Abstract
Steve Fuller, Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick, introduces The sociology of intellectual life, as ‘the most self-exemplifying of [his] books to date’ (1). This makes his argument for intellectual improvisation (‘the unholy alliance of plagiarism and bullshit’ (145)) all the more interesting, and rather neatly sets up my task as a reviewer. Since the book is an example of its own theory of improvisation, my job is simply to identify the examples of plagiarism and bullshit through which Fuller ‘conspires to make a virtue of unreliability’ (145). I must then decide whether his performance is successful — that is, I must gauge its virtue. I think he does largely succeed, and my enjoyment of the book has been diminished only by the certainty that a much more original book on the same subject, and by the same author, needs to be written. Hopefully that is happening as we speak.
Indeed, much of it has been written before, and I want to begin with the book's self-exemplifying acts of plagiarism. Fuller's discussion of this difficult subject begins by lamenting (perhaps ‘ridiculing’ is a better word) ‘the recent metastasis of the plagiarism taboo into a full-blown moral panic over the security of intellectual property rights’ (144). He then offers a recognizably ‘postmodern’ defence of plagiarism based on the idea that ‘any product of the mind is open to multiple novel uses and that, in any case, there are always many more things to think and say’ (145). But this, of course, is not really a defence of the bald textual theft that constitutes the classic (and truly taboo) cases of plagiarism. When an author presents a paragraph of prose originally written by someone else as her own, she is not stealing a ‘product of the mind’ but a product of someone else's labour. Indeed, Fuller's definition of plagiarism is much broader than the classic cases for which students are routinely expelled and over which professors are periodically embarrassed. Plagiarism, in Fuller's sense, is merely presenting ‘the established as if it were novel’ (145).
And in that sense, Fuller is in fact guilty of quite a bit of plagiarism. However, it is plagiarism of a somewhat innocuous kind, namely, autoplagiarism, i.e. stealing from his own previously published work. He's upfront about it, of course: ‘the strands of thought and writing drawn together in these pages’, he says, ‘stem from [his] participation’ in the spheres of intellectual life it is about (1). The resulting book is a kind of anthology of ‘occasional pieces’, strung together in a comprehensive argument and structured by a thematic rather than narrative outline that elides their connection to their original performances.
As usual, Fuller presents himself as a social epistemologist, practicing ‘his own version’ of that art, which he can rightfully claim to have founded. Its general aim is to describe our intellectual pursuits with the explicit aim of prescribing for it, as he declared already in 1988. It's an empirically informed normative project, and in this book, he turns his attention to the conditions under which intellectuals work. On the descriptive end, he paints a somewhat disconcerting image of intellectual life in the grip of various social ills, sometimes almost moral ones, like the ‘institutional cowardice’ fostered by contemporary citation practices in academia (86). On the prescriptive end, he proposes a reassertion of Humboldt's ideal of the university as an institutional guardian of ‘intellectual freedom’. In the three main chapters of the book, he discusses this ideal in terms of the university itself, its disciplinary roots in philosophy, and its implications for intellectuals as such. He concludes with his call for that ‘unholy alliance of plagiarism and bullshit’ I already mentioned, namely, improvisation. He wants to see more virtuosity in what he calls ‘idea-craft’ (89).
The book reads easily and smoothly, and his frame establishes a helpful order in an intense flow of (at least seemingly) effortless and often original thinking. This order sometimes feels a bit imposed, however, and the impression of a seamless flow of prose probably stems in part from a judicious use (and omission) of subheadings, which make otherwise abrupt transitions seem natural. One gets a sense that here is a master craftsman of academic prose who is being, perhaps, more crafty than truly artful this time out. There is something slightly unfinished about how this book has been composed, i.e. ‘drawn together’.
