Keywords

This project started out as an obstinate reflection. Having experienced different forms of digital humanities practices for more than a decade, I started to think about a “digital humanities sans digital tools, methods and objects.” It must indeed be possible, I thought, to discuss the effects of digitization on art, literature, or on the production of knowledge in general, not primarily as something related to certain tools or objects. “The digital” within the humanities, for example, could be explored not only in databases, archives and big data, nor in topic modeling and speculative visualizations; neither should the objects of study be restricted to computer games, to electronic works of art or to literary texts and artworks explicitly relating to computerization and other digital expressions. I asked myself: How has digitization affected literary works that in no way treat or depict the digital? And: Can we approach “the digital” as “things to think with” (to paraphrase Sherry Turkle)?Footnote 1

Soon enough, of course, I found out I was not alone—the above quote from Alexander R. Galloway being perhaps the most striking remark in this regard. The result, nevertheless, is this volume, a collection of texts which share the ambition of exploring and probing the concept of digital epistemology. It should be stated immediately that the scope of this concept or, rather, of these two words—“digital” and “epistemology”—by far outreaches the ambitions of this volume. However, the very same two words have been guiding the observations made in the chapters to follow.

The notion of digital epistemology as applied in this volume, thus, could—in some of its applications—be understood as the abovementioned “digital humanities sans digital tools and objects.” This, is not a programmatic stance, though, but rather a reminder that the epistemological consequences of digitization can be traced also in texts and artwork that are not “about” computers, networks or fiberoptic cables; and also without using specialized digital tools to perform the analysis (of course, we still use the computer to search for texts, facts and illustrative examples, and to write down and edit our reflections). But indeed, the following pages will also analyze texts that either treat digital culture as an object, or are digital born electronic works of literature (I am not as stubbornly consequent as Galloway in this regard).

Many have noted—and the humanities of today should perhaps pay wider attention to—the fact that more or less every cultural artifact today is digitally permeated in one way or another, in some or many aspects of its processes of production and distribution. For the sake of the argument in this volume, it will thus be necessary to approximate a working definition of how the “digital” in “digital epistemology” (and in some respects, the “analog”) should be understood in this particular context.

1.1 Digital/Analog

The texts that follow suggest that “the digital” can be regarded as a perspective, “a lens,” or as a starting point for different forms of historical reflection. To clarify this position, the notion of the digital in this context needs to be narrowed down. An obvious observation could be that the digital, in a historical context, somehow follows from, and extrapolates, “the analog,” or at least the broadcasting media. That could have been the easy part. However, as has been argued by Jonathan Sterne (2016), analog and digital are not a binary couple. Rather, the concept of “analog” is more or less a construction derived from digital culture: “The idea of analog as everything not-digital is in fact newer than the idea of the digital,” Sterne claims (Sterne 2016, 32, his italics). This is a valid, and from a media history perspective very interesting, point. Moreover, as we shall see (and return to), the analog, in its old Oxford English Dictionary definitions (presented by Sterne), will actually become a driving force in the notion of digital epistemology. The practice of juxtaposition is indeed analog in the sense that it points out “similarities to another unrelated group” (ibid., 34). Digital and analog, thus, are teaming up in this endeavor.

Another take on digital versus analog is provided by Galloway’s book on French philosopher François Laurelle, quoted above. While somehow keeping the binary alive, Galloway not only stresses the point that “digital” primarily is a mode of thought rather than a set of machines, networks or databases, but also notes that it “conjures a relation – a true miracle – between aggregates of things that really should have nothing at all to say to one another” (Galloway 2014, 63).Footnote 2

Today we experience a network of communications media and systems which differs radically from the situation we experienced only a few decades ago. This situation also changes the conditions of how we produce, perceive and distribute data; it changes artistic expressions and our accumulation of knowledge. To gather this heterogenic change in one single volume would be utterly presumptuous. Moreover, the change itself has a history—the notion, and materiality, of the digital is from a historical point of view far from a homogenic phenomenon. The new order of things, regarding the organizing and handling of information that computers imposed from, say, the 1960s onwards, had an impact on culture and fostered modes of thought that differ radically from the effects of games, social media, ubiquitous computing and intelligent textiles we can observe (and, alas, are being observed by…) today. Here already the notions of “the digital” and “digitization” run into some difficulties (which will be discussed in Chap. 4). “The digital,” in the current context, will be approached from a historical and epistemological point of view and, even more restricted, this perspective will be analyzed mostly through aesthetical and (some) pedagogical examples. In this volume, Alan Liu, Cecilia Lindhé and Marcel O’Gorman will work as points of departure for the explorations that follow.

