William Blake and the Digital Humanities: Collaboration, Participation, and Social Media 9780415656184, 9780203078068

Citation preview

William Blake and the Digital Humanities

William Blake’s work demonstrates two tendencies that are central to social media: collaboration and participation. Not only does Blake cite and adapt the work of earlier authors and visual artists, but also contemporary authors, musicians, and fi lmmakers feel compelled to use Blake in their own creative acts. This book identifies and examines Blake’s work as a social and participatory network, a phenomenon we describe as zoamorphosis, which encourages—even demands—that others take up Blake’s creative mission. The authors reexamine the history of the digital humanities in relation to the study and dissemination of Blake’s work: from alternatives to traditional forms of archiving embodied by Blake’s citation on Twitter and Blakean remixes on YouTube, smartmobs using Blake’s name as an inspiration to protest the 2004 Republican National Convention, and students crowdsourcing reading and instruction in digital classrooms to better understand and participate in Blake’s world. The book also includes a consideration of Blakean motifs that have created artistic networks in music, literature, and fi lm in the twentieth and the twenty-fi rst centuries, showing how Blake is an exemplar for understanding creativity in the digital age.

Roger Whitson is an Assistant Professor of Nineteenth-Century British Literature and the Digital Humanities at Washington State University, US. Jason Whittaker is Professor of Blake Studies at University College Falmouth, UK.

Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature

1 Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century Edited by Stephanie LeMenager, Teresa Shewry, and Ken Hiltner 2 Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg and Alexandra Schultheis Moore 3 Resistance to Science in Contemporary American Poetry Bryan Walpert 4 Magic, Science, and Empire in Postcolonial Literature The Alchemical Literary Imagination Kathleen J. Renk 5 The Black Female Body in American Literature and Art Performing Identity Caroline A. Brown 6 Narratives of Migration and Displacement in Dominican Literature Danny Méndez 7 The Cinema and the Origins of Literary Modernism Andrew Shail 8 The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture Pop Goth Edited by Justin D. Edwards and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet

9 Wallace Stevens and PreSocratic Philosophy Metaphysics and the Play of Violence Daniel Tompsett 10 Modern Orthodoxies Judaic Imaginative Journeys of the Twentieth Century Lisa Mulman 11 Eugenics, Literature, and Culture in Post-war Britain Clare Hanson 12 Postcolonial Readings of Music in World Literature Turning Empire on Its Ear Cameron Fae Bushnell 13 Stanley Cavell, Literature, and Film The Idea of America Edited by Andrew Taylor and Áine Kelly 14 William Blake and the Digital Humanities Collaboration, Participation, and Social Media Roger Whitson and Jason Whittaker

William Blake and the Digital Humanities Collaboration, Participation, and Social Media Roger Whitson and Jason Whittaker

NEW YORK

LONDON

First published 2013 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2013 Taylor & Francis The right of Roger Whitson and Jason Whittaker to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Whitson, Roger. William Blake and the digital humanities : collaboration, participation, and social media / by Roger Whitson and Jason Whittaker. p. cm. — (Routledge interdisciplinary perspectives on literature ; 14) Includes bibliographical references. 1. Blake, William, 1757–1827—Influence. 2. Blake, William, 1757– 1827—Criticism and interpretation. I. Whittaker, Jason, 1969– II. Title. PR4148.I52W46 2012 821'.7—dc23 2012031927 ISBN13: 978-0-415-65618-4 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-07806-8 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by IBT Global.

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction: Zoamorphosis and the Digital Humanities

vii ix 1

1

Archives and Ecologies

26

2

The Tyger

52

3

Jerusalem

72

4

Digital Creativity: Teaching William Blake in the Twenty-First Century

91

5

Blake and His Online Audiences

115

6

Folksonomies and Machine Editing: William Blake’s New Aesthetic on Flickr, Wikipedia, and YouTube

138

Coda: Dust and Self-Annihilation

164

Notes Bibliography Index

179 189 205

Figures

I.1 Graham Harwood. London.pl. 4.1 Alex Oxford. Binded with Briars. 4.2 Charles Hancock. My Deities Are So Obscure, I’m Basically Their Biggest Fan. 4.3 Charles Hancock. Urizen Is God, Now Los Is God. 4.4 Charles Hancock. Derp. 5.1 Weekly citations of six Romantic poets over a twenty-sevenweek period. 6.1 Screenshot from Jonah. 6.2 Screenshot from Jonah. 6.3 Screenshot from Jonah. 6.4 Screenshot from Jonah. 6.5 William Daniels. William Blake II. 6.6 Karen Tregaskin. Eternity in a Grain of Sand.

16 107 110 111 112 121 138 138 138 138 149 153

Acknowledgments

ROGER Books are layered by networks of ghosts whose labor disappears in the forming of words, paragraphs, transitions, and citations. I’d first and foremost like to thank Jason for taking a chance on a young scholar and being so enthusiastic when I approached him about coauthoring a book. Donald Ault has, and remains, an inspiration for my work on William Blake. I would have never looked at the later prophecies without his visionary guidance and his iconoclastic approach to literary study. Robert Early’s fascination with The Book of Urizen sparked my interest in reading Blake more closely. Conversations with Ron Broglio, Tristanne Connolly, Jim Rovira, Mark Douglas, Walter Reed, Colin Trodd, and Mark Lussier helped form many of the ideas surrounding zoamorphosis. Richard Burt has remained an important mentor for me and kept me focused on fi nishing my fi rst book. The book would have been impossible without the life-changing experiences I gained during my tenures in the Writing and Communication program at Georgia Tech (2009–11) and the Digital Scholarship Commons at Emory University (2011–12). The thinking behind multimodal composition from Tech’s Brittain Fellowship was foundational in my pedagogical experiments in Chapter 4. I learned especially from Rebecca Burnett, L. Andrew Cooper, Crystal Lake, Andrea Wood, Nirmal Trivedi, Melanie Kohnen, Andrew Famiglietti, Robert Blaskiewicz, Leigh Dillard, Matt Paproth, Jennifer Parrott, Robin Wharton, Diane Jakacki, Jesse Stommel, Pete Rorabaugh, Doris Bremm, Regina Martin, Tom Lolis, Michael Rowley, Chris Ritter, Sarah Schiff, and Rachel Dean-Ruzicka. The Georgia Tech students in my Spring 2011 “Blake 2.0: William Blake and Digital Culture” and Walter Reed’s Fall 2010 “William Blake” course at Emory University provided, quite literally, the material for a substantial portion of the book. My colleagues at Emory’s Digital Scholarship Commons (DiSC) gave me time to fi nish the book and insight into digital research. Stewart Varner, Brian Croxall, Miriam Posner, Scott Turnbull, Ben Ranker, Sari Connard, Tim Bryson, and Laura Akerman all proved to be instrumental in developing my work in the digital humanities.

x

Acknowledgments

The THATCamp and OOO communities provided a supportive network of scholars and professionals that helped nurture my enthusiasm for collaboration and speculative philosophy. In particular, I benefited from Bethany Nowviskie, Amanda French, Mark Sample, George Williams, Erin Templeton, Tonya Howe, Patrick Murray-John, Adeline Koh, Katherine Harris, Kathi Inman Berens, Lori Emerson, Tim Morton, Ian Bogost, Steven Shaviro, Levi Bryant, and Graham Harman. And I would be remiss without mentioning my new colleagues at Washington State, whose interventions helped streamline some of my more extravagant theoretical leaps: Todd Butler, Jon Hegglund, Kristin Arola, Kirk McAuley, Patricia Ericsson, Trevor Bond, Donna Campbell, Ben Bunting, and Debbie Lee. My family has continued to support me as I develop as a scholar and a person. My mother, Cathy Hodgson; my father, Todd Whitson; and the other members of my family, Charrie Dixon, Kate Whitson, Ruth Hodgson, David Whitson, Elaina Whitson, Aubrey Whitson, Jan Baumgartner, Gary Baumgartner, Donna Hodgson, Chris Hodgson, Scott Struck, Monica Swink, Harold Swink, Rory Flynn, Elizabeth Flynn, Shawn Flynn, Hope Crumley, Aimee Moore, Erin Lohbeck, Evan Baumgartner, Chris Hunter, Anella Hunter, Tina Hunter-Witt, Nathan Witt, Alexander Bear Witt, Jason Hunter, Shannon Hunter, Leah Hunter, Ethan Hunter, Andrew Hunter, Charles Hunter, David Hunter, Lucas Hunter, Brent Hunter, Ann Hunter, Kim Parks, Aaron Parks, Amanda Gogarn, and Jordan Parks. This book is dedicated to those friends and family members who are no longer with us, but who continue to impact me: my grandparents, Roger Hodgson, Mary Whitson, and David Leech Whitson; and my friend Nicole LaRose, who gabbed with me about Blake, Deleuze, and departmental politics when we were roommates in graduate school. No doubt, she would have told me to stop typing away at my computer and start doing something that’s actually useful. And so I shall. Most importantly, I wish to thank my fiancée, Leeann Hunter, and our kittens, Buddha, Nemo, and Templeton—for giving me a home, a world, and a life.

JASON For twenty years now Blake has remained a profound influence in my life and on my work, and there are several scholars who have changed significantly the ways in which I think and write about him. Steve Clark and Tristanne Connolly in particular have been excellent sounding boards for some of my ideas, curbing some of my worst excesses and encouraging what (I hope) are some of the more adventurous excursions into understanding how Blake remains such a vital force. I would also especially like to thank Keri Davies, who combines impeccable scholarly credentials with a generosity of learning that always makes receiving any message from him

Acknowledgments xi a real pleasure. In addition, for the past decade I have followed one line of thought that has uncovered considerable riches in terms of Blake’s influence, and so must express my deepest gratitude to Shirley Dent: it was during the summer of 2000 when we fi rst conceived the idea for Radical Blake that began this particular path, and she has always been one of the most provocative and entertaining writers on Blake. Other friends, colleagues, and influences remain extremely important. David Worrall not only gave me great encouragement and support early on in my career, but also inspired me to think about “global” Blake. Colin Trodd has produced exceptional work on Blake’s influence on later artists and I was very lucky to be a reader of his manuscript; as will be clear from reading this book, Mark Lussier and Mike Goode have wrought their own transformations on my perceptions of Blake. I would also like to thank Morris Eaves for his encouraging words when fi rst I began writing about zoamorphosis, and James Rovira for his contributions and enthusiasm. Some of the practical work that I began on Blake emerged out of a joint project with Jason Hall, and he and other colleagues from the University of Exeter, notably Alex Murray and Adeline Johns-Putra, have been both politely indulgent and courteously critical of my crazier ideas. I would like to thank them, and also Marion Gibson and Gary Tregidga for giving me the opportunity to develop some of my ideas on “Jerusalem” in a keynote for the 2010 conference on Myth, Mysticism and Nationalism, as well as Masashi Suzuki who, with Steve Clark, invited me to speak at the Digital Romanticisms conference in the same year. In addition, colleagues at Falmouth—Mark Douglas, Julia Kennedy, Anne Taylor, Hayes Mabweazara, Kym Martindale, Ruth Heholt, and many others—have been very supportive of my work over the years. I would like to thank my father, Bill, my sister, Rachael, and most of all my wife, Sam. They more than anyone know what Blake means to me. Finally, this book is for my mother, Kath: I know she would have read it immediately (as she read all my books) were she still here today.

Introduction Zoamorphosis and the Digital Humanities

In 2004, a group calling themselves the “Friends of William Blake” produced a “People’s Guide to the Republican Convention.” Paul Chan, Joshua Breitbart, and Nadxi Mannello helped organize the map, which included “police stations, health centers and hospitals, transportation hubs, libraries, WI-FI hot spots” but also “the hotels of the various state delegations to the offices of military-industrial companies and major Republican Party donors, to the locations of the ‘adult entertainment’ complexes that were expecting [ . . . ] booming business.” As a map, the “People’s Guide” engaged with a tradition of political map-making that includes Blake’s poem “London.” Chan clearly wanted to use the map to “mark” the “chart’rd” streets of the convention. “The thing I thought about most on this map,” he said in an interview with Artforum’s Jeffrey Kastner, “is if in fact this administration’s the most secretive that American history has ever known [ . . . ] our job is to simply reverse the terms, and make it the most transparent convention possible.” Further, Chan saw the map as a form of political organization, which would bring together “thousands of people on the streets” who are “unwilling to give up the city as a backdrop for the Republican National Convention.” And he enjoyed the image of Republican Party officials hounded by “thousands of people screaming their heads off so they’ll never get a peaceful photo-op from New York” (Kastner 217). From January to December 2009 Tim Wright sent actor Toby Jones on three of what they called “Blake Walks.”1 On the introductory video, Wright explains that Jones wanted to walk around London and receive visions. He encouraged visitors to his blog to “stick pictures and noises and stuff in his way.” “What I’m trying to do,” Wright explains on the video, “is build up to the point of, before Toby goes out for a walk, that he’s already slightly wound up by a number of people, almost like virtual, online spirits talking to him and goading him into this walk and him not really understanding what we’re all about and why he should do it.” The collective act of online participation, in other words, was designed to place Jones in a hallucinatory and confused state akin to a visionary experience. Users uploaded images and esoteric lines from Blake’s poems, and these were placed on a mobile device with a GoogleMaps application that Jones

2

William Blake and the Digital Humanities

used to navigate London. Wright fi lmed Jones as he stumbled around London, with nothing but the visions sent by the site’s visitors to act as a map to the city. Jones made short fi lms with his iPhone, live-tweeted his walks on the account @L_O_S, and uploaded photos on Flickr: partly as proof that he made it to the many landmarks and partly as a response to the visitors on the site. Walks and maps inspired by Blake have a venerable tradition. Iain Sinclair, Alan Moore, and Michael Moorcock are among a group of London psychogeographers that use Blake as an inspiration for their own explorations of the city.2 Yet each of the examples above frames different moments in which the spread of social media technology transforms how people relate to the visionary ideal espoused by Blake in the poem “London.” We can imagine, for instance, how the “Friends of William Blake” would have operated differently had the convention protest occurred in 2012 or even 2008. Handing out “twenty-five thousand” printed maps is one thing, and the move probably helped to create a more comprehensive visual and political consciousness of New York City for people worried about political transparency during the RNC (Kastner 217). The “Blake Walks,” however, transform Blake’s visionary imagination from an illuminated yet textual experience to one that is collective, multimodal, and participatory. Printed maps are replaced by GIS-enabled GoogleMaps, drawings are overlayed on augmented reality applications like Layar, visions are recorded as films on smart phones—and all of these different experiences are aggregated on a blog that is retweeted on Twitter, reblogged on Tumblr, shared on Facebook and Flickr, and remixed on YouTube. More profoundly, however, the digital tools used by Wright and Jones transform a group of people into what Howard Rheingold has called a “smart mob.” Rheingold has argued that changes in digital technology have made it possible for social groups to “cooperate in ways never before possible” (xii). Aspects of the smart mob undoubtedly made their way into Chan’s 2004 protest, many of the protesters probably had texting capabilities—for example, but the use of Flickr, Twitter, and GoogleMaps by Wright and Jones takes this phenomenon to an entirely new level. The “Blake Walks” leverage the explosion in new mobile technology to literally transform the physical experience of walking through London. This experience can be shared with anyone who has access to the Internet. In a broad sense, the emergence of the Blakean smart mob in both of these examples shows that digital media is changing how people are relating to Blake’s life and work. New technologies are forming new social groups inspired by William Blake, and these social groups are creating work at a pace and with an ingenuity that was simply not possible even a decade ago. Furthermore, this confluence of technology and culture requires the application of new scholarly and pedagogical approaches to understanding Blake’s influence on contemporary media, approaches that can be found in the digital humanities.

Introduction

3

In the introduction to A Companion to the Digital Humanities Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth defi ne the digital humanities as “the notion that there is a clear and direct relationship between the interpretive strategies that humanists employ and the tools that facilitate exploration of original artifacts based on those interpretive strategies.” DH offers a radical methodological challenge to traditional forms of humanities scholarship by employing new technologies to analyze sources in dramatically different ways. The digital humanities began as humanities computing, a field initiated—according to Susan Hockey—in 1949 with a Jesuit priest named Father Roberto Busa.3 Busa wanted “to make an index verborum of all the words in the works of St. Thomas Aquinas and related authors, totaling some 11 million words of medieval Latin.” Busa achieved this with the help of IBM computers, who created an algorhithm of linguistic lemma for all eleven million of the words. Busa has since released a CD-ROM and hypertext version of the index. As technology improved, humanities computing expanded to include the online digitization of archival sources, typified by sites like The Perseus Project, The Rossetti Archive, and The September 11 Digital Archive. Similarly, online journals like Romantic Circles, Postmodern Culture, and ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies began publishing scholarship online.4 Online scholarly editions utilized markup to provide interactive access to annotations and historical resources for texts. The Wanderer Online Edition, for example, offers online translation of the Old English text, contextual information for the poem, relevant images, links to electronic resources, a reading list, and a link to a Facebook reading group. Projects also began looking at texts as data that could be extracted to visualize relationships between large numbers of texts. The power of data visualization can be seen in Mapping the Republic of Letters from the Stanford Humanities Center, which reveals a network of letters in the early modern period. Text mining projects, like Berkeley’s Wordseer project, extract grammatical and word patterns over a large corpus of texts. Finally, the introduction of Web 2.0 made online work more social—a phenomenon whose impact on scholarship is still being decided. Alain Liu’s RoSE (research-oriented social environment) project epitomizes the integration of social media into academic discourse by analyzing forms of collaborative reading and constructing what Liu calls a “social-document graph” that traces networks of associations between academic authors. Projects like these and the technology they employ require more collaborative forms of academic labor and more creative analytical models. For our purposes, the digital humanities refers to a set of practices and commitments rather than a specific group of technologies. One of these commitments is challenging traditional conceptions of individual scholarship that is focused primarily upon creating textual criticism. Matthew Kirschenbaum’s “What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?,” for example, lists public visibility, awareness of the

4

William Blake and the Digital Humanities

university funding infrastructure, collaboration, and online networking as essential aspects of the digital humanities (60). Mark Sample identifies sharing as the primary aspect of the digital humanities, suggesting that “[w]e should no longer be content to make our work public achingly slowly along ingrained routes” (“Digital”). Because we have easier ways of publishing scholarship, the digital humanities suggests that we need to evolve new methods of working together to advance humanistic knowledge. “More and more,” William Pannapacker argues, “we recognize that the old model of the individual scholar—if it was ever really viable, and not a romantic myth—has become completely dysfunctional” (“Big”). 5 A second commitment for digital humanities scholars is seeing the performance of textual criticism as a necessary but not sufficient practice for academic work. Steve Ramsay’s “On Building” characterizes the digital humanities as an artisan field. What separates the textual bricoleur from the digital humanities scholar, Ramsay suggests, is that with the latter “we can see the grease under [their] fi ngernails.” Digital humanities scholars don’t just write about media objects—they create those objects as a part of their academic work. The work of David Gauntlett merges what he calls Media Studies 2.0, and what we identify as a variant of the digital humanities, with a DIY ethos. Gauntlett proposes that, with Media Studies 2.0, making is a form of connecting because you have to connect (materials, ideas, or both) to make something new; [ . . . ] acts of creativity usually involve, at some point, a social dimension, and connect us with other people; [ . . . ] [and] through making things and sharing them, we increase our engagement with the world, and connection with social and physical environments. (Making 2) All of these voices contribute to our understanding of the digital humanities because they value the social and collaborative production of knowledge over the ideology of the individual scholar and they reinforce the idea that creativity is a central part of the critical process. Gauntlett identifies the commitment to collaborative forms of creativity as existing before the introduction of digital technology, primarily in the work of William Morris and John Ruskin. We believe in a third, often neglected, prophet of the digital humanities: William Blake.6 In the sections that follow, we will show how Blake integrates his form of collaborative creativity—a process we identify as zoamorphosis—into his work. Furthermore, we will articulate how zoamorphosis defi nes the reception of Blake by theorists and practitioners of media studies and the digital humanities. We argue that William Blake presents an alternate form of critical awareness that is connected to creative activity rather than alienated from it. Blake’s work encourages—even demands—that people create their own work as a response to his visions. In the process, Blake’s art is a networked form of creative collaboration.

Introduction

5

BLAKE AND ZOAMORPHOSIS AS ONTOLOGY William Blake’s artistic persona, as the isolated genius or the lone visionary traveling through Eternity, deepens his appeal among a growing multitude who are—and have always been—creating what William Blake means. If Blake was, as Saree Makdisi notes at the beginning of William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s, “[i]gnored by the art world, marginalized in the engraving world, essentially unknown in the world of poetry”, he certainly isn’t an unknown artist in the twentieth or twenty-fi rst centuries (xi).7 Blake has become the prophet of comic book artists, fi lmmakers, musicians, novelists, even computer programmers and churches. Indeed, as Jason Whittaker and Steve Clark argue in Blake, Modernity, and Popular Culture (2007), there is a veritable “Blake Brand,” which uses Blake’s image as a tortured genius to sell everything from Threadless T-Shirts to coffee cups and crafts on Etsy.8 Apart from demonstrating Blake’s prominent, and growing, influence— what do all of these references, adaptations, and transformations of Blake’s work add up to? For us, adaptation and collaborative creativity are the building blocks of a truly social and digital media approach to Blake studies— one that can extend his influence beyond the literary approaches to his work and embrace the grassroots media ecosystem emerging in the early twentyfirst century. We shall show the interactions between a digital humanities invested in creative collaborative participation and a strand of Blake studies that considers Blake as a prophet of creative ontology.9 By creative ontology, we mean to highlight Blake’s belief in the visionary power of creativity as a force that can expand consciousness and change reality. Such a blunt statement might seem naively utopian in our cynical postmodern society. However, Blake’s commitment to truly understanding all aspects of creative production, an approach embraced by contemporary DIY and social media aficionados, matched his unerring belief in the power of individual and collaborative human imagination. Further, we shall use Blake to theorize zoamorphosis, a creative act that emerges in collaboration with others in the present and the past, those lines of flight that activate a new Blake in which there is a propagation rather than preservation of Blakean memes.10 Take, for example, Blake’s understanding of prophecy. As Ian Balfour argues in The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy, for Blake, prophecy is not simply a thing of the future but “is also profoundly a thing of the past, an echo, a citation. [ . . . ] [A]s it happens, Blake engages the Hebraic, Christian, and English prophetic traditions in a spectacular and highly selfconscious way” (129). This highly self-conscious, and we argue creative, understanding of history is displayed in the episode from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell in which Blake has dinner with Ezekiel and Isaiah. The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert that God spake to them; and whether

6

William Blake and the Digital Humanities they did not think at the time, that they would be misunderstood, & so be the cause of imposition. Isaiah answer’d. ‘I saw no God, nor heard any, in a fi nite organical perception; but my senses discover’d the infinite in every thing, and as I was then perswaded, & remain confi rm’d, that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences but wrote.’ (MHH12; E38)

Two questions emerge from this episode that we feel are essential to understanding zoamorphosis. First, why use Isaiah and Ezekiel to communicate what is—presumably—Blake’s message? Second, why does Blake say that Isaiah cares little about being misunderstood or (perhaps more radically) about misunderstanding the message communicated by God? Blake’s dinner with Isaiah and Ezekiel defi nes zoamorphosis as a process that is both collaborative and creative. Blake’s understanding of creativity is always in a dynamic relationship to either the past or to someone else. Blake’s voice becomes clear when he is speaking through the voices of others, as what Balfour would call an echo. Additionally, the voice that Blake speaks through is not simply the voice of Isaiah. Blake transforms Isaiah’s voice, and makes it his own. In this sense, we argue that zoamorphosis is concerned with creativity as a mediated activity. Blakean creativity emerges in interaction and collaboration with but also between separate media. In the foregoing example, Blake is speaking with Isaiah’s voice but also noting a dissonance between God speaking, Isaiah speaking, and Blake (himself) speaking. Further, we fi nd a dissonance between descriptions of seeing, speaking, and—as it is noted more fully in later portions of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell—handwriting and printing. Importantly, the difference between media in this passage is not simply a cause for reflection. Isaiah does not wait to understand the consequences of writing down a description of a visual medium. He does not note the loss of meaning associated with translation from one medium to another. Rather, the act of moving from one medium to another is the catalyst for creative expression.11 If we look at Blake’s understanding of the Four Zoas, we’ll see yet another place where Blake lays the groundwork for zoamorphosis. Zoa translates to “living one” in ancient Greek, and the zoas appear in the Books of Ezekiel and Revelation as four beings who pull God’s chariot. At the beginning of his poem The Four Zoas, Blake identifies “Four Mighty Ones [that] are in every Man; a Perfect Unity Cannot Exist. But from the Universal Brotherhood of Eden the Universal Man. To whom be Glory Evermore Amen” (FZ1.3.5–6; E300–301). The Four Zoas are split in Blake’s poem from Albion, the Universal Man. In Jerusalem, the zoas are portrayed as “clouded” and they “rage East & West & North & South/They change their situations, in the Universal Man./ Albion groans, he sees the Elements divide before his face (J32.25–27; E178). The confl ict of the zoas is a central force in Blake’s understanding of