Here I will briefly describe two cases of auto-plagiarism to give a sense of what I mean. On page 113, Fuller begins a section called ‘The critique of intellectuals in a time of pragmatist captivity’, which is also the title of a 2003 paper he published in the journal History of the Human Sciences. And the next sixteen pages, indeed, faithfully reproduce the prose of that article. But in a somewhat audacious move, Fuller now continues the section through another six pages, by nonchalantly attaching a lightly edited version of his response to critics of the original article, which was published in the same journal in 2004. What is somewhat dissatisfying about this move is that those last six pages make no mention of the particular critics to whom he was originally responding, thus concealing their spurs to his thinking. To be sure, Fuller acknowledges their influence on his work in his introduction, but readers of this book may not be able to appreciate its dialogical character. Indeed, his responses to critics are presented, somewhat strangely, as a ‘summary’ of the very article they critiqued!
With the second case, it's personal. Fuller opens chapter 4 of the book by reprinting a piece he published in the Times Higher Education Supplement (also duly thanked in the introduction). As it happens, I read that piece when it went online in mid-2008 and immediately fired off a response on my blog, but that post, to my chagrin, seems to have had no impact on Fuller's views on improvisation, nor am I mentioned anywhere in the book. I am feigning bitterness to emphasize that something important is lost by not reporting (not ‘logging’, as it were) the original context in which the ideas were presented. Fuller's work is best approached as ‘rhetoric’ in the healthiest and most vital senses of that word. It is here given the irenic finish of a ‘treatise’.
This is of course itself a largely rhetorical decision, and the strategy really does work for the most part, producing a very readable book. Indeed, I have tried to pull off the same trick below by incorporating my aforementioned blog post in this review. But I do hope, like I say, that one day we will be given another book — one that would be considerably more difficult to write. I would like to see something more like a logbook of these exchanges, in which he gives us his personal reasons to engage with particular issues in particular ways, rather than merely restate his favourite arguments. For over 20 years, Fuller has participated in some of the most interesting social situations from which the so-called ‘knowledge society’ has emerged. We want more than just transcriptions of these occasions and engagements. We want to know what he thinks happened.
Fuller's definition of bullshit in his ‘unholy alliance’ inverts his definition of plagiarism: it is the presentation of ‘the novel as if it were established’ (145). To my mind, this is really Fuller's main intellectual strength. Reading his luminous accounts of intellectual history, one gets the sense that he has read everything and knows exactly how it went down. But this illusion is convincing, one soon realizes, because he seems to know almost at first-hand what the major figures of Western intellectual history meant. And at some point — for no one can know that much — one must simply assume that he is making it up — or rather, that he is giving us his own very personal, perhaps partly hallucinated (and never dull), but wholly sincere account of why thinkers have said what they have said, and why we, their heirs, today think what we think. He presents all this as though it were common knowledge, and sometimes as though what we should think about it is wholly obvious. (Again, he seems to be trying to submerge his rhetoric for the purpose of producing a ‘sociological’ book, though it is never very far from the surface.) He gives us the opportunity to play along, to pretend to know as much as he does, and to join him on the right side of the history of ideas — even a bit out in front of it. But somewhere in the back of one's mind, one knows its bullshit of a sort. Fuller is right to talk of ‘conspiring’ to make this a virtue. He needs us to play along.
His bullshit of course has a name. Sprezzatura was defined by Baldasarre Castiglione in the sixteenth century as ‘a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it’ (2002, 32). Fuller describes it as ‘a broad term for the improviser's art runs the gamut from ‘making it up on the spot’ to ‘thinking for oneself’’ and suggests Galileo as a ‘grandmaster ’ among its practitioners (146).
Now, when I hear the word ‘improvisation’, I usually reach for my gun. One of the problems with making a virtue of improvising is that, as Fuller more or less suggests, you have to be a genius to pull it off. At the very least, you have to be an accomplished practitioner of your art. You have to have mastered your discipline.