1.2 Liu/Lindhé/O’Gorman

In 2014, Professor Alan Liu (Dept. of English , University of California, Santa Barbara) presented a brief blog post suggesting how to approach the notion of “digital epistemology” (Liu 2014).Footnote 3 Liu’s text operates on another level of abstraction than we will encounter in this volume, but in essence he shares the same objective: digital competences should not be a concern only for those who explore digital objects or electronic culture, nor for those who do big data, text mining or work with the digitization of cultural heritages—rather, and moreover, Liu explains, “digital knowledge should announce an epistemic shift for the academic practice as such” (ibid.). Digitization challenges the core of academic and pedagogical practice, not only by the appearance of new tools and objects, but by the fact that our modes of thought and our way to structure data and knowledge are changing.

Cecilia Lindhé’s essay “‘A Visual Sense is Born in the Fingertips’: Towards a Digital Ekphrasis” (Lindhé 2013) stands out as a more distinct point of departure for several of the arguments put forward in this book. In this article she discusses the notion of “ekphrasis” through a “digital lens”:

This article, then, has as its wider scope to deconstruct the filter of printing technologies, with which we look at cultural history, and instead – with “the digital” as a lens in the form of digital literature and art – renegotiate an aesthetic practice that emanates from both rhetoric and print technology. (Lindhé 2013)

Accordingly, I want to highlight one possible path for the digital humanities: the digital as a critical lens on aesthetic concepts and cultural history. Lindhé’s argument, which has been indicative for reflections on digital epistemology, is that “the digital” (here represented by digital art and literature) should be considered as a perspective, with the same critical potential as for example poststructuralism, gender theory and postcolonialism. She furthermore notes that “digital perspectives on classic concepts could challenge or revise more or less taken-for-granted assumptions in the humanities” (ibid.).

Another important contribution to the argument in this volume comes from Marcel O’Gorman, who already in 2006 published the thought-provoking E-Crit: Digital Media, Critical Theory and the Humanities (O’Gorman 2006). O’Gorman’s argument is that digital culture calls for a new pedagogical approach, a new way to relate the humanities not only to the contemporary digital environment, but also to cultural history. The humanities of today, O’Gorman argues, utilize only a fraction of the potential that digital media offer, more particularly those aspects of digital culture that most resemble print media; that is, databases, archives and scanned books. And, he warns, if the humanists are not aware of this, there is a risk that we will end up being digital archivists rather than critical theorists (ibid., 11).Footnote 4

Regardless of whether you are digitally oriented or not in your academic and pedagogical exercises, it is important to remember that the practice of the humanities is not a given constant, but rather a “Gutenbergian” practice, with its roots in a postromantic fantasy about the hero, the genius, the nation and the authentic expression. Of course, this fantasy has been challenged throughout the latter half of the twentieth century (feminism, postcolonialism, structuralism, deconstruction, New Historicism), but digital culture offers us yet a new paradigm, and O’Gorman suggests a shift in academic practice from “hermeneutics” to “heuretics,” and from “interpretation” to “invention”:

[T]he result of this “fever for archiving” does not transform the humanities in any significant way or render humanities research more suitable to a culture of computing. New media have done little to alter the practices of humanities scholars, except perhaps by accelerating – by means of more accessible databases – the rate at which hermeneutics can be performed. Once again, I should stress the point that I am interested less in hermeneutics (interpretation) than I am in heuretics (invention). More specifically, this book asks the following question: Just as Ramus’s scholarly method had a great influence in shaping a print apparatus that has persisted for five centuries, might it not be possible to invent scholarly methods to shape the digital apparatus? (ibid., 50, see also 98–100)

This quote is interesting, since it touches upon a couple of arguments already hinted at above, but that will be brought forward in Chap. 4, that even the digital of course has a history—different materialities, different epistemologies. Because, in all fairness, we must admit that digital methods have been considerably elaborated even through the decade and a half that has passed since O’Gorman wrote this in 2006. First, different methods of mapping, such as GIS (which stands for Graphic Information System), and various forms of visualization, 3D scanning, open access archives and many more features have all increased the sensibility and variation of digital methods. Second, and connected to the first, it is not really the case that digital archives and their methods primarily supported hermeneutics, but rather that distant reading techniques, developed by the likes of Moretti (2013) and Jockers (2013), served as complementary strategies, actually challenging the very notion of hermeneutics as an instrument in writing the history of literature. On the other hand, O’Gorman still has it right, I believe, when he asks for heuretics and invention, since distant reading may be many things, but has yet to show a more playful and artistic agenda. And he is still right in asking for scholarly methods to “shape the digital apparatus,” since distant reading techniques and different forms of handling big data still seem very alien to many “traditional” humanists.Footnote 5

O’Gorman’s attitude to the analytical practice in the humanities could be understood not as an interpretative exercise aiming at a satisfactory (not to mention final) reading of a single work of art (more on his “hypericonomy” method in Chap. 5). Instead, this “digital” approach is concerned with bold juxtapositions and propositions to relate to the work in more productive contexts. The idea is to study a work of art not primarily in order to “explain” it, but rather to see what it—combined with other aspects—can generate. In line with this position, and in line with the metaphors of the digital age, we can address the cultural artifact (the literary text) as a node in a network of symbols, functions, materialities and noise.Footnote 6

Following Liu, Lindhé and O’Gorman (and others), this book has the ambition to shed some light on the notion of a (not the) digital epistemology. In this context, thus, “the digital” is not primarily regarded as tools (computers, databases, networks) or as objects (fan fiction, archives, Twitter poetry, games, electronic literature), but as a critical, discourse analytical and media archaeological concept, by which we can establish productive perspectives on our aesthetic and cultural environment and—not least—on aesthetic and cultural history.