Introduction

7

confl ict and opposition in general; and yet, this confl ict is part of the creative process. We see this plainly in Blake’s more paradoxical statements about friendship. At the end of the Leviathan episode from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake argues that “Opposition is True Friendship” (MHH20; E42). In the episode, an angel appears to Blake and gives him a tour of the cosmos, ending in a vision of a Leviathan that the angel argues is Blake’s destiny if he continues to spread blasphemy. The scene is Blake’s response to Michael’s education of Adam in Milton’s Paradise Lost. After the angel leaves, the Leviathan disappears and is replaced by a peaceful harper in a field whose song is “a man who never alters his opinions is like standing water and breeds reptiles of the mind” (MHH19; E42). Once again, Blake is in dialogue with the past, but also alters the past. As the use of shifting mediums is a source of creativity in Blake’s work, so conflict is central to Blake’s understanding of collaboration. Blake works within the framework established by Paradise Lost, but changes the content to support his own imaginative vision. Zoamorphosis embodies Blake’s sense of confl ict-based collaboration: a collaboration that enables the transformation of the past due to disagreement. Blake asserts that the best collaborations emerge out of a fundamental confl ict that pushes each creative mind to higher and higher levels of imaginative experience. The point in the foregoing Leviathan episode is not that Blake is right and the angel is wrong. For, as the angel complains about Blake’s imagination imposing upon him, Blake responds “we impose upon one another, & it is but lost time to converse with you whose works are only Analytics” (MHH20; E42). The angel is no longer working only with Aristotle’s Analytics, because this interpretation of reality has been imaginatively transformed by Blake. Similarly Blake is no longer working exclusively in his realm. Collaboration transforms the creative act from individual vision to a group model that ensures a more powerful artistic experience. Zoamorphic creativity is apparent in Blake’s poem “London,” where the woe of war and the slavery of commerce are concretized in churches and palace walls; in The First Book of Urizen, where the material world is literally manifested out of a series of successive conflicts; in Jerusalem, where subjugation and rebellion result in the construction of the City of Golgonooza; and in the Pickering poem “The Crystal Cabinet,” where the confl ict between the narrator and the Maiden introduces the reader to a parallel dimension. Zoamorphosis emerges in Blake’s visual composition where figures from Michelangelo fi nd themselves in bizarre protosurrealistic environments; where, as David Weir argues in Brahma in the West (2003), Hinduism clashes with Greek mythology; and where Dante’s distinct visual imagination becomes, in Blake’s eye, an alien sandbox of spiritual physicality. Zoamorphosis also appears in Blake’s personal collaborations: in his struggles with sometimes patron William Hayley, who

8

William Blake and the Digital Humanities

both did not support Blake well enough and supported him too much; in the debt he owes to his wife Catherine Blake, who colored his prints but is acknowledged only in an erased note on the cover of The Four Zoas; and in the many spiritual enemies he accumulated throughout his life—from Joshua Reynolds and the naturalistic style Blake hated at the Royal Academy to the solider who accused him of treason, the reviewer who lambasted his 1809 exhibit in The Examiner, and the dealer who liked the marketing concept behind Blake’s illustrations to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales but tried to commission another artist to create them. On multiple levels, then, zoamorphosis is absolutely central to Blake’s spiritual, intellectual, and creative life and gives a different ring to the short couplet he wrote to Hayley in his notebook: “Thy Friendship oft has made my heart to ake/Do be my Enemy for Friendships sake” (E506). In both conscious and unconscious ways, then, Blake embraced what Pierre Levi and Henry Jenkins have theorized as collective intelligence. According to Jenkins, collective intelligence is the idea that “[n]one of us can know everything; each of us knows something; and we can put the pieces together if we pool our resources and combine our skills” (Convergence 4). Collective intelligence is not just a strategy for Blake; it is a foundation of his ontology. In the spirit of this collaborative ontology, we agree with Laura Quinney when she argues that although the individual spirit is indeed of importance to Blake, the character of this individuality is very different than what most people see as selfhood. “For Blake,” Quinney argues, “the node of identity presents itself as the focal point, or center, of the self, but what lies at our hearts is divinity, wide and deep, by which we participate in a sense of larger being” (20). The self, according to Blake, is always primarily individual, and yet this individuality essentially exists by participating in larger forms of collaborative being. Collaborative being is on display when Blake discusses forgiveness, as in the prologue to For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise: “Mutual Forgiveness of each Vice/Such are the Gates of Paradise” (E529). Blake sees forgiveness as a project that literally embraces collective intelligence. No one can create or open the Gates of Paradise alone. But if we pool our resources and combine our skills, we can create the paradise we want. In the next section, we will see how thinkers in media studies, the digital humanities, and Blake studies have embraced Blake’s collaborative ontology as an ongoing creative project and applied zoamorphosis to their own understanding of digital media.

A MEDIA HISTORY OF ZOAMORPHOSIS

“Resonating acoustic space. A vast echo chamber for reader participation. The tiger is not in any tank or any zoo. It is a world. The symbolic does not refer—it is.” –Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker, Through the Vanishing Point, 8. [1]

Introduction

9

Blake’s influence on creative and collaborative media stretches back through the history of the digital humanities and media studies to figures like Marshall McLuhan. For McLuhan, Blake’s exploration of the “ratio of the five senses” articulates one of McLuhan’s central themes: that the medium is the message. As Levi Bryant has argued, McLuhan sees this as an ontological argument: mediums extend and transform the reality of human beings. “For McLuhan,” Bryant recounts, “semiotic entities like theories and styles—and dare I say, signs and fictions?—are no less actors than entities such as writing, telegraphs, and rivers” (“Weird”). The semiotic forms a reality just as other objects form the reality we experience, and all objects impact what we see and understand about our environment. Further, Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker call one of Blake’s most popular motifs, the tyger, a “world.” By impacting and inflecting creative expression, the tyger forms and extends a particular space and becomes a way for creating further worlds of expression.12 Bryant sees this as a form of co-evolution. He suggests that human beings have used grass and, in doing so, impacted its evolutionary history. But “isn’t it true,” he rejoins, “that grass has seduced humans so as to get itself reproduced? Isn’t the softness of grass, its rich verdant color, its pleasant earthy smell, the satisfaction it provides when being mowed, etc., a sexual strategy to get itself reproduced” (“Weird”)? The idea can be extended to other media that might not be alive. Isn’t it true that televisions have transformed how human beings relate to one another in ways that its inventors could not have anticipated? Hasn’t GPS given us a very different way of existing on the planet than we had before it was invented? Forms of technology, whether they be televisions, grass, or literary and aesthetic symbols, subtly remake the world around us—creating new possibilities of experience. In The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan develops this idea of a plastic human experience with special emphasis on how different modes of perception create different worlds in Blake’s work. Blake makes quite explicit that when sense ratios change, men change. Sense ratios change when any one sense or bodily or mental function is externalized in technological form. [ . . . ] Imagination is that ratio among the perceptions and faculties which exists when they are not embedded or outered in material technologies. When so outered, each sense and faculty becomes a closed system. Prior to such outering there is entire interplay among experiences. This interplay or synesthesia is a kind of tactility such as Blake sought in the bounding line of sculptural form and in engraving. (194–95) McLuhan sketches here a relationship between media interplay and the closed systems of particular media forms. An individual medium, let’s say in McLuhan and Parker’s earlier example “the tiger,” forms a world— which accordingly changes the way senses perceive—or what McLuhan

10

William Blake and the Digital Humanities

would call “sense ratios.” In McLuhan’s analysis, the tiger is more than a motif or a reference. It is a technology, an ontology, an echo chamber that lures people to adapt, transform, or appropriate his work. The tiger is also a form of social media, because it creates associations between itself, Blake, and other human and non-human actors. For McLuhan, participation never occurs in a void: it includes a technological medium, collaborators, and the world which all produce in tandem with each other. The tiger gives form to sensual experience, thus producing a world, and then invites creative expression in this new world. Could we not see this process as akin to the sexual strategies of grass? Isn’t the tiger, in a way, seducing its collaborators to reproduce itself? McLuhan and Parker’s analysis of the tiger and its focus on the “human sensorium” and creativity anticipates what we see as the problems and questions surrounding two areas of Blake research. First, as media theorists, McLuhan and Parker sketch a powerful alternative to the archival philosophy on display in much of the work on Blake in media studies and the digital humanities. The brilliant archival work done by The William Blake Archive is, for example, limited by its attempt to faithfully represent Blake’s work. This has caused Marcel O’Gorman to declare that online archival projects are plagued by a “fever for archiving” that downplays the performative and creative potential of the digital world (xv). In contrast, McLuhan and Parker’s tiger is less concerned with Blake than it is the reader participation resonated by the world of the tiger. Digital humanities communities have embraced creativity, participation, and public access as a form of what Bethany Nowviskie has called “tactical preservation.” Nowviskie aligns understanding with making because we cannot preserve everything, instead cultural heritage is made anew by the process of archiving. “That’s how we pass [our cultural heritage] on,” Nowviskie argues, “how we interpret and conserve our inheritance,” “how we make it all anew.” Second, McLuhan and Parker transform the questions posed by reception studies. Previous work on Blake in reception studies has focused on epistemology, mimesis, and economics. Apart from Clark and Whittaker’s formulation of “the Blake Brand” in Blake, Modernity and Popular Culture, we also have Mike Goode’s use of the term “Blakespotting” to signify the proverbial aspect of Blakean quotes. Goode’s powerful image of Blake’s proto-Marxist proverbs adorning staunch capitalist Donald Trump’s penthouse is matched only by his provocative statement that “it is difficult to defend that the proverb, once dislocated from Blake’s copperplate and relocated onto the gilded walls of a luxury penthouse, cannot mean what Trump seems to want it to mean here” (770). Goode’s status as a literary scholar makes him more interested in questions of meaning, and how that meaning proliferates with Blake’s proverbial form, and Whittaker and Clark’s use of branding also interrogates the circulation of meaning in global capitalism. Although each text provides interesting reflections on the versimiltude of Blakean appropriations, McLuhan and Parker offer a

Introduction

11

fascinating alternative—that questions of reception are not only epistemological but also ontological. Not only do we need reflections on the meaning of Blakean appropriations, but we also need to map, create, and participate in the tiger’s world. As media theorists, then, McLuhan and Parker can see the archival aspects of Blake as an important figure in literary history in addition to the importance of Blake as a thinker of digital and multimedia creativity. In fact, many Blake scholars have gestured towards—if not explored the full implications of—a Blake scholarship devoted to creativity. In Narrative Unbound, for example, Donald Ault notes that Blake’s enterprise is geared towards denying a single fundamental reality underlying the events in his poems and “generat[ing] a narrative field in which the past is not fi nished and closed but incomplete and open—alterable and revisable” (4). Ault sees the incommensurability of Blake’s poetry, the contradiction that envelops several layers of the narrative, as generative of a revisable space. Reading is, in other words, a revisionary act. There are creative gestures in other strands of Blake studies as well. Ron Broglio, Marcel O’Gorman, and Bill Ruegg opine what it might mean to “turn to William Blake as the theorist for writing in the digital medium”. For them, this means noting a “certain networking dynamic in Blake’s texts, a certain bordering on chaos and form, a certain transformational (il)logic of representation” (144), which match forms of digital writing. O’Gorman extends this attitude in his book E-Crit: Digital Media, Critical Theory, and the Humanities, in which Blake’s “turn against the dehumanizing potential of new technologies and, most importantly, against a techno-bureaucratic version of education, provide an ideal exemplar for inventing a new method and materiality suitable to the current apparatus of computing” (67). And further, David Baulch sees in Blake’s work a rejection of representation and a “step into what Deleuze calls ‘an unrecognized and unrecognizable terra incognita’” (136). Deleuze links many of the creative gestures in Blake studies. Especially important are Deleuze’s call in Difference and Repetition for viewing the history of philosophy as a collage or fiction, in which “[o]ne imagines a philosophically bearded Hegel, a philosophically clean-shaven Marx, in the same way as a moustached Mona Lisa” (xxi–xxii) and the defi nition of philosophy as “the discipline which involves creating concepts” from What is Philosophy?, his collaboration with Felix Guattari (5). Many of the Blake scholars just mentioned, however, limit their exploration of Deleuze’s dictum to new interpretive strategies. Ault sees creativity as derivable fundamentally through the act of reading, whereas Broglio and Robert Mitchell characterize their special journal issue on Romanticism and the New Deleuze as “marking and encouraging a fundamental shift in interpretations of a philosopher.” This is hardly surprising because Deleuze himself expressed creativity as an interpretive strategy. In his books on individual philosophers—Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, The Fold: Leibniz

12

William Blake and the Digital Humanities

and the Baroque, Nietzsche and Philosophy, and Bergsonism—Deleuze uses interpretive techniques to create new versions of the past. The result is not exactly hermeneutics, but it still relies upon textual commentary as a primary form of creative expression.13 We argue that a truly revolutionary Blakean approach to the digital humanities embraces but also transcends the culture of interpretive practice associated with print culture. Further, this shift necessitates a turn to a networked understanding of creative agency and a flat ontology that can value creative efforts in the digital age. Manuel DeLanda sees flat ontology as an alternative to a hierarchical ontology in which “each level represent[s] a different ontological category (organism, species, genera)” (Intensive 58). Flat ontology is “an approach in terms of interacting parts and emergent wholes,” which is “made exclusively of unique, singular, individuals, differing in spatio-temporal scale but not in ontological status” (58). Alfred North Whitehead, according to Steven Shaviro, also embraces flat ontology due to his belief that “everything from a neutrino to the cosmos as a whole is equally a ‘society’ in Whitehead’s defi nition of the term” (10). For Whitehead and Shaviro, each individual object is both an individual and a “society.” Levi Bryant’s The Democracy of Objects sees flat ontology as democratizing being because it asserts an infi nity of gaps or vacuums between objects regardless of whether humans are involved [;] [ . . . ] defend[s] a plurality of types of objects, ranging from the semiotic to the natural [;] [and] advocates a pluralism of types of objects at all levels of scale that are irreducible to one another. (280) Flat ontology is an approach to reality that imagines each object as made up of an infinity of parts and gaps that, themselves, are made up of an infinity of parts and gaps. None of these parts or gaps has ontological priority, but they exist in a networked plane of mutual dependence. Timothy Morton’s work on ecology is also instructive here, as he suggests that ecological thought “doesn’t just occur ‘in the mind.’ It’s a practice and a process of becoming fully aware of how human beings are connected with other beings—animal, vegetable, mineral” (7). Finally, flat ontology emerges in the work of Jane Bennett who argues for a form of distributed agency in which vitality appears “along a continuum of ontological types” (37) and William Connolly who imagines “multiple tiers of temporality [that] periodically intersect (through chemical, electrical, intentional, gravitational, magnetic, hormonal, or other means) in a world of becoming that is open to some extent” (9). For us, flat ontology reconfigures the hierarchical and epistemological model that dominates reception studies where the author’s original expression is compared with his or her adaptation in other contexts and interpreted by the critic. By contrast, we imagine the entity “William Blake” as an ontologically democratic network or society made up of everything from the ideas that inspired Blake to the material objects he used in his

Introduction

13

artwork, the animals and plants he ate, and the individuals who were influenced by his work. By creating new work, artists who adapt William Blake are actively adding to and transforming his network. The historical person named “William Blake” is only one node in an increasingly complex society that continually defi nes and redefi nes what it is that is referred to when the name Blake is uttered. It is for this reason we turn from the reader-response, reception, and historicist readings that have characterized many approaches to Blake in the past to the audience and fandom methods favored by some areas of film and media studies. The insights provided by phenomenology, psychology, hermeneutics, semiotics, and structuralism/poststructuralism were extremely important in transferring the focus of literary criticism away from the author towards the reader, as well as from the narrator to the naratee. Yet, the vast majority of reader-response–driven theories from the 1970s onwards, whether the phenomenological approaches of Gadamer, Ingarden, and Iser, the semiotic and structuralist models of Rifaterre and Culler, or Fish’s affective stylistics, privilege the individual experience with the unspoken assumption that individuality is the appropriate response to how we make meaning within texts. On the other hand, audience research and fandom studies better loan themselves to social media interpretations because—even when reading is involved—they have posited a shared audience at the point of transmission and reception. The reason why this approach is limited in a discussion of both the reception of Blake specifically and Blake’s adoption into digital humanities is that the transformations that have taken place from the late 1990s onwards in our reading habits point towards the ways in which reading itself is becoming an increasingly social experience. The notion that reading has always been essentially individualistic is, of course, false: prior to the rise not only of the printing press but also the establishment of distribution processes efficient enough to make the dissemination of texts cheap enough to be enjoyed in isolation, reading tended to be something undertaken among the group. As Alberto Manguel points out in his A History of Reading, during the Middle Ages texts were nearly always encountered in a communal context, whether Cistercian monks being read to during meals or members of the public listening to joglars recite the texts of troubadours in performances at fairs and marketplaces. As such, “the joy of the text was to be communal, not individual” (Manguel 115), although obviously there were great differences between the recital of a joglar, which depended on the performer’s skill to provide variety of expression to often formulaic material, and a public reading from the Bible in which the emphasis was on the subject matter of the text itself. Nonetheless, even while resisting the tendency to homogenize the experiences of oral culture, it is clear that some of the current practices of digital dissemination of texts share more similarities with pre-Gutenberg media. Recently, scholars such as Lars Sauerberg and Thomas Pettitt have begun to talk of what they call the “Gutenberg parenthesis”, that the five hundred or so years of print culture function as one diversion within a longer

14

William Blake and the Digital Humanities

trajectory of western media, and that contemporary phenomena such as YouTube and Twitter have more in common with medieval modes of communication. For Sauerberg, the book as a “privileged mode of cognition is . . . being marginalized and transformed” as we move from “a metaphorics of linearity and reflection to a-linearity and co-production of ‘reality’” (79). As Pettitt suggests much more provocatively, the entire history of media has merely been “interrupted by the age of print.” Whereas the notion of a Gutenberg parenthesis is useful for reminding us that the cognitive experiences presented via reading are neither essential nor intrinsic, the communal factors prevalent in media have never been absent from western culture: whether in the music hall, the cinema, or millions of homes as a radio or television broadcast, media is more generally a shared rather than isolated experience. Similarly, even within literary reception studies there have been those, such as Jauss, who acknowledge the greater role to be played by the audience rather than the individual reader in transforming the horizon of expectations that surrounds a text. Similarly, Roger Chartier’s The Order of Books critiques phenomenological approaches to reading that erase the concrete modality of the texts in favor of a “universality” of the experience of reading. For Chartier, the flaws of Rezeptionstheorie extend even to Jauss, who fails to bridge the gap between an abstract, even pure, text and the historical processes that occur during the transformations of this horizon of expectations. As Chartier points out, drawing on Roger Stoddard, books are not written by authors but manufactured by scribes, editors, printers, artisans, and engineers, citing the example of how the reformatting of William Congreve’s works made him more accessible and so acceptable into the canon as a new legitimacy was transferred to his plays via the processes of material production (Chartier 10–11). The importance of this material production has been recognized in Blake studies for a long time, particularly via the work of Viscomi, Essick, Eaves, Bentley, and all those scholars who have insisted upon the importance of the material artifact of the book. And yet, with the exception of Bentley, this work has largely been restricted to the understanding and re-evaluation of Blake’s books and prints within the contexts in which they were produced. Understandably with regard to academic scholarship, they have wished to focus attention on the errors that are produced when providing interpretations drawn from Blake’s works reproduced in formats that differ to the original mode of production. And yet it is precisely those non-original reproductions— the refractions of Blake’s work that introduce error—that are so important to a rigorous understanding of the reception of Blake. Rather than a cognitive mode based on reflection of the original, reception studies must embrace a mode that deals with co-production via social media—including the ethical and aesthetic difficulties that are often introduced by such co-production. More recent examples of communal reading can be found in fandom and celebrity studies. Henry Jenkins’s Textual Poachers identifies “media fandom” as a group of people who not only consume media texts, but also actively produce adaptations of those texts in the form of fan fiction. By

Introduction

15

adapting, or “poaching” texts, Jenkins argues that “fans cease to be simply an audience for popular texts; instead, they become active participants in the construction and circulation of textual meanings” (24). His more recent Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide shows how this property of fan culture funnels into social and participatory media as fan and consumer communities “are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content” (3). The rise of alternate reality games as a major marketing device for fi lms and games, for example, makes transforming the hype of a new product into a participatory game in which fans gather clues and go on missions to receive pictures of central characters or major plot points. And the appropriation of fandom in analyses of literary celebrity has emphasized the way literary figures are co-produced by marketing and fan response. Tom Mole’s Byron’s Romantic Celebrity indicates how fandom extends all the way back to the eighteenth century. 14 Blake, of course, received nothing like Byron’s level of celebrity during his lifetime, although during the twentieth century his status has often eclipsed that of the Romantic star. Significantly, many of Blake’s “fans” who have emerged in the twentieth century have often seen themselves as more actively engaged in a participatory culture than is often the case for long-dead literary and artistic icons. In an essay entitled “This Is Personal: Blake and Mental Fight,” the artist Christopher Bucklow observes that the relation many people have to Blake is unusual, “for all the other Romantic poets and artists—excepting Wordsworth—are dead in this sense—dead and buried physically and spiritually—never invoked in general conversation.” This may be something that is peculiar to Blake, where his admonition in Jerusalem, “I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s” (10.20; E153), provokes his followers to challenge his own systems as much as he challenged his own precursors, whether the Bible, Milton, or prophetic traditions of his day. Bucklow himself draws attention to the fact that he does not particularly appreciate the creation of a “Christ-like” Blake, and in his demand for a more infernal relationship with the poet and artist, one based as much on contraries as agreement, we may see a familiar pattern when Blake appears online, one that encourages any potential followers to be knowingly of the devil’s party.15 Take as an example, London.pl, a version of Blake’s poem “London” written in the Perl programming language by Graham Harwood for the 2004 CUNY exhibition “Social Capital—Forms of Interaction.” Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall as a general purpose Unix scripting language in 1987. It is inelegant, especially when compared with the concision of Python or the efficiency of C#. Yet it is often seen as a particularly literary programming language, as it conforms very closely to human language and is often used to process and represent text. Harwood’s program was printed in the form of a page from one of Blake’s illuminated manuscripts, accompanied by not only a figure clipped from Blake’s America but also images of Big Ben, Westminster Cathedral, the London Eye, and framed by Blakean leaves, flowers, and bodies.

16

William Blake and the Digital Humanities

Figure I.1 Graham Harwood. London.pl. 2004. Digital print.

Harwood gives copyright of the poem to “William Blake (1792–2002),” but mentions that “[p]ermission granted to use and modify and append this library as long as the copyright above is maintained, and credit is given

Introduction

17

for any use of the library.” The theme of transformation and manipulation runs throughout Harwood’s comments, as he describes London as a “mansion built in misery” where “the proprietary city” “cloaks the flesh in fear.” Although Harwood clearly wants Blake’s name to maintain its place as the author of “London,” he sees property as the locus of despair, a state that can be overcome only by creative manipulation of cities, programs, and poems. The title of Harwood’s illumination “Pearl Routines to Manipulate London” conflates his code routines with the “chart’rd streets” mentioned in Blake’s “London,” and perhaps suggests that the ability of Perl to enact computation and calculation—rather than simple representation—adds a capacity for the poem to transform the reality it describes. It is clear that Harwood’s code is a supplement to Blake’s poem, a new version, which adds features to the original text. Harwood then mentions a possible module that is designed to “fi nd and calculate the gross lung-capacity of the children screaming from 1792 to the present” and “calculate the air displacement needed to represent the public scream.” The program accounts for class and age by creating a DeadChildIndex, which constructs a series of datatypes and variables used to assign specific values to the algorithm. # % { # IndexValue => { # Name => “ Child name If known else undefi ned ”; # Age => “ Must be under 14 or the code will # throw an exception due to $COMPLICITY”; # Height => “Height of the child” # SocialClass => “RentBoy YoungGirl-Syphalitic-Innoculator # CrackKid WarBeatenKid ForcedFeatalAbortion # Chimney-Sweeps UncategorisedVictim ” # }, As many as found #} Note that Harwood excludes children who are over 14, because he suggests such individuals might be complicit in the suffering he is calculating. The index is also commented out (“#”). London.pl was not designed to actually work, because it is missing some of the necessary modules to calculate all of the values needed in the algorithm. But, as far as its Perl syntax is concerned, it could potentially work. DeadChildIndex is applied to a line that accounts for the fact that a single child could be, for example, both a “CrackKid” and a “Chimney-Sweeps,” averages that the “average daily scream output of fear for the period 1792–2002 is 6,” and determines the number of days a particular person lived. Finally, Harwood shows us a line that connects all of these filters to code that accounts for the influence of height and weight on lung capacity, and averages height and weight based on class. This final calculation is, of course, an intrinsic critique of the way working conditions and poor nutrition of people in poorer classes influence height, weight, and lung capacity.

