The diffusion of the printing press in Europe, 1450-1500

These maps are just too pretty not to re-post. They come from Jeremiah Dittmar’s fascinating new paper, Information Technology and Economic Change: The Impact of the Printing Press.

The diffusion of the printing press, 1450-1500. Source: Jeremiah Dittmar.

There’s a good summary of the paper at Vox, but the take-home message is probably in two parts. Firstly:

• First, the printing press was an urban technology, producing for urban consumers.
• Second, cities were seedbeds for economic ideas and social groups that drove the emergence of modern growth.
• Third, city sizes were historically important indicators of economic prosperity, and broad-based city growth was associated with macroeconomic growth (Bairoch 1988, Acemoglu et al. 2005).

And secondly:

I find that cities in which printing presses were established 1450-1500 had no prior growth advantage, but subsequently grew far faster than similar cities without printing presses. My work uses a difference-in-differences estimation strategy to document the association between printing and city growth. The estimates suggest early adoption of the printing press was associated with a population growth advantage of 21 percentage points 1500-1600, when mean city growth was 30 percentage points. The difference-in-differences model shows that cities that adopted the printing press in the late 1400s had no prior growth advantage, but grew at least 35 percentage points more than similar non-adopting cities from 1500 to 1600.

Elif Batuman on the double-entry book-keeping of writing

Elif Batuman. Image: ecu essays.

I must be the very last person in the literary world to discover the complex delight of reading Elif Batuman, but this piece of writing by her really did my head in.

It’s the first chapter of her doctoral dissertation, and it’s quite possibly the most erudite, dextrous and fleet-footed jaunt through the literary theory of the modern novel I’ve read since … well, since Borges:

The time of writing is not problematic for all novelists; only for 1) professional, full-time writers, who 2) maintain a strict allegiance to the raw material of lived experience.  The time of writing is not problematic for Casanova, because he takes up writing only in his retirement: far from scribbling his memoirs in the fear that he would die before completing his work, he actually tried to draw out his writing as long as possible, to fill his remaining years.  At the opposite end of the spectrum, metaliterary gamesters like Sterne or Diderot feel no epistemological responsibility to base their works on real experiences; to the contrary, epistemological self-sufficiency becomes for them a point of pride.  A much-cited passage from Tristram Shandy, for instance, testifies equally to a vivid awareness of the time of writing and a complete indifference towards “research”:

I am this month one whole year older than I was this time twelve-month; and having got… almost into the middle of my fourth volume—and no farther than to my first day’s life—’tis demonstrative that I have three hundred and sixty-four days more life to write… so that instead of advancing, as a common writer, in my work… I am just thrown so many volumes back.

Shandy delights precisely in his own ability to keep writing with no new material at all.  Life does not interrupt Shandy’s writing; Shandy interrupts his own writing, congratulating himself on the inexhaustible nature of his new amusement (“I shall lead a fine life out of this self-same life of mine”), and on its capability to stimulate the “manufactures of paper.”  He is not battling an inescapable condition, but inventing a gratuitous obstacle, protracting his “Life” with digressions, deferrals and ruptures.  That Shandy himself  sees these obstacles as voluntary is borne out by his claim that they were “never applicable before to any one biographical writer since the creation of the world,” and would “never hold good to any other, until its final destruction” (198): engaged in willful play, he has no idea of having stumbled onto an inherent novelistic problem.  In similar fashion, Diderot gleefully protracts the story of Jacques’s loves:  “What is there to prevent me from marrying off the master and having him cuckolded?  Or sending Jacques off to the Indies?  And leading his master there?  And bringing them both back to France on the same vessel?  How easy it is to make up stories!”37  “Qu’il est facile de faire des contes”: for Cervantes or Boswell or Proust, it is not so easy.  The artificial hurdle becomes, in their works, an organic barrier.  Play becomes work—or at least a more arduous game, with a stringent new rule: the epistemological obligation to “make up” stories from something, some real material.  “Faire des contes” becomes, in this way, “faire des comptes”: each narrative element—each obstacle, separation and reunion—is a debit which must be balanced, in the credit column, with some experiential knowledge.  To introduce the central metaphor of this dissertation, I propose that this balance can be construed as such an account in the style of double-entry bookkeeping:

 

Debit	Credit
The time of research, lived experience	The time of writing
Material for a book	Unhappiness, knowledge, experience
Ginés’s crimes	Ginés’s terms in the galley
Marcel’s experiences; the dinner invitation	Marcel’s solitude; the writing notebook

If in this light we reconsider Boswell’s metaphor of reaping no more than he can sow—living no more than he can record—we see that it is essentially an economical one: if his experiences are too numerous to write about in the remaining time, Boswell will have misspent his life.