Moreover, “digital epistemology” is not primarily a tool, or a concept, for establishing causality; it is not about cause and effects, but rather about relations. The relation between art and its context, between body and text, between human, machine and environment. And between postmodern and—in this case—early modern modes of thought. These relations are indeed possible to detect all through the history of cultural artifacts, but the concept of digital epistemology will accentuate this media historical perspective even further. New media always remind us of the relation between old and new. By emphasizing this, I am subscribing to the notion of recursive historiography, as proposed by Markus Krajewski in The Server (2018). To define this, Krajewski first quotes the mathematical definition of recursion as “returning (to known values); obtained via recourse of what is known.”Footnote 7 Then he transforms this concept to the media archaeological discourse, noting that it inspires both historical comparisons and a possibility of creating, through iterative juxtapositions, a new historical narrative. And he concludes that “[w]hat is via this recursive procedure is not merely the possibility of connecting two non-simultaneous phenomena but also the ability of a concept to invoke itself” (Krajewski 2018, 158).Footnote 8

In this context, the concept of digital epistemology, as we shall see, not only establishes relationships between early modern and contemporary cultural expressions, but moreover revisits the narrative of digital history from the 1960s to the 2010s. This concept will also highlight new relations between objects within the same category, establishing and trying out new connections between—for example—literary texts. In a post on Litteraturbanken (“The Swedish Literature Bank”), a researcher in the history of ideas, Andreas Önnerfors, highlights that the archive of Litteraturbanken makes a perfect example of a digital cabinet of curiosities , where texts can be ordered in a way that “facilitates how we can recognize the different voices of the literary texts through the thin walls of time and titles,” and furthermore:

The digital library of Litteraturbanken orders the names of the authors carefully, and alphabetically, and in a list – but which physical library should in the next move rearrange all the books so that they suddenly were sorted alphabetically by titles? Öjungfrun [Island Virgin], and Anteckningar om Öl [Notes on Beer], Yttersta domen [The Final Judgement] and Äktenskap och demokrati [Marriage and Democracy], Vivisektioner [Vivisections] and Vuer af Stockholm [Views of Stockholm], are arranged in immediate relations to each other. These thin walls everywhere …. Regardless author or title: the digital reproduces the asymmetric, spectral logic of the curiosity chamber, where the hierarchies between time and space are not totalitarian but transcendent, exceeding. (Önnerfors 2017)

The juxtaposition of digital culture and the cabinets of curiosity will be a recurring motif in this volume.

1.3 Epistemology and Early Modern Modes of Thought

In a work which embraces epistemological as well as media archaeological perspectives, Michel Foucault will appear as a given reference; even more so, since the texts in this volume, in their discussions of digital epistemology, make recurring connections between the digital age and early modern modes of thought. Similar connections are explored in Les Mots et Les Choses, Foucault’s ambitious outline for a history of thought and order from the Renaissance onwards (Foucault 2002). Of vital importance for the ideas brought forward in Foucault’s book (and as a point for departure also for this volume) are the categories “order,” “episteme,” and “archaeology” (we will soon return to the latter category). The notion of order (“l’ordre”) is explained by Foucault as follows:

Order is, at one and the same time, that which is given in things as their inner law, the hidden network that determines the way they confront one another, and also that which has no existence except in the grid created by a glance, an examination, a language; and it is only in the blank spaces of this grid that order manifests itself in depth as though already there, waiting in silence for the moment of its expression. (ibid., xxi)

Order, in this regard, thus points to the relations between objects and the discourse utilized to arrange them. In Towards a Digital Epistemology, the order of things, for example in the cabinets of curiosities—or Kunstkammer (I will use the terms interchangeably)—and the Renaissance emblem will be related to a number of positions and practices in our contemporary digital age. As for the notion of episteme, Foucault suggests the following:

In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice. (ibid., 183)

In the texts that follow, suggestions will be made that digitization indeed has set the conditions for such an episteme, and this, of course, is also in line with Lindhé’s claim that digitization, regarded as a “critical lens,” can offer us new perspectives on our age as well as on history (Lindhé 2013). Moreover, Foucault’s definition is well in line with the definition of epistemology proposed by historian of science Professor Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, who use the term epistemology “for reflecting on the historical conditions under which, and the means with which, things are made into objects of knowledge” (Rheinberger 2010, 2).

In the context of this volume, both Foucault’s and Rheinberger’s perspectives contribute to the epistemological approach where we regard digitization as a historically situated phenomenon, which dictates the conditions for how knowledge is produced and presented. Thus understood, epistemology and “modes of thought” are closely related; media and cultural artifacts not only depict our existence but, moreover, determine how we observe it.

