Subject: An excerpt from The Electronic Word by Richard A. Lanham

An excerpt from:

The Electronic Word:  Democracy, Technology, and the Arts

by Richard A. Lanham

The University of Chicago Press


ABOUT THE BOOK:

"_The Electronic Word_ is a stunner, an utterly original 
contribution to the discussion of reading, television, 
education, democracy, technology, competitiveness, and 
Theory.... Lanham is more literate than the defenders of 
literacy, more hip than the defenders of hipdom. He looks 
forward, not too far, and sees us all pushing computer mice 
and synthesizing music. The breadth of reference in the book 
is astonishing.... Who better than such a wordsmith as 
Lanham to welcome the new age? It is not some computer-mad 
barbarian but Richard Lanham, the historian of rhetoric, the 
master teacher of writing, who invites us in."--Donald 
McCloskey

The personal computer has revolutionized the structure of 
communication, concealing beneath its astonishing 
versatility and consumer appeal a bold transition to 
electronic, postmodern culture. Unchecked by the inherent 
limitations of conventional print, digitized text has 
introduced a radically new medium of expression. 
Interactive, volatile, mixing word and image, the electronic 
word challenges all our assumptions about artistic, 
educational, and political discourse.

_The Electronic Word_, Richard Lanham's collection of witty, 
provocative, and engaging essays, explores this challenge. 
With hope and enthusiasm, Lanham surveys the effects of 
electronic text on the arts and letters and how they might 
be taught in a newly democratized society.

In this excerpt (chapter 4 of the book), Lanham argues that 
technology, the arts and letters, and the democratization of 
higher education are converging in ways more profound, and 
more resistant to categories of Left and Right, than the 
American academy has yet been prepared to recognize.



COPYRIGHT NOTICE:

"Chapter 4" from THE ELECTRONIC WORD:  DEMOCRACY, 
TECHNOLOGY, AND THE ARTS, by Richard A. Lanham, published by 
The University of Chicago Press, (c) 1993 by The 
University of Chicago.  All rights reserved.

This text may be used and shared in accordance with the 
fair-use provisions of US copyright law, and it may be 
archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that 
this entire notice is carried and provided that the 
University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is 
charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or 
republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, 
requires both the consent of the author and the University 
of Chicago Press.



TEXT:

(The chapter is preceded by an author's headnote. Ordering 
information for _The Electronic Word_ (which is available 
both as conventional book and in a hypertext edition for the 
Macintosh) appears at the end of the excerpt.)


The 1988 Duke conference at which I delivered the first 
version of this paper was described by its appointed 
summationer as a "pep rally for the New Left." It certainly 
felt like that. Lynne Cheney, then director of the National 
Endowment for the Humanities and self-appointed leader of 
the humanities’ New Right, sent advance copies of her report 
on the state of the humanities in America1 to the conference 
participants, as if firing a warning shot across the enemy’s 
bow. Several of us read the report and returned her fire in 
our presentations.
     My paper was supposed to supply the keynote, but I 
don’t think it did so. It didn’t fit the race/gender/class 
political agenda. Defining the "Great Books" debate in terms 
of Left and Right proved too much fun for both sides for 
either to notice the obsolescence of that confrontation. As 
I have argued in the preceding essays, the real change we 
must confront and understand is not a new selection of 
canonical great books but, as our expressive radical moves 
from print to screen, a new conception of human reason and 
how Western culture creates and transmits it. There are 
political implications aplenty in such a switch, but they 
don’t emerge from debates between "Westerns" and "Western 
culture."
     It has been discouraging to watch the profound 
disinclination of the "theory world" to acknowledge its 
rhetorical roots and branches. Perhaps any new academic 
movement in a competitive intellectual bureaucracy must 
exaggerate its newness to inspirit its adherents. But in 
this case, the failure to recognize the return of the 
rhetorical paideia for what it is has led to a needless 
"foundationalist" debate. We could clarify this debate by 
returning, ad fontes, to that ancient quarrel between the 
philosophers and the rhetoricians which we are now 
reincarnating.
     Equally discouraging have been the efforts to defend 
the codex book as the bastion of Western culture, as if 
defending the wrapper would protect what is in the box. In 
1977, Congress established the Library of Congress Center 
for the Book, and the Modern Language Association of America 
has embraced the subsequent yearly rally-themes, such as 
"Explore New Worlds-Read," our motto for 1992. I’m not 
quarreling with these pious exhortations. I wish people 
would read more; it is good and good for them, and besides 
that, it makes them more like me, an addictive reader all my 
life. But these efforts to galvanize the codex book in the 
face of encroaching electronic expression miss the two basic 
points that should underlie such a campaign.
     The first is the "Q" question, which I consider in 
chapter 7. Before we fix on the book as the center of 
humanistic culture, shouldn’t we have a better idea of _what 
books do to and for us_? This is, after all, the fundamental 
issue confronting humanistic inquiry today. We should worry 
about what is in the box. Then we can better answer the 
second vital question: Having decided what we want to 
protect, how do we make sure it survives the movement from 
book to screen? Books will endure for a long time but, as we 
shall find several scholars arguing in chapters 8 and 9, a 
powerful tide is carrying us from printed to electronic 
expression. To defend the book _just for the form of the 
codex book_ is to focus on the box and not the contents. 
America does not lack, after all, for examples of industries 
and bureaucracies that have trained themselves around a 
particular technology and perished with it. Why should the 
American academy share this fate? If we fail to understand 
the expressive environment of our time, we will have failed 
in our duty as transmitters of culture, whether we think the 
culture to be preserved consists of Dead White Males or Live 
Female Revolutionaries of Color.
     I continue to think that it is the convergence of 
technology, the arts and letters, and the democratizing of 
higher education that poses our paramount cultural and 
educational _explanandum_. I don’t think this convergence 
either can or should be politicized into the current Left 
and Right. Its political implications run much deeper than 
this, and neither side seems predisposed to think much about 
them.
     My interest in the lower-division curriculum began in 
1952 when, as a naive sixteen-year-old Ford Foundation 
Scholar, I entered the Directed Studies Program at Yale. It 
hit me so hard I never got over it, and I have spent more 
years than I want to reckon trying to recreate for my own 
students the magic that I found there. Some of those years 
were the ones I spent as director of the UCLA Writing 
Programs, and it was there that I hoped to create the 
curriculum I describe at the end of this essay. Alas, it was 
not to be.