Consider the case of improvisation in jazz. In 1937, at the age of seventeen, Charlie Parker was thrown off the stage in Kansas City by Jo Jones, who picked his cymbal off its stand and threw it down at Parker's feet. ‘Don't bullshit me’, we can almost hear Jones saying. Now, if this story had been told in the context of ‘the growth of science’ (about someone like Galileo, for example), history would be brought in to vindicate Parker and vilify Jones. Jones would be said to have gotten Parker wrong; he didn't understand his genius, it would be said. But that's not how the story is told in jazz history. Jones, a recognized master of his art at the time, is presumed to have been right. The unproven Parker, for his part, is humiliated but — and here's the point — the story (however mythical it may be) marks the exact point at which Parker really gets serious about practising. He learns how to play the blues in all twelve keys, and every conceivable tempo. He resolves to get better.
Fuller's basic point is sound enough. There are a lot of ‘reliable’ academics out there who need to get free of their ‘text’ and learn to improvise. But if they don't do this often enough, it seems to me, it is because they really do want to get their references right, and they want to get the details of whatever they are talking about right. The solution to their stylistic problems is not just to start plagiarizing and bullshitting; they'll get a cymbal thrown at their feet if they do. What they actually have to do is rehearse what they know; they have to internalize it, make it their own.
After all, Fuller leaves out the equal and opposite diagnosis of contemporary public speaking in academia. There are more improvisers out there than he suggests, and they are not always a joy to watch. Many of them are as full of, well, B.S. as the speakers he complains about are devoid of courage and vital intelligence. (Again let me pause to say that this book is full of signs of both.) These people would do well to prepare a text and check its accuracy before presenting their views in public. They get away with it because people like Jo Jones don't end up at the universities.
The core of this book is a sustained argument for distinguishing between what is true and what needs to be said, and for providing institutional conditions that encourage intellectual risk-taking rather than rewarding intellectual cowardice. It is not just that the truth is sometimes best left unspoken; more importantly, says Fuller, sometimes untruths need to be voiced. And this is in part because we learn more from the destruction of false knowledge than the production of new knowledge. The classic example is holocaust denial, which may do more harm when repressed than when it is expressed. A more current example is the theory of intelligent design, which we do not have to believe is true in order to grant it a more dignified place in public discourse, including the classroom. Without it, evolution itself ceases to be a theory and becomes a doctrine. As Noam Chomsky in his defence of Robert Faurisson pointed out: punishing people for what they choose to say is not a central doctrine of those who oppose the holocaust, but of those who carry it out. Fuller's commitment to getting this point about intellectual freedom across is an inspiration.
‘Intellectual life’, argues Fuller, is the sphere in which such necessary conversations can take place, and that sphere demands sociological analysis because it is always at the mercy of social forces. But it also very much needs the spirited philosophical defence that Fuller provides throughout this book, and the directness with which he calls out the constitutive mediocrity of ‘intellectual life’ today.
When Manes Sperber reviewed Albert Camus's The rebel for the New York Times Book Review in 1954, he described it as a ‘logbook of the intellectual's pilgrimage’, ‘the biography of that European rebellion which was born with the French Revolution — in a deeper sense, its autobiography’. While Camus also used the strategy of sublimating his concrete engagements with his time in the confident voice of the historian of ideas, I am not convinced that Fuller has given us a comparable allegorical autobiography with this book. Then again, Camus was writing at a time when profundity and rebellion went hand in hand. Perhaps what we need today is not deep thinking about rebellion but something, yes, much more superficial, something faster, something drawn (or even thrown) together for short-term effect, something more like a good kick in the pants. Fuller has given us that book, and as a long-time fan of his writing my main complaint is that he's done too much of this already. Nevertheless, if you have not read him yet this is a great place to begin.
