, specialize in "values" that others have to embody, and then wonder why the world sets you aside. Implicit in the revolution in the liberal arts I have tried to describe is a return to a systemic and systematic involvement in the social purposes of our time. * * * I began by asking whether anything new has appeared on our agenda. Obviously I think something has. The extraordinary convergence of social, technological, and theoretical pressures indicates this beyond dispute. We have until now considered these pressures as problems, threats to our traditional essence. I suggest that we view them, instead, as telling us what that essence is, and how we might embody it in answerable practices that will bring our students, all of them, up to the height of our times. If my analysis of these three emergent conditions is correct, our times could hold for the liberal arts the very centrality we have so long sought. This centrality won't be given to us; we shall have to create it. We can do this. But we cannot do it by ignoring everything new and exciting and promising that has happened to the liberal arts in the twentieth century-as does, to instance an egregious example, the clone of the 1828 Yale Report issued by the National Endowment for the Humanities on the eve of the conference that occasioned this essay. We should not lose heart because the current public conversation about the liberal arts has been so ignorant, shortsighted, and pedagogically sterile. The long-term march of events, the extraordinary convergence, is there for anyone with the eyes to see it-and it ought to fill us with excitement, with hope, and with resolution. NOTES 1. Lynne V. Cheney, _Humanities in America: A Report to the President, the Congress, and the American People_ (Washington, D.C.: National Endowment for the Humanities, 1988). 2. Excerpts from the Yale Report of 1828 are published in _American Higher Education: A Documentary History_, ed. Richard Hofstadter and Wilson Smith, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 1.275-91. 3. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., _Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know_ (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). 4. _Integrity in the College Curriculum: A Report to the Academic Community_ (Washington, D.C.: Association of American Colleges, 1985). 5. _Report of the Study Group on Yale College_ (1972). 6. Commission on the Humanities, _The Humanities in American Life_ (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), 3. 7. Hofstadter and Smith (n. 2 above), 1.284. 8. Frederick Rudolph, _Curriculum: A History of the American Undergraduate Course of Study since 1636_ (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1977), 75. 9. _Wall Street Journal_, 6 June 1988, A1. 10. Ibid. 11. Terry Eagleton, _Literary Theory: An Introduction_ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). 12. Gregory Bateson, "From Versailles to Cybernetics," in _Steps to an Ecology of Mind_ (New York: Ballantine, 1972), 469-77. 13. G. B. Kerferd, _The Sophistic Movement_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 84-85. 14. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, _Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form_, rev. ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977). 15. This enterprise has been undertaken on a theoretical level by the POROI group at the University of Iowa. See chapter 3 n. 16 above. 16. Gerald Graff, _Professing Literature: An Institutional History_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Richard A. Lanham is professor of English at UCLA. He has written nine books, including _A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms_; _Sidney's Old "Arcadia"_; _"Tristram Shandy"_; _The Games of Pleasure_; _Style: An Anti-Textbook_; _The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance_; _Analyzing Prose_; and _Literacy and the Survival of Humanism_. ORDER INFORMATION _The Electonic Word_ is available in cloth and Chicago Expanded Book editions. 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