CHAPTER 4


In a mid-September weekend in 1988, a number of scholars met 
at Duke University and the University of North Carolina, 
Chapel Hill, for another session of the oldest class in 
American education, the Seminar on the Future of the Liberal 
Arts. Our class had, over the decades, featured many 
distinguished seminarians but a repetitive syllabus: Does 
the center of liberal education lie in methods or texts? If 
methods, intuitive or empirical? If texts, ancient or 
modern? In an age of specialization, how specialized should 
liberal education be? Should it have a core curriculum 
common to everyone and, if so, what kind? How democratic can 
liberal education become without trivializing itself? What, 
if anything, is a liberal education good for? And why, if we 
have such a dynamite product, is it often so hard to sell?
     This discussion began (if matters so deep can be said 
to begin) with the Yale Faculty Report of 1828.2 President 
Jeremiah Day and his colleagues addressed all these issues, 
and their answers don’t differ much from ours. They argued 
that students should know a lot, as Professor Hirsch has 
recommended,3 and that they should think a lot, as the 
Association of American Colleges panel has urged.4 President 
Day’s group stressed the final responsibility of each 
student for his own education, as did a subsequent Yale 
panel in 1972.5 Day’s committee argued that a liberal 
education should not be specialized or preprofessional but 
broad and humane, and these expansive sentiments have found 
echo in the Rockefeller Commission’s Report of 1980, where 
we read that "the essence of the humanities is a spirit or 
an attitude toward humanity."6 The 1828 group argued that a 
core curriculum is essential; so have many since, from John 
Erskine’s Great Books course at Columbia after World War I 
and its descendants at Chicago, Yale, and elsewhere, to 
recent pronouncements by ex-Education Secretary William 
Bennett and the _Wall Street Journal_. And just as Yale in 
1828 thought the proper time to move students from general 
education into their favorite special subject was the junior 
year,7 so do we. Like us, they were concerned to democratize 
access to higher education, and they sought to achieve this 
goal, as do we, by raising admissions standards. And of 
course they debated the canon, their Ancients and Moderns 
differing in language, but not in argument, from ours.
     The curricular historian Frederick Rudolph has some 
harsh words for the 1828 patriarchs: "They embraced the uses 
of the past, but they withdrew from the uncertainties of the 
future.   Their respect for quality, for standards, for 
certain enduring definitions of human worth, was class 
bound. They were blinded to much that was insistent and 
already out of control in American life."8 Just so. But here 
we were debating the same issues 160 years later. Why hadn’t 
we found some answers? Had nothing changed in this endless 
debate?
     I think three things have changed. Three new 
conditions, or clusters of conditions, have emerged-social, 
technological, and theoretical-and their convergence 
suggests a new kind of "core" for the liberal arts. 
     The social pressures are the easiest to summarize. 
First, the radical democratization of higher learning. In 
the early nineteenth century only one or two in a hundred 
Americans attended college, and they were almost all male, 
white, leisure-class, native English speakers; now half do, 
and they are often none of these. This change has been a 
gradual one but the quantitative change has now become a 
qualitative one. American minorities hitherto excluded from 
higher education have demanded access to it, and a new 
influx of immigrants has joined them. The immigrants who 
created modern America came in successive waves that left 
time for assimilation, and they came into an agrarian and 
then into an industrial society. Today’s immigrants come 
from dozens of cultures and languages all at once, and into 
an information society that rewards linguistic competence 
more than willing hands. Over 600,000 immigrants came to 
this country in 1987-probably more than to all the other 
countries in the world put together.9 And we have more in 
prospect: "In industrial countries the population is growing 
slowly and aging rapidly; in developing countries-China 
excepted-the population is growing fast enough to double in 
less than a generation, and 40% of the people are under age 
15."10 If we want to use that youthful energy, large-scale 
immigration and the linguistic and cultural adjustments it 
brings with it will be with us for a long time to come.
     Liberal arts education has been built on the word, and 
in America on the English word as spoken by middle-class, 
white, native speakers. We have thought of ourselves, up to 
now, as a monolingual country and have always, after each 
wave of immigration, become one again-notoriously so, in 
fact. That monolingualism has now been destabilized. We will 
have to rethink our entire enterprise. If we grow into 
bilingualism-English and Spanish-as well we may, that will 
present its own particular problems in the university, as it 
has for some time done in the schools. It may also present 
its own unique opportunities, as Greek and Latin once did 
working against one another in classical culture. If you 
want a numerical marker for this change, here’s one from the 
place where I earn my living: for several years now, 
undergraduate enrollment in the University of California at 
Berkeley and at Los Angeles has been more than 50 percent 
nonwhite.
     To this situation, add a further development. These new 
immigration patterns, permitting for the first time 
substantial numbers of entrants from non-Western lands, have 
brought to America a new citizenry for whom the "Western 
tradition" that informs our traditional humanities 
curriculum is alien. Judeo-Christian culture stands now 
subject to a polite but puzzled reappraisal. And other, very 
different reappraisals of the liberal arts are being made 
from very different points of view by women and by blacks.
     This linguistic and cultural revolution will force an 
answer to a major question that has been on our agenda since 
1828: How can we democratize the liberal arts without 
trivializing them? Up to now, our answer has been the 1828 
Yale answer: don’t really democratize them; it can’t be 
done; proceed as we always have-what else can we do, eternal 
verities being our principal product?-and let all these 
"nontraditional" students learn our ways as best they can. 
Political and economic pressures have now become too 
insistent for this. We are required to find really new ways 
to widen access to the liberal arts without trivializing 
them. Digital technology and rhetorical theory offer the new 
ways we need.
     The second social pressure is for systematic public 
accountability. Since government, whether federal, state, or 
local, pays for much of our labors and those of our 
students, it demands an accountability that Arnoldian 
sweetness and light were not formerly asked to supply. And 
students in the private sector have become more 
discriminating-or at least more price-conscious-consumers of 
educational services as well. We face now a genuinely new, 
more searching and quantitative, invigilation. We claim to 
teach culture, civic virtue, and advanced symbolic 
processing. When asked to prove it, we have always begged 
the question: of course we are vitally important, even 
though, since we do what we do "for its own sake," we can’t 
tell you why. But the issue is now being forced. George 
Steiner has been pressing it for years, to our stifled 
embarrassment, juxtaposing the pretensions of Western 
culture to the hundred million people that same culture has 
slaughtered in the twentieth century. And now the 
government, with less elegance and learning, is asking the 
same question: If the liberal arts do supply these needful 
qualities, as you claim, let’s have some proof; show us some 
statistics. If we can’t or won’t comply, then resources now 
given to us will be allocated elsewhere.
     The liberal arts, like higher education as a whole, 
have operated heretofore on our version of the "General 
Motors rule" ("What’s good for General Motors is good for 
the country"). What’s good for the arts must be good for the 
country. To doubt this only proves you a Philistine. Now we 
are asked, shocking though it be, to do some cost 
accounting. We shouldn’t be surprised at this. Every other 
sector of American professional life is being held 
accountable in new and detailed ways for its practices. Why 
not us? With our customary GM complacency and with a 
conception of costs that would disgrace a child’s lemonade 
stand, we will find this required accounting more than an 
incidental bureaucratic aggravation. It will force us to 
rethink the heart of our enterprise, to provide at last a 
straight answer to another vital question we have been 
dodging since 1828: What are the liberal arts good for?
     Third, educational sequence. Students now often come 
older to the university, attend in broken times often more 
than one institution, and take more than four years to 
graduate; more of them work, and work more. This fragmented, 
discontinuous pattern is now more norm than exception. To it 
we may add the conceptual dislocations they feel hourly as 
they change classes from one disciplinary universe to 
another. Yet our thinking about the undergraduate curriculum 
continues to assume the four-year, upper- and lower-
division, linear sequence and ignores the conceptual 
bewilderment it imposes on students. This assumption, as we 
shall see, blinds us to the only kind of core curriculum-a 
third key item left over from the 1828 agenda-that is 
possible today.
     None of these social pressures-democratization, 
accountability, or educational sequence-is unprecedented, 
but surely we must reckon their intensity and combined force 
as something really new. The second emergent condition I'’ll 
consider, the pressures of electronic digital technology on 
the liberal arts, is in itself truly a new thing under the 
sun.