A major new talent.

Corey Doctorow rebuts Evgeny Morozov

We’ve all heard about (though I’ve ot yet read) The Net Delusion.

Now, a leading thinker/practitioner in the field of new media reviews Morozov’s book, rebutting his thesis:

At its core, there is some very smart stuff indeed in The Net Delusion. Morozov is absolutely correct when he forcefully points out that technology isn’t necessarily good for freedom – that it can be used as readily to enslave, surveil, and punish as it can to evade, liberate and share.

Unfortunately, this message is buried amid a scattered, loosely argued series of attacks on a nebulous “cyber-utopian” movement, whose views are stated in the most general of terms, often in the form of quotes from CNN and other news agencies who are putatively summing up some notional cyber-utopian consensus. In his zeal to discredit this ideology (whatever it is), Morozov throws whatever he’s got handy at anyone he can find who supports the idea of technology as a liberator, no matter how weak or silly his ammunition.

Read the rest in The Guardian

Also worth a look is Clay Shirky’s Foreign Affairs piece on the political power of social media (firewalled)

Hollywood’s institutionalised sexism

Several media outlets including The Wrap have carried articles today about the “celluloid ceiling” – the long-term institutionalised sexism of Hollywood’s motion picture industry.

The data is sourced from Martha Lauzen’s recent report “The Celluloid Ceiling:Behind-the-Scenes Employment of Women on the Top 250 Films of 2009″. According to Lauzen, the percentage of women involved as directorss, producers, cinematographers and associated roles is low and declining:

In 2009, women comprised 16% of all directors, executive producers, producers, writers, cinematographers, and editors working on the top 250 domestic grossing films.  This represents a decline of 3 percentage points from 2001

The graph below says it all. As you can see, men still dominate Hollywood.

Historical Comparison of Percentages of Women Employed in Key Behind-theScenes Roles, 1998-2009. Source: Martha Lauzen

The Wrap carried an interview with high-grossing director Catherine Hardwicke, of Twilight fame.

Catherine Hardwicke …  directed 2008′s “Twilight,” the first in the hugely successful vampire franchise, but Hardwicke told The Wrap she was prevented from even pitching to direct “The Fighter.”

“I couldn’t get an interview even though my last movie made $400 million,” she said to The Wrap. “I was told it had to be directed by a man — am I crazy?” said Hardwicke, who also noted she liked what David O. Russell did on the film. “It’s about action, it’s about boxing, so a man has to direct it … But they’ll let a man direct “Sex in the City” or any girly movie you’ve ever heard of.”

 

Michael Berube on the Sokal Hoax and the science wars

At Democracy: A Journal for Ideas, the always-perceptive Michael Berube has a wonderful potted history of Alan Sokal’s Social Text hoax. For those who’ve forgotten or don’t know, the short version is that Alan Sokal, a New York University physicist, submitted and had published a hoax paper to then-influential cultural studies journal Social Text. The paper made fun of cherished theories of postmodernism and science and technology studies such as constructivism and relativism, and threw in a farrago of dodgy physics references for good measure.

The ensuing controversy cystallised the disdain many conservatives (not to mention scientists and philosophical hard materialists) felt about the 90s postmodernist in-crowd. But Berube’s article has a sting in the tail: the ideas of relativism and constructivism advanced by thinkers such as Andrew Ross in the 90s are now being used, he argues, for far more nefarious purposes, against science by demogogues and populists on the right. I’ll let Berube explain in more detail below, but the whole article is recommended:

The cover of Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont's book about the hoax, Intellectual Impostures. Image: Profile Books

What, you ask, was the Sokal Hoax? While I was chatting with my colleagues at the Postmodern Science Forum, New York University physicist Alan Sokal, having read Higher Superstition, decided to try an experiment. He painstakingly composed an essay full of (a) flattering references to science-studies scholars such as Ross and Stanley Aronowitz, (b) howler-quality demonstrations of scientific illiteracy, (c) flattering citations of other science-studies scholars who themselves had demonstrated howler-quality scientific illiteracy, (d) questionable-to-insane propositions about the nature of the physical world, (e) snippets of fashionable theoretical jargon from various humanities disciplines, and (f) a bunch of stuff from Bohr and Heisenberg, drawing object lessons from the uncertainty at the heart of quantum mechanics. He then placed a big red bow on the package, titling the essay “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” The result was a very weird essay, a heady mix–and a shot heard ’round the world. For Sokal decided to submit it to the journal Social Text, where it wound up in a special issue edited by Ross and Aronowitz on . . . the “Science Wars.” Yes, that’s right: Social Text accepted an essay chock-full of nonsense and proceeded to publish it in a special issue that was designed to answer the critics of science studies–especially, but not exclusively, Gross and Levitt. It was more than a great hoax on Sokal’s part; it was also, on the part ofSocial Text, one of the great own-foot-shootings in the history of self-inflicted injury.