18 William Blake and the Digital Humanities $VitalLungCapacity = ((0.041 * $Height)– (0.018 * $Age))—2.69 ; return $VitalLungCapacity; }else{ if(! $Height){ $Height = Get_HeightFromClass(Height => $DeadChild->{SocialClass}) } if(! $Age){ $Age = Get_AgeFromClass(Age => $DeadChild->{SocialClass}) } if($Age && $Height){ }$VitalLungCapcity = ((0.041 * $Height) – (0.018 * $Age)) – 2.69 ; return $VitalLungCapacity; }else{ if($Age){ $VitalLungCapacity = ((3.6) – (2.1) / 8.0) * $Age; return $VitalLungCapcity; }else{ $VitalLungCapacity = ((3.6) – (2.1) / 8.0) * int(rand(14)) ; return $VitalLungCapcity; } } } } Harwood’s code is a simple calculation designed to add a computational dimension to Blake’s poem. In fact, he imagined that the value returned for “$VitalLungCapacity” could be applied to a program that would play a sound fi le of screaming that all of London could hear. Wendy Chun has suggested that Harwood’s program represents a meaningful approach to coding as “the source of things other than the machine execution it is ‘supposed’ to engender” (52). We agree, and zoamorphosis is a perfect way to show how programmers in the digital humanities are fi nding ways to manipulate code such that it shows what Bruno Latour has said about nature and mechanism. “Protecting human beings from the domination of machines and technocrats is a laudable enterprise,” Latour argues in We Have Never Been Modern, “but if the machines are full of human beings who fi nd their salvation there, such a protection is merely absurd” (124). Neither the machine nor London itself is the source of misery. Misery, rather, stems from the idea that children, cities,

Introduction

19

authors, or beings have immutable laws, histories, or discourses that they must follow, rather than belonging to a vast network in which creativity constantly, infernally, and zoamorphically renews our relationships with Blake and his world.

THE BLAKE 2.0 CLOUD We imagine our study bridging audience reception, fandom, celebrity, flat ontology, and the digital humanities by focusing on both collaborative and creative aspects of Blake’s appearances online as well as considering how social co-production has affected his offline reception. As we mentioned with regard to the work of Tim Morton earlier, flat ontology never just occurs in the mind but is a practice of creating and building the networks we describe. This book, therefore, occupies only one aspect of our work— the other being The Blake 2.0 Cloud we are currently creating with other Blake scholars, students, and fans. Blake 2.0 began life as a design for a web site in 2008, one that would combine Web 2.0 tools with an interest in the primary focus of Jason’s research, the reception of Blake, his second life—that virtual domain where instances of Blake are not so much reproduced as enacted and embodied in multiplicities of forms. Roger started work on the cloud in 2009, and applied his interest in comics and digital media to the articles and projects he produced. We began with a plateau, in the middle of things—something inconspicuous and relatively innocuous: a blog, Zoamorphosis. There is always something of an act of vanity in a blog, a process of self-publishing. To treat this vanity as itself significant is to succumb to narcissism. Yet, at last, something existed, or, more accurately, performed, not necessarily a substance and more instance than being; yet that something could perform acts of agency within the network of a Blake 2.0 cloud. As a development of utility computing, making virtual servers available over a network, the virtue of cloud computing is that it provides a way to increase capabilities or capacity on the fly, infrastructure often being elsewhere. The transformation of our work on Blake, which we conceive as operating as application rather than text, began with a very simple imperative: we want people to read what we write, and the simple fact is that driving traffic to a site requires working with such things as Google webmaster tools and SEO techniques. To bring human readers to a simple blog, we wrote for the machine, tweaking and modifying the text constantly in an attempt to move it up search engine rankings. In practice, there is always the possibility of modification and, as such, any instance of Blake 2.0 must be always in beta. The next step is that no single application can achieve everything. As such, planning had already begun on another stage to deploy various application frameworks (blogging tools, wikis, social networking software), but with no obvious center to Blake 2.0 it became clear that communication between the various nodes of

20 William Blake and the Digital Humanities a distributed cloud would be as important as the nodes themselves. Ideally, all aspects of that cloud should be able to communicate with each other in some shape or form, sharing data so that when one part of the cloud is updated, another part responds to notify others navigating the cloud. Focusing on data, using the Web as a platform for distributed information is one important part of Web 2.0, and in many respects this is where the challenge of Web 2.0 has been most readily accepted by academic publishers but often in relatively limited terms. The site of application remains the site, but communication online today is much better thought of as part of a spectrum: rather than simply constructing a web site, more or less clearly delineated, information should be shared across a range of platforms where appropriate—iTunes, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and many, many more where users of the Web frequently congregate. This in turn leads to the more challenging aspect of Web 2.0, that new technologies have enabled an architecture of participation where visitors expect as a matter of course to be accomplices and contributors rather than just observers and consumers. The reason why this challenge is so often resisted is because the subversion of the status quo is often far from ideal: lack of trust in experts can easily be replaced by a high noise-tosignal ratio rather than the mythical rational self-correction of market forces. Yet the practice of engaging with this audience is precisely what is often most compelling about Web 2.0: as David Gauntlet has demonstrated, the decentered and distributed models engendered by new digital ethnographies and methodologies indicate that online media are no longer an adjunct or “optional extra”, but have changed the way we engage with all media.16 Our experiments with the Babel of noise produced by Web 2.0 have changed us in ways we did not initially consider. Instinctively, we began operating on a model of communication from producer to receiver, but the desire to drive up reception for that signal has often resulted in very different vectors and messengers of mediation. For example, until 2009 we were skeptical of the value of the social media site Twitter. It was when Jason noticed a sudden spike in traffic, traffic driven to the cloud from a post in Twitter, that he began to consider it more seriously, and the labor of using Twitter led us to gradually develop much more effective filters and, in turn, appreciate its value in surprising ways. The demand to provide machinereadable content means that there are now plenty of platforms that can suck out information from Twitter and mediate it in extremely effective ways, which in turn has led us to consider the ways in which the Blake 2.0 cloud can be distributed through social media sites often without active participation and beyond centralizing control: as Blake wrote of his designs in a letter to Dr. Trusler in 1799, “Tho’ I call them Mine I know they are not Mine” (E701). An effect of this is that the agitation in the network caused by posts, disseminations, and disturbances has sometimes provided

Introduction

21

us with surprising insights and new directions as participants correct errors or realign operations. These questions of ownership bring us back to what it means to be, in Morris Eaves’s words, “Blake’s caretakers” (413). In “On Blakes We Want and Blakes We Don’t” (1995) Eaves argues that Blake no longer needs to be rescued for posterity, but that critics should create resources that “supplement the original message and sustain interest in it” in the wake of his “ready reproducibility”, which often leads to a “loss of focus” and “blurring of identity” that “threatens to dissolve in a sea of white noise” (414). In contrast, we never believe that our written or online work merely sustains Blake’s original message. We love the white noise. All of our efforts are imagined as creative ones. We are creating nerdy and L33T Blakes, just as we observe queer Blakes, goth Blakes, animal Blakes, and yuppy Blakes in online forums and across different social networks—and then (from a larger perspective) we collaborate on an emergent photomosaic that stretches to everyone and every thing that carries Blake with them. As Eaves admits in the title to his essay, there are a multitude of Blakes. But unlike the putative reader Eaves addresses, we don’t have to be in a position where we choose one Blake over another. To the contrary, we want all of the Blakes, every single one.

CHAPTERS Our book proceeds through the different ways the massive amount of Blakean material online engages with the creativity and collaboration of social media networks. The fi rst section introduces these themes with reference to the way most Blake scholars, artists, and activists fi rst encounter him: through a history of the collected edition and two of his most popular zoamorphic motifs. Our purpose is to show how the political and social aspects of zoamorphosis appear throughout the entire history of people adapting his work, from the very first edits of “Tyger” for Alexander Gilchrist’s Life of William Blake to the counterculture and post-punk adaptations of the Jerusalem hymn “ . . . and did those feet.” The second section approaches Blakean creativity through an analysis of his audiences, rather than exclusively through the perception of individual readers, and illustrates what possibilities emerge in scholarship and teaching when approaching Blake as a social media phenomenon. The fi nal chapter and the conclusion draw out some of the consequences of our argument for literary studies and archives, the academic spaces where Blake has traditionally been studied. We give special attention to the emergence of folksonomy and algorithmic editorial control and their part in archiving Blake on social media sites like Flickr, Wikipedia, and YouTube; the place of Blake in a discussion of labor in digital media and the digital humanities;

22

William Blake and the Digital Humanities

and the part Blake has to play in decoupling creativity from traditional human-centric assumptions about agency.

“When We Read Blake, We Read a Virtual Blake Transmitted to Us via a Series of Editors, and It Frames How We Read the Originals.” The fi rst chapter sketches a history of the collected editions focusing on Blake. Beginning with the “Poetical Sketches,” the thirteen poems included in the fi rst edition of Alexander Gilchrist’s Life of William Blake; continuing through the printed editions of the twentieth century by figures such as Yeats/Ellis, Keynes, Erdman, Ostriker, and Bentley and Dorfman; and fi nishing with a history of the digital archive in the Blake Multimedia Project, the Blake Digital Text Project, The William Blake Archive, and the 2011 Blake’s Notebook iOS app published by the British Library; we contextualize the Blakean archive as a collaborative and creative project that continually reinvents Blake for the needs of very different social groups. Most scholars encounter a “virtual Blake,” because most criticism is derived from engagement with Blake’s collected editions rather than the originals, and this phenomenon suggests Blakean criticism is a much more creatively inclined activity than many researchers would admit.

“That Blake Had So Clearly Rewritten His Own Poem Was Taken as Prima Facie Evidence That the Text Was Open to Further Revisions as Required.” The second chapter, on Blake’s Tyger, shows how the popularity of Blake’s poem encourages creative revision, transformation, and remixing as part of an ongoing mashup. As a case study, “Tyger” was revised from its fi rst public appearance in Gilchrist’s Life. We show how the act of revising Blake is central in early poetic editions like those by Robert Graves and also in more recent interpretations like Stanley Fish’s reading of the poem as a form of interpretive community. From here, the tendency to re-create Blake’s Tyger can be found in places as various as Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, John Tavener’s choir piece “Tyger,” goth and folk music interpretations by Greg Brown and Thelma, visual appropriations by Joel-Peter Witkin and Korshi Dosoo, and digital media art from Guilherme Marcondes. We suggest that “Tyger” shows how zoamorphosis operates on a dynamic plane of minute particulars, with the virtual Blake luring artists to re-create his work in different mediums and thus extend his influence.

“And Yet This Was the Double Life of ‘Jerusalem,’ Both Establishment and Radical, Whose Usage Depended Very Much on Where It Was Deployed.” The third chapter shows how collaboration, this time in the adaptation and use of Blake’s Jerusalem, engages the reception of Blake’s work as a

Introduction

23

political activity. Starting with a consideration of the fact that the Jerusalem hymn never appears in Blake’s prophecy Jerusalem and is instead included only in the fi rst two versions of the poem Milton, we conceptualize the hymn as a form of social co-production: a grassroots aesthetic response to the mass distribution of the hymn in the widely popular 1917 composition by Sir Hubert Parry. We chart how “Jerusalem’s” co-production—through classical and popular music, as well as theme and political propaganda—illustrates that social media is something both much wider—and much older—than digital media, although new digital and online technologies encourage more rapid responses that have taken the hymn far beyond Blake’s initial object.

“Blake’s Disparity and Obscurity Conceptualize Creativity as a Pedagogical Model.” Blake has always been difficult to teach, especially if students venture beyond the Songs or the prophecies written in the 1790s. This chapter suggests that, rather than avoiding Blake’s almost mythical difficulty, teachers and students should leverage social media to engage with his texts and help us incorporate creativity, participation, and collaboration as important twenty-fi rst century forms of literacy. In the spring of 2011, Roger taught three sections of what he called “Blake 2.0: William Blake and Digital Culture” at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His course included a Twitter backchannel, a crowdsourced guide to Blake’s Milton written collaboratively on GoogleDocs, and a project in which students were asked to creatively (and critically) re-create one of Blake’s ideas, characters, or phrases. The chapter shows how the teaching of literary history changes in the wake of projects like the ones included in Roger’s class. Specifically, we look at Peter Turchin’s cliodynamics, where historical phenomena are treated computationally: in terms of long-term trends. One essential part of cliodynamics is the idea of approaching history in terms of systems thinking. In other words, it is less important to understand historical events in cliodynamics than it is to investigate the trends and systems that construct those events and the way they are interpreted. We suggest that Blake is well suited to systems-thinking, but that he adds a necessarily creative approach to history that is sometimes neglected in purely computational analyses.

“Twitter Exposes the Fact That, Outside of Academia, Blake Is Being Deployed in Ways That Treat Initiated Readers as Largely Irrelevant.” Whereas Blake can be used as part of a participatory dynamic to encourage the teaching of creativity in the classroom, his texts and art follow rhizomatic pathways through everyday life that are only now possible to begin charting in any detail through the possibilities opened up by online and digital media. Traditionally, scholars have worked with methodologies and

24

William Blake and the Digital Humanities

techniques (such as close-reading) that presuppose a relative scarcity of the text, that even while the Blake industry exploded into action at the end of the twentieth century, the relative audiences for various papers and publications would remain relatively small. Blake, however, is a true mass media phenomenon, as quantitative analyses of his appearances online make quite clear. In the face of this, digital humanities will have to employ wide-reading techniques and methodologies to engage with everyday Blake, ones that share aspects with such things as television, journalism, and fandom studies rather than more traditional forms of literary analysis.

“Is It True that Most Blake Readers Go to the Blake Archive, or Does a Larger, Non-academic Audience Exist on Flickr, Wikipedia, and Youtube?” To what degree are taxonomic approaches to editing Blake necessary in a world where non-academic people and non-humans are working on curating Blakean appropriations online? We begin this chapter by showing how folksonomy is changing archival practices on social media sites like Wikipedia and Google, and the impact of this change on the way Wikipedia represents Blake. We then turn to the New Aesthetic, an artistic movement begun by James Bridle that focuses on how new technologies are changing how we envision the world around us. The New Aesthetic is most compelling in its connection to understanding how editorial policies are being shaped by algorithms and bots, a phenomenon we call a “mechonomy.” Machines are beginning to help fi lter and curate the cultural meaning of artistic representation, and human beings are reflecting on this phenomenon across different social media sites. On Flickr and YouTube, Blake is being used to challenge distinctions between nature, culture, and technology, and his work is being compared to the operations of MRI machines, the syntax of code and other machine languages, the mysteries of the Hadron Collider, the evolutionary capabilities of robots and androids, and the thoughts of cities and urban spaces. The chapter concludes with a brief reflection on the connection between literary adaptation and evolutionary adaptation, and wonders about the role of what Margaret Cohen calls “the great unread” in the work of selection and tagging and, more broadly, the question of what work survives and what work does not.

“Let’s Stop Reading about the Building of Golgonooza in Jerusalem, and Start Actually Building It.” The coda begins by considering how Blake himself took a common biblical trope—the human race being created from dust—and metamorphosed it via Milton and Neoplatonism into the visionary experience expressed in Europe: “and shew you all alive / This world, where every particle of dust breathes forth its joy” (EURiii, 16–17; E60). The section concentrates on

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how such a tiny figure is used by Philip Pullman to conceptualize his understanding of atheist spirituality. We also show how Pullman’s work can be read as a myth of what remains of literary studies in the wake of the digital humanities, the rise of globalization, and the death of the author. Further, we see in Pullman’s Dust a desire for connection that extends beyond traditional notions of nationalism and disciplinarity, a desire that is often articulated in fantasies that the digital humanities will create new forms of labor and common spaces that can survive budget cuts and the closing of departments. Instead of lingering within the salvific dreams of scholars looking to digital technology to save the humanities, we suggest instead that the humanities and literary studies should practice what Blake called “self-annihilation.” We should, in other words, abandon institutional egos and embrace experimentation, while not confusing the conservatism that goes along with a fear of annihilation with righteousness. Our goal in William Blake and the Digital Humanities is to encourage what Mark Sample has called a deformed humanities, in which we “take apart the world, deform it, and make something new” (“Scholarly”).17 There’s a spirit of adventure in Sample’s term, one that recalls what Blake said in the preface of Milton: “O Rouze up Young Men of the New Age!” Imagination, craft, and collaboration are needed now more than ever. We believe that, despite the growing threats of climate change, a worldwide economic recession, a mushrooming gap between the rich and poor, crises in academic publishing and public funding for education, cuts to humanities programs, and attacks upon teachers—or perhaps because of them— the single most important thing we can learn from Blake is the ability to approach complex issues and technology with creativity, imagination, and a spirit of wonder. Blake has already served as an inspiration to generations of artists looking for imaginative, political, artistic, and spiritual freedom. “Suffer not,” Blake urges, “the fash[i]onable Fools to depress your powers by the prices they pretend to give for contemptable works” and believe that “there is a Class of Men whose whole delight is in Destroying” (M preface; E95). Digital technology has shown us that a “great outdoors” exists beyond our campuses and theoretical models, if we can learn to recognize potential allies, abandon our institutional egos, and use our talents to make something new.18

1

Archives and Ecologies

VIRTUAL BLAKE In A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism, in which he argued for a socialized conception of editing whereby publishing is to be seen as part of a series of “literary productive relations” of which authorial intentions are only one, often problematic, component when devising copy texts for later editions, Jerome McGann makes some rather curious comments on Blake: When Blake assumed the roles of author, editor, illustrator, publisher, printer, and distributor, he was plainly aspiring to become a literary institution unto himself. Unfortunately, he could not also assume the role of one crucial component of that institution as it existed in his period: the reviewer. As a consequence, his work reached only a small circle of his contemporaries. Also, his productive processes were such that he could not mass produce his works, so that his fame, his full appreciation and influence, had to wait upon his death, and the intervention of a number of important persons who never even knew him. The mechanical reproduction of his rare original works was a fi nal, splendid insult to the equally splendid principles of a genius. Had that insult never been delivered, Blake would have been no more than one of those who ‘bare of laurel . . . live, dream, and die.’” (47) Considering that A Critique was published in the same year as McGann’s The Romantic Ideology, this extract is fascinating. Whereas McGann devotes considerable efforts to promoting the social theory of editing and publication, Blake is seen as almost entirely outside that mode of production and thus occupies a different category. His works are autographic rather than allographic, the products of “splendid principles of a genius”, and to reduce the aura of these products to mechanical reproduction is a “splendid insult”, bringing them at last into the drive towards material production and consumption. In The Textual Condition, McGann directs this accusation of “mechanical reproduction” squarely at the Erdman edition of Blake’s writings, which was fi rst published in 1965 and then in revised

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versions in 1982 and 1988: after making the important point that Erdman’s decision to reproduce only the lexical and grammatical levels of Blake’s works, thereby omitting the visual and iconic, represents adherence to a fundamentally different bibliographical code, he once again tropes Blake as an exceptional case: Blake is unique in the history of English literature precisely because of his effort to bring every aspect of the signifying process, linguistic as well as bibliographical, under authorial control: in fact, to make the author’s intention what many textual critics believe it is and ought to be, the ultimate and sole authority of the entire text. (57) Blake, as McGann points out, was unable to bring every factor of the bibliographical code under his control (perhaps an implicit reference to the lack of reviewers), but the depiction of the sole author working in an “act of resistance to those collaborative inertias as they were undergoing a new expansion at the dawn of the age of mechanical reproduction” (58) appears incredibly romantic, even heroic. McGann’s socialized theory of editing and publishing made an important, if not uncontroversial, contribution to problematizing essentialist and idealized notions of copy-texts and the status of the author. Blake obviously wrote, designed, and printed his own illuminated books, and, as such, he would appear to be in complete control of what he has manufactured. However, as a number of writers have demonstrated in the past two decades in particular, what precisely such control means is not automatically self-evident: Blake’s texts were often dictated by the accidents of his production techniques, as well as the fact, argued persuasively by Viscomi, that his illuminated printing had to be squeezed in between commercial considerations.1 The use of the term “resistance” when describing Blake’s attitude to collaborative publishing cannot help but invoke an attitude of heroic defiance, presumably, in this case, to the capitalist opportunities that were enabled by co-operation. Certainly Blake is an exceptional case in the publishing world, but this is because the rare combination of artistic and poetic skills was combined with the even rarer commercial potential for application due to his skill in engraving, which Blake appears to have tried to capitalize on repeatedly. If Joseph Johnson had gone ahead with publication of The French Revolution and then become a distributor, even publisher, for Blake’s other works, taking on the role that Bernard Quaritch was to offer to William Muir, 2 Blake would have happily entered the fold of collaborative publishing. Viscomi’s Blake and the Idea of the Book was a revolutionary publication in Blake studies and rightly so. Viscomi corrected the attitudes of scholars who had blithely neglected the provenance—indeed, the ontology—of the books they had been using, especially within a critical framework where the abstract text had supplanted the material book in a metaphysical

28 William Blake and the Digital Humanities sleight-of-hand. From our introduction, it should come as no surprise that we share Viscomi’s concerns with the concrete, immanent, and particular instance of the book as medium. It should also come as no surprise that we do not share Viscomi’s reduction of Blake to the material originality of his books, which is limited in its application to the understanding of virtual Blake. Important as Viscomi’s methods are, our own task is more concerned with zoamorphosis, the collaborative, often contradictory process of creative reception in which Blake’s own works are one important object in a fl at ontology punctuated by the Gutenberg parenthesis of print. By “virtual Blake” we are drawing off of thinking surrounding virtuality begun by Henri Bergson, and developed by Gilles Deleuze and Levi Bryant. For Bergson, memory does not simply represent some original perceptive experience. “There is no perception,” he argues, “which is not full of memories. With the immediate and present data of our senses, we mingle a thousand details out of our past experience” (33). Deleuze seizes upon Bergson’s conception of memory and perception to question the traditional relationship between virtuality and possibility. Deleuze sees the possible as being opposed to the real; the process undergone by the possible is therefore a ‘realisation.’ By contrast, the virtual is not opposed to the real; it possesses a full reality by itself. The process it undergoes is that of actualisation. [ . . . ] The virtual [ . . . ] is the characteristic state of Ideas: it is on the basis of its reality that existence is produced, in accordance with a time and a space immanent in the Idea. (Difference 263) Virtuality is not, in Bergson’s and Deleuze’s thought, some lesser state of being that has not fully actualized itself—and is simply possible. Rather, as Levi Bryant points out, “[t]he virtual is the condition under which the actual actualises itself” (Democracy 106). We see Blake’s virtuality as manifested in critical, editorial, and creative work and as a condition under which different Blakes are produced and reproduced. We suggest, contra materialist scholars like Viscomi, that any Blake we encounter is articulated by the powers and potentialities of this virtual Blake, a Blake whose image is constructed out of a cultural apparatus forming an institutional memory. Yet it is also important to note that the virtual Blake is not ontologically or temporally prior to what could be called an “actual Blake”: that is, either the Blake who actually lived from 1757 to 1827, or one of the several fictional or biographical Blakes who inhabit novels or critical editions of his work. Bryant is careful to suggest that the virtual does not simply determine the actual, such that the essence of William Blake is simply a series of texts or a historical discourse. Even if a god-like entity could view all perceptive accounts of Blake from his birth to the present day it would still not fully understand William Blake, because actuality is not a totality but merely a

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manifestation. The actual Blake perceived by this divinity would simply be yet another manifestation, with virtual Blakes withdrawing from view and potentially determining manifestations on other planes of existence. Both virtual and actual are enmeshed; they form what Bryant calls the tendency of objects to be split between substance and quality. “Because substance changes,” he argues, “because it is capable of carrying contrary qualities, substance, in its proper being, must differ from its qualities” (Democracy 104). Virtuality is the power or potential of an object to be actualized in a particular manifestation. It is, in other words, Blake’s virtuality that calls to individual editors and demands creative attempts to revise, preserve the integrity of his work, or make him something different altogether.3 That the illuminated books cannot, for example, now be separated from the critical apparatus of the industry surrounding Blake studies starts to indicate some of the ways that we should consider the archive not as a selfsustained entity but part of a wider virtual ecosystem. McGann’s social text editing is, in this context, an important if incomplete editorial model. Wayne C. Ripley has argued that social text editing “provides the most appropriate editorial model for Blake’s illustrations of other authors,” while pointing to The Rossetti Archive as the best example of social text editing. According to Ripley, The Rossetti Archive brings facsimiles, transcriptions, and critical notes of all the contemporary editions of Rossetti’s writings together with all states and reproductions of his paintings, drawings, and prints. It also includes the writings and visual arts of his circle and important influences and documents regarding his reception history. (Para 6.) For Ripley, as well as Jerome McGann, D. F. McKenzie, and many of the authors who have developed the ideas surrounding social text editing, individual literary works are part of a larger “social text” that should be traced by the scholarly edition. McGann sees the social text editing as admitting two propositions: “fi rst, that the apparitions of text—its paratexts, bibliographical codes, and all visual features—are as important in the text’s signifying programs as the linguistic elements; second, that the social intercourse of texts—the context of their relations—must be conceived as an essential part of the ‘text itself’” (Radiant 11–12). Social text editing represents an important advance in editorial theory, yet Ripley’s article on “delineation editing” is also important for its suggestion that editorial policies must apply Blake’s conception of the bounding line to make distinctions between what should be included in a collection and what should not. We suggest, however, that both McGann and Ripley base their editorial theories on conceptions of individual and social imagination that are correllationist and fail to account for the acts of reception that are involved in editorial processes. Such discussions form an important point in attempting to locate more fi rmly the historical