                         *    *    *

     Imagine a student brought up on computers interacting 
with the volatile text I'’ve described in earlier chapters. 
She is used to moving it around, playing games with it, 
illustrating and animating it. Now let her follow Arnold’s 
advice and sift a dubious classic like, say, _Love’s Labor’s 
Lost_. Imagine her charting the rhetorical figures, 
displaying them in a special type, diagramming and 
cataloguing them, and then making hypertext animations of 
how they work. She’ll use another program now on the market 
to make her own production, plotting out action, sight 
lines, costumes, etc. And then a voice program to suggest 
how certain lines should be read. Or she can compile her own 
edition, splicing in illustrations of cheirographia from the 
contemporary manuals. Or make it into a film. Or simply mess 
around with it in the irreverent way undergraduates always 
have, mustaching the _Mona Lisa_ just for the hell of it.
     All of these machinations upon greatness are 
pedagogical techniques that open literary texts to people 
whose talents are not intrinsically "literary," people who 
want, in all kinds of intuitive ways, to operate upon 
experience rather than passively receive it. Codex books 
limit the wisdom of the Great Books to students who are 
Great Readers-as, to be sure, all of us who debate 
curricular matters were and are. Electronic text blows that 
limitation wide open. It offers new ways to democratize the 
arts, ways of the sort society is asking us to provide. If 
groups of people newly come to the world of liberal learning 
cannot unpack the Silenus box of wisdom with the tools they 
bring, maybe we can redesign the box electronically, so that 
the tools they have, the talents they already possess, will 
suffice. We need not necessarily compromise the wisdom 
therein.
     I don’on'think that the Great Books, for example, the 
classical tradition now defended with Luddite determination, 
will suffer by electronic presentation. Just the opposite, 
in fact. (And, we might reflect, because they are mostly in 
the public domain, the great books will be the first to be 
digitized.) We have, ever since the Newtonian interlude 
banished rhetoric, sifted out the rhetorical ingredient from 
our classical texts. Yet all these texts, the Greek and 
Roman ones entirely, the medieval and Renaissance ones in 
Christian partnership, were created out of a rhetorical 
tradition and can be understood only in light of it. We have 
had so hard a time selling the Great Books partly because we 
have systematically travestied their greatness, strained 
out-both in commentary and in translation-half of what makes 
them great. They weave their spell out of the ancient 
quarrel between the philosophers and the rhetoricians, and 
we have cut that quarrel in half and broken the spell. 
     Here, as so often, the humanities have _created_ the 
"humanities crisis" they have spent the last century 
maundering on about. The bit-mapped, graphics-based personal 
computer is, as I have argued in chapter 2, intrinsically a 
rhetorical device. In its memory storage and retrieval, in 
its dynamic interactivity, in the dramatic rehearsal-reality 
it creates, in the way game and play are built into its 
motival structure, it expresses the rhetorical tradition 
just as the codex book embodies the philosophical tradition. 
The computer’s oscillation between reader and writer 
reintroduces the oscillation between literate and oral 
coordinates that stands at the center of classical Western 
literature. The electronic word will allow us to teach the 
classical canon with more understanding and zest than ever 
before. We don’t need to worry about its impending 
destruction, or deconstruction. Western Lit is in no danger 
from Westerns. They are both going interactive.
     Indeed, by devising new ways to unlock the Western 
tradition for _nontraditional_ students, we may find out 
more about what its wisdom is and does, begin to answer that 
other pressing question, what are the arts and letters good 
for? Up to now, the liberal arts have always, when pressed, 
been able to define their essence by appealing to their 
expressive means. Literary scholars read books and write 
them. Musicians compose music and play it. Artists paint 
pictures. Taking away this physical definition of the 
liberal arts-defining them by pointing to the physical 
objects they create, or that create them-compels the arts to 
define their essence in a new way.
     The powers of digital technology both to teach 
nontraditional students and to document how they learn are 
being explored in a world the academic liberal arts have 
ignored, the world of applied-learning technologies 
developed for business, government, and the military. The 
developers of these interactive laserdisc "texts" and 
computer-managed instructional programs, because they do not 
share our commitment to the codex book, and because they 
must document the success of their efforts, have approached 
digital pedagogy without crippling preconceptions. They are 
redefining what a textbook is, among other things, and 
completely renegotiating the traditional ratio of alphabetic 
to iconographic information upon which it has been based. 
Their _logos_ has already become bi-stable.
     They capitalize on another democratizing insight that 
traditional humanists have ignored. When the arts are 
digitized, as they all now have been, they become radically 
interchangeable. A single digital code can be expressed in 
either sight or sound. Even the most traditional musicians 
are coming to acknowledge that the basis for the creation, 
notation, and performance of music has become digitized. It 
is not simply that notation and printing-the notoriously 
expensive bottleneck in that art-is now almost a do-it-
yourself affair. Musical instruments themselves have been 
transformed. The clavier keyboard is now a unitary input 
device for all kinds of musical output. One digital "horn" 
creates the sounds of every instrument in a wind ensemble. 
Visual and musical signals are routinely translated into and 
out of one another for sampling and editing. If you sit down 
to a weighted-action electronic keyboard, you confront, in 
addition to the familiar eighty-eight in white and black, 
wave forms graphically displayed, a library of sounds on 
disk, and a computer to play, and play with, them. Such 
instruments, and such a manner of composition and 
performance, call upon talents quite different from those 
demanded when our mothers cajoled us into doing our Czerny 
exercises. The neural mix seems almost totally new, in fact. 
One software program, cheap and widely available, allows 
anyone, with no training whatsoever, to compose music by 
drawing with a mouse and then translating the sketch into 
its musical equivalent. (No, the music produced isn’t 
horrid.) Digital synthesizers and samplers allow sounds to 
be created and edited as visual patterns. Musicians can now 
even choose with a keystroke which temperament (among other 
performance parameters) they wish to observe, from 
conventional equal temperament to the just intonation of 
Harry Partch. Digitization has rendered the world of music-
making infinitely more accessible than it was, accessible to 