Copenhagen Business School
T
From birth, my toddler has been bombarded by images and videos of himself. Digital photo frames constantly, and automatically, rotate highlights of our past year. The television has, as screen-saver, a random slide show of the last shots imported from the variety of digital cameras we own (and we are guilty of taking hundreds of photos to capture one good shot). The digital video has recorded many day trips, and trips caused by new Wellington boots. Often we sit and look at photos, or watch the same clips over and over again — at his suggestion — as he delights in seeing himself at the beach, in the snow, or chasing the cat. He engages and responds to this barrage, reacting to and interacting with images of himself taken a few minutes, days, or weeks ago.
The child of today is the most photographed and documented of any generation. This differs completely from my own personal experience: although my parents made the effort, most photos of my childhood can be found in a few carefully filled photo albums. There are large temporal gaps between photographed events, which have one photograph each. Given there was no immediate feedback with analogue technology, there was no chance to fix any blurring, grimacing, or poor-framing. My childhood memories are allied with fading 1970s Technicolor and the flickering of cine-films: the physical aspects of the media bound up with my own recollections and understanding of who I am, and where I came from.
The development of an understanding of autobiographical self is based on a complex interplay between our own memories of facts, emotions, and experiences, and our changing memories of these mental and physical memories. As we grow and change, our perceptions of who we are, are subject to constant remodelling, depending on current wants, desires, ambitions, and projections. Dijck's book, Mediated memories in the digital age, aims to highlight the transformation that recent changes in the information environment are exercising on our development of personal cultural memory, or ‘the acts and products of remembering in which individuals engage to make sense of their lives in relation to the lives of others and to their surroundings, situating themselves in time and place’ (6).
Dijck is careful to demonstrate that different media plays — and has played for a long time in human society — an important role in shaping both our personal and our collective cultural memory, changing and focussing our interpretation of past events, and intertwining with our remembrances:
Media and memories … are not separate entities — the first enhancing, corrupting, extending, replacing the second — but media invariably and inherently shape our personal memories, warranting the term ‘mediation’. (16)
Dijck's text focuses on this idea of ‘mediated memories’ as objects of cultural analysis:
Mediated memories are the activities and objects we produce and appropriate by means of media technologies, for creating and re-creating a sense of past, present, and future of ourselves in relation to others. (21)
In particular, Dijck is interested in how the ubiquity and pervasive nature of digital technology is reshaping our view of our past, and therefore our identity.
It is necessary, when covering such a broad subject area, to bring together a number of diverging disciplinary perspectives such as those in psychology, neurobiology, cognitive philosophy, computer science, and anthropology. The premise is ambitious, and is often wrapped up with metaphors and allusions to popular culture to contextualize the point the author is making: the organization of analogue photographs in the shoe-box under the bed, the plot to the Michael Gondry and Charlie Kaufman film ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’. In doing so, Dijck provides an introduction to cultural memory, and what it means in an age of technological, social, and cultural transformation, rooting the discussion in the types of behaviour we are familiar with, and the cultural environment in which the book was written.
Dijck begins by introducing the concept of cultural memory, and the important role of media in its formation, explaining discussions undertaken by social scientists and cultural theorists regarding the importance of this ‘mediation of memory’. Mediated memory is a multidisciplinary matter. But what is memory itself made of? In the second chapter, Dijck addresses what we currently understand by the concept of ‘memory’, bringing together discussions from neurobiology and the cognitive sciences, and juxtaposing them with cultural theory and socio-cultural practices.
The following four chapters address specific types of media that we rely on to populate our understanding of ourselves: Words, sounds, still images, and moving images are each given a chapter in which to explore particular aspects of how the transition to digital format is changing notions of privacy and openness, and the relation between personal memory and shared experience. Diaries and blogs are concentrated on in the chapter on text, demonstrating how a reflective and private analogue genre now has a communicative and public function. The role of popular music in the formation of individual remembering and collective heritage is investigated. The changing role of imagery, and the transformation of photography from its analogue attempt to record moments in time, to the digital encouraging shared experiences whilst communicating in the language of photography, is explored. The role of film in shaping and manipulating memory is used to demonstrate how malleable our memories can be, a fact that is exacerbated by the ubiquity of digital video technologies.