30

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Blake in a social locus of production and consumption. Viscomi, Eaves, Essick, Bentley, Davies, and many other scholars concerned with the manufacture and distribution of Blake’s works have demonstrated how authorial intentions are far from the only concern for determining how the archive of Blake’s materials has influenced his reception in the near two centuries since his death. Here, in the vast majority of cases, what we are dealing with is the “splendid insult” of mechanical reproduction. Whether in facsimile or conventional typography, what readers of Blake almost inevitably read is a text that has emerged from the various processes associated with nineteenth- and then twentieth-century publishing. As Ripley observes in relation to Blake’s texts themselves: “Blake’s extensive use of different media forms has meant that the fi rst task of every editor has been to remediate this work—to translate it to a new medium, which irrevocably changes its form, context, circulation, and meaning” (par. 3). Nearly every encountered text of Blake’s is virtual in the sense that it is not one of his originals. The task for the reception scholar is to map out the fields created by these virtual texts insofar as they help to create a potential horizon of expectations in which an imagined community may explore Blake’s art and writings. Whereas McGann may see Blake as occupying a “unique” category in which the norms of social publishing are held in abeyance, the vast majority never read those originals but rather publications that very clearly are the products of communal, commercial, technological, and editorial processes over which Blake exercised no control whatsoever. As Ripley, drawing on McLuhan, observes, professional editing began with John Sampson’s recognition of the “disservice” that an editor must do to Blake’s intentions. Considering the social nexus within which publication operates (a nexus that, most importantly, requires readers in order to proceed), this returns us to what David Greetham refers to as the “ontology of the text”. The tendency to treat the text as an abstract entity ignores the fact that it requires performers, and thus cannot be conceived independently from its physical manifestation. As Roger Chartier remarks: Readers, in fact, never confront abstract, idealized texts detached from any materiality . . . In contrast to a purely semantic defi nition of the text, which characterizes not only structuralist criticism in all its variants but also literary theories concerned with reconstructing the modes of reception of works, it is necessary to maintain that forms produce meaning, and that even a fi xed text is invested with new meaning and being (statut) when the physical form through which it is presented for interpretation changes. (50) Although Greetham does not insist on a choice between physical and essentialist positions with regard to the status of the text, seeing this as part of a debate going back (at least) to arguments between the librarians of Alexander and Pergamon in the fourth century BC (50), it is the investment of the

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“fi xed text” in a new physical form that is important to creating the horizon within which reception of Blake’s works takes place. Here, Greetham’s discussion of iterability after Derrida’s critique of J. L. Austin’s and John Searle’s distinction between “felicitous” (perfected, complete) versus “parasitic” (figurative, enacted) speech acts is extremely useful, drawing attention to the ways in which iteration produces a sort of “universal variation” that produces textual instability in the transmission of text: “the very language of bibliography—reprint, reissue, copy—demonstrates the discipline’s concern with repetition” (34). For Derrida, the limits of iterability are social conventions rather than inherent in the medium itself, and if no statement is inherently authoritative or constative, but always performative, then there is no fi nal appeal to the empirically grounded referent of the constative. Foucault saw the archive as a system of dispersion that constitutes the historical statements—the network of rules—that establish what is meaningful and operate through the materiality of the medium itself. Discursive formations lay down the conditions for which enunciations can be made, and from the regularity of which characteristics of a group of statements can be formulated. As such, it “is not an atemporal form, but a schema of correspondences between several temporal series” (74). The influence of these temporal series can be seen with regard to a particular type of discursive formation that contributes to the development of a Blake archive: the collected edition. Rather than a simple, unified progression of ideas that have brought us ever closer to a perfected understanding of Blake, these objects, the collection of written texts, constitute schema that help to explain some of the preconditions in which the subject of Blake may be formulated. In terms of the writings (and the artworks form their own important schema in terms of gallery collections and catalogues), it has long been recognized that the majority of texts that we read and that bear the name of the author “William Blake” have a radically divergent relationship to the illuminated books that he actually printed, most clearly in those editions that present the relief printed books as conventional typography. When we read Blake, in all but a few circumstances we are reading the formulation of a virtual Blake transmitted to us via a series of editors, and so powerful is this structure that it frames how we even read the originals: one does not simply “forget” The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake or similar texts when confronted with Copy E of Jerusalem. After Deleuze and Guattari, we may say that this virtual Blake is a mapping of relations, the “plane of consistency” that provides the space to be populated by objects, the “plane of organization” (Thousand 270). The effects of seeing Copy E on a reader will be manifestly different to those of the Erdman edition, not least because of the rarity of the event and its presentation as an artistic artifact, but in evaluating those effects we should never make the common mistake of ascribing some greater ontological reality to the original. The relation between Blake as both subject (the writer/artist who produces the text/artworks that we read/see) and referent (the object of

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interpretation constituted by the arrangement of those texts/artworks) is frequently the object of such slippage in his reception history. To take an example that arose during Blake’s lifetime and dominated his reception during the three decades or so after his death: mad Blake produced mad texts, the madness of those texts proving the underlying reality of the madness of the subject. The crudeness of that sentence is intended to highlight a caricature of the discourse, its self-fulfilling circularity. But in fact that discourse as a set of statements on “mad Blake” was itself contradicted by other statements by figures such as John Linnell and Samuel Palmer, largely neglected from 1827 to 1863, that took an oppositional position in relation to a dominant discursive field; oppositional, that is, until the publication of Gilchrist’s Life, whereby mad Blake was replaced by Saint William, to offer another caricature, in which the inspired devotion Blake’s works were capable of producing thus proved the devotional inspiration of the artist who made them. Alongside this simple, even naïve construct, was a related conception of Blake as lyric poet whose attempts at epic and prophetic verse were unsustainable, an interpretation validated by the fact that no editor until the fi nal decade of the century thought it relevant to publish the vast majority of the prophetic works. This changed with publication of the Yeats/Ellis edition of 1893, one that began to swing the pendulum the other way, towards a Blake of profound and erudite—if sometimes erratic—subtlety, one who promises a system if only the appropriate reader can be found. Although the opinions of Yeats and Ellis have been largely superseded, their approach to the systematic Blake was in many respects immensely influential on the critical discourse of the twentieth century, with only a few dissenting voices. In many respects it became a prophecy that fulfi lled itself via a burgeoning Blake industry devoted to explaining a system that, very often, it was creating in the very process of supposedly referencing the original author. It is a little too glib to explain these processes of discursive formulation as competing strategies of power, striving for explanation, although that is precisely what they are. What is more important here is Foucault’s emphasis on the archive as a diff ractive system, one in which attempts to provide coherence via equivalence or systematization are complicated by points of incompatibility between different objects, concepts, and modes of expression. Blake the lyric naïf is not compatible with the arch-systematizer, and yet each generation fi nds its archetypal Blake. Whereas it is possible to read the history of editions of Blake’s works as a progress, each generation building on the work of the next, they should be seen as a progression of sometimes violent and contrarian reaction. The professionalization of editorial work on Blake in the twentieth century, which manifests itself in the truly great works of Keynes, Bentley, and Erdman, is, in fact, a rather precarious victory: at precisely that moment when a fi nal, authoritative edition of Blake, a coherent and concrete vision of his writings, is achieved a century and a half after his death, the success of this very enterprise results

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in anxieties within the scholarly community that maybe we are reading the wrong Blake. After the review of Erdman’s work by the Santa Cruz school, as well as Nelson Hilton’s important work and the critique by McGann referred to previously, there begins the important revisionism of what it means to read Blake that, during the 1990s, results in The William Blake Archive. Alongside the material archive there is always the process of the virtual archive, the plane of consistency that makes possible the organization of particular objects: the important work done by Eaves, Essick, and Viscomi is a vital collection that will continue to underpin the ecology of reception in the twenty-fi rst century. Yet we should not think that we return to the “real” Blake, but rather an important virtual Blake in electronic facsimile because of the limitations of another set of virtual Blakes, the collected editions and selections that emerged between 1863 and 1982, Gilchrist’s Life, and the revised edition of The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake.

BUILDING THE BLAKE ARCHIVE One would expect a book on the digital humanities, of course, to be particularly interested in the electronic Blake Archive, the best example of this virtual Blake, yet we will better understand its significance by mapping out the plane of consistency that emerged from another virtual archive, one constructed during the two centuries that made up the Gutenberg parenthesis during which Blake lived. Print culture generated its own virtual Blakes, which in turn provided the ecosystem that enabled the Blake Archive. Although various of Blake’s lyrics had been reproduced during his lifetime and shortly after his death, principally by Malkin, Allan Cunningham, and the edition of Songs of Innocence and of Experience published by J. J. G. Wilkinson in 1839, the fi rst substantial collection of his poetry that allowed a much wider audience for Blake came with the publication of Alexander Gilchrist’s Life of William Blake, Pictor Ignotus in 1863. Consisting of two volumes, it is the second, the selection of poems and designs edited by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, which is important here. As Dorfman observes, the principal objective in Rossetti’s selection was to make Blake as “accessible” as possible, so that Rossetti selected mostly lyrical poetry of a non-“metaphysical” kind. “The editors were on the whole conservative; nothing previously reprinted was left out.”4 Alongside this selection, drawn mainly from Poetical Sketches and Songs of Innocence and of Experience, was a section entitled “Poems Hitherto Unpublished”, which included a large number of lyrics from Blake’s Notebook, as well as The Book of Thel and selections of Blake’s prose. An appendix included a sample of Blake’s letters as well as annotated catalogues of Blake’s works. The overall effect of the structure was to provide a readily available collection of those poems that had already garnered some attention, as well as to

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extend and emphasize Blake’s lyrical talents with poetry that had not been read, and to offer some insight into Blake’s theories of the arts in particular. Morris Eaves (“Crafting”) remarks that “the nineteenth century started the fundamental recovery work of preparing Blake for reintroduction into the communication system that he had attempted to resist with his illuminated books”, streamlining, annotating, modifying, and assimilating what had been radically resistant texts. From The Poetical Sketches, eleven of the nineteen Miscellaneous Poems were included in the second volume of the Life, although in a very different order (so that, for example, “To Spring” and “To Summer”, which begin the version printed during Blake’s lifetime, were included towards the end of Rossetti’s selection). With all these poems, Rossetti silently amended minor elements of the poems, mainly punctuation, but corrections are generally less noticeable in the Miscellaneous Poems than in the selections from “King Edward the Third”. Some of these corrections rectify mistakes in grammar, spelling, and punctuation, or amend irregularities in Blake’s meter or line lengths—for example, from “The world of men are like the num’rous stars” (E424) to “The world of men is like the numerous stars” (Life II.16), and “I hope your Majesty cannot refuse so great” (E429) to “I hope / Your Majesty cannot refuse so great” (Life II.17). The more substantial, and most notorious, change to be considered in the next chapter was his wholesale rewriting of the “The Tyger”. The attempts to rewrite Blake in accordance with the rules of language and syntax abound throughout the manuscript poems and prose extracts. Considering the manuscript state of some of these writings, and the proselytizing desire of Rossetti and his associates, in many ways this is entirely understandable: they were, to repeat Dorfman’s assessment, trying to make Blake accessible, and the selections included with the Life were not intended as a scholarly collection. It did mean, however, that most readers would have to wait longer to see Blake’s own words, and, occasionally, it resulted in grievous injustices to Blake’s poetry. Nonetheless, Swinburne for one highly praised Rossetti’s efforts, regretting Blake’s “curiously reckless and helpless neglect of form”, which the editor had “smoothed off” (109); Swinburne himself had no qualms about further “smoothing off” Blake’s lines throughout William Blake: A Critical Essay. Considering the lack of reaction by Blake to Malkin’s misquotations, not just with “The Tyger” but also with other poems, such as the alteration of the fi rst line of “Holy Thursday” from Innocence to “’Twas in the pleasant month of June, their hands and faces clean”, it is probable that the author was less concerned about modifications to his poetry than later scholars, although one can only forgive Rossetti insofar as he was a publicist for Blake’s work rather than an editor.5 Nonetheless, as Dorfman observes, there was a “dissenting voice” in the form of R. H. Shepherd, who edited Songs of Innocence and Experience (1866, containing the Pickering MS poems), Poetical Sketches (1868), and

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a collected volume, Poems of Blake, which appeared in 1874 a few months before a rival collection by Dante’s brother, William Michael Rossetti, the Aldine edition (Dorfman 111–12). Shepherd was much more concerned to offer a text that would bear some reflection on Blake’s original, if irregular, poetry, but it was less influential at the time than Rossetti’s collection. The Aldine edition of Blake’s Poetical Works extended considerably the collection brought together in the second volume of the Life, including (after the influence of Shepherd) the complete poetry from Poetical Sketches, omitting only the short prose pieces, the Songs, and many of the previously unpublished poems included in the Life with some modifications, such as a new title, The Everlasting Gospel, for the lines published as “The Woman Taken in Adultery”. With the exception of Poetical Sketches, William, like his brother, felt no compunction in silently amending Blake’s text. The accurate version of Blake’s earliest collection was due entirely to Shepherd’s publication in 1868: In reproducing the Poetical Sketches in the present volume, I have followed the reprint which was published by Mr. Pickering in 1868, under the editorship of Mr. R. H. Shepherd. I thus forego certain emendations which were introduced by my brother into that earlier reprint which appears in Mr. Gilchrist’s book, vol. 2, of some selected poems from the same series. These emendations were indeed great improvements, and they rectify various annoying and inexcusable laxities in point of metre or syntax, of here and there of expression. (cxxxi–cxxxii) As with the second volume of the Life, a good example of William Rossetti’s editorial approach can be seen in his treatment of “The Tyger”, which is actually included in two versions. The fi rst, bar some minor amendments to punctuation, is close to the version as it appears in Songs of Experience as printed by Blake, but the second version was that of Dante Rossetti. Significantly, in a footnote in the Aldine edition, William remarks that the second “shows certain variations on MS. Authority. These may be regarded as improvements” (120). There is evidence of the Rossettis’ use of Blake’s Notebook—for example, by changing the title of “The Poison Tree” to “Christian Forbearance” and the inclusion of “A Cradle Song” and “Lafayette” (“Let the brothels of Paris be opened”), but as has already been noted, Dante Rossetti’s rendition of Blake’s “The Tyger” bore very little relation to Blake’s manuscript drafts: rather, the evidence that Blake had revised the poem appeared to have been used as the motivation to modify that verse that had been printed as the Rossettis saw fit. By closely guarding access to the Notebook, they misleadingly preserved a sense of an authenticating, mystifying authority, that they had access to Blake’s original intentions that would support any revisions they saw fit to make. As Dorfman points out (144), the Aldine edition, despite its relative lack of editorial rigor, was much more popular with the Victorian

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reading public than Shepherd’s Pickering edition, not simply because it contained more poems but also because of the association with the Rossettis and Swinburne. Until the 1880s, when the Muir/Quaritch facsimiles began to be issued, the majority of readers would have had to rely on the Aldine/Pickering collected editions, or the selections included with Gilchrist’s Life. Indeed, for most readers these collected editions would have remained the only real possibility of encountering Blake even after the Muir facsimiles appeared. As we have seen, the hermeneutic possibilities created for readers by these collected editions were very different, Shepherd applying much more rigorous editorial standards than the Rossetti brothers. Nevertheless, they shared one thing in common: readers of Gilchrist’s Life and Swinburne’s Critical Essay would have been made aware of Blake’s prophetic poetry, but with the exception of Thel and the prototype Tiriel, as well as a few artistic manifestos that clearly supported the requirements for Pre-Raphaelite propaganda, there was little opportunity for themselves to evaluate the majority of work that Blake had printed during his lifetime. For the mainstream of Victorian readers, Blake was a lyric poet, and the Victorian archive determined that his poetic reception was largely restricted to a lyrical discourse. The main difference evident in Victorian and Modernist reception of Blake is much greater sympathy during the later period to Blake’s prophetic books, and the reason why this change occurs is due to the work of W. B. Yeats and Edwin J. Ellis. The Works of William Blake: Poetic, Symbolic, and Critical was published in three volumes by Bernard Quaritch in 1893, the fi rst collected edition of the majority of the poetry with a voluminous and frequently misleading erudite commentary. The fi rst volume contained a memoir of Blake along with an explanation of the symbolic structure of his mythology and, as such, will be dealt with in more detail in the third section. Volume 2 comprised an interpretation and paraphrased commentary, whereas volume 3 included Blake’s poetic works with the series of facsimiles produced by W. Bell Scott. Yeats and Ellis began the commentary with an overview of what they perceived to be Blake’s mythological system, in which elements of the prophetic books corresponded to the head, heart, and loins as well as the fourfold symbolism of the Zoas (II.4–8). Of note is their arrangement of the three volumes: by deferring Blake’s poetry until after their systematic exposition, it is quite clear that the editors saw themselves as guiding, even training, the reader towards what they perceived as the proper and appropriate way to understand Blake’s works. In itself, this is not especially new: the second volume of the Life containing selections of Blake’s works had been preceded by a volume of biography that prepared the reader’s sympathies, whereas the Aldine edition included a 133-page “Prefatory Memoir” that had the same ambitions. Neither, however, was as extensive—or as grueling—in terms of critical commentary as that produced by Yeats and Ellis.

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The volume containing the poetry was a curious hybrid of conventional typography and facsimile reproductions. The lyrical poetry, whether in relief printing or manuscript, was reproduced typographically, as was Vala, but the prophetic works were published as facsimiles covering nearly three hundred pages. Although samples had been produced before, for most readers this would have been the fi rst time that they would have had chance to see any extensive rendition of Blake’s illuminated printing and to read the mysterious and difficult books to which Blake had devoted so much of his time but that had only been darkly hinted at by his Victorian commentators. The use of facsimile also probably served a practical purpose and immediately explains the importance of volume 2: rather than engage in the laborious task of transcribing Blake’s prophetic poetry, the editors could concentrate on their preferred mission of explaining the “real” meaning of Blake in paraphrase. How much readers were able to take in of this wealth of visual riches is unclear, and the fact that Vala was reproduced in conventional typeface probably explains its potentially greater influence than the other epic books, Milton and Jerusalem, on a number of early twentieth-century writers and artists. Of the poetry in typescript, Yeats and Ellis did not share Shepherd’s rigor, but aside from unremarked amendments to Blake’s punctuation and spelling they avoided most of the temptation to “improve” the lyrical poetry, although they were frequently inconsistent and casual in terms of arrangement and transcription of those poems. Vala is a different matter, although, considering the state of the manuscript (sections of which were included as facsimiles in volume 3), one must remember Blake’s invocation of the forgiveness of sins before all things. The reproductions of the prophetic works frequently contain errors, most notably in the visual representation of the plates (which are sometimes little more than crude approximations of Blake’s illustrations) but also textual inaccuracies. It is hard to disagree with various critical comments on the Yeats/Ellis edition that indicate its historical significance but woeful inadequacies as a scholarly edition.6 One important effect within the critical community was to stimulate the demand for more accurate textual versions of Blake’s writings, such as John Sampson’s 1905 edition of the Poetical Works. However, until the publication of Geoffrey Keynes’s three-volume edition by Nonesuch Press in 1925, The Works of William Blake: Poetic, Symbolic, and Critical remained the prime source for Blake’s prophetic poems. As such, for all its failings from a scholarly and academic point of view, this is a critically important text for those working on the reception of Blake, the influence of which on a generation of general and even specialized readers cannot be neglected. The Yeats/Ellis edition was, for a period of thirty years or so, the primary means by which those readers had access to the prophetic writings; what is more, it created the impression of an erudite, occult, and, above all, systematic writer who demanded careful learning on the part of an audience if it was to have any chance of comprehending Blake’s arcane knowledge.

38 William Blake and the Digital Humanities A key element of the publication of collected editions and selections of Blake’s work throughout the nineteenth century was that, with the exception of R. H. Shepherd, it can be seen as undertaken largely by amateurs. Until the twentieth century, Blake’s works lay in the hands of devoted fans who had few qualms in explicitly rearranging and organizing Blake’s texts in line with their own systems and ideological conceits. Part of this, however, must be due to the fact that Blake did present not inconsiderable problems for these early editors: the works in relief printing were deeply unfamiliar in their format and appearance, although with selections from the Songs most editors displayed little hesitation when it came to the inclusion of sample plates, leading to the assumption that they could expect readers to make sense of these illuminated lyrics. For the majority of the prophecies, however, they largely turned away or overlaid the poems with their own covering cherub in the form of an obfuscating system. The struggle, literally, to read Blake’s texts, to signify them within a coherent archive, thus invoked a number of responses, such as silent modifications of lines and poems and editorial interjections that would prepare the reader for the task that lay ahead. It was not to be until a hundred years after Blake’s death, however, that an interested audience would be able to engage with Blake’s own words more or less as he wrote them—although in a very different form to that which he intended. Publication of Keynes’s three-volume The Writings of William Blake by Nonesuch Press in 1925, stimulated by the selection produced by John Samson in 1905, which in turn was an attempt to correct the errors of the Yeats-Ellis edition, meant that, for the fi rst time, an edition of Blake’s poetry and prose became available that provided a careful and accurate transcription of Blake’s poetry. This became more valuable to readers and scholars than the two-volume The Prophetic Writings of William Blake edited by D. J. Sloss and J. P. R. Wallis and published in 1926. The significance of the Keynes edition, supported by the Bibliography of William Blake he had released in 1921, cannot be underestimated, and until the appearance of the Erdman edition it was to become the standard text— although this did not happen automatically and it was not uncommon for a significant number of critical commentators during the 1930s and 1940s to refer to Sloss and Wallis. When Keynes revised and added to a later edition, The Complete Writings of William Blake, fi rst published by Nonesuch in 1957 and then Oxford University Press, the inclusion of variant readings made this by far the most comprehensive collection of Blake’s works yet to appear, effectively establishing (with a few subsequent modifications via other scholars) the canon of Blake’s writings. Despite Keynes’s valuable, even magisterial work, a problem noted by commentators such as Bentley was the normalization of Blake’s irregular punctuation, so that when D. V. Erdman’s The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake was published in 1965 without such amendments this was

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to become the standard edition for scholars of Blake. The Keynes version, however, had a complex publishing history that has affected its reception (and, consequently, the reception of Blake) greatly: in 1927, a one-volume Poetry and Prose of William Blake appeared, without the notes included in The Writings and intended as a cheaper, more popular version. Indeed, throughout the 1930s and 1940s, this was probably the version that most readers in search of Blake’s complete works would have encountered; when the bibliographical notes were restored to The Complete Writings, the subsequent inclusion of that volume in the Oxford Standard Authors series made Keynes much more widely available than Erdman even until the fi nal decades of the twentieth century. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake was, as Erdman noted in his acknowledgments to the 1965 edition, the result of six years of labor to perfect a text for the Concordance to the Poetry and Prose of William Blake (1967), and Erdman worked with a number of academic collaborators including Bentley, Robert F. Gleckner, and Martin K. Nurmi. Both the fi rst and later revised editions (1982, 1988) included a commentary by Harold Bloom, although—as with all such commentaries—this has become less valuable than the text itself. As well as collecting together all known writings by Blake, including late discoveries such as “The Phoenix to Mrs Butts”, which was fi rst published in the Times Literary Supplement in 1984, Erdman’s fidelity to Blake’s unconventional punctuation quickly made this work the most reliable collected edition, and the revised version was approved by the Modern Language Association as a scholarly edition, the fi rst time this had occurred for a text expected to be used not just by scholars but also in the classroom. Significantly, readers would now have to deal with all of Blake’s peculiarities of syntax as well as his idiosyncratic ideas and imagery, but, some hundred and fi fty years after Blake’s death, the significant expectation was that even general readers could cope with such peculiarities without the need for any “smoothing out”. Because these two editions, Keynes and Erdman, are so familiar to scholars, along, perhaps, with the slightly less well-known Bentley edition of William Blake’s Writings, published in two volumes by Oxford in 1978, they have received less attention than earlier, more obscure versions that are much less reliable. However, these three editions—Keynes, Erdman, and Bentley—have such an important role to play in establishing the Blake archive, that field of discourse in which statements about Blake can take place, that their role in organizing that archive is of fundamental importance. The fi rst, and most obvious, point is that these editions formalize the archive of Blake’s writings in a way that was not necessarily available even to him as an author: the list of works that Blake provided to Dawson Turner in 1818 is a severely truncated list of works in illuminated printing as well as a set of prints, whereas the 1793 prospectus “To the Public” is obviously restricted to early publications and artworks. At no point did

40 William Blake and the Digital Humanities Blake himself produce a complete catalogue of his works, and, although there were evidently manuscripts that have since been lost, a collected edition frames the author’s work for subsequent generations as a stable artifact that tends to obscure its virtual nature. This, of course, is true of all writers, but, considering the vast discrepancy between how the artist printed his books and how they are generally read, the case is more extreme when dealing with Blake. Perhaps the nearest example that comes closest to the transformation of the original text into a published artifact is when a writer whose work exists principally in manuscript, such as the poetry of Emily Dickinson, is published after his or her death, a physical metamorphosis that completely alters the reader’s relationship to the text. Of the three most important collected editions of the twentieth century, those of Keynes, Bentley, and Erdman, the organization of texts has important consequences for the experience of reading. Keynes presents the texts in chronological order, with no regard for distinctions of medium, genre, or format. Bentley’s two volumes consist of one devoted to the engraved and etched writings, again in chronological order, and the second containing all other writings arranged into conventional typography, manuscript, inscriptions, marginalia, and letters. Erdman’s, with which most readers will be familiar, is the most complex: following the collection of works in illuminated printing in chronological sequence, there are fourteen more sections, some of which consist of groupings of texts, such as the “Prophetic Works, Unengraved”, others being individual texts such as Poetical Sketches and The Everlasting Gospel. Such editions do not raise exactly the same concerns of anthologies—for example, what Vincent B. Leitch et al. refer to as the “monumentalizing tendency” of sections and headnotes that offer a false sense of mastery over texts and their controversies (175–76)—but there are some similarities. The collected edition obviously offers the sense of completion, as already noted, but also that of connection. Erdman and Bentley group together the works in relief and engraved printing, emphasizing these as a body that obviously has its source in Blake’s working methods but, as can be seen from even a cursory glance at the contents page in Keynes, is interrupted by a much wider range of types of writing except for short periods of intensive activity in 1793 and 1794–95. After nearly two decades of relying on Erdman, Keynes can actually be frustrating in that the “natural” and “obvious” collation of the illuminated works into a coherent body is missing, a remnant of that hope for organic unity that owes much more to the reader’s desire for some mastery over the virtual archive than to Blake’s historical practices. The collation of the illuminated works is, of course, the most evident example of an organizing principle in the Blakean archive, one that goes back to Yeats and Ellis at least, but other editorial decisions are equally significant. Grouping the letters is one obvious tidying up that we take for granted, and is something done in all editions of Blake’s works that include them going back to the second volume of Gilchrist’s Life, although the fi rst

