CLAL on Culture
Welcome to CLAL on Culture where you will find the latest thoughts and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on contemporary culture: high and low, material and ethereal, trendy and retro, Jewish and otherwise. Every other week you will find something new on this page.
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Will the Real Elianna Please
Come Forward?
By Robert Rabinowitz
Three months ago, my wife and I were
blessed with our first child, a beautiful little girl named Elianna. Because our families live far away, in the UK and
Israel, we bought ourselves a very basic digital camera so that we could send photos via
e-mail within five minutes of taking a
picture. This allows our families to feel
much more in touch with Elianna as she grows and develops week by week. Between the ease
of taking pictures and the excitement of parenthood, we have taken between four and five
hundred digital photos in the few weeks since Elianna was born.
This growing cache of digital images
of my new daughter that I’ve been making and circulating has led me to think about
the changing technologies of memory. Though
digital photos might strike us as merely a minor variation on the paper photo medium, some
of the seemingly trivial differences between them will surely have profound implications
for our experiences of memory, and our ideas about what constitutes a true and reliable
record of reality.
With so many photos on our hard
drive, for instance, I have been thinking about where and how we are going to store them. There is a certain safe, concrete durability about
a photo album which can stay in a cupboard or on a shelf for years within easy reach. There is no computer medium which matches that
durability. And there is a good chance that
today’s file formats will not be accessible to the technology of 20-30 years’
time.
In addition to being physically more
ephemeral than film-based photographs, digital photos are also more mutable. The computer program that comes with the camera
has a range of editing capabilities: changing the brightness, shifting the color to sepia,
adding some special effects, editing out inconvenient details. It might be argued that there is something
fraudulent about altering a photo so that it does not accurately reflect reality. But often I feel that a photo does not reflect the
reality that I wanted to capture while the digital camera allows me to get closer to what
I actually wanted. Why insist that the aim of
a photograph is to obtain an “objective” picture of reality? That certainly was not the purpose of portraiture
throughout most of the history of painting. I
am actually quite happy for my memories to be tinged with the fuzzy, cloud effect that the
computer allows me to put round the edge of a photo.
I want my photos of Elianna to reflect – to borrow a phrase from F.
Scott Fitzgerald – my “irresistible prejudice” in her favor.
The ephemerality and mutability of
digital photos when compared to paper photos brought to mind the historical process by
which oral cultures, which relied on the storage and transmission of information through
the ephemeral and highly mutable medium of memory, were supplanted by cultures that relied
on writing and more durable records. As
digital information technology spreads, perhaps we are entering a new phase in which the
“hard copy” is now being supplanted by a continuous, dynamic, ever-changing flow
of ones and zeroes. The shift in how we make
and store photographs raises some of the same fundamental issues raised by the previous
transition. What are the best ways to
preserve and transmit information over time? What
gets created or lost in different modes of transmission?
Evidence that these questions are not
merely theoretical but have profound cultural implications connected to issues of power
and authority can be found in both classical Jewish and Greek thought. The Babylonian
Talmud, for example, makes a distinction between those teachings that were written,
like the Torah, and those that traditionally were to be committed to memory and
transmitted orally, such as the Talmud itself. It
cites the opinion of rabbis who state: “Those who write the traditional teachings
[are punished] like those who burn the Torah, and he who learns from them [the writings]
receives no reward…matters received as oral traditions you are not permitted to
recite from writing and written things [Biblical passages] you are not permitted to recite
from memory” (Temurah 14b). The passage is particularly ironic, of course, for
having been preserved in the very same written work it condemns.
Plato, in The Phaedrus, may help us to understand the
vehemence of this objection to making a “hard copy” of oral teachings. Socrates cites approvingly an Egyptian tradition
that writing creates “forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will
not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not
remember of themselves. [Writing] is an aid
not to memory, but to reminiscenc.” (Phaedrus
275a-b [Jowett]). Socrates does not seem to
object to the use of notes that are written in order to help one memorize something, but
to the replacement of memorization with information storage via “hard copy.” For Socrates, over-reliance on written texts as
carriers of information rather than one’s own memory represents not just a shift in
mode of storage, but actually an erosion of character.
He claims that people who rely on writing will “be hearers of many
things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally
know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the
reality.” (I could almost see Socrates
giving me a knowing look when I read a report in the Atlantic
Monthly of February 2001 that while “some 80 percent of seniors at elite colleges
and universities had scored the equivalent of a D or an F on a rudimentary survey of
American history...99 percent correctly identified Beavis and Butthead.”)
