As we slowly develop a literacy for this so-called “digital methodology” — which is at once a maturity in patience and in what literary scholars know as slow, careful, “close reading” — we’ll be developing what the German philosopher-poet Fredrich Schiller described as an “aesthetic education” and what Dewy described as a literacy and taste for “aesthetic experience”–without which we can never develop, said Dewy, the ethical reflexes needed to obtain both “democratic freedom” and “spiritual freedom,” otherwise known as “enlightenment” or “nirvana” (in Sanskrit).
Indeed all this will entail growing in a capacity for auto-critique (i.e., self-critique): in a capacity for annulling in ourselves all the contemporary forces of speed, over-stimulation, commodification, justified self-interest and / or sheer egotism that imperil our freedom by imperiling our capacities for “aesthetic experience. ” Our semester-long digital methodology, in other words, calls on us to reorganize and redirect our desires, such that our desires may exist in the interests of genuine democratic freedom and less prepoderantly in the interests of the speed and the appetites of materialist and consumer culture.
We will follow Schiller and Dewy this semester in believing that evolution in humanity – and indeed planetary evolution as such — is “not possible in the absence of [human] subjects trained in the practice of freedom,” which in return is a training that is not possible in the absence of a training in “aesthetic experience,” the outlines of which we will develop both all semester and for the rest of our lifetimes. And so we will spend the whole semester – by way of mobilizing a digital methodology aimed at fostering a tact for “literary reading” — developing a more precise sense of what this thing called “aesthetic experience” is, and how it is that (precisely through our practice of glossing other people’s artistic digital responses to our semester’s “great” texts) we can ourselves come to share in this very liberating evolution of our own humanity called “aesthetic experience,” and which is both the life-source and the after-life of all our semester’s “great” works.
All this transformation and evolution in consciousness and humanity begins with you, with your readiness for making connections, for making illuminating links, for making interfaces between the old and the new, interfaces between classical word-worlds and digital-worlds.
The following pages on this blog — my own blog — serve as models of what I understand as our semester’s “Digital methodology,” models for how to make the sort of connections that I’ve outlined above.
But I stress again: our blog own glosses on digital commentaries on the great works ARE NOT necessarily called to be themselves illuminations on the core aesthetic experiences of great works but rather starting points for a discussion on this core aesthetic experience, to be developed all semester.
And strangely enough, For T.S. Eliot the act of involving oneself in something akin to this methodology of “making connections” was the act of involving oneself in nothing short of the personal and shared experience of Heaven.
If Hell is where nothing connects, then being in the field of English must be the key to heaven’s door! We are in the business of finding connections–within texts, between texts and contexts, between texts and ourselves, between our readings and the readings of other interpreters.
A big part of the semester’s aim is to cultivate a threefold skill: the skill of identifying, the skill of experiencing and finally the skill communicating experiences of an aesthetical nature. This threefold skill won’t come all at once but gradually– with patience and with the cultivation of a love and a reverence for bare-raw experience in general. Consequently, our blog projects fundamentally name and give expression to the aesthetical experiences which — as we will soon discover — are definitively bound up with the numberless ordinary and extraordinary depth-connections between digital works and great works– between Digital Worlds and so-called Classical Worlds, between the New and the Old — swarming all over the internet.
Let us now fare forward into the business – the heroic quest — of throwing some light on some of those depth connections.
Or in other words, let us fare forward into the beautiful journey of archiving (on our very own blogs) our own depth connections with other people’s digital depth connections on the depth connections — on the total-democratic experience of spiritual, ethical and aesthetic freedom — that all great works of world literature exist to incarnate, and to turn into an Everywhere.
-MP