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edition of Keynes interspersed them throughout the text chronologically. This reflects the hybrid status of letters to literary figures in such collections, as not only literary but also biographical, often used as prime material to be mined but occasionally revealing insights into a writer’s style and technique. Interestingly, one of Blake’s own organizing techniques, that of the manuscript collection, presents complications as can be seen in the contrast between how texts in the Notebook and the Pickering Manuscript are presented. All include the Pickering Manuscript as a coherent section, but of these three editions only Bentley includes the text from the Notebook in one place; Keynes extracts texts from the Notebook in more or less chronological order so that The Everlasting Gospel appears much later in his collection, whereas Erdman organizes them according to his other classifications, whether Songs and Ballads, Satiric Verses and Epigrams, Miscellaneous Prose, or The Everlasting Gospel. Nelson Hilton, in “Blake and the Apocalypse of the Canon” (1988), as well as the Santa Cruz group, explored some of the theoretical issues of such organizing principles of the archive some thirty years ago. Hilton argued that teaching Blake from facsimile unleashes a disrupting “‘semiotic’ or differential, disseminating potential” (143), whereas the Santa Cruz group called attention to Blake’s texts as a site of graphological production (4–30). Jerome McGann, as we have already seen, launched a critical assault on Erdman’s decision to translate “the linguistic components of Blake’s work only”, neglecting “the physique of Blake’s work, so crucial to the original ‘intentions’”, and seeing the differences between the “Erdman” Blake and the “Blake” Blake as fundamental differences in the bibliographical codes (Textual, 56). The Santa Cruz group’s review of Erdman’s text drew attention to the many problems attendant on fi xing Blake to a typographic book, and many of their ideas, like those of Hilton and McGann, have become commonplace in teaching and reading Blake—a task made much easier with the advent of The William Blake Archive. And yet, although reference to Blake’s composite art is a commonplace in Blake studies, in most instances there are problems that prevent the use of facsimile copies from being more widespread. This is not simply laziness or carelessness: all but the smallest selection of academic books and papers on Blake published each year commonly use the Erdman edition for citations, with references to the Blake Archive forming a small minority. In part, this is due to the blindness of most Blake critics in that, although we understand the importance of the composite designs and text, these are appealed to in most cases only as excursions away from the main direction of reading, itself no doubt due to the fact that the majority of scholarship is still written and printed rather than composed via video or visual design. Erdman fulfils an important role in creating the imagined community of Blake scholars that is unlikely to be supplanted any time soon because of the difficulty of reading Blake in facsimile (never mind those few, rare, original copies carefully conserved in museums and libraries). Although the proliferation of the

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editions published on The William Blake Archive constantly illustrates the blindness of reliance on Erdman’s text, even when so carefully and methodically prepared, this blindness is also attended by significant insights, of which The Everlasting Gospel will serve as an example. This poem exists in manuscript form in nine separate sections in the Notebook as well three sections on a separate piece of paper. Extracts from these selections were fi rst published in volume 2 of the Life under the title of “The Woman Taken in Adultery”; the title The Everlasting Gospel was fi rst given by William Michael Rossetti in the Aldine Blake and since then has become more than a label of convenience: rather, it identifies one of the most important unfi nished, or at least unedited, fi nal works of Blake. Without the virtual text of The Everlasting Gospel, we simply would not have such a clear conception of this masterpiece in the archive, and whereas it is important for scholars working with the text to be aware of and understand its genesis, this is one case where returning to a facsimile of the original would restrict its access to all but the very smallest minority of specialist readers. The importance of the role of editors in creating a virtual Blake should not be underestimated: it is the organizing and creative principle without which in many cases we would struggle to appreciate Blake’s texts at all. This returns us to the general reader: Keynes and Erdman, supplemented by Bentley, are foundational stones in the construction of the archive in the twentieth century, but almost certainly they are not actually the texts that the majority of readers consult. Most readers do not spend months or years studying Blake, and so questions of accuracy in transcriptions are relatively unimportant: access is key, not verisimilitude. As such, popular selections and editions, of which there are many dozens, if not hundreds, are often more popular, not to mention substantial collections not already mentioned here, such as the Longman annotated editions by W. H. Stevenson and David Fuller, or the widely selling Penguin Complete Poems, edited by Alicia Ostriker. This, of course, creates a substantial problem for reception methodology: once the scholar moves beyond the early twentieth century, editions and collections of Blake proliferate and it becomes very difficult, if not impossible, to ascertain which particular edition a reader consulted unless he or she has left explicit references or a specific copy in his or her collection. However, there are a few broad principles that still apply. The fi rst is the most mundane in that it has already been commented on by various critics such as Bentley and Dorfman, and this is that accurate copies of Blake’s corpus did not come into general circulation until a century after his death, which is why it is so much easier to pinpoint editions used when dealing with the Victorian and early Modernist periods. In the mid-twentieth century, although it cannot be guaranteed that a particular figure working with Blake’s poetry may have read Keynes, he remains the most likely source. This is not always helpful in that the arrangement of these selections (which is important to conceptualizing the virtual text and

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thus the reader’s response to a virtual Blake) may differ greatly; nonetheless, from this point on it may be assumed that readers have access to a more or less accurate and coherent textual version and that any aberrations are due to their own hermeneutic activity. Outside of critical circles, the influence of Erdman gained ground more slowly in the fi nal decades of the twentieth century, but an interesting and fi nal point to be made here is that it has brought increasing acceptance of Blake’s idiosyncratic punctuation and syntax: many times we encounter undergraduate students who have obvious difficulties in understanding Blake (as, indeed do both of us), but, although occasionally they will draw attention to his cavalier attitude towards certain basics of writing, they never query whether he would be better served by a “smoothing” editor. If anything, errors and fluctuations are very much part of the Blakean “style”.

VIRTUAL ORGANIZATION: THE ARCHIVE AS A DIGITAL ECOSYSTEM One of the most important precursors (or, more accurately, a contemporary project that has since been superseded) to The William Blake Archive was the Blake Digital Text Project. Begun in 1996, the ambition of the project was respectably limited in scope—although still sufficiently impressive at a time when, for most scholars and students, access to Blake’s texts still comprised a visit to the library if the relevant text was not at hand. As outlined in a paper written by Nelson Hilton in 1999, “the central concern of the Blake Digital Text Project is to make available the text of Blake’s writing in a scholarly and comprehensive fashion”, and whereas the Erdman edition of Blake’s poetry and prose was relatively widely available at that time, Hilton’s version of Erdman, Thiesmeyer, and Wolfe’s Concordance to the Writings of William Blake, fi rst published in 1967, certainly was not.7 Hilton certainly maintained greater ultimate ambitions for the digital presentation of Blake’s work, writing in a 2005 essay that the potential of Flash would offer new possibilities for condensing arguments around Blake’s visual design into the moving image, an illustration of Blake’s city of Golgonooza, or the “living zoon” of art embodied.8 Whereas work on the Blake Digital Text Project ceased in 2003, it remains the simplest way to search through Erdman’s text (due to behind the scenes work on the copy of the text stored on The William Blake Archive servers at the time of writing) and remains an incredibly valuable resource for scholars. Indeed, although completely taken for granted in a world where Google has held dominion for over a decade, that transformation provided by searchable text-as-database cannot be underestimated compared to a period in which the perusal of print concordances and catalogues did indeed represent considerable, even grinding, labor.

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One illustrative example of the failure of a particular ecosystem can be seen in the remnants of The Blake Multimedia Project. Unlike Hilton’s Project, which may look very dated compared to contemporary web sites but at least has found a niche in the supportive environs of HTML, The Blake Multimedia Project is for the vast majority of users an dead end that exists now merely as a relic of the new media technologies available in the mid-1990s. This project was begun in 1994 by Steve Marx and Doug Smith at the Interactive Learning Institute at CalPoly, and it is theoretically possible—but practically impossible—to view the Project online. The Project involved students using hypertext editions of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, and The Book of Thel among others, and, as the versions were to include combinations of Blake’s illuminated printing as well as his text, it would have offered something closer to the Golgonooza text envisaged by Hilton than his own more modest, but also more practical, Blake Digital Text Project. Unfortunately for visitors today, The Blake Multimedia Project was produced using HyperCard on a Mac computer. HyperCard, developed by Apple in 1987, was an application that became popular with academics and corporations in the 1990s, offering a more powerful hypertext environment than Berners-Lee’s HTML for much of that decade. For theorists such as George Landow writing in the early 1990s, HyperCard was certainly a much better illustration of the potential of hypertext than HTML, using stacks of virtual “cards” to store information of various types that could be accessed non-sequentially. Unfortunately, as the program (which had been distributed free with all Macs) was withdrawn by Apple in 2004, it is simply impossible for most visitors to the CalPoly site to view the original files other than in the form of static images uploaded to the Web. As such, although The Blake Multimedia Project is little more than fi fteen years old, it is as esoteric for Blake students and scholars as the Camden-Hotten forgeries produced during the nineteenth century. This is just one example of the issues of digital preservation that will be returned to in the fi nal chapter. Rather like the (in) famous BBC project to transfer the Domesday Book to optical disc in the 1980s, the required technology capable of reading the fi les is obsolete: the HyperCard system, by allowing readers to compare text and gloss plates in the same virtual space, offered an important, indeed revolutionary, development that has not actually been fulfi lled properly by any other digital tools so far envisaged for use with Blake’s work. Yet as it was supplanted within a couple of years by The William Blake Archive, so the incentive of updating the project was greatly reduced, academic, social, and, indeed, economic factors to match that of the technological decision to create the Project in software that would soon cease to be supported. As such, regarding online media for academics working with Blake, the most obvious starting place is The William Blake Archive, established in November 1996, with publication of copies of The Book of Thel and Visions of the Daughters of Albion. By early 1997, work had begun to provide

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some media-rich elements using Java, followed by other innovations such as the use of Inote, which allowed a more sophisticated way of annotating image-rich information rather than simply surrounding it with text on a page. Inote itself was drawn from The Rossetti Archive and The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War, but the next major technical update was the launch of “WBA” 2.0 in 2001. In retrospect, although version 2.0 of The William Blake Archive introduced some welcome features—for example, around navigation and comparison—it was much less significant than the transfer to XML with WBA 2006: this was a major overhaul, including a shift to eXist and Apache software (as opposed to the old Dynaweb server hosting SGML fi les), and established the most recent major technical overhaul on the site, which, since then, has concentrated on providing new editions of Blake’s works, employing standards such as the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standard for encoding electronic texts in the humanities (Lee and McGhee, pars. 14–15). The William Blake Archive itself has developed the most ambitious plan in terms of archiving, publishing, and mediating Blake: its editors—Morris Eaves, Joseph Viscomi, and Robert N. Essick—had laid important groundwork prior to their work on the Archive, drawing attention to the radical difference in Blake’s illuminated books, drawing on important bibliographical work by precursors such as Bentley. As Viscomi famously demonstrated in Blake and the Idea of the Book, Blake is likely to have produced his books in small print editions, making individual copies—or, more accurately, sets of copies—drastically different from each other. With the exception of only a very few Blake scholars who had the dedication, time, and financial support, virtually no one in the twentieth century had ever been able to see the vast majority of different copies that Blake had produced and that, after his death, had been scattered around the globe. The sheer scale of the task undertaken can be seen when comparing a similar project begun more or less simultaneously with The William Blake Archive: Tate and the William Blake Trust produced an extremely handsome edition of the illuminated books between 1991 and 1995, six volumes that reproduced copies of all Blake’s illuminated works but that, due to the expense and limitations of print, had to be restricted to a single variant of Blake’s individual books, usually the most beautiful. With such limitations of print removed, the Archive in the time since it has been set up seeks to provide as many variants of Blake’s illuminated books as is possible, not necessarily reproducing every single copy (working on the assumption that many are similar because produced as part of a print run) but certainly enough variants to demonstrate the important differences between individual copies. Such an approach was practically—if not technically—impossible in the age of print because of the enormous expense involved in color-printing facsimiles of the huge variety of Blake’s books. Joseph Viscomi’s “Digital Facsimiles: Reading the William Blake Archive” (2002) offers one of the most straightforward explanations of the value of

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The William Blake Archive. As he points out, typographic translations distort Blake’s original artifact: although he plays down the distortion that inevitably must take place in any mediation to a new medium, the editors of the Archive were quick to realize the potential of digital media for disseminating and transmitting Blake’s calligraphic and illustration publications. This was not something specific to Blake studies, for all that the illuminated books themselves created an unusual challenge: Katherine Hayles, writing at about the same time as Viscomi in her essay “Translating Media: Why We Should Rethink Textuality” (2003), makes the more general point that literary criticism is filled with assumptions specific to print—assumptions that become more difficult to maintain when the move to digital formats indicates that we should begin to think of texts as processes rather than objects. One early response to the Archive was provided by John Unsworth in 2000, in an essay entitled “Scholarly Primitives: What Methods Do Humanities Researchers Have in Common, and How Might Our Tools Reflect This?” Unsworth, who was director at the Institute for Advanced Technologies in the Humanities at University of Virginia when the Archive was developed there, argued that as well as providing ready access to facsimile copies of Blake’s work, the Archive also fulfilled a fundamental need among scholars to be able to compare different texts side by side, allowing scholars to zoom in on images and see which parts of a plate were originally etched on copper and those that were added later, for example. Yet Unsworth was also clear that, in 2000 at least, the tools available (particularly the Java features of the Blake Archive and Inote annotation) were not quite sufficient for all requirements that the Blake editors envisaged at the time, and indeed offered a somewhat more reflective tone into the discussion of the Archive’s abilities. Huge improvements have been made since then, of course—particularly in terms of online collaboration, although crowdsourcing technologies that have become commonplace in the past half decade, and which are fundamental to those architectures of participation that have been such a feature of Web 2.0 developments, are precisely some of the innovations that are treated most cautiously by The William Blake Archive: Whereas the twentieth century saw the development of a professional and coherent approach to archives and editions of Blake’s works that had been haphazard at best in the previous hundred years following his death, the explosion of wikinomic approaches to Blake’s materials perhaps represents the most serious challenge to those scholars seeking to preserve a coherent account of Blake’s oeuvre. Indeed, the task of collaboration and inclusion has been one of the sticking points for many scholars working in the field: in a globalized environment where production companies working in a variety of media are used to dealing with designers in California, programmers in Mumbai, and product manufacturers in Shenzhen, The William Blake Archive still remains focused fundamentally on its three original editors. Its operations have expanded considerably since 1996, to now include a distinguished advisory board as well as fielding a host of

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project assistants to forward its important work. Yet for any visitor to the Archive itself the communication model established is very much a monodirectional one: the only means of interacting with the site is via email on the User Comments page, and the expectation in part is that most users will wish to gain permissions to use images or transcriptions. This observation is not an attack on the “proprietary” nature of the Archive. Over the years, scholarly work on the Archive has documented for the labor involved in the construction of the Archive, and, in the onslaught of an apparent free-for-all that has surrounded peer-to-peer sharing in the past two decades, the editors maintain a commendably responsible approach to the copyright of the resources they distribute freely to visitors of the Archive. Yet in some ways it seems that the process of collaboration on the Archive itself has changed little from a 1997 paper by Morris Eaves for the Journal of Electronic Publishing, entitled “Behind the Scenes at the William Blake Archive: Collaboration Takes More Than Email”. In that article, Eaves drew attention to something that many scholars working in the field of digital humanities will feel is more important than ever, emphasizing the role of face-to-face contact in the development of the Archive itself. The role of trust in developing an authoritative scholarly resource has long been an important one, particularly because Blake was so ill-served by his early editors in many respects; and yet for a visitor to the Blake Archive there is little more than email that is available (in a world of tagging, folksonomies, wikis, and groupware documents), giving the impression at least that the editors cannot extend their trust much further. It is easy to see why: in the age of Pirate Bay and BitTorrent, no intellectual property is sacred. This, it must be emphasized, is not a question of “monetizing” the Blake Archive—as the editors have proudly and consistently stated, the Archive is and remains free. It is, rather, gatekeeping to preserve a particular coherence to the resources offered by the Archive itself. Yet this approach does come at a cost: there is no role for what Richard J. Cox (2009) and others refer to as the “citizen archivist”, whereby professionals can work alongside the public to create sustainable participation. As many of those who have worked on the Archive have gone on to become (rightly) immensely respected scholars in the field of Blake studies and the digital humanities, The William Blake Archive has served as an extremely useful professionalization machine: it is, increasingly, the realm where a subset of Blake scholars learn their craft, yet we also wonder whether it harks back to a set of gatekeeping practices against a background of media scarcity that seek to maintain the privileges of print in the digital age. The Archive, then, represents a culmination of editorial practices that were established only slowly—and extremely painfully—in Blake studies, but that do not appear to be as sufficiently forward-looking as they could be. John A. Walsh picks out The William Blake Archive and The Rosetti Archive as two exemplary resources for scholars in the digital humanities, while noting O’Gorman’s observation that the field is susceptible to

48 William Blake and the Digital Humanities “archive fever” at the expense of more adventurous, experimental, and creative uses of technology: [S]omewhere in the early 1990s, the major tenets of deconstruction (death of the Author, intertextuality, etc.) were displaced into technology, that is, hypertext. Or to put it another way, philosophy was transformed, liquidated even, into the materiality of new media. This alchemical transformation did not result in the creation of new, experimental scholarly methods that mobilize deconstruction via technology, but in an academic fever for digital archiving and accelerated hermeneutics, both of which replicate, and render more efficient, traditional scholarly practices that belong to the print apparatus. (O’Gorman xv) It is worth restating that the Archive offers a fundamentally important system for approaching Blake’s work, the most comprehensive collection of Blake’s works that were previously far too scattered in their original form for the majority of the public ever to see. By making the Archive freely available, the editors of the Archive have performed a fundamentally important role in establishing Blake’s presence in a way hitherto inconceivable, and this itself forms one of the most generous and fundamental public services ever conceived in relation to Blake. That there are forbidding proscriptions on the use of the materials in the Archive is a feature of the current chaos surrounding digital rights and should not detract from the valuable work undertaken by the Archive’s editors. Yet, and here lies our fundamental criticism of the Archive, the danger is that it becomes an ecosystem that is too closed, too restricted, for the twenty-first century (and, indeed, beyond). What was cutting edge in 1996 is much less innovative a decade and a half later, and a driver for innovation that has been greatly enabled by digital technologies in that period has been open source projects. This should not be idealized as the only source by any means (one only has to consider the almost paranoid levels of secrecy surrounding Apple’s inventions, which has done nothing to hinder that company’s success in recent years), but certainly some of the most significant developments in recent years, not least the technologies underlying the Internet itself, have been radically collaborative ones. Some elements recognizing a way forward for a reconceptualizing of the work of the Archive are present in what Morris Eaves has in recent years proposed as new requirements for web-based scholarly editing, what he calls x-editing. The “partial symptomology” (Eaves’s term) of x-editing includes that it is interactive, collaborative, dispersed, highly adaptive, experimental, and radically incomplete (“Crafting”). The last symptom is particularly important as the essay in which Eaves introduces the notion of x-editing is that in which he accounts for how Blake’s work had been assimilated from the nineteenth century onwards into conventionally acceptable forms. It is perhaps significant that the symptom of radical incompleteness has entered into the work of one of the editors of The William Blake Archive, which, for a long time, appeared to hold out the promise of precisely the

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opposite—that, for the fi rst time in the history of Blake’s mediation, digital technologies held an opportunity to present complete facsimiles of all his works. In his essay, Eaves does not say much more about why x-editing itself must be a radically incomplete exercise, and in some ways it seems counterintuitive to the processes involved in the construction of The William Blake Archive online. After all, the fact that the editors have not thus far provided a complete, holographic representation of all Blake’s works does not mean that the work is not possible to complete: by adding another facsimile of a copy of Jerusalem or Songs of Innocence and of Experience each year, by including more of the biblical tempera paintings, for example, so the complete catalogue of Blake’s oeuvre should fi nally become available. And yet Eaves has an important point in terms of x-editing, and makes the valid observation that, were it not for accusations of carelessness, one could present x-editing as “ugly” or “dirty” editing. The radical incompleteness of Eaves’s approach to such editing stems in part from another of his observations, that just as with print editing x-editing must track the curve of its technologies, but, as has become very evident since 1995, the rate of technological change in the digital sphere invariably renders certain processes obsolete before they have chance to embed. When the editors of the Archive began their multimedia work bringing together facsimiles of Blake’s work, Google was a research project begun by two PhD students at Stanford University, Amazon was an online bookstore begun two years previously, which many observers believed would fail in its fi rst decade as it seemed incapable of generating any profits, Mark Zuckerberg would have to wait six years before attending Harvard and kick-starting Facebook, and Apple was a failing company that would have to wait another year before its reinvention with Steve Jobs back at the helm. The reason for mentioning these four companies is that, at the time of writing, they represent the four main media companies operating not only within digital media but also within the media full stop. The fact that none of them existed as significant participants in shaping the digital world and online experiences at the time the Blake Archive was established indicates just one way in which x-editing must be a radically incomplete process because of the ecosystem in which digital and technological innovation takes place. The William Blake Archive was created in an environment in which mobile apps did not exist and social media as currently understood was an insignificant concept—in which, indeed, the major means of locating information online still relied more on people organizing that information into directories (as via Yahoo!) than the code-driven search and page-ranking algorithms of Google. A visual difference at least between the environment in which the Archive was fi rst created and one dominated by the big four of Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google can be seen by comparing the relatively static mediations of Blake’s illuminated books on the Archive to the recent release of Blake’s Notebook on Apple’s iBook platform. Actually, the differences between the slick representation of the Notebook compared to the much more editorially prudent and conscientious depictions on the

50 William Blake and the Digital Humanities Archive itself may reflect much more to the credit of the work undertaken by the Archive editors: the British Library iBook looks very contemporary, but one is tempted to ask “so what” beyond the tactile pleasures of using a touch interface to once again navigate Blake’s texts. The possibilities offered by tablets and mobile media in a “post-PC” world have, with regard to Blake at least, still to be explored. What that potential could be is better illustrated by the excellent app produced by Faber and Faber, reproducing T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land with a wealth of interactive and critically well-informed multimedia that is a pleasure to use and opens up innovative ways of engaging with the text that are new not only to print, but also to digital media as it has previously been available in the form of desktop or notebook computers. Touch interfaces in particular seem to be a return to the intimacy of books. With sales of the iPad expected to reach 66 million in 2012, the rapid growth of the market for tablets introduces an important new factor in the transmission and consumption of digital texts: The William Blake Archive has done extremely important work in mediating the illuminated books and other works to a new audience, but we wonder how many people actually sit down to “read” the Archive, as opposed to using it to reference images and sometimes text (although Erdman’s Complete Poetry and Prose remains the standard). The post-PC environment is literally at its beginnings, and the next step is to produce an iPad app that will enable the important scholarly work done on the Archive to be read in a very different way to how it is, we suspect, currently referenced and used online. And yet this brave new world brings with it its own problems. Apple, Amazon, and Google all talk avidly of the virtues of newly formed ecosystems for ebooks: in contrast to the academic motivations that have driven the founders of The William Blake Archive, however, all three commercial companies are unsurprisingly driven to fi nd new ways, in the parlance of our times, to monetize online and digital distribution. That is entirely unsurprising—it is, after all, what print publishers have been doing with other forms of media for centuries. What is of most concern, however, is that this new generation of digital distribution will be, in the words of a blog post from The Economist from 2010, as “free as a bird in an aviary”. Amazon locks consumers of its ebooks into a proprietary format that can be read only on Kindlesupported software—software that is, ultimately, more important than the physical Kindle itself, insofar as Amazon’s main ambition is to get readers to buy content from its stores, regardless of what device they view that content on. Apple’s approach appears diametrically opposite, in that the EPUB format used for its ebooks is an open one, the aim being to get consumers to buy more hardware in the shape of tablets and smart phones. Yet the distribution of its apps is, ultimately, at the behest of Apple alone, and is as much concerned with monopolizing digital distribution as Amazon. Even Google, whose original plans for an electronic bookstore made great claims about its openness, has also been criticized by authors for its “rights

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grab” over copyrighted work. Although we have been sometimes critical of aspects of The William Blake Archive, as it has failed to take advantage of transformational processes made available via digital technologies, it can easily be held up as one of the great public achievements in the digital humanities. Although Steve Jobs, according to a New York Times article from 2007, had an “inexhaustible interest” in the books of William Blake, that interest did not prevent him from selling off his collection when it no longer served his purposes as a CEO (Rubin 2007). If the ecosystem of the Internet since its emergence in the 1960s has often been a Darwinian one of frequently brutal piracy alongside collaborative and participatory cultures, the new environment of digital publishing as these three companies battle among themselves to monopolize the ebook market may very well prove to be a commercial dictatorship of intelligent design.