people who before had not the talent or the resources to 
make music and hear how it sounds.
     The metamorphic pressures on painting are equally 
Ovidian. Even as pixeling a written text onto an electronic 
screen radically destabilizes and volatilizes it, so 
painting on an electronic screen launches the image into an 
existence forever _in potentia_. Electronic painting exists 
to be transformed by the viewer. The image you see is but 
one readout of a digital code that can produce hundreds 
more. Apply a contrast-enhancement program and you have a 
different picture; a Fourier transform and you get yet 
another. The Arnoldian ideal of fixed perfection simply 
dissolves. Again, as with literature, the entire supporting 
structure of criticism must be recomputed.
     This digital revolution offers the most extraordinary 
opportunities to _teach_ the arts in new ways, from 
kindergarten to graduate school. The criticism/creation 
dichotomy automatically becomes, in a digital world, a 
dynamic oscillation: you simply cannot be a critic without 
being in turn a creator. This oscillation prompts a new type 
of teaching in which intuitive skills and conceptual 
reasoning can reinforce one another directly. The digital 
interchangeability of the arts through a common code-that 
old Platonic dream that everything returns to 
mathematics-allows us to translate one range of human 
talents into another. Our sense of how teaching _in_ the 
arts, and _about_ the arts, ought to proceed is 
metamorphosed, again with truly Ovidian intensity and 
insouciance, by this convertibility. Academic humanists, so 
far as I can discover, have hardly begun to think about 
these opportunities, but they will help us answer the social 
pressures of the time.
     Digitization of the arts radically democratizes them. 
The woman who wrote the program that translates a drawing 
into music did so because she wanted to open up musical 
composition to people who had no training in or talent for 
it, but loved it nevertheless. Digitization makes all the 
arts interactive, opens them up potentially to the full 
range of talents that humankind possesses. The people who 
developed the personal computer considered it a device of 
radical democratization from its inception. It was a way to 
open levels of symbolic transformation, and the work and 
information that went with them, to people hitherto shut out 
from this world. This democratization is a perfect instance 
of the new thinking society is demanding of the liberal 
arts.
     I have remarked in passing that digitizing the arts 
requires a new criticism of them. We have it already in the 
postmodern aesthetic. The fit is so close that one might 
call the personal computer the ultimate postmodern work of 
art. The Italian Futurists at the beginning of the century 
attacked the codex book and its conventional typography, and 
in their "Teatro di Varietà" bullied the silent Victorian 
audience into interactivity. Duchamp and Stella exhibited, 
or tried to exhibit, their celebrated urinal in order to 
move the definition of art from the masterpiece to the 
beholder. John Cage opened music-making to everyone by 
converting everything into a potential musical instrument. 
The repetition and variation of motifs drawn from a 
treasure-house of standard forms (a routine postmodern 
rhetorical tactic from Andy Warhol to Charles Moore) is done 
by the electronic arts with ridiculous ease. Electronic 
interactive fiction finds rehearsals in printed postmodern 
fiction.
     One of the computer’s most powerful gifts of 
interactivity is the power to change scale. Absolutely 
altering one boundary-condition of the visual arts, it has 
put scaling into continual dynamic play as a choice for both 
beholder and creator. Scaling is an analytic as well as 
creative tool of extraordinary power, and it is available to 
anyone "reading" images on a graphics computer. You just 
click in the zoom box. Scaling is everywhere in the 
postmodern arts, from Oldenburg’s gigantic Swiss Army Knife 
Venetian Galley and Rosenquist’s gigantic billboard 
paintings to the music of Philip Glass. Robert Wilson’s 
dramas are extended experiments in the time-scaling of 
rhetorical gesture, in the revelations of very, very slow 
motion. Everywhere such experiments strive to make us aware 
of how scale determines the world we live in, and gives us 
an unprecedented power to domesticate it, live in it 
comfortably. A major term in the liberal arts has been 
factored out of the masterpiece aesthetic and radically 
democratized, and has found a direct digital counterpart.
     The most powerful influence of the computer on modern 
thinking, I would argue, is not statistical or scientific 
but humanistic. Rhetorical, in fact. Precisely as the 
rhetorical practice of declamation put dramatic rehearsal at 
the center of classical thought, the computer has put 
modeling at the center of ours. It is difficult to 
overestimate the influence of this across-the-board 
dramaticality in the world of contemporary affairs. And 
again we find a counterpart in that range of postmodern art 
which constitutes itself from self-conscious happenings.
     My long discussion of Christo’s _Running Fence_ in 
chapter 2 addresses directly the questions first formulated 
by the 1828 Yale committee: How do we democratize art 
without trivializing it? How do you factor out the powers of 
the masterpiece and make them available to an untrained 
audience? If the liberal arts teach citizenship, how can 
they do it for every citizen? As with all of Christo’s 
works, the "work" involved not only building the fence 
itself but turning into self-conscious art, through hearings 
and publicity and subsequent films and publications, the 
four years of arrangements and permits and bureaucratic 
wrangling needed to legalize the administrative structure, 
and all the engineering efforts needed to design and build 
it, and the civic efforts needed to control and comfort the 
crowds who would view it. Christo converted American 
industrial enterprise, that is, into a gigantic Happening, a 
live civics lesson. _Running Fence_ was not intended to 
allegorize the deficiencies of bureaucracy and so reform 
them, but only to make people visualize large-scale human 
organization in a clearer and more self-conscious way, as 
having its own form, justification, and even beauty. It made 
its art up out of politics.
     But to act in, and thus to "appreciate" _Running 
Fence_, no one needed a credential in connoisseurship. They 
had only to be what they were, do what they did to earn 
their living and play their social roles-but to look at all 
this in a new way, to look AT it rather than THROUGH it. 
Christo too was creating the pedagogical technique society 
now requires of the liberal arts, a new liberating art that 
could offer art’s defamiliarizing power to a wider audience. 
It was not intended to be immortal (like all Christo’s work, 
it was soon taken down) but to teach the opposite lesson, a 
reverence for transitory, _mortal_ enterprise. _Running 
Fence_ was also extraordinarily beautiful, because the 
beauty was needed to teach the integral lesson, show the 
dynamic relation between beauty and purpose that Christo has 
given his career to illustrating.