1.3.1 The Emblem

The concept of “modes of thought”—here associated with “epistemology”—in this study emanates from Peter M. Daly’s presentation of the then (1979) recent German reception of the emblem (Daly 1979). Inspired by Albrecht Schöne and Dieter Walter Jöns, Daly suggests that we should separate the emblem as art form from the emblem as a mode of thought.Footnote 9 The emblem, considered as a genre, had many forms, but the emblematic (!) emblem consisted of a heading (inscriptio), an illustration (pictura), and a comment (subscriptio). The emblems were mostly gathered in emblem books, an immensely popular genre in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, especially in France and Germany, as well as in Belgium and the Netherlands. The pictura often could have quite a bizarre or grotesque composition, arguably to catch the attention of the reader and stylistically a remnant from the medieval bestiaries that were one important source of inspiration. The bestiaries displayed many examples of the wonders of God’s creation and also contained fables and moralities, and thus can be seen as foreboding not only the emblem books, but also the Kunstkammer . The emblem books did not display a fixed set of rules or regulations on what was to be called an emblem. Some books did not contain pictures at all, while some contained pictures only. In some cases the subscriptio only consisted of a few lines, while in others they could be stretched out to several pages. John Manning goes on to point out, and rightly so, the trouble of trying to capture the emblem at all in any definition: “The mistake that so many theoreticians make is that they look for a normative embodiment of form, which denies the very flexibility that gave the genre life” (Manning 2002, 25) (Fig. 1.1).Footnote 10

Fig. 1.1
figure 1

Copper engraving probably by Jan Gerritsz Swelinck (born around 1601), after a drawing of Adriaen van de Venne (1589–1662); Public Domain https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?cwurid=477794

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The emblem genre rises parallel to the evolving industry of book printing, and surely was a good indicator of the skills of the printer, since the emblems naturally often displayed a multimodal character, combining typesetting and woodcuts. Despite the enigmatic and combinatory character of many emblems, however, they should not be treated as riddles or rebuses to be solved, but rather, as pointed out by for example John Manning and Peter M. Daly, as devices to set in motion thought processes, often (obviously) with a moral or religious tendency (Daly 1979; Manning 2002, passim). Thus, the emblematic mode of thought encouraged combination and composition; a call to create, rather than to interpret.

By shifting focus from studying the emblem as a form or genre to regarding it as a mode of thought, Daly suggests, we can approach the emblem not only as a trick of signs and symbols, but moreover as corresponding to biblical, mythological and allegorical presumptions on how the world—according to the consumers of the emblem—was indeed organized. It is not primarily a matter of the “form” of the emblem, nor about any sort of “realism,” but rather a reflection of the experiences that the reader—or viewer—of an emblem has (ibid. passim).

This is in line with John Manning’s observation that the various expressions of the emblems corresponded to, and embodied, the realities in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe:

There was literally nothing under the sun that was not emblematic – at least potentially. The four elements, the heavens, fourfooted beasts, birds, fishes, plants, stones and insects could instruct the “eye of understanding.” What made this symbolic universe different from the medieval “Book of Nature” was the active participation of the individual within the construction of significance. (ibid., 30, my italics)

What Manning points out here is thus, firstly, that the emblem was not only an art form but in fact corresponded to the observation of the contemporary environment, of nature and culture. The emblem is thus given epistemological qualities. Second, the author emphasizes here that the emblem, considered as a mode of thought, called for activity, in contrast to the more passive interpretation that characterized the Middle Ages’ approach to the “book of nature” (for example in the bestiaries) that could be “read” as an appendix to the Bible, proving the greatness of the Creator. This medieval “text” was in some sense finished, which is not the case for the emblematic mode of thought. And while, as Manning and Daly suggest, the seventeenth century established an emblematic epistemology, our own time establishes a digital ditto, with several striking similarities.

1.3.2 The Cabinets of Curiosity

The other early modern phenomenon that will be repeatedly addressed in the chapters to come is the cabinet of curiosities. This had its heyday during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They could be designed as huge cabinets with a variety of compartments, drawers and booths, or even occupy entire rooms, like a kind of museum.Footnote 11 The collections aimed to create an overview of the accumulated knowledge of the time, and with their combination of manufactured (often bizarre) artifacts and natural or found objects in artistic arrangements, the Kunstkammer of course also constituted a monument to their powerful owner. Here, tangible materiality was combined with an associative and artistic practice, which, however, could follow fairly strict principles. In his overview of the cabinets of curiosities in European cultural life, art historian Horst Bredekamp presents a fairly common order for them in the seventeenth century (Fig. 1.2):

Fig. 1.2
figure 2

“Musei Wormiani Historia,” the frontispiece from the Museum Wormianum depicting Ole Worm’s cabinet of curiosities (Public Domain)