2

The Tyger

TYGER REDUX “The Tyger” is undoubtedly one of the most famous and most loved of Blake’s poems, fragments of which have reverberated through popular culture for at least a century. The phrases “fearful symmetry” and “burning bright” alone are the titles of more than a dozen books, fi lms, television episodes, and comic books, whereas “Tyger, Tyger”, or “Tiger, Tiger”, is the name of anything from coffee bars and restaurants to karaoke booths and retailers of Buddhist charms and pendants. The appropriation of the Blake brand is, of course, frequently little more than opportunistic marketing as inconsequential as the Charles Dickens pubs found around the world from London to Melbourne, or William Shakespeare gift shops, but such Tyger-related paraphernalia is only one of the most evident signs of the diff usion of this much-anthologized poem throughout popular culture. The popularity of “The Tyger” was not solely a twentieth-century phenomenon, unlike the reception of many others of Blake’s works. It was one of the few poems to have made some impression on the poet’s contemporaries during his lifetime, being reprinted in Benjamin Heath Malkin’s A Father’s Memoirs, translated by Henry Crabb Robinson for the Vaterländisches Museum, and appearing in Alan Cunningham’s Life shortly after Blake’s death. Charles Lamb thought it “glorious” (BR 394), and Dorothy and William Wordsworth copied the poem along with several other of Blake’s songs into a commonplace book, although William Beckford made a note in his copy of Malkin that the lines of Blake’s verse were stolen “from the walls of bedlam” (BR 571), whereas Coleridge’s fi nal judgment was “I am perplexed—and have no opinion” (Bentley 2004, 353). Perplexity, as Bentley notes, has been a common reaction to this apparently simple poem, one so straightforward in its meter and diction at least that it is as frequently included in collections of children’s verse such as the Oxford Book of Poetry for Children as in adult anthologies. Of critical reception, not a little of which has focused on the incongruities between the forceful, even sublime text and the rather domestic example of Panthera

The Tyger 53 tigris included in the illustration to this song of experience (looking for all the world like a stuffed toy), there have been a substantial number of essays indicating the fascination that these six verses continue to hold.1 Repetition through anthologies and critical debate provides two means by which what we call zoamorphosis may occur, transformations and mutations that, as O’Gorman observes, are the common focus for media work in the humanities that concentrates on archiving and hermeneutics (xv, 50). O’Gorman’s critique of this focus is mainly concerned, as the title of his book, E-crit, suggests, with the tendency of bringing the apparatus of print scholarship into the field of digital humanities. O’Gorman argues instead for a hypericonomic apparatus more suitable to “a picture-oriented, digital-centric culture”, one that foregrounds the multilinear and cross-media potential of all texts. Zoamorphosis shares many of the features of O’Gorman’s model—as indeed it should: one of the major sources for that model is Blake’s composite art, which demonstrated the potential of using technology in a way “that subverted the dehumanizing potential of mechanical reproduction” (57). To this model of hypericonomy, however, zoamorphosis also adds an important emphasis on the function of social media within a media ecology. As such, it is not restricted to the individual reader rewriting (or responding to) the individual text, but the operation of mass audiences on the formation of multiplicities of a text within a much wider media landscape. As we shall see, it is precisely the refusal of an audience passively to accept the fi xed meaning of the poem as transmitted from expert readers—who themselves cannot agree what “The Tyger” is—that makes it one of the most fascinating examples of zoamorphosis. Individuals may make up a particular response to Blake’s poem (and, less frequently, the accompanying design), but it is also clear that such a response takes place in collective spaces that operate within a flat ontology, where all events at all scales have the same reality. The material nature of collections and anthologies of Blake’s work has already been explored in the previous chapter, and the second of these strands that combine in zoamorphosis—critical reception—will play only a minor role here. Instead, we shall concentrate on three other strands: rewriting, adaptation, and rebranding. This is by no means to suggest an inversion of traditional hierarchies in order to establish new ones— the critics were all wrong! The audience is always right! It is simply the case that hermeneutic activity around “The Tyger” has always tended to function within a very closed environment, and so the important activity of the text within a social media framework has been neglected. The reception work of critics, of course, itself forms an important interpretative community, but it is no more (or less, for that matter) real an activity within the media environment in which this two-hundred-year-old poem has flourished and mutated. Rewriting and adaptation—and, to a lesser degree, rebranding—are more important to this chapter because they display related but also oppositional modes of requisition of an artistic

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original, rewriting in which the text is edited in accordance with the editorial principles of how the supposed original should have existed, the other taking a supposed original as a starting point of what might be possible to create. In general, the former operates from a taxonomical assumption whereby “The Tyger” needs to be classified in accordance with a hierarchical categorization of what constitutes “correct” poetry, whereas the latter is closer to a folksonomy in that it provides more flexible and adaptable (but, almost by defi nition, less reliable) re-readings that can also be added to much more easily. There are, potentially, examples in which adaptations of “The Tyger” could serve as a hierarchical recategorization of Blake’s text, forcing compliance to a “proper” vision— whatever that may be—but in practice it appears to be impossible to fi nd any examples that conform to this with regard to “The Tyger”. Another way of conceiving of this dichotomy is in terms of Bernard Stiegler’s discussion of the transition from hegemony to isonomy (equality before the law) in relation to user-generated content, an economy and politics of reception that emphasize the citizenship of the reader rather than his or her status as a subject (“Carnival”). “The Tyger” as a social media text is, of course, clearer in adaptations than in rewritings, which appear to operate in accordance with the demands of a hegemonic revisionist agenda in order to bring it in line with professional standards of sense, syntax, and grammar. Yet even rewriting takes place within an ecology of audience and organizational expectations. Again, as with discussions of the critical reception of “The Tyger”, we should beware rushing to a simple inversion of values (“The revisionist is wrong! The adapter is right!”). Although there are probably few who would—at least publicly—defend the examples of rewriting that will be discussed in this chapter, we suspect there are many more who, privately, do believe that Blake’s poem does not really make much sense. Rather, all of these are events that share equal reality when considering “The Tyger” as process: many readers will obviously think of Blake’s poem when they hear the line “Tyger Tyger, burning bright”, but many will also think of musical versions by John Tavener or Tangerine Dream, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, or Tracy Chevalier’s Burning Bright—or the extremely popular series of UK venues (www.tigertiger. co.uk) where “you can eat, drink, party and entertain all under one roof, whatever the occasion!”

TYGER REVISED As has long been recognized by Blake critics, versions of “The Tyger” until the 1870s tended to be curiously casual in terms of accuracy. Malkin changed the line “What dread hand? & what dread feet?” to “What dread

The Tyger 55 hand forged thy dread feet?”, as well as offering some other minor amendments such as changing present tense “dare” to the past tense and alterations of punctuation, offering the justification that the poet’s “unrestrained measure . . . has not unfrequently betrayed him into so wild a pursuit of fancy, as to leave harmony unregarded, and to pass the line prescribed by criticism to the career of imagination” (BR 572). Cunningham echoed Malkin’s version, with a few modifications of his own, such as the substitution of “formed” for “forged”, whereas a notorious alternative reprint was included by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the second volume of Gilchrist’s Life, the full effect of which can be seen by comparing it to the text included in Erdman’s edition of the Complete Poetry and Prose:

“The Tyger” (from Erdman)

“The Tiger” (from the Life)

Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

Tiger, Tiger, burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Framed thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies. Burnt the fi re of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand, dare sieze the fi re

In what distant deeps or skies Burned that fi re within thine eyes? On what wings dared he aspire? What the hand dared seize the fi re?

And what shoulder, & what art, Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand? & what dread feet?

And what shoulder, and what art, Could twist the sinews of thy heart? When thy heart began to beat, What dread hand formed thy dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain, In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? what dread grasp, Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

What the hammer, what the chain, Knit thy strength and forged thy brain? What the anvil, what dread grasp Dared thy deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears And water’d heaven with their tears: Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

When the stars threw down their spears, And water’d heaven with their tears, Did he smile his work to see? Did He who made the lamb make thee? (II.57)

Tyger Tyger burning bright, In the forests of the night: What immortal hand or eye, Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

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As can be seen immediately, this goes far beyond simple amendments to Blake’s punctuation and spelling. As well as omitting the fi nal stanza completely, various changes to lines make substantial alterations to the meaning of the poem. Some are grammatical, such as revisions from present to past tense, whereas “What dread hand formed thy dread feet?” (taken from Cunningham’s revision of Malkin) is obviously an attempt to make sense of the original line. Other changes, however, appear to be based more on the editor’s whim: “Knit thy strength and forged thy brain?” as a line is no more logical than “In what furnace was thy brain?”, and, if Rossetti believed that he was creating a coherent unit with the preceding line, his corrections greatly weaken the concatenation of the earlier images, especially with his preference for the word “knit”, which is nowhere found in Blake. In most other cases, Rossetti’s editorial interventions are more subtle, restricted to minor corrections, but with “The Tyger” he appears to have been baffled when grammatical obscurity combined with the sublime. As we have already seen, Swinburne thought that Rossetti had pursued the correct editorial approach in “smoothing off ” what he saw as Blake’s rough and ready form, and the process of “improving Blake” continued with the samples included in William Blake: A Critical Essay. The Aldine collected edition of Blake’s poems published in 1874 by Dante’s brother, William Michael, included not one but two versions of “The Tiger”, one fairly close to Blake’s original aside from some minor changes to punctuation (106–7), but the second being the version from the Life (120–21). William included the following justification in a footnote: “The present version is the one which figures in Mr. Gilchrist’s book, and shows certain variations on MS. Authority. These may be regarded as improvements; and I think it better to include this version as well’ (120). Rossetti’s defensive tone, as we have already seen, was almost certainly a response to Richard Herne Shepherd’s publication of more accurate transcriptions of Blake’s lyrics in his versions of the Poetical Sketches (1868) and Songs of Innocence and of Experience (published in The Poems of William Blake, 1874), yet his tactical appeal for inclusion of the “smoothed” edited version by his brother is an interesting one. Certainly, on the evidence of Blake’s Notebook, which had been acquired by Dante Rossetti in 1847, “The Tyger” is one of Blake’s most heavily revised poems in the manuscript, with excellent guides to the textual revisions being offered by Martin Nurmi (“Blake’s” 669–85) and Michael Phillips (William Blake 62–64, 67–69). Two versions exist in the Notebook (Erdman N108, N109), one of which is included here: Tyger Tyger burning bright In the forests of the night What immortal hand &/or eye Dare/Could frame thy fearful symmetry

The Tyger 57 In what/Burnt in distant deeps or skies The cruel/Burnt the fire of thine eyes On what wings dare he aspire What the hand dare sieze the fire And what shoulder & what art Could twist the sinews of thy heart And when thy heart began to beat What dread hand & what dread feet Could fetch it from the furnace deep And in thy/the horrid ribs dare steep In the well of sanguine woe In what clay & in what mould Where thy eyes of fury rolld What/Where the hammer what/where the chain In what furnace was thy brain What the anvil what the arm/arm/grasp/clasp/dread grasp Dare/Could its deadly terrors clasp/grasp/clasp Tyger Tyger burning bright In thee forests of the night What immortal hand & eye Dare form/frame thy fearful symmetry (N109)

Even the most cursory glance at this version shows that William Rossetti’s claims for authority are extremely dubious. The Rossettis guarded access to the Notebook jealously and, at best, William’s assertion is disingenuous; at worst it is dishonest by implying that behind the printed version of “The Tyger” was a manuscript form that could serve as the ideal copy text restored by the two brothers. Despite obvious editorial malpractice, however, which may or may not be excused as stemming from a desire to promote Blake to a wider Victorian reading public, there is something equally fascinating taking place here for the reception critic: when looking at the manuscript version of what was to become one of Blake’s most famous poems, the Rossettis saw not a fi nal text but one in process, of which the printed version (which, textually at least, remained unchanged during Blake’s lifetime) was merely one variant in a series of flat ontologies. That Blake had so clearly rewritten his own poem was taken as prima facie evidence that the text was open to further revisions as required. 2 The desire to improve “The Tyger” through rewriting has not been restricted to Blake’s early editors. In the 1967 BBC Omnibus documentary, Tyger, Tyger (1967), Christopher Burstall interviewed a number of people, including Adrian Mitchell, Robert Graves, and various school children to

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collect their responses to Blake’s poem. Graves, who suggested that the stanzas were an example of the poet’s schizophrenia, had also written his own arrangement of the poem. Graves wrote about “The Tyger” twice, once in his collection of Oxford lectures, Poetic Craft and Principle (1967), and again in the essay “Tyger, Tyger”, published in the collection The Crane Bag and Other Disputed Subjects. The fi rst is a relatively brief discursion on Blake’s poem as part of the third lecture delivered in 1964 as an example of “incoherence seemingly due to haste and lack of poetic control” (Poetic 89), listing Blake’s poetic failures before offering his own version. Thus the transition from present tense to past tense for “dare” is, as already has been noted with reference to Malkin and Rossetti, a common “smoothing” of the poem to align it with notions of grammatical correctness. Graves goes on to trace the origins of what he calls a “poetic muddle” in the line “What dread hand and what dread feet?” [sic], which in The Crane Bag he argues contributes to it making “poor prose sense” (“Tyger” 133–40). In both the Oxford lecture and his later essay, Graves returns to the draft in the Notebook to explain that originally the hands and feet in the fi nal line of stanza three were “messengers, not artificers”, collecting the tyger from “the furnace deep”, but in deleting an unsatisfactory stanza Blake had left a confused and confusing fragment. As such, Graves’s new version rectifies what he sees as grammatical and semantic errors in the original, and, although it is hard to see that this is an improvement on Blake’s printed version, it certainly follows a rigorous, if doctrinaire, line of thinking. The same cannot be said, as R. J. Dent points out, for omitting the penultimate stanza. Of the lines, “When the stars threw down their spears”, Graves writes, “Blake does not indicate whether the stars threw down their spears in bellicose mood, or simply let them fall from their grasp in grief” (Poetic 90), and for him this seems sufficient reason to omit the entire stanza in order to clarify the meaning of the poem. R.J. Dent (“A Collaboration of Unlike Minds”) comments: “This is pedantry at its worst. Given the tight restrictions of meter and the rhyme scheme, let alone the immediacy of the subject matter, it would be interesting to see how Blake could have (or if he really should have) ‘indicated’ the supposed mood of the stars.” However, although this appears to be an explanation of the excision of the stanzas and other corrections in the service of precision, Dent condenses Graves’s following sentences, which would complicate the critique offered in “A Collaboration of Unlike Minds”: Yet these anomalies, including the confusion of tenses already noted— with “dare” in the present tense, but “could”, “was”, “did” and “made” in the past—increase the nightmare tension of the poem. To repair them would be to show Blake’s mind in a less unbalanced state than it was and so falsify his them. Yet to saddle readers with an unresolved nightmare is not, I suggest, a responsible poet’s task. (“Tyger” 138)

The Tyger 59 The complaint that readers might be “saddled” with ambiguity is comical, and Dent is right to mock this, but his own ellipsis in turn neglects some of the nuances of Graves’s argument. Dent claims that Graves operates out of enmity towards Blake, and that “[T]he rewrite or re-arrangement is therefore a way for Graves to attempt to belittle a powerful poem and try and infuse his own poetic sensibility into an already-written and canonical text”. Whereas Dent appears to approach Graves from the perspective of Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of influence, presenting him as a failed “strong” reader of the text, in actual fact, although Graves’s arguments may be extremely problematic, his essay is actually much more sympathetic than may fi rst appear. On fi rst reading, and particularly in the light of Burstall’s documentary, Graves’s comments on Blake’s “schizophrenia” appear little more than a rehash of the old criticism of the artist’s madness, but a comparison with Van Gogh indicates a more positive aspect: Van Gogh, too, had been a dull enough painter until his schizophrenia developed and was accompanied, like Blake’s, with religious hysteria and persecution-mania. Van Gogh’s famous Chair and Sunflowers seem to come right out of the canvas at you, and are to most ordinary pictures as feverish dreams are to pale daylight fancies. The main difference between Blake and Van Gogh was that Van Gogh killed himself before reaching the schematic or so-called “psychedelic” phase symptomatic of L.S.D. art. (“Tyger” 137) Graves’s cod psychology is risible and very much tied to the historical locus of an ageing man’s reaction to the excesses of the 1960s counterculture, but the significant point that Graves does not see madness as antithetical to original, even great, art should not be neglected. The revisionist reacts to what he sees as obscurity (philosophical and theological, as well as grammatical), and although his rearrangement declaws “The Tyger”, it does not necessarily follow that his motivation is automatically enmity or anxiety. The earlier lecture, by contrast, is much more mean-spirited in its final assessment of Blake’s poem: The truth is that Blake could not reconcile poetic creation, whether human or divine, with planned intellectual creation, or inspired human behaviour with moral laws; and it may be argued that the very confusion of his mind, when he considers the problem of how an All-loving God could have created both lamb and tiger, lends the poem this needed agonizing element. I cannot agree. If a poet believes wholly in what he says, the right words—however distraught they seem—will leap up to their exact place in the poem; and these are clearly not the right ones. (Poetic 90–91)

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This superior and superficial criticism makes a rather astonishing assumption: having suggested that the problem of theodicy is central to the poem, Graves reprimands Blake for failing to answer the problem of evil with a precision that had eluded Augustine, Irenaeus, and Leibniz, philosophers who had explicitly claimed to provide answers in a way that is never proposed in “The Tyger”. Not that Graves is always entirely depreciatory of Blake: in his fi rst lecture from 1964, he declared himself “proud” that the former poet may have had a role in leading Samuel Palmer to offer a visual modification of Milton’s L’Allegro similar to Graves’s own revision, although the defi nition that immediately follows his esteem, whereby poetry is described as “the profession of private truth, supported by craftsmanship in the use of words” (Poetic 26), etiolates the subject to such an extent that it is hardly surprising Graves could fail to appreciate “The Tyger”. Yet, whereas there is much that appears faulty in Graves’s estimation insofar as it attempts to impose a rather Urizenic taxonomy on Blake, at the same time it is impossible to read Graves—against Dent’s dismissive appraisal—without being aware just how profoundly he was stimulated by Blake. Graves sees Blake as someone who cannot make up his mind, an example of stark originality that must be completed and fi nished. Graves is critical of Blake (and, from a particular pedantic view, correctly so) and his views are somewhat patronizing, but at the same time Blake is a catalyst for further creative work. Regarding Blake’s solecisms, the most pertinent advice was offered in 1874 by Richard Herne Shepherd, who was specifically refuting Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s editorial practice, but whose words apply in even greater measure to Graves. After admitting Blake’s occasional metrical failings, his uncertain rhymes and grammatical errors, Shepherd concludes that “a reader who should be greatly offended by these occasional inaccuracies would be quite incapable of appreciating his higher beauties: the matter makes us forget the manner” (xii). Whereas Grant and Robinson, writing at the same time as Graves, may have made subtle arguments regarding the use of “dare” as a present-preterite or past potential subjunctive, I am perfectly happy to accept that Blake often wrote with the same “artful carelessness” that Viscomi attributes to his printmaking, especially as Grant has the wisdom to observe that “unschooled Blake was probably not in the habit of making the sharp tense distinctions to be expected of university graduates” (597). That Blake sacrificed tense and sometimes sense does not excuse similar laxity in the type of professional reader addressed by Grant and Robinson, and indeed both of these critics, in subtly different ways, provide insights to such readers that are still profoundly more useful than the doctrinaire criticism pursued by Graves. Stanley Fish famously played with critical readings of “The Tyger” as an example of the fallacy of projects of literary criticism “where everyone’s claim is that his interpretation more perfectly accords with the facts, but where everyone’s purpose is to persuade the rest of us to the

The Tyger 61 version of the facts he espouses by persuading us to the interpretive principles in the light of which those facts will seem indisputable” (339). Fish compares Kathleen Raine’s response to the question “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” to that of E. D. Hirsch. For Raine, the answer is an emphatic no, the tyger being “unambiguously and obviously evil”, whereas for Hirsch the answer is an almost equally emphatic yes, celebrating the tyger’s holiness as good. Fish explores these two positions (as well as alluding to others) in terms of the interpretive assumptions of the critics involved, but whereas Fish is rightly critical of the unexamined presuppositions that lie behind a restricted pluralist reading of texts such as “The Tyger” (that a range of interpretation is possible, but not any interpretation), his theory of interpretive communities tends towards the same conclusion, shifting the production of meaning away from what is in the text towards the ways of producing the text. The production of meaning, for Fish, is not infi nite but always constrained: we regularly determine that certain readings are incorrect, and Fish has fun, if more briefly, with readings of Blake’s poem that see it as both good and evil or beyond good and evil. We would argue, however, that meanings are unconstrained, that they operate according to what Deleuze and Guattari call double articulation, whereby different ordering processes take place simultaneously but on different plateaus, processes that take meaning to the edge of chaos. Rather than meaning consisting of either/or, it is both/and: thus the tyger is evil and good and beyond good and evil and holy and possibly none of these things and probably much more. The problem with Graves’s rewriting of “The Tyger” is not that, in the terms of the limited discourse within which he operates, he is incorrect: Blake was a bad grammarian, and we should not necessarily forget nor excuse this. Rather it is that Graves sees the task of interpretation as delimiting meaning to an intended primary sense, territorializing the tyger as an abstract machine that represents what the poet should have said originally. Yet if desire is not a representamen based on lack, with the promise of a return to the absent original, but rather desiring-production in which desire creates meaning, then articulation is always double articulation, a paradoxical double bind in which becoming is identifiable as part of a dynamic system of order, of meaning, but is always non-identifi able and thus on the edge of chaos—an abstract machine that does not gesture to a hierarchical system of meaning that can be transmitted from author to reader, but instead operates on a network of relations. Just as Alain Badiou saw in conceptions of infi nity a leftover of theology, that the infi nite can be constrained or defi ned by a single totality or entity, “the One”, preferring instead Cantor’s theory of transfi nite numbers, whereby each set of numbers may be fi nite but in turn has relations to other sets, being fi nite but unbounded, so meanings generated by Blake’s poem can be interpreted within a particular network but also have relations to other networks: interpretation is not infi nite (itself an ideal) but transfi nite.

62 William Blake and the Digital Humanities “The Tyger”, then, may be considered an abstract machine operating on the edge of chaos, a dynamic network, folding signification, and Graves’s rewrite is an extreme version of the various attempts to unfold that meaning and fi x it from falling into chaos at the same time that, paradoxically, he adds to the Tyger machine (and thus generates more chaos). Graves is obtuse, and yet he has a point: meaning in Blake’s poem is not especially clear. However, Graves’s own restructuring in some ways does not go far enough. He criticizes the poem as being “poor prose sense” and excises certain offending stanzas, but what is left behind barely stands up to positivistic scrutiny. Tigers, of course, do not “burn bright” (as opposed, perhaps, to tygers), although this type of metaphor is so familiar that it functions as a kind of writing degree zero of that which we call poetry and so is not particularly offensive. However, when attempting to visualize clearly the line “In what distant deeps or skies. / Burnt the fi re of thine eyes?” immediately problems occur. The metaphor evidently references stars in space, but conceptualizing the space in which the creation of the tyger takes place is almost impossible, and not simply for the crude reason that tigers tend not to inhabit outer space; rather, the space of an enclosed forge that is alluded to in the following lines is somehow expected to unfold itself into unbounded deep space. Yet even this is less troubling than the dominant imagery of the poem that conceives the tyger as being created by some sort of demiurge, if not God himself: leaving to one side the metaphorical language of hands, feet, anvils, and chains—of an embodied creator physically struggling with his creation—an assumption behind “The Tyger” is that there is a creator, even if there is no defi nite answer to the question “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” In The Crane Bag, Graves takes issue with Blake’s conception of God (“His Tyger is, in fact, the concept of evil” (“Tyger” 135)), but for a logical positivist such as A. J. Ayer even the fundamental statement “God exists” lacks any form of cognitive meaning, being neither empirical (testable by sense experience) nor analytical (true by defi nition), and so merely expresses vague, and ultimately senseless, feelings. Graves’s Urizenic task, if pursued to a positivistic end, almost by defi nition must reduce poetry to nonsense, for Urizen’s palace, built on the wreck of the Eternal Man in The Four Zoas, cracks and falls into non-entity as soon as desire stands before the starry throne of reason. However, as the proverb of hell points out, “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise”, and the same is the case with Graves’s assessment of “The Tyger”. The attempt to impose a rigid conceptual system of meaning on Blake’s poem demonstrates instead just how dynamic a network it really is. Endless readings of “The Tyger” are not merely possible but in fact are demanded by a text that deliberately refuses to answer the question “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” It is because of this refusal to validate even the most basic frames of reference—to provide the good prose sense that would ground a tiger impossibly adrift in space—that “The Tyger”

The Tyger 63 provides such a rich source for subsequent adaptations, attempts to articulate a creature that is good and evil and holy and many other things.

