In this electronic information age, art gives the greatest exercise for the muscles of our minds, critic Sven Birkerts tells Belinda McKeon.
The computers were coming. They were going to take us over. They were going to destroy our ability to think for ourselves, to use language in anything approaching a complex, subtle, intelligent way. They were going to rip us away from our books.
They were going to flatten our sense of history, existing within the depth of field which linked us to the past as well as to the present. Computers, catching us fast in their electronic webs, were set to shatter our very selves, to pulverise our patches of subjective space.
Things didn't look good, wrote the critic and essayist Sven Birkerts in his 1994 book, The Gutenberg Elegies, which set out the unsettling details of what lay ahead. Things looked grim, and glassy-eyed, and sort of soulless. "Being a curmudgeon is a dirty job," Birkerts wrote, "but somebody has to do it. Someone has to hoist the warning flags."
Twelve years later, Birkerts is still waving the red flag. He still sees the electronic age as posing a threat to the integrity of individual identity; he still sees the internet, and digital technology, as the frazzling, fragmenting forces which pull the self in so many different directions - so many of them useless, so many of them shallow - that the self begins to lose its moorings, begins to lose its sense of itself, its stance on the things which matter.
He still fights the curmudgeon's fight; these days, however, he fights it as much within the contested territory as without. He uses computers now - back in 1994, he proudly declared that he had produced the manuscript of his book on a word processor - and has even stretched to e-mail, with an address (his moniker is Cyberbirk) which looks like a weary shrug towards his old friend, intransigence.
He won't, however, hear tell of a mobile phone. As a writer and editor (he heads up the literary journal AGNI, produced out of a basement in the Boston University building where Robert Lowell once taught), as a teacher (he has taught at Harvard, Amherst and Emerson College, and currently teaches on the writing programme at Mt Holyoke, Massachusetts), and as a father (he has two teenage children, both resolutely digital, he says), he has been forced to come reluctantly online. But an e-mail account is as far as he's willing to go, he insists.
"It makes things more complicated," he says, sitting in a battered armchair in the aforementioned basement, not a computer screen in sight. Back issues of AGNI are packed around the walls, and it's difficult to get a phone signal down here. Birkerts looks content. But he's not really, it seems.
His deep pessimism about the influence of technology on society, on the human mind, still stands, he says, and that he is now "implicated" in this very technology only gives him an even starker impression of the problems.
"I just have new things to be depressed about," he says. "I still feel alarmed and disheartened, not by the fact of these things, but by the pace of them."
BIRKERTS WILL BE in Dublin this week, to give the third annual Irish Pages lecture, in association with Critical Voices, the Arts Council's programme of public debate. "The Drowning Signal" is the title of his talk. It will comprise an update of sorts on The Gutenberg Elegies, an analysis of just how far and how fast we have travelled, in the clutches of the digital, over the past decade, and how we need to steer this trajectory, to avoid a future that is disastrous on all human fronts, from the psychological to the physical to the intellectual.
The venue, the Royal Irish Academy, sounds apt, he remarks. Apt, because like much of his writing on the conflict between self-hood and cyberspace, his talk will deal partly with his conviction that a stable sense of self is intimately connected to the sort of undisturbed, contemplative reading and thinking that he associates with the quiet of old-fashioned libraries, the literary culture of the academy.
Yes, it's a romantic conviction, admits Birkerts, and one for which he has earned the scorn of more tech-happy writers including Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired magazine, with whom Birkerts has been engaged in a long-running debate since the publication of the Elegies. But it's a conviction to which he's still happy to sign his name. Because he genuinely believes that the privacy of human identity is at stake.
"When I talk about the self," he says, "I basically talk about a distillation of subjective inwardness, that which we are when we're alone, as opposed to a social self. Though the two are obviously in relation, I think that if the nature of social living, and the whole pressure on the social self changes, it obviously affects us in our solitary or existential self."
Pressure on the social self, he argues, happens when the notion of the community in which that self comprehends itself becomes radically overhauled, in time and in space. Communities are being replaced, he says, by complex networked social entities.
"There used to be these given sanctums. I mean, there used to be a certain, essential, common human isolation which at one point was actual, was geographic; it was the circumstance of how people lived. And we've gotten very, very good at modifying that, changing it, turning the basic 'I' in the world into an 'I' with many wires, plugs, things protruding. It has changed the nature of thinking. The contemplative self now has to fight to make a space in which to be a contemplative self. In ways that I think were very different in the past."