                         *    *    *

     I have been edging sideways toward the third of my 
three emergent conditions. To it I have despairingly-like an 
outfielder throwing his glove at a ball soaring overhead 
into the stands-given the name of "theory." The ball I’m 
throwing my glove at represents, if I have drawn its many 
parts together correctly, the revival of the classical 
system of education, the rhetorical paideia, of an applied 
rather than a pure, an interactive rather than a passive, 
conception of the liberal arts. This system of education 
prevailed in the West from the Greeks onward, until it was 
set aside by Newtonian science. It is now returning in the 
many guises I have described in chapter 3. It includes 
precisely the emergent social conditions I have been 
describing, as well as the postmodern digital aesthetic that 
is replying to them. Indeed, rhetoric itself may be viewed, 
like them, as an attempt to democratize genius for those 
not, by nature or society, gifted with it, to explore how 
far contrivance might supplement talent. A fit between the 
rhetorical paideia and the social and technological 
conditions that are helping to revive it makes intrinsic 
sense. It is not simply an accident.
     This revival of our traditional paideia includes those 
parts of contemporary literary criticism and cultural 
studies which have rediscovered that all arguments are 
constructed with a purpose, to serve an interest-a 
rediscovery symbolized by Terry Eagleton’s reflection, at 
the end of his literary-theory survey, that we might as well 
call the whole subject "Rhetoric."11 And it includes a great 
deal more. Taken together-wrapped up into that ball soaring 
above this essay’s outstretched glove-these theoretical 
efforts to make sense of our time amount, as the revival of 
rhetoric should, to a curricular revolution, a new 
didacticism. We might call it _experimental humanism_.
     Rhetoric persuades by taking for its engine our 
evolutionary heritage as primates-our need for pure play and 
competitive hierarchy-and slipstreaming behind them some act 
in the practical world. On this plate lies the main bone of 
contention over which the philosophers and the rhetoricians 
have been fighting all these 2,500 years. The philosophers 
believe that human motive is purpose-driven, and play and 
game derivative functions; the rhetoricians-forced to get 
results in the world of affairs-have always inverted this 
pattern. Sensible use, commonsensical reason, took charge, 
when these rarities could take charge, because the 
evolutionary deities of game and play, or the politicians 
and rhetoricians who manipulate them, had prepared the way.
     We now find ourselves in yet another rehearsal of this 
ancient quarrel between the philosophers and the 
rhetoricians. We pit sacred texts against topical ones, 
ultimately meaningful ones against ultimately meaningless 
ones, Plato against Isocrates, finally-you can fill in the 
other contrasted pairs of proper names yourself-pitting 
Almighty God against what one eminent theorist has called 
"the pleasures of the bottomless." The history of Western 
thought suggests that if we wait until this dispute is 
resolved before devising a responsive liberal arts 
curriculum, we shall wait a right good while. But Western 
education has never had the leisure to wait.
     Henri Marrou argued that, in this historic quarrel, 
although Plato won the battle, rhetoric won the war, 
actually formed the curriculum. I must disagree. The 
rhetorical paideia did not resolve this struggle, or simply 
teach the rhetorical side of it, but built the debate itself 
into Western education as its operating principle. Rhetoric 
as a theory has proved so exasperating and unsatisfactory 
precisely because it oscillated from one world view to the 
other. Rhetorical man was a dramatic game-player but he was 
always claiming that the ground he presently stood upon was 
more than a stage. Rhetoric’s central decorum enshrined this 
bi-stable oscillation: the great art of art was the art of 
hiding art, but you had better start out with some art to 
hide. In behavior, you should always be sincere, whether you 
mean it or not. This root self-contradiction, as Baldesare 
Castiglione saw when he gave it the Renaissance name 
_sprezzatura_, causes trouble only when you take it out of 
time. _In_ time, as a perpetual oscillation, it works fine. 
Generations of thinkers have bemused themselves, as we do 
today, by taking the oscillation out of time, stopping it to 
point out how immiscible the two ingredients are, how moral 
and formal judgments can never mix. This is how Peter Ramus, 
in the middle of the sixteenth century, started our 
humanities crisis. The rhetorical paideia that is now 
returning puts the oscillation back into time, handles the 
problem the Renaissance way. Experimental humanism, with its 
often outrageous didactic, seeks to reanimate that 
oscillation. It represents not a nihilistic repudiation of 
the Western intellectual tradition but a self-conscious 
return to it.
     The primary social pressure on the liberal arts-this at 
least has not changed-has always been a deep hunger for 
secular wisdom, for some cybernetic control of the forces 
that threaten to destroy us. This the rhetorical paideia, in 
the bi-stable form I have described, has always tried to 
supply. An educational system of this sort does not deny our 
need for absolutes; it domesticates and controls that need. 
In its natural oscillation, the rhetorical paideia is deeply 
irenic, would keep the peace by preventing us from filtering 
the self-interest and self-consciousness out of our most 
profoundly disinterested convictions and then committing 
atrocities in their name. It would control purpose, as 
Gregory Bateson counseled in his landmark article on the 
Treaty of Versailles, by showing us its roots in play and 
game.12 A rhetorical education, while reminding us of the 
inevitable circumstantiality of all human judgment, shows us 
how we can control and offset that circumstantiality. G. B. 
Kerferd remarks, in his book on the Greek Sophists, that it 
is not two-sided argument per se that distinguishes 
rhetorical education but the insistence that the _same 
person_ take both sides, first one then the other.13 
Civility requires the acceptance of imposture. That 
necessary lesson in toleration and self-understanding 
undergirds civic education in a secular democracy. It is the 
lesson that Americans are asking us once again to teach 
them. How, using the technological and theoretical resources 
we have just been pondering, might we do so? What would a 
liberal arts curriculum responsive to these emergent 
conditions look like? Let me briefly sketch a possible 
pattern.
     It would depart, in my view, from a reversal of the 
basic structural polarity of the undergraduate curriculum. 
Undergraduate education has systematically separated the 
first two years and the last, the upper and lower divisions. 
Ever since the upper division coalesced around the 
disciplinary major, it has predominated. The lower division 
has languished, a low-rent dumping ground without a 
rationale of its own. If I am correct that the convergence 
of social, technological, and theoretical emergent 
conditions constitutes a return to the classical rhetorical 
paideia, then this dominance is about to reverse itself. 
Rhetoric has always been a _general_ theory. That is its 
reason for being. It is centripetal, not centrifugal. It 
draws all subjects into its political and social center 
rather than spinning them out into separate, apolitical 
integers, as the modern curriculum has done. Rhetoric’s 