TYGER REMADE Graves’s rewriting of “The Tyger”, itself a very minor moment in the reception of the poem, is important because his attempt to fi x the meaning of the poem, to nail it down on the cross of holy signification, draws attention to just how chaotic the poem really is. W. J. T. Mitchell, in “Chaosthetics: Blake’s Sense of Form”, perceptively writes that the assumption that chaotic art is just “bad art” or not even art at all is at some level a disservice when dealing with Blake. In fact, it seems that Mitchell himself cannot completely evade the negative connotations of chaos, seeing it not as a contrary of form but a negation, one that refuses a dialectic with form just as madness refuses a dialectic relation with sanity (171–72). If “The Tyger”, however, is perceived not as simply as either the negation of form (it is a powerful but ultimately meaningless poem) or a finite antithesis that may be reconciled with the thesis of form in an infi nite dialectic synthesis (one reading continually being corrected by another), but is, rather, a transfi nite set of meanings that must have relations with other transfi nite sets, then the dynamism of “The Tyger” may very clearly be seen as a process of chaosthetics. The Tyger machine is not one of originally perfect form “falling” into disorder—this is not our metaphor at all—but rather one that exists within one particular set of interpretations but, when transferred to another set of operations in the normal activity of social media (sharing books, reciting poems, broadcasting music, and so on), generates new objects, new interpretations, new meanings. There is nothing mysterious about this: it is simply what happens when we experience any event in a different context or medium. What is so compelling about the transformations that take place is that the central ambivalence of “The Tyger” refuses a singular point of clarity: it refuses hegemony and so becomes a forceful example of isonomy. Remember: we are not told whether the one who made the lamb also made the tiger. Hence the particular richness of this zoamorph, with so many variations and mutations. Only a few can be considered in any detail in this chapter, and the reader who follows through even half of them will fi nd that he or she discriminates for or against some of them (inevitably, we have exercised such judgment in selecting a number that we fi nd especially significant). What is being demonstrated here, however, is that this user-generated content requires recognition of principles of folksonomy and isonomy rather than taxonomy and hegemony. Meanings are transfi nite rather than rigidly fi nite or idealistically infinite (and always moving towards the final goal of “ultimate” interpretation): particular adaptations may work in one medium or circumstance, and then are translated across to another network. As

64 William Blake and the Digital Humanities such, this is not an argument for simply “anything goes”, but rather a serious consideration of the complexities of chaosthetics through some specific examples of how the Tyger zoamorph can be seen to work in a variety of circumstances and media. The presence of that zoamorph extends through literature, drama, poetry, novels, music, visual culture, and animation. In terms of the written word it provides the title to Chevalier’s Burning Bright, as well as a section in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (see also Bradbury’s 1951 short story, “Here be Tygers”, which also echoes the chapter “Tiger! Tiger!” Kipling’s The Jungle Book) and Adrian Mitchell’s plays Tyger and Tyger Two. The poem is referenced in Ed Bemand’s Beheld, is alluded to in the tiger scene in Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon, lies behind the tigers that appear in Angela Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoff man, is cited by Mina in David Almond’s Skellig, is one of the creatures in Nancy Willard’s A Visit to William Blake’s Inn, and is also the inspiration for Roger Zelazny’s short story “The Burning” in the Blakean anthology Sparks of Fire. Graphic novels have drawn upon it, notably Chapter 5 of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen, which ends with a quotation of the fi rst chapter, and in a 2003 edition of Garth Ennis and John Severin’s The Punisher the young Frank Castle hears the poem as describing the type of creature he will become. John Cotton, a poet and schoolmaster, published a version of the poem in Michael Horovitz’s 1969 anthology, Children of Albion, and it is virtually contemporary to Graves’s rewriting but demonstrates a very different type of critical and creative relation to “The Tyger”. The echoes of Blake’s poem extend beyond the mere title. The repetition of fi rst and last verse is, of course, structurally similar, but Cotton’s particular skill is to evoke Blake’s tyger without simply replicating it, either verbally or thematically. Thus, for example, the line “And thwarted purpose rage” evokes the roaring of Rintrah in the argument of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, where “the just man rages in the wilds” (E33), the argument also beginning and closing with duplicate lines: “Rintrah roars & shakes his fi res in the burdend air; / Hungry clouds swag on the deep” (E33). “Bars” and “limits” are, of course, by no means exclusively Blakean words, but as common tropes throughout his poetry express a desire for unbounded freedom, as in Milton: Seek not thy heavenly father then beyond the skies: There Chaos dwells & ancient Night & Og & Anak old: For every human heart has gates of brass & bars of adamant, Which few dare unbar because dread Og & Anak guard the gates Terrific! (20.32–36; E114)

In Cotton’s poem, the bars are Urizenic—restrictions that impose bounds upon the tiger and thwart his purpose. In contrast to the apparent or at least

The Tyger 65 potential energy of Blake’s tyger unbound, Cotton’s tiger is constrained not merely by the bars of his cage, but also by those of his body, stripes of light and dark on his skin that, one imagines, ripple with rage as he treads his cage. The condensed physicality of the tiger is indicated powerfully in the single line, “400 lbs of muscle, bone”, a specificity of mass combined with an economical material anatomy that beautifully emphasizes a conservation of power with the omission of the conjunction one would typically expect, preserving also the regular iambic meter that it shares with Blake’s verse (interrupted only by the spondee “Shines through”). The rhythmic and rhyming structure of Cotton’s verse also appears to embody the “fearful symmetry” of the former: rhymes, or more accurately repetitions and pararhymes, become oppressive, replicating the cage in which the tiger fi nds himself. Despite the many similarities of the tyger and the tiger, then, Cotton’s beast is no mere reiteration of Blake’s: both are associated with violent imagery, but in Blake’s poem the potential energy of the creature he describes has been condensed at its birth and now breaks free of all bonds that the narrator doubts even mortal hand or eye could frame, whereas Cotton’s tiger is freeborn but now imprisoned within the cage that mocks not only him but also the limited ends and ambitions of the spectators without. For Blake, as recognized in Tavener’s setting, there is at least the possibility of a divine marriage, but in Cotton’s poem the viewer is divorced from the subject of the gaze, able to see the sun that illuminates the bars of his skin but barred out from the energy of the tiger sun that shines from within. This remaking, as with many of the others to be considered in the rest of this chapter, draws attention to the critical work that goes on in adapting Blake to new forms and audiences: Cotton does not accept Blake’s single vision of the tyger any more than Graves, nor does he attempt to restrict it to a singular framework of correct hermeneutic interpretation. The tyger, as an act of monstrous—but also glorious—manufacture is more clearly the provocation to further acts of creation and invention. Unsurprisingly, considering its origin as a song of experience, there are many musical settings and adaptations of “The Tyger”, both classical and popular, and it is probably second only to “Jerusalem” in terms of the number of versions that have been released in the last century. The fi rst arrangement was composed by Sir Graville Ransome Bantock in 1908, followed in 1909 by a piece for voice and piano by Alan Gray. In 1913, Clarence S. Hill set Blake’s words to music as part of his cycle Three Songs by Blake, and other arrangements in which “The Tyger” forms part of a more extensive treatment of Blake’s verse include Solomon Pimsleur’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1922), Benjamin Britten’s Songs and Proverbs of William Blake (1965), Theodor Hoffman’s The Lamb and the Tyger (1965), John Mitchell’s Visions from the Flame (1977), Hayg Boyadjian’s Song Cycle on Poems of William Blake (1978), William Bolcom’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1984), and Dmitry Smirnov’s Fearful Symmetry (1981, revised 2003), as well as many more occasional pieces by various

66 William Blake and the Digital Humanities composers including Sir John Tavener, Trevor Jones, and Giles Swayne. In all these versions, Blake’s text is preserved more or less intact, serving as the catalyst for musical interpretations in which, very often, a composer seeks to engage with the philosophical and theological questions raised by the poem. Of classical arrangements, three are worthy of special note insofar as they engage with other substantial relations between the respective composers and Blake’s works. Mike Westbrook’s Glad Day: Settings of the Poetry of William Blake (1999) combines pieces for a chamber orchestra choir with jazz, and a 2008 performance with vocalists Kate Westbrook and Phil Minton received considerable critical acclaim. The album is particularly important as a testimony to Westbrook’s long involvement with Blake, the genesis of these renditions lying in his work as a composer with Adrian Mitchell on the play Tyger (1971), followed by the music-drama Glad Day for Thames TV in 1975 to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Blake’s birth and a collection of musical settings of Blake’s verse, Bright as Fire, fi rst performed in 1980 and then again in 1997. Similarly, the Russian composer, Dmitry Nikolaevich Smirnov, who was born in Minsk and studied at the Moscow Conservatory but has been resident in Britain since the early 1990s, 3 has composed two operas based on the works of Blake, Tiriel and Thel, both of which were fi rst performed in 1989, as well as the song cycles The Seasons (1979, based on the four poems from Poetical Sketches), Fearful Symmetry (1981), Songs of Love and Madness (1988), The Seven Angels of William Blake (1988), The Innocence of Experience (2001), and a ballet, Blake’s Pictures (1988–1992). As such, his six poems for voice and organ, Fearful Symmetry, which includes a version of “The Tyger”, composed in 1981 and fi rst performed in Moscow in 1986, indicate just how important this text is for framing what has become one of the most substantial bodies of classical work dealing with Blake’s poetry. It is, however, Sir John Tavener’s beautiful 1987 piece for an unaccompanied thirteen-part choir that demonstrates just how powerfully “The Tyger” may be remade. In it, Tavener offers a response to Blake’s question “Did he who made the lamb make thee?”, in which the thrilling harmony of the singers (comprising five sopranos, two altos, three tenors, and three basses) resolves the tyger’s fearful symmetry into a grandiloquent testimony to the concord of God’s creation. For Tavener’s Greek Orthodoxy, the answer to the terrible question that is underscored by what is usually interpreted as violent imagery within the poem is, rather, a resounding affi rmation that interprets visions of furnaces and forging as “portions of eternity, too great for the eye of man” (E36)—and yet not, perhaps, for man’s ears if he would but listen. Tavener’s remarkable achievement with his arrangement of “The Tyger” is to transform an often discordant, even furious, poem into a hymn to God’s glory that is serenely passionate: the composer’s response is a dialogue with Blake’s poem that transforms it into a work that seems almost compassionate. Like the best adaptations that take Blake as a source of inspiration, its effect is to alter rather than simply reinforce the listener’s

The Tyger 67 experience, expanding the horizon of expectations so that our interpretation of the poem is transformed. In popular music, “The Tyger” has been at least, if not more, prevalent, with variants covering genres as diverse as country/folk (Greg Brown, Songs of Innocence and of Experience [1992], Nick Harper, Smithereens [1998]), progressive/experimental rock (Tangerine Dream, Tyger [1987], Birdsongs of the Mesozoic, Sonic Geology [1988]), goth (Mephisto Waltz, Immersion [1998]), techno/electronica (Dead Nine, I Believe in Magic [2008]), and black/death metal (Thelema, Fearful Symmetry [2008]). Several bands have taken their name from Blake’s poem, such as the Adelaide-based indie group Tyger, Tyger, and The Lamb and The Tyger from Gettysburg, whose MySpace page describes them as “liberal arts rock” (www.myspace.com/ thelamandthetyger). Generic conventions, of course, provide a clear context for many of the interpretations of these songs when they follow Blake’s lyrics closely—the Belarus band Thelema, for example, delivering what could be described as a conventionally classic exposition of a metal anthem that is the polar opposite of Tavener’s arrangement. Occasionally Blake’s poem serves as an exit point for a song that interprets his text much more freely, as with Ian Astbury’s “Tyger” on Spirit\Light\Speed (1999) or the instrumental version of “The Tyger” on Sonic Geology (1988). As with the discussion of classical music, this chapter can convey only a very small part of the incredible richness of this zoamorph, but will concentrate here on one particular example of the transformations undertaken by Blake’s text in an unusual setting. In this case it is by focusing on the remarkable example of Thelema: having formed in Belarus in 2003 out of two other death metal groups, Oyhra and Ravenland, they released their fi rst demo, “On Heavenly Fields” (2003), followed by an EP, Divine Image (2007) and Fearful Symmetry (2008). Although a much more slender oeuvre than Dmitry Smirnov’s, they similarly demonstrate how Blake can appeal to an audience in the former Soviet republics as they tour throughout Russia, the Ukraine, and Belarus. Fearful Symmetry, recorded in Poland, draws on a wide range of Blake’s poetry, including “The Crystal Cabinet” and even The Four Zoas in a track that takes its inspiration from the lines: “This is no warbling brook nor Shadow of a Myrtle tree \ But blood & wounds & dismal cries & clarions of war” (93.14–15; E365). As with many new bands, their music also demonstrates the transition from older forms of distribution and publishing to a reliance on social media to reach their audience, with most significant activity taking place on MySpace (www. myspace.com/telemaband) and the Russian social networking site Vkontakte (vkontakte.ru/groups.php?act=s&gid=5710253). In contrast to the verbal poetry of “The Tyger”, in literature and music, its associated illustration has attracted somewhat less attention from artists, in many respects hardly surprising considering its un-terrific aspect. Two interesting examples, however, are provided by Korshi Dosoo and Joel-Peter Witkin. Dosoo’s “Tyger” print series features pencil and inked images,

68

William Blake and the Digital Humanities

colored in Photoshop and printed on vellum-style paper to mimic the production style of comic art. The “Tyger” series is also a stylistic homage to the work of comic artist Mike Mignola, creator of the long-running Hellboy series (1993–present), which is itself highly influenced by Blake and includes a reference to “The Tyger” in the second collection, Wake the Devil (Lussier, “Blake” 153). Other influences on Dosoo include Pierre-Paul Jouve, Christian Waller, Aubrey Beardsley, and mid-twentieth century propaganda posters from the Spanish Civil War, and his prints reimagine Blake’s poem as a comic book with different panels sequentially representing lines from Blake’s verse. The first image presents a ferocious Tyger, with glowing yellow eyes and bright orange fur contrasting with the dark grey and black tones of the background. The figure of the Tyger recalls the monstrous behemoth from William Blake’s print “Behold Now Behemoth Which I Made with Thee”. In an interview with Roger, Dosoo suggested that this print, from Blake’s series of illustrations to the Book of Job, contained the largest degree of Blake’s visual inspiration for his Tyger prints, the large muscular body of the behemoth and circular eyes being reflected in Dosoo’s Tyger. The final panel of Dosoo’s sequence brings the viewer back to the mythological depiction of the Tyger. Dosoo’s prints reinforce the questioning nature of Blake’s poem, but they also suggest that the being of the Tyger is transformed by the questions posed by Blake’s narrator. Given Dosoo’s varied interests in science fiction, fantasy, animal art, religion, anatomy, and science, we can see the Tyger as a manifestation of Dosoo’s distinctly postmodern animalistic religiosity. Animals are often figures of our collective fantasies, subject to the questions we ask of them and the roles we place them in. The Tyger can be a figure of mythology or a specimen for science. Yet the Tyger can also be a comic character: a fierce creature with bulging muscles, superhuman powers, and god-like yellow eyes. Dosoo’s work shows us those strange Blakean spaces where animals and science collide with mythology, pop art, the supernatural, and the graphic novel. Blake’s imagery also impacts Witkin’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, a collection of his photographs linked to various of Blake’s poems. As a collection, this is one reading of Blake that I fi nd frustrating because I see in it very little of Blake’s innocence to balance Witkin’s experience, but the image accompanying “The Tyger” is a witty and elegant piece. It displays a decomposing and scabrous rhinoceros, a droll allusion to Dürer’s famous woodcut from 1515. Dürer, as is well known, never actually saw the rhinoceros that arrived in Lisbon, the fi rst in Europe since Roman times, and his armor-plated beast is a fantastical invention worthy of a medieval bestiary. The joke, of course, is as much on Blake, the implication being that the eighteenth-century engraver had never seen the animal he depicted either. Whereas Dürer’s woodcut depicts a resilient and robust warrior, Witkin’s creature is decrepit, its face already decaying into a skull and the diseased plates covering its body ill-fitting and rancid as it stands on a soiled, clothcovered podium in a bare studio. Nor is the satire restricted to Blake and

The Tyger 69 Dürer: considering the imposing question of Blake’s verse, if God indeed is responsible for this undead revenant, then the sublime aspirations of the original poem are severely undermined. Alternatively, this rhinoceros may be itself an undead God, with Witkin interpreting a post-Nietzschean Blake who laughs as much as fears the former sublimity of this creation. Whereas there is, as is typical of Witkin’s art, a sinister reminder of death that almost reeks from the image (for my response to it is as much olfactory as visual), in addition this outlandish and alien creature on the edge of extinction is comic and full of pathos. Alongside the grim humor directed against the creator who has botched his creation, one cannot help but feel sorry for this ramshackle construct carelessly assembled in a grubby, dilapidated studio, waiting for a Godot who never arrives. Despite the paucity of visual responses to Blake’s poem, one recent video short offers a remarkable reworking. Tyger, by the Brazilian illustrator and animator Guilherme Marcondes, was produced in 2006 in response to a call by Cultura Inglesa, part of the British Council in Brazil, to present a piece of work that referenced British culture. Working with the scriptwriter Andrezza Valentin and a band called ZEROUM for the music, Marcondes produced a four-minute video combining puppetry and animation showing the progress of a gigantic tiger through Sāo Paulo, where the artist lives and works, at night. As the creature, controlled by three puppeteers, stalks the city, so illuminated flowers appear on screen and the citizens of Sāo Paulo transform into different types of fauna, a family at dinner becoming apes, or a group drinking at a bar turning into butterflies. Neil Gaiman (2007) described the sequence as “like something I dreamed as a boy”, and it is also reminiscent of J. G. Ballard’s The Unlimited Dream Company, a rewriting of Blake’s Milton in which the hero, Blake, crash-lands an airplane in the London suburb of Shepperton, his procession through the town causing a similar transformation of drab streets into a beautiful but ominous surrealist nightmare. Writing of the film on his web site, www.guilherme.tv, Marcondes remarks: Our intention isn’t to illustrate or pay homage to the original text. This is one of our favorite poems and Blake’s dystopian vision of the modern world is still strong. Although different from the other pieces in “Songs of Experience”, where “The Tyger” was originally published, this one gives us a hint of wonder along with a fear of progress. The tiger is as much dangerous as it is marvelous and this ambiguity makes us avoid the pure romantic negative vision of society. Significantly, it is once again the text of Blake’s poem rather than the accompanying images that are most important to Marcondes’s interpretation, although the Bunraku-style model of the tiger, controlled by two men swathed in black costume, shares more than a passing similarity to Blake’s original image, the child-like nature of the model contributing to

70 William Blake and the Digital Humanities a sense of playfulness as well as wonder and fear. As the city becomes jungle in Marcondes’s film, and humans are transmogrified to an animalistic state, so Tyger also uses Blake’s poem as an ecological critique, the chaos of civilization that the tiger disrupts unable to frame the gigantic creation’s fearful symmetry and so reverting to nature. That this is a reading against what Kevin Hutchings identifies as Blake’s “human ecology” (my emphasis) should not be neglected: the animated figures of people that populate Tyger are often less significant than the mammals, fish, and insects that they become. Yet, in contrast to the rewritings with which this paper began, Marcondes is also quite clear that his encounter with Blake can be contrarian and perhaps even oppositional, using the inspiration of the initial text to stimulate a new creative work that is not subordinate to its precursor, just as Blake was not subordinate to Milton or the Bible. At the same time, this act of revisionism, that owes nothing to anxiety but is, rather, an act of creative confidence, is sure enough of itself not to worry about the perceived infelicities and failures of the original text, in contrast to editors such as Malkin, the Rossettis, and Graves. Marcondes’s ecological and digital transformation of “The Tyger” indicates the pleasure that Blake’s poem so often involves. Whereas it is tempting to lyrically evoke notions of jouissance, such mutations also present the viewer with a practical application of how zoamorphosis may work within the field of a virtual plane that does not merely wait to be actualized but stimulates the activities of creativity—activities that we shall return to when discussing the values of teaching creativity in Chapter 4. John Law, when presenting new ways of conducting research, draws upon method assemblages that have perhaps long been recognized by artists in which the method no longer discovers and depicts underlying realities, but rather participates in “the enactment of those realities” (45). Zoamorphosis is a method-in-practice that is concerned with exploring how “minute particulars” are activated and enabled by the field of the virtual Blake that operates alongside them. This is not, however, to deny discrimination and judgment on the part of the critic and scholar. As Graham Harman observes: Not all translations are equal—there are better and worse translations of Shakespeare, just as there are better and worse meals with which to catch the flavor of certain wines, and better and worse ways (in Latour’s best example) to refine crude oil into gasoline for your car’s tank, which by no means implies that the gasoline is a “copy” of the crude oil. This is not relativism, but rather the most hardcore possible realism. It is not relativism, because there really are better and worse translations; it is hardcore realism because it takes real objects so seriously that it holds them to be irreplaceable by any conceptual model—no model of a banana or apple, however detailed, can step into the world and become a banana or apple. (“Road” 179)

The Tyger 71 The virtual Tyger, as with virtual Blake, is a plane of consistency that would not exist without Blake’s original poem “The Tyger”—but which original? Copy B? Copy F? Copy AA? Even at source, the virtual Tyger was operating alongside these actualizations, which is why we require a more sophisticated ontology to deal with receptions of Blake’s work. Zoamorphosis means treating all Blakean objects seriously, not simply those produced by Blake, who was himself as much a reader as writer of his own work, rediscovering oblique meanings days, months, or even years later.4 When dealing with this universe of Blakean objects, then, there are criteria that will be set by the critic that should be as clear as possible, but we should beware of undermining adaptations with shorthand appeals to a superior authority, whether the “original” text or a higher interpretive community. In many respects, the decisions that have operated throughout this chapter with regard to revisions of “The Tyger” have largely been aesthetic ones: they become much thornier when turning to our second zoamorph, the hymn “Jerusalem”.

