Bowers Final Chapter, Or More Of A Critical Review

If I didn't agree that we need to be worried about what digital technology is doing to us, I would dismiss Bowers as a grumpy old hack. My argument would basically be that he is presenting a new version of the master/slave morality. Cultural Commons is good, and abstraction is evil. Cultural Commons is best embodied in face to face interaction. The written word is seen as the best expression of abstraction and how it spreads. He has and values the cultural commons, but power is held by those that use and champion abstraction. Neither side needs to be clearly defined or explained because it is clear to people on the side of cultural commons what is good and what is evil. This leads to the polemic tone and feel of the work as well as a partial explanation for why he is sparse on details.

If I didn't take his concerns about our future and the part that technology is playing in it, I could stop there and not really give another thought to the book. However, I think his concerns are very valid and that his points are often very interesting, and sometimes very good. Since that is the case, my approach will be to try to bridge the difference between what is set up as evil with what is set up as good. In this way I would hope to show in more detail what each is while at the same time showing a productive way forward that tries to address his concerns but comes from more of a middle ground approach. What follows is a sketch of what I mean.


“The difference between reading about a person’s craft knowledge and skill in making something and actually observing—or more importantly, being physically, creatively, and mentally engaged in carrying out the task on one’s own terms, is the difference between living in the limited world of abstractions and being fully involved in the multiple world of emergent relationships.” He goes on here to talk about reading about a musical performance and actually participating in one. I think the example of music is great, but I would use it in a different way, one that emphasizes the interpretable nature of writing.

I don’t think many people would say that picking up a sheet of printed music and playing it doesn’t involve some sort of interpretation. There is a lot that musical notation can tell you about how a piece should be played and how it should sound, but it can’t tell you everything. Recording a piece of music does more than writing out the musical notation. It tells you exactly how the piece should sound, and from there a talented musician can figure out how it should be played. There is no room for interpretation if you take the recording to be the definitive version of the work.

But how many artists think that what they recorded is the definitive version that can’t be changed. Live performances are often different and that is not just because the band may not have the technology (or even skill) to reproduce exactly what was done in the studio. A song can be reinterpreted if the artist thinks they, the audience or the song itself has changed and has something new or different to say.  Musical notation obviously needs interpretation. I would argue that the written word does as well. And, even a live performance (the face to face version) and a recording are not the definitive version of a piece of music. It can always be interpreted in new ways, especially by the artist that wrote it.

Descartes is one of the philosophers that Bowers mentions as being responsible for the abstract nature of the Enlightenment and modern world. I can see how that is a reasonable interpretation of Descartes. He does place a lot of importance on ‘clear and certain notions’ as the source of truth and reality.  These things are abstractions like the idea that triangles have three sides and that physical objects have extension.  But I am reading a book by a former professor of mine on The Meditations, and the reading proposed in the book is that they are truly meditations that have an experiential component that is essential to the proper understanding of Descartes' project. Unless you do what Descartes asks you to do in the book, or think his thoughts along with him, you are not going to get the full picture of what he is trying to convey and convince you of. Descartes' Meditations are not just a logical argument in words; they are being engaged in to carry out the task.

Most people may not see the printed words as being interpretable, and they may view it as Bowers portrays it: as a static fixed message giving static truths. However, that is not what it has to be. (And as a student of philosophy, it has been a long time since I have  see it that way.) Any piece of writing can be understood as an interpretation of something real, and one that can itself be interpreted. Emphasizing the fact that writing is interpretation and the interpretable nature of the written word can help counter a lot of what Bowers is against without throwing out the benefits of writing. Writing is not abstract in the way that Bowers sees as negative if the ability of the community reading the text to interpret it is emphasized. Writing is not abstract in the way that Bowers sees as negative if we are taught to read in a way that assumes the gaps in the text need to be filled with participation, experience or even meditation upon the subject the text is talking about. This, I think, can bridge the gap between writing and the cultural commons. It is a way of (to use a phrase and idea from Nietzsche) going beyond the strict distinction between good and evil. It can also be seen as an adaptation of hermenutics to every day reading and writing, not just sacred or academic texts.