natural home is the lower division not the upper. If we are 
in the midst of a systemic change from specialized inquiry 
to general thinking, then the felt seriousness of the 
curriculum will shift from the upper division to the lower.
     Our educational history is littered with the corpses of 
lower-division programs. Because the lower division occupied 
a crucial position as climax of secondary preparation and 
necessary basis for the major, its conceptual vacuum has 
proved chronically painful, and we have filled it with one 
program after another, but never with real success. These 
usually Edenic programs have seldom outlasted their original 
visionary creators and they have rarely proved popular with 
either students or teachers. Both groups always knew that 
the "serious" world lay in specialized inquiry and hastened 
to join it. General programs in the liberal arts have failed 
because they have been, for the last hundred years and more, 
working against the intellectual orientation of higher 
education, an orientation built upon the reductive 
specialized inquiry inspired by Newtonian science and the 
complexities of the modern world. In that scheme of things 
no core curriculum could be found because none, by design, 
could exist. Because that orientation is now changing, we 
may be able to build a lower-division program which, since 
it no longer stands at variance with the felt center of its 
time, will endure.
     The structure for this program is already in place and 
funded: the _infra dig_ freshman composition program. We 
need only expand from that base. I am now going to vex 
sophisticated souls by saying a word about my former line of 
work, freshman comp, because it bears directly upon our 
agenda. The way we have trivialized the teaching of 
composition is precisely the way we have trivialized the 
liberal arts themselves. We teach comp only as the art of 
transparent expression of pure, apolitical, extrahuman 
truth. We remove the rhetoric, the human interest, from it. 
As with our typography, the ideal is a crystal goblet. The 
utopian world implied by this Edenic view of human 
communication is precisely the world of unchanging and 
nonnegotiable secular truths that Thomas More enshrined in 
his _Utopia_ and that the liberal arts have used as a 
lodestone ever since. In it, the basic rhetorical impulses 
of competition and play are outlawed in favor of plain 
Edenic purpose. Style gives way to an insubstantial 
something we have learned to call "substance." In this 
fashion the liberal arts deny their own reason for being. 
They conceive themselves as teaching a utopian, Socratic 
lesson about the primacy of substance over style, and yet 
their own substance, their words and sounds and shapes, are 
denied and repudiated by such primacy. The liberal arts have 
for four hundred years been trying to pull the rug out from 
under their own feet, and more often than not they have 
succeeded. The liberal arts have made their own problems. 
That crucial oscillation between play and purpose which 
constitutes their creative center has been taken out of time 
and shut down. No wonder we academic humanists have a hard 
time explaining what we do.
     Rhetorical education works in the opposite way. 
Stylistic decorum measures how we look alternately AT and 
THROUGH a text (or a painting), first accept it as 
referential and then refer it to a reality beyond. This same 
measurement is then mapped onto behavior as a social 
decorum. Every stylistic balance models a social one. In the 
rhetorical scheme of things, formal and moral judgments, 
though immiscible, are held in manageable alternation. A 
system of education like this spins out from its center in 
bi-stable decorum a stylistic-behavioral allegory. As I 
argue in "The ‘Q’ Question" (chapter 7), here is where we 
must look if we are to answer that long-standing question 
about what the arts are good for, about how moral and formal 
truths can be related to one another in human life. This bi-
stable conceptual core, and its lessons, ought to stand at 
the center of the composition course, as they should at the 
center of the liberal arts more largely conceived.
     The logical course to follow this composition course 
will build upon the digital interchangeability of the arts. 
It should develop what for the first time we now can 
develop, a genuine rhetoric of the arts, a comprehensive 
discussion of their means and ends. Such a discussion will 
not distinguish between the fine and applied arts, because 
digitization has intermixed them beyond recall. It will 
assume the digital presentation of the arts as a second norm 
and contrast its dynamic genius with masterpieces of fixed 
presentation, in this way reflecting the oral/literate axis 
around which the Western liberal arts have always circled. 
Such a course should provide students of the humanities with 
a general framework within which they can locate all their 
further work in the liberal arts-and, I should say, not only 
in the liberal arts. It will embody, that is, a genuine core 
for this core curriculum.
     The third course in this sequence would aim to teach 
the discipline of two-sided argument I spoke of earlier. The 
real way to open the American mind would be to show it that 
democratic government requires allegiance to genuine two-
sided argument, to the psychological and social discipline 
required when you learn to speak on both sides of any 
question, put yourself in your opponent’s shoes. This 
discipline is no mystery; it forms the secular basis of 
individual tolerance and humane understanding. And, 
obviously enough, it enfranchises our public system of 
justice, of a trial by jury in which competing dramatic 
reenactments are staged and one is determined to be 
referential, and in case-law becomes so. This moment of 
determination, when the contingent becomes the absolute, is 
the moment of that oscillation we have found again and again 
in the emergent conditions we now face-the oscillation from 
a "reality" to the circumstances that have created it and 
back again.
     We can study it in an infinity of manifestations, 
theoretical and historical. Surely, for example, it has 
created the pivotal oscillation of English constitutional 
history, wherein the monarchy, that needful absolute, has 
had to be repeatedly reinvented and reabsolutized by the 
most preposterous myths, only to be repeatedly compromised 
and qualified by good sense or violence. And we have, in the 
legislative and executive branches, built this same 
oscillation into the center of our own American 
constitution. If you want to teach citizenship in American 
democracy, you don’t build your educational system on 
Hirsch’s collection of canonical facts, or Bennett’s 
collection of canonical texts-or on Allan Bloom’s collection 
of Platonic pieties either. You build it, as the educational 
system that was invented to sustain democracy built it in 
the first place, upon a bi-stable alternation between the 
contingent and the absolute. The only true absolute, in a 
secular democratic education, is the obligation to keep that 
oscillation going, preserving a bi-stable core for the 
Western tradition that is not timeless but forever in time. 
The ways to do this are as infinite as the particular 
courses such a curriculum would create but the center 
remains the same.
     A sequence of this kind, a new core curriculum in 
language, the arts, and democratic politics, is doable right 
now. It needs no further study. The electronic technology 
required is for sale in the marketplace, and cheap. Is, in 
fact, pixelating around looking for its natural home. The 