Cannily, Sokal chose Lingua Franca, a then-influential (since folded) magazine that covered the academy and the humanities, as the venue in which to publish his “gotcha” essay, in which he revealed that the whole thing was a great big joke. And as if on cue, Ross and Aronowitz fired back almost precisely as Sokal believed they would: Aronowitz called Sokal “ill-read and half-educated,” while Ross called the essay “a little hokey,” “not really our cup of tea,” and a “boy stunt . . . typical of the professional culture of science education.” Aronowitz and Ross had every reason to feel badly stung, no question; but the terms of their response, unfortunately, spectacularly bore out Sokal’s claim that “the targets of my critique have by now become a self-perpetuating academic subculture that typically ignores (or disdains) reasoned criticism from the outside.” It was not hard to wonder, after all: If indeed Sokal’s hokey boy-stunt essay was not really your cup of tea, why did you publish it in the first place?

For many people, the answer to that question was simple: because the theory-addled, jargon-spouting academic left, of which Social Text now stood as the symbol, really didn’t know squat about science and really wasdevoted to the project of making shit up and festooning it with flattering citations to one another’s work. It was what critics believed all along, and now they had the proof. The disparity of audience response was–and remains–stark: In my academic-left circles, Sokal’s name was mud, his hoax an example of extraordinary bad faith; everywhere else, especially on the rest of the campus and in the world of journalism, Sokal was a hero, the guy who finally exposed the naked emperor (and there was much talk of naked emperors) and burst the cultural-studies bubble that had so drastically overinflated certain academic reputations–and academic egos.

Alex Burns on attention cascades

Over at his blog, Alex Burns has an excellent post on Google Ngram and its ability to map long-wave “attention cascades”:

I chose the literature on the Graeco-Armenian magus George Gurdjieff and the Russian journalist Pyotr Uspenskii (Ouspensky) for several reasons. It is a structured ‘body of work’ with primary sources, pupil narratives, and second- and third-generation commentaries. This segmentation means it can be compared with a range of authors and topics using bibliometrics, historical research, and anthropological methods. It anticipated themes of the 1960s Age of Aquarius and 1970s environmental movements. It grew endogenously after some specific events, such as the timed release of Gurdjieff’s authorised writings and the early popularity of Ouspensky’s neo-Theosophical writings on consciousness, mathematics, and comparative religion. The fluctuations in Google’s Ngram Viewer can be interpreted, in part, as the rise-and-fall of what Ouspensky called the ‘Fourth Way’ in the Human Potential movement and other subcultures.

What anthropologists can teach journalists: Daniel Miller’s The Comfort of Things

I’ve just finished Daniel Miller‘s book The Comfort of Things. It’s a remarkable work of contemporary anthropology, in which Miller and an assistant spend 17 months interviewing and observing nearly all the inhabitants on an ordinary street in suburban London.

I think this book should be compulsory reading for journalists and especially students of journalism schools and courses. This is because the approach Miller takes to interviewing and engaging with his subjects is almost the polar opposite of the typical way in which journalists and reporters approach the task.

Rather than approach his task in the one-dimensional, goal-directed way so common of journalists – in which they relentless interrogate their subject until they get the answer they want – Miller gently befriends the inhabitants of this ordinary street, eventually obtaining access to their living rooms and discovering what their material possessions can tell us about their lives, their loves and the status of their lives. It’s the sort of “long-form narrative” that actually achieves the kind of engagement that most contemporary novelists seem to struggle with, let alone journalists. The best comparators I can think of are Iain Sinclair and Theodore Zeldin.

To top it all off, Miller’s writing is beautiful, easily superior to almost anything you’d read in the New Yorker, The Guardian or the London Review of Books.

Recommended.

Australia Council CEO Kathy Keele replies

Australia Council CEO Kathy Keele has responded to my article in Overland. For the record, she does identify some factual errors in my piece which I freely acknowledge and will address in a subsequent post.

Here is the text of her reply:

Kathy Keele,  Australia Council CEO, responds to Ben Eltham’s Overland 199 article

Ben Eltham’s article raises a number of important issues worthy of further debate. I welcome his passion for the vitality of the arts in this country and the need for a dynamic approach to cultural policy.