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  • Naturalia – objects from the natural kingdom as well as ancient sculptures

  • Artificialia – arts and crafts

  • Scientifica – globes, watches, measuring and weighing tools

  • Exotica – odd objects that could also appear in any other category. (Bredekamp 1995, 34, and passim)

Some details to observe here: that ancient sculptures belonged to “nature,” while arts and crafts are sorted into the same category (which may be understood as corresponding to the Aristotelian notion of techné). Bredekamp also highlights the significance Francis Bacon gave to the design of the Kunstkammer : Bacon argued for the importance of play in the process of relating the various objects to each other, and “play” should be understood here in a broad sense—associations, jokes, games or letting objects play with one another (ibid., 67). The associative and pleasure-oriented approach seems to be central for Bacon. Elaborating on this “playful” aspect of science, Bredekamp notes that the cabinet’s perhaps most important contribution is to situate knowledge not as a hidden core of an expression or person, but as something that arises in free association:

Reflections of the thought expounded through the Kunstkammer have remained alive in history of style, psychoanalysis, and in iconology – that is, in everything expressing the knowledge that playfulness is a necessary prerequisite for the mind to be creative and that the essence, the inner core of an effort or a person, has not remained intact in the center or in the linear path to that center, but in free, concomitant phenomena void of obvious purpose. (ibid., 109)

Instead of the straight order of cause and effects, cabinets of curiosity present related phenomena for no apparent purpose, but inspiring creativity and reflection. In an essay on the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, Susan A. Crane also emphasizes the difference between the objects in the Kunstkammer and the objects in a museum, where the curiosities were assembled for their individual stories and the cabinet also freely combined fact and fiction (exhibiting many “fake objects,” such as unicorn horns), while the museums that emerged in the nineteenth century ordered their objects for the purpose of systematically telling the greater narrative of the nation or of history (Crane 2000, 72). We will return to this in Chap. 3.

1.3.3 Epistemology Engines and Recursive Historiography

From the perspective of digital epistemology, digital expressions and phenomena are not studied primarily for their technical benefits, but rather for how they can relate to the production of the episteme of our time, as reflected in culture. This mirrors the reflections on epistemology, technology and embodiment put forward by the philosopher of technology Don Ihde in Bodies in Technology (Ihde 2002). Ihde lets technical innovations throughout history serve as objects which bring together human and mechanical agency, leading to the production of knowledge: “My devices,” he claims, “will be particular machines or technologies, which provide the paradigmatic metaphors for knowledge themselves” (ibid., 69). Ihde suggests that this relation between humans and machines should be called epistemology engines, a relation which generates questions about how we perceive, obtain and distribute our understanding of the environment.

So, then, what does digital epistemology mean? If we return to Alan Liu’s short text—induced by the establishment of a “Centre for Digital Knowledge”—he suggests that a research institute based on these presumptions would have to question the notion of “Centre” itself, “since that form is vested in traditional ways of organizing knowledge production that the digital is currently reinvesting in a wider, differently articulated network of institutions, collectives, and media” (Liu 2014). The tradition of organizing and distributing knowledge is challenged. Liu continues:

It thus seems clear that a Centre for Digital Knowledge that relies solely on traditional institutional forms – even the now normative “interdisciplinary” form (e.g., a centre that creates weak-tie intersections among faculty in different fields) [sic] – will be cut off from some of the most robust conceptual and practical adventures of digital knowledge. A key test for the proposed Centre for Digital Knowledge, therefore, will be whether it is willing at least on occasion to accommodate non-standard forms of knowledge organization, production, presentation, exploration, and dissemination acclimated to the digital age or open to its networked ethos. (ibid.)

Following Liu, digitization should have consequences for how we organize the very formation of knowledge, once again motivating the concept of digital epistemology. This stand also motivates us, along with Friedrich Kittler, to regard digitization as a “discourse network” or a “writing-down-system” (Kittler 1990, passim). Texts and works of art created during the digital (r)evolution of the post–World War II period can be said to reproduce different kinds of digital logic whether or not they are “born digital,” and whether or not they explicitly address or describe digitization. A novel, or any work of art, need not be “about” computers to express a digital logic or order of things.

Moreover, and as a consequence of the above, the concept of digital epistemology can address and frame literary and artistic practices from practically any historical period. “Digital” logic, “digital” forms and “digital” modes of thought anticipate digital technology and can therefore be observed in art from different times. This lets us return to, and elaborate upon, the concept of recursive historiography, as presented by Marcus Krajewski above (Krajewski 2018, 158). In the introduction to the anthology Deep Classics, historian Shane Butler (2016) points out how our relation to premodern and ancient times for a long time has been characterized by distance, more or less rooted in rhetoric: terms like “ancient times,” the “Middle Ages,” the “Renaissance” generate a discourse of distancing and progress, which makes us prone to regard the past as a precursor of our own time, instead of realizing that these cultural expressions are perfect representations of their own time and not in need of any “direction” to be so. In so reasoning, he shows how the aesthetic practices of the past also are representations of modes of thought. Butler takes an example from Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, where the famous psychoanalyst draws parallels between ancient Rome and the human psyche: all the historical buildings, the ruins, the ones built after or on top of the older structures, all of them exist de facto as historical objects through which we understand our own times (and the parallel for Freud, obviously, is that our memories function the same way). As Butler points out:

