As a rule of thumb, this semester we’ll understand the “instruments” of the digital — especially digital video instruments but also other digital instruments as well — as a great mercy, as a great cosmic fortuity. Because, as we will soon discover, these digital instruments –despite the influence of many critics who argue that the instruments of “the digital” solely or mostly breed triviality, degradation, mental and imaginative laziness (which they indeed sometimes do) –potentially constitute extraordinary unforeseen possibilities of seeing, feeling, thinking and extraordinary unforeseen possibilities of creative re-presentation which, if properly harnessed, can help us “to see what no one has seen before” of our great works.
How?
With the resources of a multi-media form like “youtube” or “vimeo” available to almost anyone everywhere, we now have access not merely to a few but to numberless (at least thousands of) eminently valid angles of approach towards our great works.
And so let us seriously ask this question: who will get “to see [more of] what no one has seen” of our great works: the so-called genius professor solely in possession of his own individual angle of approach (and/or solely in possession of the angles of his own limited, “close-circle”), OR the person or persons (like us) who have desired to welcome, to involve, to include, to seize hold of ALL the possible angles of approach to the great experiences of our great works — the long angles, the short ones, the deep angles, the shallow ones, the expert ones, the amateur ones?
Arguably the correct answer is this: “To see what no one has ever seen before” of our semester’s great works — and to indeed see it by use of the Koyre-like “instruments,” specifically the very video instruments associated with modern resources of “the digital,” instruments that will necessarily condition our seeing processes towards our great works — is to see the sum of all the individual (and often idiosyncratic) experiences partaking in the great experiences of the great works, which is to see more of the true (aggregate) experience behind our great works.
For the great work is only great, it has been argued, because the experience at the core of a great work inherently carries powers of reproducibility and applicability so powerful and so “great” as to be finally inexhaustible to any single angle of approach and inexhaustible to any number of angles of approach. Therefore, for us to use “the digital” as a methodology aimed at harnessing as many of the numberless angles of approach to the great experiences of our great works as possible is for us to aim to experience “what no one has experienced before” of the great experiences of our great works — because what we’ll be angling to experience finally is as much as can be possibly experienced of the great experience of a “great work” — galaxies of seeing and experiencing.
Or in other words, what we’ll be angling to see is what could not have possibly been seen of the “aesthetic experience” of our great works until now, until the age of the digital. That is, we’ll be able to glimpse something of the immortality of the great experience of a great work: we”ll be able to glimpse how still very alive, how non-ephemeral, and how inexhaustibly applicable, how very undying this “great” experience manages to be despite its status as one of the oldest human (so-called traditional) things on the planet; and we’ll be able to see how very different this “great” experience is from all the other more ephemeral, transient and readily dying experiences (fads of art and fashion and television) in our time that come and go as quickly as the years or decades or elemental seasons come and go.
Indeed, when treating and speaking of “the meeting of digital works with great works” we speak of treating and speaking about the democratization of –and about an unbounded democratic methodological approach to —the great aesthetic experiences at the core of our great works. And moreover we speak of a democratic approach so widespread, so limitless — i.e., so all-inclusive in its interest to welcome and embrace any and all individualized and idiosyncratic approaches to a great work — that the result, the tally, will have to be mind-boggling, because the result / tally will have to be a total all-encompassing experience that includes all and excludes no experience of the great experiences of great works. Our digital methodology humbly exists in the interest of acquiring perhaps only the tiniest little taste of that total all-encompassing “great” experience, an experience that spans the millennia and momentarily terminates as the core experience of the digital commentaries of our own millennium. We speak finally of a spirit democratization of the great (aesthetic) experience of great works, a spirit of democratization that assumes both that we, firstly, ennoble the “great” aesthetic experience of the great works by illuminating the numberless (perhaps millions) of digital experiences participating in the so-called “great experience”; and that we, secondly, ennoble all the unique individualized experiences of digital users worldwide who stand ready to pattern their individualized experience, in some degree, to a former great one.
In any case, prior to the inception of the “instruments” of the digital — the digital as it is made universally manifest on the World Wide Web as a tool for “seeing what has not yet before been seen” — prior to this inception, such a phenomenon as the democratization of the great galaxy of experience of our great works would not be there to be observed and / or experienced.
Digital instruments will serve to help us as a class this semester to not only share in the core experience of the great works but also to share in the millions of experiences patterened in some sense to the more original great-works experience. And this original great-works experience — as a kind of Big-Bang-experience of written imaginative literature — in turn becomes all the greater as a result of the great democratic phenomenon by which the great work becomes more and more elaborate and refined as it becomes more and more ushered into existence as it becomes more and more picked up and recalled by later generations…including now a digital generation of user like you and me.
For, when it comes to the great experience at the core of a great work, we speak not only of an angle of approach towards a “fact” or a “study” or an “information” or a “product” or a “datum,” but rather—because it is not just any familiar-modern-“anesthetized” experience that one angles towards when one angles towards a great work but an unfamiliar and often strange (even de-ranged) “aesthetic” experience of great depth and complexity that one angles towards — we speak of a deep exuberant (almost vertiginous) experience, indeed of an experience that can literally, as Maxine Greene has already reminded us, “transform the world.”
We will assume that the instruments of The Digital — the very digital instruments that we will rely on all semester to access our “great works” — do not necessarily have to exist for us as they usually exist for us in our digital epoch, namely as a form of prosthesis — as a surrogate, as a form of virtuality — as a paltry substitute for the experience and knowledge of real reality. Rather, we will assume that the instruments of The Digital — again, I borrow from Alexandre Koyré’s insight above — may exist for us as “an incarnation of the spirit,” as an expression of the human desire “to see what no one had ever seen before” of the greatness of the experience of our semester’s “great works.”