In a final chapter, Dijck sketches out how digitization, multimedia, and online search mechanisms may redefine what we understand as memory, as instead of relying on our own interpretations of events, we evolve to integrate the machine into habits, thinking, and expected modes of operation, using the computer as an extension of our own memory processes.
Dijck describes this text as ‘a modest proposal to rearticulate the changing meaning of cultural memory at a time of transition’ (xvi). Since the writing and publication of this book in 2007, internet technologies, social networking platforms, and the technologies which allow the creation of user generated content have all changed rapidly, The sharing of video online, for example, is much more common, whilst one of the most commonly used micro-blogging platforms, Twitter.com, was only founded in 2006, and only permeated culture and news reporting since 2009: the book does not mention it. However, by grounding this book in both cultural and psychological theory, entwining perspectives of the biological and cognitive sciences, and not putting too much focus onto the specific details of the websites, file formats, and creation technologies which make up our changing information environment, this book manages to raise important questions about the evolving relationship between technology and memories, and documenting and forgetting, without appearing too dated.
Less successful are some of the case studies around which each chapter is constructed. The chapter on music, for example, centres around comments made by radio listeners about their favourite songs on a yearly countdown in a Dutch radio show, and the memories that become attached to particular popular music. The online database which accompanies this yearly programme hosts a variety of comments and stories. Dijck uses this to analyse how individuals invest emotion and affect in recorded music, and whether the act of undertaking this listing of best songs, and the discussion thereafter, shape their collective memories of the past. Whilst this is an interesting approach, it would have been more interesting to look at how internet technologies are changing the way that music itself can be shared through streaming and peer to peer technologies, and the control the music industry has (or wishes it has) on access to digital music. Does the changing information environment, in which a multiplicity of music tracks can now be accessed, instead of the ‘top ten’ on rotation on music channels, change collective memory? How is personal memory affected if there is not a centralized communal music source, such as a radio station? The book has no mention of Napster, iTunes, eMusic, or other online music stores. The book does not address the online communities which build up around specific musicians, and how the detailing of live track listings, the documentation of recording sessions and appearances, and even continual reference and logging of what a particular artist wears can contribute to both group and individual memory (and obsession). What is lost and what is gained by such digital online documentation? How are our memories of going to see a performance at a specific time and date affected, if we can look up recordings of this on YouTube, discuss the track listing at SongKick, share the photos that we took at Flickr, and download illegal MP3 bootlegs from an online forum? Many of the case studies would have been improved by investing more time in the digital world that the book attempts to inhabit. The discussions which frame aspects of memory in the different digital media would have had more resonance as a result.
Nevertheless, the strength of this book lies in the attempt to span a wide academic area, and to point out to the reader useful sources in the passing. There is a large bibliography, and the book is peppered with extensive footnotes which define and clarify terms that those not familiar with the latest psycho-social or neurobiology literature will appreciate. There is no doubt that the text raises important questions regarding how our memories, and our very sense of autobiographical self, are changing and will continue to change as user generated digital content becomes more pervasive, and the changing information environment allows us to extend our thought processes — including personal recall — through the browser search box.
Whilst reading this book, I could not help seeing in amongst the theorizing, an image of a small boy endlessly engaging with moving and still images of himself and his family, constructing his own identity, and understanding how the world — which has always been digital, for him — works. Alongside other normal parental concerns and paranoias, we should add a realization and concern that we are shaping the memories, and the development of sense of self, of the most recent generation through recording, photographing, and re-broadcasting every moment of their lives. The effect this will have on shared, and personal, cultural memory remains to be seen. Mediated memories in the digital age is a novel, yet necessary, investigation into our current understanding of how memory and machine interact, and a forewarning of an issue which will probably change the machinations of shared cultural memory, and therefore society.
Senior Lecturer in Electronic Communication, Department of Information Studies, University College London
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