Riffling fantastically in the archaeological cross-section, Freud joins the city’s classical and post-classical architecture into a seamless tradition. As with the unconscious, nothing is ever finally, fully lost here. (ibid., 10)

Another point of reference here could be one of Friedrich Nietzsche’s “untimely meditations,” more precisely The Use and Abuse of History, where the philosopher laments the view of history as something passed, something to reflect upon only for the sake of “Bildung.” On the contrary, he claims, the only thing that makes history relevant is its presence in the now, and the presence of the now in history:

It is true that man can only become man by first suppressing this unhistorical element in his thoughts, comparisons, distinctions, and conclusions, letting a clear sudden light break through these misty clouds by his power of turning the past to the uses of the present. But an excess of history makes him flag again, while without the veil of the unhistorical he would never have the courage to begin. What deeds could man ever have done if he had not been enveloped in the dust-cloud of the unhistorical? (Nietzsche 1909, 11)

Nietzsche and Freud both place emphasis on parallels between, and the presence of, then and now in the now, much the same as T.S. Eliot was to demonstrate with The Waste Land some decades later, and this approach to history also characterizes this volume. Early modern genres and order of things such as the Kunstkammer and the emblem will not primarily be treated as historically situated expressions of older world views, but rather as productive modes of thought, capable of illuminating our own digital times. By focusing on epistemological rather than intermedia aspects, we can study not only the relation between texts and other media, but also on how our digital culture actually consists in different modes of thought, and how this can generate pedagogical as well as methodological challenges and possibilities. Alan Liu, again, describes this situation as that “the goal is to engage the topic of what it means to ‘know’ in the digital age in a spirit of serious play – at once disciplined and exploratory of new paradigms” (Liu 2014). Serious play, where we explore what it means to search and find knowledge in and about the world in which we now participate. This also echoes Johanna Drucker’s statement in Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production:

We have to have a way to talk about what it is we are doing, and how, and to reflect critically and imaginatively if tools of the new era are to be means to think with, rather than instruments of a vastly engineered ideological apparatus that merely has its way with us. (Drucker 2014, 194)

“The tools of the new era”: our digital utensils and interfaces are not neutral, but “objects-to-think-with.”Footnote 12 In a way, this is a cybernetic line of thought—human and machine (and “nature”) are agents in a communicating system. In Graphesis, thus, Drucker poses the important question about what role digital tools play in how humanities regard their traditional approach to (and dissemination of) their results. A recurring figure of thought for Drucker is that we today have the tools to visualize and problematize research within the humanities in ways that the different fields traditionally have not encouraged. Moreover, she shows how many of these new visualization techniques actually have early modern predecessors. For example, Drucker discusses the notion of “interface” in a way that forebodes some lines of reasoning in this present volume:

The critical design of interpretative interface will push beyond the goals of “efficient” and “transparent” designs for the organization of behaviors and actions, and mobilize a critical network that exposes, calls to attention, its madeness – and by extension, the constructedness of knowledge, its interpretative dimensions. This will orchestrate, at least a bit, the shift from conceptions of interface as things and entities to that of an event-space of interpretative activity. (Drucker 2014, 178)

Drucker identifies the visual interfaces as something that guides our thought patterns and, in the continuation of this argument, a main topic in Graphesis becomes the epistemological effect of our digital forms of representation:

More attention to acts of producing and less emphasis on product, the creation of an interface that is meant to expose and support the activity of interpretation, rather than to display finished forms, would be a good starting place. (ibid., 179)

When interfaces are regarded as productive meeting places rather than as representations of something already finished, we can start to realize the imaginary potential of digital tools. Invention rather than interpretation, as Marcel O’Gorman suggests, heuretics rather than hermeneutics (O’Gorman 2006, 50 and 99). The emphasis in Drucker’s argument lies on materiality: the tradition of humanistic interpretations needs to be vitalized with the (digital) forms for the dissemination that cultural expressions today utilize. Drucker juxtaposes digital visualizations with early and premodern forms, genres and rhetorical modes, although these juxtapositions in her presentation function more as historical footnotes, rather than as epistemological tools.

But, as we shall see, early modern modes of thought can be regarded not only as historical points of reference, but moreover as recursive (in Krajewski’s terms) and congenial models for approaching contemporary cultural expressions, while at the same time a broader insight into the functionality of digital interfaces may instruct the understanding of early modern aesthetics.Footnote 13 In this volume, phenomena like salon culture, cabinets of curiosities, emblem books and the archival principle of pertinence will be addressed. This approach also leads to reflections upon how the interfaces of the humanities have influenced the content of education, research and communication.