administrative structure is there. We could do it right now.
     How would it affect the upper division of specialized 
inquiry? Our thinking about the core curriculum has been 
based on the conventional upper-division, lower-division 
separation, the linear four-year progression, and the common 
faculty, that were assumed by the Yale Report of 1828. 
Because times are different now, that _way of thinking_ will 
no longer work. We need a new _conception_ of a "core" for 
the entire four years. Let me borrow one from an original 
book by the architect Robert Venturi and his associates, 
called _Learning from Las Vegas_.14 Venturi took his Yale 
seminar out to Vegas for a design exercise. From the 
ordinary judgmental point of view of a modern city planner, 
there was only one ideal solution: level the place and start 
over. So too for Hutchins and his associates at Chicago, and 
"core curriculum" planners ever since, there was only one 
solution to the marketplace curriculum: abolish it and 
establish a new, ordered, linear sequence in its place. 
Ideally, a St. John’s College, four years of lock-step 
courses teaching the classics the way the classics, by Zeus, 
used to be taught. Venturi suggested, instead, that the 
seminar suspend judgment and look at Las Vegas, since it 
consisted largely of signs, as a system of signs. What did 
it do? How did it do it? Could a semiotic compass of some 
sort be devised to find one’s way around in such a world? 
Perhaps, having mapped it, to enjoy it?
     From similar thinking emerged the eclectic aesthetic of 
postmodern architecture. This aesthetic sought not to tear 
the city down and "renew" it but to teach us how to see it 
and-at our own pace and in our own way, by ourselves and in 
small groups-to mend it. It taught this lesson by designing 
eclectic buildings as self-consciously didactic exercises in 
how to look at the stylistic repertoire found in American 
cities. I suggest we use this interactive aesthetic, based 
on beholder as well as beheld, as an educational pattern.
     Imagine the lower-division sequence I have sketched as 
a building like this, a continually remodeled and adaptive 
self-conscious work of art. The sequence ought to provide 
for an undergraduate a way to view the educational city as 
it is, a curricular compass for navigating in the academic 
marketplace and constructing a personal order there. We are 
not going to change, probably we _should_ not change, the 
way disciplinary inquiry proceeds or teaches. Humankind is 
naturally specialist. But we can set up an _integrative_ 
pattern with which specialization can alternate, a lower-
division program that can help students find their way in 
the specialized lands through which they must voyage. Here, 
too, a lowly structure lies ready to hand as a place to 
begin, the "writing across the curriculum" courses so common 
now in American universities. These courses can examine the 
"rhetoric" of the specialized disciplines, show students the 
boundary-conditions within which "absolute" disciplinary 
truths are created, map them on a basic rhetoric of the arts 
and sciences.15 Renew, that is, the vital oscillation 
between absolute and contingent which disciplinary 
specialization has all but shut down. (I discuss these 
curricular possibilities at greater length in chapters 5 and 
6.)
     Such a pattern of courses, such a new "core 
curriculum," would once again put the lower division and the 
upper division into fruitful oscillation, bring this dead 
administrative sequence back into time, into a generative 
bi-stability that reflects its theoretical premise. Our 
present disciplinary structure, as Gerald Graff’s 
_Professing Literature_ makes clear,16 is built upon 
defusing conflict by separating the opposing parties, if 
they bicker long enough, into separate departments so they 
no longer have to talk to each other. Built, that is, upon 
shutting down the root oscillation of the liberal arts. We 
must start it going again, and if we cannot do so in the 
separate disciplines, we can show our students how to do it 
for themselves. If art can lie in the beholder, why not the 
liberal arts curriculum that studies it?
     This lower-division program ought to be organized not 
as an academic department but as an "intrapreneuring" unit, 
a quasi-independent division that pioneers changes in a 
large bureaucracy. It should, for a start, experiment with 
different patterns and terms of faculty hiring. If our 
theoretical thinking blurs the distinction between critic 
and creator, perhaps our hiring policies should follow suit. 
Not all the creative thinking in the liberal arts is taking 
place in university seminars. The primary intellectual 
contracts for the next century-between word and image, 
between page and screen, between goods and information, 
between high art and low, between the society’s need for 
symbolic processing and who is to supply that need-are all, 
in fact, being negotiated off-campus. It might be a good 
idea for us to get to know those folks, maybe even hire one 
or two of them.
     This intrapreneuring unit also should experiment with 
new administrative patterns. If our present labor practices 
in the liberal arts are a scandal, the poverty of our 
organizational thinking is even worse. Along with enrichment 
of this thinking should go-another first-some real cost 
accounting. This unit might train a new kind of academic 
administrator as well, one whose skills at refereeing the 
career game are complemented by a larger strategic vision.
     And, finally, it should foster _systemic_ thinking. 
Education by discipline sets up every discouragement 
possible, for both student and teacher, to systemic 
thinking. The massive bureaucratization of learning that has 
taken place in America since World War II has intensified 
this discouragement. Attempting a large view of _anything_ 
is automatically suspect. Implicit in the argument of this 
essay, and in every development in the arts I’ve alluded to, 
is a return to systemic thinking for liberal education. The 
classical rhetorical paideia was the original training in 
systemic thinking: it treated liberal arts education as a 
system, from early childhood to the forum and law court. We 
must recover that systemic view and the responsibilities 
that go with it. We now can recognize the infrastructure of 
literacy upon which the liberal arts depend as a social 
construct; there is nothing inevitable about it and we can 
no longer depend on middle-class customs to sustain it. The 
intrapreneuring lower division ought to think of this entire 
system as within its charge. It will have, for openers, the 
world of electronic "text" and "textbook" to redefine and 
recreate, and the liberal arts curriculum with it. The arts 
and letters cannot be taught by means of a technology that 
stands at variance with the technology that creates and 
sustains the general literacy of its society. To make sure 
that a technological gap does not open ought to be a primary 
charge to this new academic unit.
     Such an endeavor contravenes what many feel to be the 
true center of the liberal arts-their "purity," their 
distance in time and place from the ordinary world of human 
work and pleasure. But the "humanities crisis" that has been 
our routine cry for a century and more is one we have 
manufactured ourselves by distancing ourselves from the 
world. Claim to be above the struggle, specialize in 
"values" that others have to embody, and then wonder why the 
world sets you aside. Implicit in the revolution in the 
liberal arts I have tried to describe is a return to a 
systemic and systematic involvement in the social purposes 
of our time.