The next step would be to find a way to go beyond the division between technology and data and experience. A recording of something is often see as a more definitive version of it than a written description or notation whether it is a video, audio recording or picture. The data derived from specialized equipment that observes an event is often seen as offering a more definitive version of the event than our senses, and even of a video recording. Both of these are very deceiving. It takes the context (time and place, and history) out of the event that is being recorded in the same way that Bowers says writing does. (Bowers even mentions this in the book.) However, he doesn't seem to offer a solution to the problem. I would say that the solution is for people to understand data and recordings the same way I propose they see writing. The recording or data set is just one interpretation of the event, and they can themselves be interpreted. Being aware of this is, I think, the biggest way to counter the negatives that Bowers sees coming from them. I sense this as an option in his writing, but I don't remember him pointing it out specifically.

I know this doesn't address many points in the book nor does it really address the last chapter specifically. What it does do is try to address the main problem(s) or flaw(s) that I saw in the book that kept coming to mind as I was reading.

Bowers Chapter 6

I like a lot of the points that he makes about the current state of culture and wisdom in the modern world, and how technology and science (scientism) have made an impact on that. I do still think he is selling short abstract thinking (especially philosophy), print and the West in general. I agree that data is over emphasized and the limitations of it are something most people are blissfully ignorant of. (We are at the same time ignoring all of the negatives that can come about along with the positives of convenience that we enjoy.) And I agree that it will come back to bite us. I agree that profits and convenience have taken over as the dominant values that influence how we (and especially businesses) make decisions. And I agree that it will come back to bite us. Culture is not much more than entertainment these days, and wisdom is outsourced to computers that run algorithms and sift data. These are things that need to be corrected, and he offers some good ideas in that respect.

However, I think he misses a whole host of elements that are in western culture that could be taken up and emphasized to help rehabilitate it and instead he goes to non-western cultures for solutions. Yes, analytic philosophy is abstract and tries to neatly categorize and explain things, and in doing so it misses a lot that it doesn’t even realize it is missing: unknown unknowns. But that is not all analytic philosophy. Even more so, there is the continental tradition as well which in many ways tries to keep the whole and the emergent in our minds as it inquires into the particulars. Nietzsche and Heidegger are two of my favorites, and they have elements of the whole and even a kind of mysticism to them, especially Heidegger’s later works after the ‘turn.’ Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy talks about the irreconcilable tension between the Apollonian and Dionysian, a relationship that constantly needs to be re-negotiated to provide a ground for thought and society. He talks about the fact that everything things is absolutely individual and unique and that language is a lie that makes us think that things are able to be put into categories with labels in his essay Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense. It is almost the total opposite of Bowers whole, but it can have basically the same affect: make all categorization and labeling provisional and in constant need of revision and updating. Derrida definitely undermines the ridged framework that Bowers is against, and even thinkers like Kant and Hegel can be read to go against it to certain degrees. (With Kant we can never know things in themselves; we can only know them as humans know them. With Hegel things are essentially historically relative and we can really only be expected to know things according to our time in history. Both leave space for continual revision and re-evaluation of how we categorize, label and even see the world.) Given possibilities like these, I think it is not necessary and even more risky to try to import non-Western systems into the contemporary Western context to try to fix what are very Western problems.  (I can’t find the source or a quote now, but I remember reading about Heidegger’s correspondence with at least one Japanese philosopher and how he found Easter thought interesting but was insistent that the way forward for the West had to come out of the Western tradition and not from an outside source. I very much agree with that.)

It is possible that he is avoiding giants of the Western tradition because there is so much involved in reading, interpreting and understanding them. The ideas I offered above are by no means uncontroversial takes on the writers I mentioned. The Western tradition (as far as I know it compared to the East) has a much more complex and even ridged way or dealing with thought traditions and texts. (But maybe the east has a tradition and it is not a print one, so those of us on the outside simply miss it.) It is not easy to get into the discussion that makes up Western philosophy, or to get into some of the texts; Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger are not always accessible to the everyday reader. Maybe that is why he jumps to the Eastern and indigenous traditions which tend to be more poetic and (at least to those of us that are not part of the Eastern tradition) less burdened with a complex (printed?) history or interpretation and discussion. But are they really less debated and interpreted? Or is he simplifying them to present them as such, and we just don’t realize it because we are ignorant of the tradition and culture they come from? I am not sure, but I am suspicious.