I agree completely that culture is much bigger than the arts and indeed that the arts are bigger than ‘what the Australia Council funds’. We made this point in our submission to the National Cultural Policy consultation process. How we set the parameters of ‘culture’ so that it yields a policy that’s workable for government is a good topic for discussion.
But there are a number of points in his essay that need to be corrected.

One of Eltham’s key criticisms of the Australia Council is that its view of the arts is antiquated, remaining largely unchanged from the 1970s. As examples, he names arts practices that are not supported by the council’s art form boards – gaming, genre fiction, online writing, and musicals, to name a few.

The problem is that this isn’t true. For a healthy debate to proceed, it’s important to correct these and some other factual inaccuracies.

• He states that the council ‘funds opera but not musicals (except when opera companies mount musicals)’. This is incorrect. The music and theatre boards have an initiative called Music Theatre which supports the development of musicals.

• He argues for the artistic importance of gaming, and asks ‘why doesn’t the Australia Council support gaming?’ It does. The council has over many years funded artists who create game art works and explore game culture as an artistic practice.

• He states that the council supports ‘serious novels, generally, but not genre fiction or online writing’. Not true. The Literature Board has funded genre novels, interactive media writing, websites, iPhone apps and graphic novels through our New Work and Write in Your Face grants programs. The board recently completed a three-year initiative called the Story of the Future and published the Writer’s Guide to Making a Digital Living.

• Eltham states that the council ‘funds companies that only produce a few works a year but not festivals that produce hundreds’. In fact, each year the council funds dozens of works that are presented at festivals all over the country. We also fund the Major Festivals Initiative which commissions new Australian work for presentation at the seven capital city festivals.

Questioning the amount of funding allocated to these various new art practices is one thing. I worry, however, that his critique is based on an idea that the council doesn’t fund these arts practices at all.

What I want to make clear is that many ‘new’ art practices are currently funded by the Australia Council from within the existing art form boards, through our inter-arts section and, indeed, through programs and initiatives across council. The key criterion, no matter what its form, is that the art is excellent.

I also need to correct the impression left by Eltham that abolition of the Community Cultural Development Board in 2005 demonstrated that the council ‘turned its back on community arts’. He fails to mention that the Community Partnerships Committee, with an upgraded remit to support community arts practice across the nation, was formed the following year. This year Community Partnerships will be allocating approximately $10 million in funding.

Eltham also notes his objections to the funding allocated to the major performing arts companies. It is useful to note that while the Australia Council manages the distribution of this funding, decisions as to which organisations are funded and by how much are set by the six state arts ministers and the federal arts minister.

In spite of these errors and misunderstandings, I do believe Eltham’s piece raises a fundamental question: how do we most effectively fund the ever-changing way that art is created? This question needs to be constantly revisited by those sitting both inside and outside our arts funding agencies.

Kathy Keele
CEO Australia Council for the Arts

 

Rebutting Christopher Madden: part 1

Recently I had a piece published Overland magazine calling for radical reform, perhaps even abolition, of the Australia Council for the Arts. This week, the Overland website carries a response by cultural policy analyst Christopher Madden.

I think Madden’s rebuttal misguided in several important respects and so today I’m going to unpick his piece item by item … but before I do that I think it’s worth saying that we agree on many things. More than that, I welcome this debate – it’s exactly what I hoped to provoke with the piece. Madden’s response to my article is robust, informed, detailed and well-intentioned. It’s also, I think, quite wrong.

The legacy and troubles of the Warburg Institute

 

Pages from Aby Warburg's Mneomysyne Atlas. Source: Mathias Bruhn

 

In The Burlington Review, Christopher S. Wood has a careful dissection of E. H. Gombrich’s famous 1960 opus Art and Illusion: A study in the psychology of pictorial representation.

Gombrich was a prominent member of the Warburg Institute – but is the famous London institute under threat from savage cuts to British higher education funding. Anthony Grafton thinks so.

The value of the Warburg Institute to the study of art and ideas has been a recurring theme in my studies. Works such as Panofsky’s Studies in Iconology and Frances Yates‘ The Art of Memory have remained touchstones in fields such as art history and form a large part of the intellectual inheritance of currently important fields such as cultural studies.

But apparently the Warburg Institute and its remarkable library face significant funding and administration issues, no doubt as a result of the ongoing crisis of the British public sector and the UK university system. There’s an excellent interview with Grafton from ABC  Radio National here.