                         *    *    *

     I began by asking whether anything new has appeared on 
our agenda. Obviously I think something has. The 
extraordinary convergence of social, technological, and 
theoretical pressures indicates this beyond dispute. We have 
until now considered these pressures as problems, threats to 
our traditional essence. I suggest that we view them, 
instead, as telling us what that essence is, and how we 
might embody it in answerable practices that will bring our 
students, all of them, up to the height of our times.
     If my analysis of these three emergent conditions is 
correct, our times could hold for the liberal arts the very 
centrality we have so long sought. This centrality won’t be 
given to us; we shall have to create it. We can do this. But 
we cannot do it by ignoring everything new and exciting and 
promising that has happened to the liberal arts in the 
twentieth century-as does, to instance an egregious example, 
the clone of the 1828 Yale Report issued by the National 
Endowment for the Humanities on the eve of the conference 
that occasioned this essay. We should not lose heart because 
the current public conversation about the liberal arts has 
been so ignorant, shortsighted, and pedagogically sterile. 
The long-term march of events, the extraordinary 
convergence, is there for anyone with the eyes to see it-and 
it ought to fill us with excitement, with hope, and with 
resolution.


NOTES

     1. Lynne V. Cheney, _Humanities in America: A Report to 
the President, the Congress, and the American People_ 
(Washington, D.C.: National Endowment for the Humanities, 
1988).
     2. Excerpts from the Yale Report of 1828 are published 
in _American Higher Education: A Documentary History_, ed. 
Richard Hofstadter and Wilson Smith, 2 vols. (Chicago: 
University of Chicago Press, 1961), 1.275-91.
     3. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., _Cultural Literacy: What Every 
American Needs to Know_ (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).
     4. _Integrity in the College Curriculum: A Report to 
the Academic Community_ (Washington, D.C.: Association of 
American Colleges, 1985).
     5. _Report of the Study Group on Yale College_ (1972).
     6. Commission on the Humanities, _The Humanities in 
American Life_ (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of 
California Press, 1980), 3.
     7. Hofstadter and Smith (n. 2 above), 1.284. 
     8. Frederick Rudolph, _Curriculum: A History of the 
American Undergraduate Course of Study since 1636_ (San 
Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1977), 75.
     9. _Wall Street Journal_, 6 June 1988, A1.
     10. Ibid.
     11. Terry Eagleton, _Literary Theory: An Introduction_ 
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).
     12. Gregory Bateson, "From Versailles to Cybernetics," 
in _Steps to an Ecology of Mind_ (New York: Ballantine, 
1972), 469-77.
     13. G. B. Kerferd, _The Sophistic Movement_ (Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press, 1981), 84-85.
     14. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven 
Izenour, _Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism 
of Architectural Form_, rev. ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 
1977).
     15. This enterprise has been undertaken on a 
theoretical level by the POROI group at the University of 
Iowa. See chapter 3 n. 16 above.
     16. Gerald Graff, _Professing Literature: An 
Institutional History_ (Chicago: University of Chicago 
Press, 1987).


ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Richard A. Lanham is professor of English at UCLA. He has
written nine books, including _A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms_;
_Sidney's Old "Arcadia"_; _"Tristram Shandy"_; _The Games of
Pleasure_; _Style: An Anti-Textbook_; _The Motives of Eloquence:
Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance_; _Analyzing Prose_; and
_Literacy and the Survival of Humanism_.



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