This volume is far from the first to relate digital culture to early modern orders and genres. For example, the Kunstkammer is repeatedly taken as a point of reference in regard to digital interfaces. In a thesis from 1996 with the title “The Computer as an Irrational Cabinet,” Charles Gere discusses at length why the computer “space” should be related to the cabinet of curiosities, and emblematics, rather than to the traditional museum: “The computer can become a space for a modern ‘emblematics,’ where elements are juxtaposed in different configurations to engender new meanings.” He refers further to “benjaminian techniques of juxtaposition, montage and collage” in order to deconstruct “how we represent object and material culture” (Gere 1996, 84). The thesis then goes on to discuss possible “multimedia” interfaces inspired by the notion of the cabinet.

In What is Media Archaeology? Jussi Parikka makes some observations on the same relationship, albeit just en passant, but in so doing he emphasizes an important point:

Indeed, to an extent, one could say that it’s not only the curiosity cabinets and such-like that have been a focus of rethinking media and archives through models of heterogeneous order and amazement … but also that media history itself can become such a curiosity cabinet – for better or for worse, as the danger lies in being drawn into writing about “curiosities” for their own sake, instead of asking the simple and critical question “why”: why is this particular technology important, and what is the argument behind this research into this curiosity of media history. (Parikka 2012, 65, my italics)

The following pages are an attempt to address this “curiosity of media history,” not only observing similarities for their own sake, but also putting them in a productive relationship to each other.

1.4 Media Archaeology

In Friending the Past: The Sense of History in the Digital Age (2018), Alan Liu discusses the relation to history brought forward by the use of digital tools and perspectives. As in this volume, Liu sees important links between and possibilities for the combination of media archaeology and digital humanities: “What is the sense of history of the network age discoverable through media archeology?” he asks (ibid., 101).Footnote 14 He also quotes the introduction to the Amodern 2 issue on “Network Archaeology”:

Drawing from the field of media archaeology, we conceptualize network archaeology as a call to investigate networks past and present – using current networks to catalyze new directions for historical inquiry and drawing upon historical cases to inform our understanding of today’s networked culture. (ibid., 140; and Starosielski et al. 2012)

Once again, Liu touches upon perspectives very close to the ones addressed in this volume, and once again, we operate on different levels of abstraction. Interestingly enough, Liu does not approach this sense of history from an epistemological point of view (which could be expected given his earlier blog post). However, he does some important work in merging distant and close reading techniques, and he discusses the possibility of media archaeology perspectives in the study of both historical and contemporary interfaces (especially in an interesting analysis of “timelines”).

By extrapolating Liu’s proposals, both in the blog post and in Friending the Past, the concept of digital epistemology could be said to establish a multidimensional and media archaeological approach to culture. The media archaeological perspective is shown primarily in the attention directed to the materialities of media, and on the insistence upon a historizing, yet non-linear, perspective. In the following pages this will be apparent when we look at digital history from the 1960s onwards, and when we juxtapose early modern expressions with present digital culture.

With its roots in discourse analysis and media history (counting Michel Foucault and Marshall McLuhan among its ancestors), media archaeology is well suited to describing these conditions. But it also seems apparent that this theoretical perspective can be regarded as an actual expression of the digital epistemology that is examined here, and several factors could be seen as consolidating this argument. For example, search engines such as Google and Bing, as well as library databases, encourage delving into one-year studies, or more or less random juxtapositions between topics or historical moments. The evolution of search engines and digital databases happens to coincide with fatigue concerning the hermeneutical paradigm, which has permeated the academic discourse of modernity—that is, during the last two centuries. Not that media archaeologists should be using Google or Bing more than their hermeneutic colleagues (if they ever were to be divided into two camps), but it becomes apparent that the “epistemology of the internet” is well matched with media archaeological approaches. It is reasonable to suggest—bearing in mind Marshall McLuhan’s dictum from Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man that the content of every new medium is always another medium—that the media archaeologist’s fascination with the (neglected, preferably) materialities of the history of media is both an effect of the possibilities brought forward by new technology, and a result of the increasing interest in analog nostalgia and the tactile qualities of media in art, music and literature we have seen in the past decades. In this volume, one argument thus will be that this analog and tactile nostalgia is an effect of, rather than a reaction to, digital media. These explorations, combined with a Foucauldian critique of the linearity of historiography, are common denominators for the heterogenous practices that are sorted under the media archaeological umbrella. This critical stance, we may remember, is articulated in The Archaeology of Knowledge:

There are the notions of development and evolution: they make it possible to group a succession of dispersed events, to link them to one and the same organizing principle, to subject them to the exemplary power of life … to discover, already at work in each beginning, a principle of coherence and the outline of a future unity. (Foucault 1972, 21–22)

For the French philosopher these coherences and unities are restrictions rather than representations of a “correct” order. As a consequence, the categories with which we normally describe the progress of cultural history—that is, epochs, genres, -isms—no longer can be seen as given. On the contrary, in Foucault’s analysis they appear as means of power and sorting tools, by which one includes some objects in history and excludes others. One counter-strategy against these tendencies could be (as did Nietzsche, Freud and Foucault) to regard history as something contemporary, the past as an active ingredient in the now—and it is apparent that digital tools have facilitated this approach.