But the past has passed. And community, it can be argued, is a much more vibrant and inclusive thing now that it is a virtual as well as a physical possibility. Nor does it necessarily rule out interaction of a geographic kind; think of the kids on networking sites such as Bebo or Facebook, which allow members to search for one another by school, and say online the hello which shyness or circumstance might render difficult in the outside world. In cyberspace, after all, nobody can see you blush (spoken like a true survivor of an all-girls' school).
It can't be denied that the communication made possible by websites like these, or by other forms of online networking - chatrooms, forums, blogs - has the potential to be less than friendly, to be intimidating, sinister, criminal. But there's surely no reason to fear that, by being partly conducted through the computer screen, human relationships are on their way to something dire?
"Well, I have my own personal nostalgic attachment to the historical precedent, to the norm," says Birkerts, "because it's the world as I found it and grew up in it. Because of that, it seems to be, you know, the right world. I also hold open the possibility that if we are at a transformation point, and on some threshold, and if things radically reconfigure on the other side of that . . . I'm not going to risk saying that that's The Bad. But I think that enormous questions are going to come up about how we create a sustaining sense of individual value and purpose. To be living in a world which is dominated by a way that it hadn't ever been before, by quick-paced instantaneous operations systems at many, many levels. It's just - where is the self in that?"
What most worries Birkerts about what he believes to be the future of the human self is the extent to which that self will be "networked": attuned to signals, reliant on search engines, rather than thinking and making connections for itself. It's an extreme vision; a vision, almost, of intellectual atrophy. But, for all the extremism of Birkerts' caution, it's one which may well ring uncomfortably true for anyone who already treats Google like a family member.
"I think that what will happen is that we will increasingly delegate to our technology and allow it to become a kind of prosthesis," he says. "You know, so that it's always there, the tool, and you don't, in a sense, really need to hold all that information you had once held about the origins, say, of the French Revolution. Because what you know, now, is how to get to it. That becomes a second field of knowledge."
AS A TEACHER of writing and of literature, Birkerts has seen first hand the results of the new methods of scholarship: bibliographies consist of one Wikipedia entry after another, library seats are empty as a quick scan of Google Books in the dorm room the night before deadline provides all the references a student needs to give the impression of being well-read.
Unsurprisingly, Birkerts is not a huge fan of internet-led research. "What I don't like is that there's a reflex habit that gets planted, which will only deepen," he says. "Which is the idea that knowledge is, essentially, available at a single trough. And it sort of begins to push away and dilute the whole sort of tactile variousness of book culture, which had all of its problems, but which was also a wonderful metaphor for individuated diversity of thought and expression. And everything didn't flow into this one basic spout, this one spigot. And I think that it changes our inner sense of relation to the idea of knowledge, and that we need to be aware, when these things become habitual."
Internet research is often so rapid and so narrow in its focus that the sense of serendipity which can inform more meandering reading and thinking is lost.
"It eliminates the context of adjacency," Birkerts says. Which is also the problem of what will happen if newspapers disappear, which he believes they essentially will, faced with blogs and other online sources of information.
"If you can just cut straight to your story, what you lose is always the peripheral context of other stories, stories that you may or may not read. And in the [ virtual] library, you can't go to a section of the shelf, and look through the physical book for the information, and make a hundred points of contact with probably useless but sustaining and potential kinds of information."
It's the literary imagination, or more broadly the artistic imagination, in which Birkerts sees a glimmer of hope for the sustenance of self and of the very muscles of the human mind. The creation and the reception of art demands the sort of time, he says, which cannot be lived in jump-cut form, which cannot be flashed through, from window to window; it demands "the kind of time that has very much to do with attention and focus," he says.
"Time not aware of itself as time. The time you inhabit when you're mowing a field, or reading for hours . . . the time of absorption. And I think that this time, duration time I call it, is the time in which we either create or experience any sort of art, for one thing.
"Art can't be experienced in multi-flip-second time, it has to be engaged. And when you really make your way back to the work of art or literature or whatever it is, you're not only getting the wrestling with the message or the meaning or whatever it is that the artist is trying to impart, but in the process of doing it, you are also tapping into the kind of focus and attention that was required to make it. And that becomes a great kind of resource, in a way."
Sven Birkerts will deliver the third annual Irish Pages lecture, The Drowning Signal: Self in the Information Age, at the Royal Irish Academy at 7.30pm on Thurs, in association with Critical Voices 3. The lecture will be followed by an audience Q&A. Admission is free but booking is recommended, through www.ria.ie/ committees/irishliteratures/new.html or on 01-6762570