Socrates also believes that “writing is unfortunately like painting; for the
creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet, if you ask them a question
they preserve a solemn silence. And the same
may be said of speeches. You would imagine
that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of
them, the speaker gives one unvarying answer. And
when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may
not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not” (Phaedrus 275d-e [Jowett]). Writings lose the “live” element of oral
communication in which the words exchanged are tailored to the particular characters of
the participants and their context. A written
document, from this perspective, is like a speech uttered by no one to nobody and thus
ignores the very particularities that give communication its purpose. Perhaps this is why the Baal Shem Tov, the
legendary founder of Hasidism, objected so strongly to a written record taken of his
stories, advice and teachings (Martin Buber, Tales
of the Hasidim: Early Masters,
p. 66).
Socrates, the Talmudic rabbis and the
Baal Shem Tov all understood that something more was at stake in the shift from reliance
on memory to written documents than merely the adoption of a better technology to carry
out an otherwise neutral task. The increased
longevity and pervasiveness of documentation has led to a changed understanding of the
relative balance between memory and “writing,” so that, as Socrates forecast,
writing (and printing) no longer serves as an aid to memory but has become the standard of
objectivity itself.
A series of passages in the Philosophical Investigations, one of the two
master-works of Wittgenstein, a twentieth century Austrian philosopher of Jewish ancestry,
exemplifies this shift in the standard of objectivity.
The passages argue against the theory that the true meaning of any word is
to be found in the private intentions of the person using it and hence that meaning is,
strictly speaking, incommunicable. Wittgenstein
claims that meaningful language use depends on objective, sharable standards of
correctness. To illustrate his point, he
contrasts a person’s recollections of a
train timetable with the physical document by which we are able to judge the correctness
of those recollections (Philosophical
Investigations, §265). In these
passages, Wittgenstein characterizes memory as subjective, fuzzy and unreliable, while he
sees physical documents as objective and immutable. The
shift in information storage technology from memory to documentation has actually
transformed what counts as objective and real.
This change in the standard of what
counts as objective and real undermines the foundation of oral cultures, and hence the
authority of oral teachers, as Socrates, the Talmudic rabbis and the Baal Shem Tov well
understood. Donald Tuzin, an American anthropologist who specializes in the study of the
Ilahita people of Papua New Guinea, illustrates the way written culture can undermine oral
culture. The Ilahita’s origin myth tells the tale of a First Man who kidnapped and
seduced Nambweapa’w, a beautiful woman who usually took the form of a cassowary. Historical research suggests that key elements of
this myth, which the tellers believe goes back to the very origin of the human race,
actually brought to Papua New Guinea by Malay traders in the mid-nineteenth century
(Donald Tuzin, The Cassowary’s Revenge, pp.
68-95).
Tuzin’s research demonstrates
that one of the ironic features of memory is that while it is both more ephemeral and more
mutable than documentation, the very process of memorizing oral communication creates a
very conservative sense of fidelity to the original.
The paradoxical combination of apparent fidelity and actual mutability
allows for relatively new components to be incorporated into an oral tradition without any
noticeable discontinuity. Of course, this
mutability of memory cannot be demonstrated without reference to more immutable forms of
data storage, such as writing. The historical
studies of the evolution of the cassowary myth could not be undertaken without written
records and other artifacts that can verifiably be dated. Such
historical and anthropological evidence also throws into question the traditional rabbinic
claim of an unbroken and inerrant oral tradition from the time of Moses to the time of the
Talmud, and hence the authority of the rabbis who make that claim. The undermining of oral cultures is a powerful
feature of the Enlightenment and Modernity to this day.
Haym Soloveitchik, in his article “Rupture and Reconstruction” (in
Jews in America, edited by Rosenberg &
Waxman) discusses how books codifying standard Orthodox Jewish practice continue to
displace the varieties of traditional practice that people have inherited through their
families.
Today, however, we may be seeing the
beginning of a reversal in this process, which will have equally profound effects. The very mutability and ephemerality of all
digital documents, like my photos of Elianna, mean that they cannot serve as the standard
of objectivity in the way that physical artifacts do.
To borrow Socrates’ distinction, digital photos are less like aids to
reminiscence – artifacts that serve as surrogate memories – than aids to
memory – artifacts that only serve to prompt the memory to recall what actually
happened. Perhaps this will force us to pay
more attention to being in the present moment rather than relying on the camera to catch
it for us so we can relive it later. And
maybe it will result in a new period of de-codification and de-standardization in many
areas of life, including religion, as people endlessly modify the ideas and information
they receive and transmit through their computers. Shifts
in information technology have played a key role in major intellectual and social
revolutions in the past. Perhaps the
increasing power and diffusion of information technology will lead to a culture in which
deaf, unresponsive physical artifacts and documents will lose their authority –
just like the oral teachers before them – and be supplanted by the mutable and
ephemeral power of the high-tech equivalent of oral communication to create a world in
which direct, live human communication is prized as the true standard of objectivity and
reality.
To view other articles by Robert Rabinowitz, click here.
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