Media archaeologists, apparently, find inspiration in Foucault and The Archaeology of Knowledge, but they also turn to Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk, where the physical spaces—the arcades—function as nodes for analyzing a string of related phenomena:

Method of this project: literary montage. I needn't say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse – these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them. (Benjamin 1999, 460)

Benjamin’s lines of reasoning, his method (rather than his view of history), is clearly echoed in Foucault’s reflections in The Archaeology of Knowledge:Footnote 15

For archaeological analysis, contradictions are neither appearances to be overcome, nor secret principles to be uncovered. They are objects to be described for themselves, without any attempt being made to discover from what point of view they can be dissipated, or at what level they can be radicalized and effects become causes. (Foucault 1972, 151)

The contradictions here work in a “rhizomatic” way rather than as a dialectical synthesis. No secrets, no enigma, only these contradictions we call history. With digital epistemology, digitization is regarded as (different) modes of thought, modes which encourage juxtapositions and treat cultural history as a montage.

In an essay discussing “The World Wide Web as Curiosity Museum,” Michelle Henning connects Foucault’s archaeology to the “Berlin school of ‘media archaeologists’” and also to Benjamin’s method:

The practice of writing history should be, according to Benjamin, not sequential, but based on the establishing of constellations, a collage-like process in which past moments and historical material operate as denaturalizing “shock” to the present. (Henning 2007, 73)

Media archaeologists, thus, possibly inspired by Benjamin’s method and Foucault’s challenge to historiography, apply different strategies in order to write those alternative histories Foucault calls upon. For example, they may, as does the Finnish media archaeologist Erkki Huhtamo in Illusions in Motion 2013, regard the history of media as a more or less literally archaeological endeavor, tracing those technological artifacts that are forgotten, or that never found their way into the histories of arts or media (Huhtamo 2013). Or, as Finnish compatriot Jussi Parikka notes, taking cinema as a case in point: “The emphasis in media archaeology has been on nineteenth-century devices that seem to gesture not only a way towards the birth of cinema, but also to the possibilities of differing routes” (Parikka 2012, 64). Another method is to study very narrow time spans, maybe just one single year (Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht 1997), and to use the year as a more neutral point of departure in writing history, as in for example A New History of French Literature and the accompanying volume A New History of German Literature, where entries appear by year and not by subject, genre or epoch (Hollier 1989; Ryan and Wellbery 2004).Footnote 16 Another version of this model is to bypass the evolutionary narrative of history by juxtaposing, or contrasting, shorter or longer time spans, as in Friedrich Kittler’s groundbreaking study Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (Kittler 1990) or—on a more humble scale—as in an essay by this book’s author on H.G. Wells’ and Orson Welles’ respective versions of The War of the Worlds (Ingvarsson 2012).

1.5 The Book

The following chapters approach the notion of digital epistemology from different heuristic angles. In Chap. 2, “Evoking McLuhan’s Juxtapositions in the Digital Age: Archaeology and the Mosaic,” the media archaeological juxtaposition of then and now is traced to the practice of Marshall McLuhan, and how he contrasted his own time with the Renaissance. But the chapter also points to some important differences between McLuhan and the media archaeology of the digital age. This is followed by some quick examples of recursive juxtapositions between older forms and the digital age. The chapter ends with two contemporary examples of “analog nostalgia.”

Chapter 3, “CCC versus WWW: Digital Epistemology and Literary Text,” traces “the digital” in literary texts that do not obviously treat digital phenomena, and continues to suggest the use of some early modern genres and orders of things as reference points to (our) contemporary literature. Chapter 4, “‘Books Are Machines’: Materiality and Agency 1960–2010,” approaches digital history in two ways. First, the progression from huge machines to ubiquitous computing is juxtaposed with the technologies of fear, shifting from bombs to viruses, tentatively as a result of the Y2K scare (and as I am writing this, the Covid-19 pandemic is making the virus threat more obvious than ever; the following chapters, though, were written before the outbreak, so I leave it to the reader to make further observations). Second, two Swedish literary experiments, one from 1965 and the other from 2010, are analyzed in their staging of digital technologies and the effect this has on the notion of agency. Finally, in Chap. 5, “Towards a 21st Century Pedagogy for the Humanities,” the juxtaposition between digital culture and early modern modes of thought is extrapolated, and the approach here could be regarded as more pedagogical, ending in a list of suggestions for how collaborations could be encouraged between digital humanists and historians of art or literature.

Since my approach is that of offering perspectives, rather than promoting a one-dimensional argument, I will not even try to summarize the content. Moreover, considering the relative brevity of this work, it is my hope that the reader will not find it all too necessary to have a final repetition of my proposals and perspectives.