3

Jerusalem

“BRING ME MY BOW”: SOCIAL MEDIA AND CO-PRODUCTION If “The Tyger” is the most loved of Blake’s Songs, then the most famous of his lyrics has the ironic status of not being written by him, at least not under the title by which it is most commonly known. The stanzas from the preface to the epic poem Milton, A Poem, which begin “And did those feet . . .” have become much more famous as the hymn “Jerusalem”, a staple of hymnals, recitals, and concert performances such as Last Night of the Proms, as well as providing the backing track for a large number of plays, films, and radio broadcasts. In addition to multiple classical versions of the song, “Jerusalem” has frequently been re-scored for brass bands and variants performed by a multitude of popular music groups, whether pomp rock in the form of the version released on Emerson, Lake, and Palmer’s 1973 Brain Salad Surgery, or the angry political protest included on the 1990 album Pax Britannica by the avant garde industrial group, Test Dept. Blake is sometimes invoked in some of these renditions, usually to support a particular position with regard to political or aesthetic choices, yet, more than most of Blake’s other texts or artworks, “Jerusalem” is a perfect example of Blake’s art as social media because it simply did not exist before Sir Charles Hubert Hastings Parry composed the hymn in 1917. Blake had written the stanzas probably in 1804 or shortly thereafter, when he began composition of his long epic, Milton, a Poem. Although the preface in which those stanzas appear is as famous among Blake scholars as the lyric itself, it is almost unknown among the wider public (many of whom are probably not even aware that Blake composed a visionary poem drawing on Milton for its inspiration). The preface begins with a denunciation of classical modes of art and a call to the “Young Men of the New Age” to return to the Bible, and ends with a quotation from Numbers: The Stolen and Perverted Writings of Homer & Ovid: of Plato & Cicero. which all Men ought to contemn: are set up by artifice against the Sublime of the Bible. but when the New Age is at leisure to Pronounce; all

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will be set right: & those Grand Works of the more ancient & consciously & professedly Inspired Men, will hold their proper rank, & the Daughters of Memory shall become the Daughters of Inspiration. Shakspeare & Milton were both curbd by the general malady & infection from the silly Greek & Latin slaves of the Sword. Rouze up O Young Men of the New Age! set your foreheads against the ignorant Hirelings! For we have Hirelings in the Camp, the Court, & the University: who would if they could, for ever depress Mental & prolong Corporeal War. Painters! on you I call! Sculptors! Architects! Suffer not the fash[i]onable Fools to depress your powers by the prices they pretend to give for contemptible works or the expensive advertizing boasts that they make of such works; believe Christ & his Apostles that there is a Class of Men whose whole delight is in Destroying. We do not want either Greek or Roman Models if we are but just & true to our own Imaginations, those Worlds of Eternity in which we shall live for ever; in Jesus our Lord. And did those feet in ancient time, Walk upon Englands mountains green: And was the holy Lamb of God, On Englands pleasant pastures seen! And did the Countenance Divine, Shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here, Among these dark Satanic Mills? Bring me my Bow of burning gold: Bring me my Arrows of desire: Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold! Bring me my Chariot of fire! I will not cease from Mental Fight, Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand: Till we have built Jerusalem, In Englands green & pleasant Land. Would to God that all the Lords people were Prophets. Numbers XI. ch 29 v. (E95–96)

Certainly not everyone who has drawn upon “Jerusalem” is unaware of the original context in which Blake’s words appeared, and for some this has ensured that the hymn is a profoundly radical text that intrinsically denounces those hirelings who would “for ever depress Mental & prolong Corporeal War”. Yet it is quite clear that Blake himself, in many respects,

74 William Blake and the Digital Humanities failed to recognize the full significance of the text that he had composed. It appears in only two of the extant four copies of Milton, having been omitted in later additions, probably because its appeal to the “Young Men of the New Age” implied a “confidence in fi nding a wide readership for the poem, a confidence that Blake may have lost by the time he collated the two later copies” (Essick and Viscomi 40). Certainly by the time of Blake’s death the lyrics that were later to become so famous appear to have been more or less forgotten, although it did achieve some circulation during the nineteenth century—for example, being included in the section on “Patriotism” in H. C. Beeching’s A Paradise of English Poetry, from 1893. The poem’s true afterlife, however, only begins in 1915, when the poet laureate Robert Bridges included it in the anthology The Spirit of Man and then commissioned Parry to compose music for the text. It is from this point onwards that “Jerusalem” can be seen as part of English national life in particular, but also as a nexus of agencies seeking to use the text to perform a series of often contradictory ambitions. Blake’s “Jerusalem” is one of the clearest and most startling examples of the co-production discussed throughout this book, a return to the social reading that was common before the Gutenberg parenthesis made print a privileged mode of cognition. As already pointed out, Blake did not write “Jerusalem” but rather the lines from the prologue to Milton, yet it is the hymn that is more often broadcast and heard than the text that is read, and the occurrences of such broadcasts and, indeed, performances, more often take place in a social context than not, whether it is sung in a church or at a sporting event, or heard in the context of a radio broadcast or fi lm. Keri Davies has provided an excellent account of Parry’s composition and the early reception of “Jerusalem” (192–93), which also draws attention to the fact that the jingoism that the hymn has often attracted was very far from Parry’s original purpose, although it was indeed composed at least partially for national and patriotic purposes. After the inclusion of the stanzas in Bridges’s The Spirit of Man, Parry was asked to set them to music for the organization “Fight for Right”, set up by General Sir Francis Younghusband to counteract German propaganda. As Davies observes, Parry’s initial commitment was uncertain (and, indeed, he was to withdraw from Fight for Right in 1917), but he eventually agreed and “Jerusalem” was fi rst sung on March 28, 1915 at Queen’s Hall by a choir of three hundred volunteers (192). The social aspects of co-production are immediately evident in the composition, performance, and immediate reception of the Parry-Blake hymn. Henry Jenkins in Convergence Culture draws attention to the fact that media convergence is a cultural process rather than merely a technological endpoint, so the transformation of the Blake stanzas into a widely performed hymn depends not only on the developments that were taking place in sound technologies at the turn of the twentieth century, but also on active and democratic processes of reading and reception that iterated

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a radically different form of the poem. For Jenkins, fan culture can help us understand innovations in media because the “political effects of these fan communities come not simply through the production and circulation of new ideas (the critical reading of favorite texts) but also through access to new social structures (collective intelligence) and new models of cultural production (participatory culture)” (246). The production of “Jerusalem” as a new hymn appears the very antithesis of the fan culture discussed by Jenkins, but its dissemination is far from restricted to a coterie gathered around Parry or Elgar: whereas an establishment may have wished to use “Jerusalem” to promote a very particular form of that hymn, the social contexts in which it was used fit closer to the participatory culture and co-production discussed by Jenkins, with a grassroots response to mass culture frequently transforming the reception of the hymn. As such, greater attention to participation as a source of cultural production in the digital humanities as well as the humanities more generally changes the stakes of cultural analysis. It becomes social, about making something. It becomes about shaping cultural texts so that they work for us, rather than at the behest of hegemonic forces, whether those of the Establishment or giant corporations. The successful dissemination of this cultural meme is put into bolder focus by the fact that “Jerusalem” was not the fi rst setting to music of Blake’s lines: in 1907, Walford Davies, who had studied under Parry at the Royal College of Music, composed an a capella piece for “And did those feet”, alongside two others based on texts by Shakespeare and A. H. Clough for the Morecombe Festival of the following year (Fitch 57). This was not the only composition by Davies taking Blake’s words as inspiration, for in 1934 he published Ah! Gentle May I Lay Me Down, which included texts from “The Couch of Death” and Thel, as well as Edmund Prys. Yet although Parry produced only one composition on Blake’s works, it was his reworking of the stanzas from Milton that caught the wider imagination of the public. Davies’s hymn has never been republished, whereas Parry’s has undergone a long history of performances and publication. Fight for Right issued the song as a single sheet in 1916 for use at its rallies (Fitch 167), helping to spread its popular appeal rapidly during the war, and its appearance in Hymns of the Kingdom and Davies’s own Students Hymnal, both in 1923, established one foundation of its reputation as a stalwart of congregational services. As Fitch records, from the 1920s to the 1980s it was to appear in more than a dozen important hymnal collections (Fitch 168–69). Parry’s hymn, then, was not the fi rst musical setting of Blake’s words, nor was it the last: other versions noted by Fitch include those by Bernard Sidney Garte (1946), John Linton Gardner (1951), Virgil Garnett Thomson (c. 1953), John Chorbajian (1972), William Russell Smith (c. 1974), and James Austin Collingnon (1983). To hear these alternate versions is to experience a sense of dissonance: the words are familiar, and yet the music has not formed part of that general horizon of expectations surrounding the hymn.

76 William Blake and the Digital Humanities Chartier’s “concrete modalities” come into play here: specific circumstances contributed to the widespread acceptance of the Parry-Blake hymn, some of which undoubtedly are due to the particular appeal of Parry’s composition, but more of which depend on the occasion of its formation. That Parry was composing during a major war is, of course, immensely important—but also an indication of how co-production could easily escape the aims and ambitions of the composer. Parry disliked immensely the jingoism surrounding the propagandic effort espoused by Fight for Right, and, according to Walford Davies, was not particularly happy with the result of his own attempt to inspire patriotic feelings. Yet although Parry wrote to Younghusband in May 1917 withdrawing his support for Fight for Right, his song had been taken up by an alternative organization that received much more fulsome support from him. On March 17, 1917, the hymn was performed at the Albert Hall as part of a Suffrage Demonstration meeting, and the next year Millicent Garrett Fawcett asked for it to be sung at another Demonstration concert in 1918, after which she suggested it become “the Women Voters’ hymn” (Davies 192).1 Parry was pleased at the link and hoped that the connection would endure, and so very quickly after its fi rst performances the hymn was being associated with two very different types of fight, one much more corporeal, the other mental fight. James Carroll argues that the importance of the hymn during World War I was that it “invited a war-exhausted British public—and their shell-shocked sons—to keep fighting ‘till we have built Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land’” and that “the war had given it irresistible resonance as the holy city of sacrifice, atonement, and redemption through killing” (Carroll 236). It was certainly this notion of “redemption through killing” that was as abhorrent to Parry as it would have been to Blake, who would have seen such usage as exemplary of those hirelings he railed against in the preface to Milton. The connection to the Suffragettes provides a more complex political context for the later adoption of “Jerusalem” by the Women’s Institute. Founded in 1915 as a female counterpart to the Agricultural Organization Society, one of the overriding aims of the Institute during the war was to enhance food production in Britain. From 1919 onwards, however, as Lorna Gibson observes, the emphasis shifted to rural development and the education of members (“Conducting” 192). One of the effects of the devastating loss of life incurred during the war was that many everyday cultural activities had suffered, including a dearth of conductors in villages and towns throughout the country. As such, the emphasis on training women in performance was intended to improve daily life and serve as a transition until the final acceptance of women to be trained as conductors in conservatoires during the 1930s. Even then, in the thoroughly gendered sphere of conducting, women tended to be restricted to choirs and amateur orchestras. Nonetheless, as Maggie Andrews (1997) observes, although the Women’s Institute was the “acceptable face of feminism”, the adoption of

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“Jerusalem” as the society’s official hymn in 1924 could not entirely erase its Suffragette connotations for all members who lustily sang the BlakeParry composition. Indeed, over the following decades it did not merely follow its official aims in improving rural life but also provided an environment where women could contest social constructions of gender (qtd. in Gibson 198). The fi rst treasurer, Helen Auerbach, was closely connected with Millicent Fawcett, as was Grace Hadow, its fi rst vice chairman [sic]. The mixture of “Jerusalem”, then, with the jam of the Women’s Institute may hint at ways in which the apparently safe adoption of Parry’s hymn could overlap with underlying radical tensions. And yet this was the double life of “Jerusalem” in its fi rst few decades, both establishment and radical, an actant whose usage depended very much on the status of the network in which it was deployed. To us, “Jerusalem” has always seemed more interesting as a tactical object, intervening at certain nodes, rather than a strategic concept giving overall meaning to whatever network in which it operates. Bridges’s initial commission of the hymn by Parry and its use by Fight for Right clearly put it on the side of the angels (as Blake would have understood that term in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell), yet Parry’s own relations with Younghusband’s organization, and the jingoistic bent of Fight for Right’s activities during World War I, were awkward and clearly inimical to his vision of whatever was meant by building Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land. His friendly support for the Suffragettes, particularly in correspondence with Millicent Fawcett, suggested that in this respect at least he was of the devil’s party quite knowingly, and a diabolical reading of “Jerusalem” as a call for militant mental fight against the established status quo appears to have received his blessing. That this blessing was more than implicit is indicated by the fact that he assigned copyright for the composition to the National Union of Women’s Suff rage Societies, with it then being allocated to the Women’s Institutes. Whatever the reasons for Parry’s generous action, one of the consequences of his re-allocation of copyright was a recognition that “Jerusalem” no more belonged to him than it did to Blake any more. This is perhaps nowhere as evident as the subsequent reworking of the hymn by Edward Elgar for the 1922 Leeds Festival. This is the version most familiar to listeners, being the version usually (although not always) performed at Last Night of the Proms, for example, and Elgar’s score was intended to provide a version that could be played by much larger orchestras than envisioned by Parry. The re-scoring and thus, in some senses, re-envisioning of the hymn was not itself new: Parry had originally written “Jerusalem” as a piece for a solo voice and unison chorus with piano accompaniment before re-scoring it for a small orchestra in 1917 (Fitch 934; Davies 192). Indeed, arrangements for solo voices and piano accompaniment continued to be produced throughout the twentieth century, although they remained less popular than the Elgar arrangement. Parry had known Edward Elgar at least since 1899, when he used his influence with the concert manager

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Hans Richter to arrange for a performance of Elgar’s Variations at one of Richter’s London concerts (J. Moore 258–59). Because of the friendship between the two men (Elgar’s honorary degree from Oxford was again due to Parry’s influence as professor of music, and indeed he later claimed that he had learned much of his own technique from the study of Parry’s writings), his adaptation of “Jerusalem” was almost certainly an act of homage to his former mentor rather than any form of agonistic anxiety of influence struggling to eclipse its predecessor: yet it certainly did eclipse Elgar’s arrangement. It was upon hearing this version that George V was said to have preferred “Jerusalem” to “God Save the King” (Dent and Whittaker 89), and this was the version that was to become a stalwart of later performances of the Last Night of the Proms (although, significantly, not when introduced by Sir Malcolm Sargent in 1953, who preferred Parry’s version as less flamboyant and more straightforward).

KITSCH AND CULTURE JAMMING In many respects, Elgar’s arrangement can be seen as the official establishment anthem whereas Parry’s continues to retain a greater potential for radicalism. Such an easy dichotomy is problematic, of course—after all, whereas Elgar composed his Coronation March for the 1911 coronation of George V, Parry also contributed Te Deum to the same event. Likewise, whereas certain members of the Women’s Institute had strong connections to the Suff ragettes, many of those female choirs singing alongside a piano in village halls the length and breadth of the country probably believed that England’s green and pleasant land had much more to do with a conservative vision of rural stability. Those on the left, particularly in the postwar period, have often fought considerably to deny this aspect of “Jerusalem” and return to “Blake’s” original meaning (and, indeed with recent scholarship, Parry’s), but if the hymn is illustrative of anything it is as a model of collective ownership, consumption, and participation. As Jenkins remarks, many critical pessimists remain locked into “the old politics of culture jamming”, taking up resistance as “an end in itself rather than a tool to ensure cultural diversity and corporate responsibility”, in an attempt to preserve ideological and aesthetic purity rather than to transform culture (249). Those culture jammers tend to be more receptive to the reception of the Blake-Parry hymn as part of the labor movement, as when it was taken up by the Labour Party during the 1945 general election. Clement Attlee told his party during that year, “Let’s go forward into this fight in the spirit of William Blake”, quoting the final stanza of Blake’s poem (cited in Commanding Heights, 2002). Indeed, “Jerusalem” was to remain a stalwart of Labour Party conferences in the decades after World War II (even if Tony Blair was to be caught on camera looking rather uncomfortable during one such rendition in 2005), and the notion that Attlee’s administration was

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seeking to build a New Jerusalem has become a commonplace of history books and biographies ever since. Although Blake’s mysticism was kept in check in the Labour manifesto of 1945, “Let Us Face the Future”, the constant repetition of “build” within that document indicated how the radical poet had been adopted and adapted by the party, whether it was to create a new postwar consensus or the future NHS. The invocation to build Jerusalem in the context of a more socialist state represents a high-water mark of “Jerusalem” as a heroic text in which the song could be adopted as an embodiment of nation building. From the late 1950s onwards, and indeed throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the BlakeParry hymn was much more likely to be used in ironic contexts as multiple overlapping horizons of expectations were radically transformed by the rapid disintegration of the British Empire. Parry himself, as we have already seen, was troubled by some of the patriotic interpellations of “Jerusalem”, but if anything the hymn entered what may be seen as a kitsch phase. This transition into kitsch is representative of one way in which the technologies of mass culture demonstrate the interaction of this text in everyday life, and which in turn has presented some commentators on “Jerusalem” with their own particular grievances. As “Jerusalem” became more popular and better known as it was disseminated through sound recordings and especially via the new medium of television, so artists, writers, and musicians have tended to see the hymn as demeaned in some way that detracts from Blake’s original intentions. Thus, for example, Iain Sinclair sees that through constant repetition it “declines into a heritage token, an emblem to be bolted on to the bonnet of any old banger” (qtd. in Davies 193), whereas in his diaries written during The Last of England Derek Jarman sneered that Blake was “a minor poet who wrote this popular football hymn”, a comment on the use of “Jerusalem” at football matches and in movies such as Chariots of Fire rather than demonstrating his feelings towards Blake himself. For those who have constructed a particular affi nity with Blake, this tokenistic use is frequently viewed as a degeneration of the original, from intrinsic artistic taste into an easily commodifiable kitsch. As we have already indicated in the introduction to this book, however, the flat ontologies and networked understanding of creative agency with which we believe the digital humanities is better suited to work also involve a shift from the hierarchical categories of previous ontologies, each level appropriating a greater level of Platonic “reality”. Similarly, as Sam Binkley has argued, there is an alternative way of viewing kitsch that moves away from the traditional hierarchical framework in which kitsch is often understood. What is most significant about kitsch, suggests Binkley, is precisely its repetitiveness. Kitsch tends to carry the baggage from its origins as fake imitations of luxury items even among sociologists and cultural historians, demonstrating the lack of cultural capital on the part of the possessor—unless, of course, such acquisition is exercised ironically—this itself is surprising because, as Binkley points out, the implicit criteria once used to separate

80 William Blake and the Digital Humanities high and low art have been dismantled by those very writers (131–32). Part of the problem is that in breaking down the old aesthetic, moral and political barriers between high and low culture have been maintained mainly by emphasizing elements of creativity and innovation—precisely those features that kitsch, by defi nition, must lack. Kitsch, argues Binkley, spurns creativity per se yet still manages to retain a unique aesthetic sensibility grounded in a repetition of the everyday and the familiar, what he refers to (after Bourdieu) as “the taste of necessity” (132). The purpose of this taste of necessity is to offer a sense of embeddedness, what Anthony Giddens calls “ontological security”—the background of reassuring traditions and patterns of behavior, “comforting cosmologies” that make possible creative actions in the flux caused by the disembedding institutions of modernity. “Jerusalem”, then, very often is kitsch, but it is precisely its repetition as part of the “modest cadence of daily life” (Binkley 135) that is so important about the hymn. It is during the decades following World War II that it achieves this status as a re-embedding ritual and routine. Nor should it be denied that the subsequent derogation of the hymn by various cultural commentators has a certain element of class politics about it, one that may just as well be concerned with the philistinism of sections of the middle class as with antagonisms towards the working class. Reviews and articles of the boy band Blake in the middle part of the last decade, who rose to fame with their own rendition of “Jerusalem”, had as much to do with mocking their easy listening, crossover appeal to a swathe of the middle class for whom classical music was too difficult (and subsequent schadenfreude when they were dropped by their label) as it had to do with their musical talents. Whereas the Blake-Parry’s status as a tokenistic badge of heritage, as kitsch, is established most strongly during the postwar period, its roots lie in precisely those village hall renditions and repetitions that took place in Women’s Institute halls the length and breadth of England’s green and pleasant land. Although it is those variants that break against this repetition, that demonstrate disembedding creativity and innovation, that tend to be the most appealing to critics, the background muzak of “And did those feet . . .” should never be treated dismissively. It is the modest cadence that encourages regular reinventions of the hymn. As such, the mechanical and technological aspects of mass culture are particularly important to the transmission of “Jerusalem” as kitsch repetition during the twentieth century. Television has already been mentioned and will be returned to shortly, but it is developments in music technology and reproduction that provide the conditions for Parry’s version of Blake’s stanzas to become so popular. The appearance of the song in hymnals from the 1920s onwards, as already noted, helped to cement its position as part of the establishment of the Church of England, but it was through sound recordings that it gained a foothold in popular culture. Improvements in gramophone technology meant that early solo and orchestral recordings appeared not long after Parry had composed his score, and Fitch notes a

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few of these, such as by D. Berthel and Peter Dawson, or the BBC Male Chorus (Fitch 169). Most of these renditions no longer survive, although a slightly later one, by Paul Robeson in 1939, had the virtue of being re-released a number of times. Robeson’s rich, bass voice can hardly be described as kitsch, and his decision to record “Jerusalem” a year after his performance for the Welsh International Brigades to commemorate the thirty-three Welsh men who died fighting on the side of the Republicans in Spanish Civil War may have been part of the radical aspirations of this son of a former slave (Boyle and Bunie 396). Yet for many of those who would have thrilled to Robeson’s voice when they heard it on the Victor Black Label, or later on The Best of Paul Robeson (1970) or The Essential Paul Robeson (1974), or even today on YouTube or last.fm, the voice they would recognize would be that of Joe singing “Ol’ Man River” in James Whale’s 1936 fi lm version of Show Boat—itself, of course, a reflection of the hardships faced by African Americans in the south. Robeson, then, serves as a useful—perhaps fortuitous—fulcrum between the heroic and the kitsch. The repetition of “Jerusalem” on gramophone and later long-playing records (introduced in 1948) would provide an important part of the mechanical interaction of mass audio culture, and certainly later versions of the hymn would more clearly fall into what is usually understood by kitsch than Robeson’s recording. Fitch helpfully notes some of the classical and traditional recordings that appeared in the 1960s in particular—for example, on the album Music for the Queen, arranged by Charles Hobey and performed by the Central Band of the RAF in 1968—but it is during the 1970s that “Jerusalem” really starts to become part of the pop muzak of everyday life and so participates in an aesthetic of repetition and embedding. The online catalogue Allmusic.com notes over a thousand recordings with the title “Jerusalem” since 1970 (not all of them the BlakeParry hymn, although the vast majority are). Recording artists are as varied as the Grimethorpe Colliery Band, the England Cricket team, The Fall, and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. Inevitably, perhaps, it is some of the more unusual of these recordings—precisely those ones displaying creativity and innovation—that will be the subject of the rest of this chapter, but as an example of the embedding function of social media the more mundane and vulgar versions should not be dismissed too quickly. As well as sustaining various interpretive environments in which the hymn has been performed, they are also a reminder that the “Gutenberg parenthesis” alluded to earlier began to unravel long before the emergence of a digital oral culture. An ironic stance towards the role of “Jerusalem” as part of the Establishment can be seen in two fi lms from the 1960s: 1962’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, adapted from Alan Sillitoe’s 1959 short story of the same title, and the 1967 movie Privilege. Whereas many of the sound recordings beginning to appear during this period can be seen as being part of the kitsch aesthetic of repetition, embedding the BlakeParry hymn in popular consciousness for a new generation, both of these

82 William Blake and the Digital Humanities fi lms were able to draw on the familiarity of that hymn precisely to critical readings of the text. Sillitoe’s story was originally published in a collection of the same title alongside nine other works, and the contention between classes in the English system is established almost immediately in the opening paragraphs: You might think it a bit rare, having long-distance cross-country runners in Borstal, thinking that the fi rst thing a long-distance cross-country runner would do when they set him loose at them fields and woods would be to run as far away from the place as he could get on a bellyful of Borstal slumgullion—but you’re wrong, and I’ll tell you why. The fi rst thing is that them bastards over us aren’t as daft as they most of the time look, and for another thing I’m not so daft as I would look if I tried to make a break for it on my long-distance running, because to abscond and then get caught is nothing but a mug’s game, and I’m not falling for it. Cunning is what counts in this life, and even that you’ve got to use in the slyest way you can; I’m telling you straight: they’re cunning, and I’m cunning. If only ‘them’ and ‘us’ had the same ideas we’d get on like a house on fi re, but they don’t see eye to eye with us and we don’t see eye to eye with them, so that’s how it stands and how it will always stand. (Loneliness 9, 7–8) As Allen R. Penner observed a decade after publication, both story and fi lm had attracted contradictory readings of the purpose of Sillitoe’s text, whether it depicted the moral decay or the human dignity of the protagonist, Colin Smith, played by Tom Courtenay in Tony Richardson’s fi lm. Whereas certainly the story fits with Sillitoe’s typical themes of rebellion against “oppressive management and conservative politicians” (255), its contradictory critical reflection owes much to the purported liberalism of the eponymous governor, who makes Smith his favorite prize runner and accords him particular privileges, as well as the fact that Smith’s crime is not committed out of economic necessity but out of choice, a crime for which he expresses no remorse at all. This is rebellion without a cause: Smith is a recusant who, famously in both story and fi lm, simply refuses to win, stopping short of the fi nishing line although he is ahead, in a defiant gesture. It is at this point that the story demonstrates the repressiveness that underlies the governor’s apparent liberalism—that he is indeed not as daft as he may look most of the time—when Smith is forced to perform hard manual labor. It is tempting to read Smith’s act as a deliberate act of provocation, forcing the authorities to reveal their coercive power, yet the protagonist’s reaction at the end of the story remains deliberately ambivalent. Sillitoe’s own politics cannot remain in doubt, of course, as the son of an illiterate Nottingham tannery worker who refused to give up his working-class roots frequently published his stories in left-wing newspapers such as the Daily Worker, but the recalcitrance of Smith is intended

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as another provocation—in this case to the reader, refusing to allow the typically middle-class audience (at least among critics) an opportunity for easy redemptive interpretations of Smith’s actions. What Smith values most about himself, after all, is his cunning, and strips away the civilizing overlay of British culture to reveal a Hobbesian or social Darwinian vision of society red in tooth and claw. The adoption of “Jerusalem” in the fi lm directed by Tony Richardson is in some ways a return to a problematized version of the heroic vision of the Blake-Parry hymn. The hymn is sung as part of not only the reformation considered integral to the Borstal system, offering education through discipline and routine rather than punishment, but also something approaching spiritual redemption, returning members of a potential underclass to the social, national, and even spiritual fold of England. In the episode in which the boys sing the hymn, one of the inmates of Ruxton Towers is recaptured and beaten by the warders, with scenes segueing between the two contrasting visions of life in the Borstal. The scene serves as a classic, even crude, exposition of the coercive roots of reforming liberalism, but significantly, although “Jerusalem” itself may serve as an ironic counterpoint to the violence taking place in one of the forbidding rooms of the Borstal, the boys themselves—somewhat surprisingly, perhaps—do not treat Blake’s words and Parry’s melody ironically: rather, it is an expression of working solidarity that, in the end, is rather jarring in contrast to the rebellious individualism of Colin Smith himself. Although separated by only five years, Peter Watkins’s strange fi lm Privilege operates in a very different milieu. Watkins was a radical and pacifist documentary maker, most famous for his grueling 1965 docudrama The War Game (withdrawn from television transmission almost immediately because of its horrific depiction of the effects of nuclear war), but Privilege had more in common with later fi lms such as Nicholas Roeg’s Performance and Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. A satire in which a pop star, Steven Shorter (played by Paul Jones, who had previously been a vocalist for Manfred Mann), is manipulated by the church to become a messianic leader, the fi lm was poorly received at the time although it has since become a cult hit. Jones’s performance of “Jerusalem” is indicative of Watkins’s alienating effects throughout the fi lm, his group dressed in black and standing in front of a regimented crowd of youths separated from the stage by a huge Union Jack while the Archbishop of Canterbury inspects this proto-fascist youth league, with fi reworks creating a backdrop more reminiscent of the sounds of the civil war to come that Privilege appears to prophesy. In some respects, both The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner and Privilege—produced by left-wing directors and scriptwriters—operate against the more general trends of wider reception of “Jerusalem” throughout the 1960s, which was the steady acceptance of the Blake-Parry hymn into the background muzak of post-imperial Britain: whereas Watkins’s

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vision is more darkly satirical than Sillitoe’s and Richardson’s, both accord the hymn considerable sociopolitical potency as a text able to comment on prevailing conditions of the time. A very different alternative was offered by the 1969 “Buying a Bed” sketch broadcast in episode 8 of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The subsequent popularity of Monty Python should by no means be taken as indicative of a more general interpretative community than either of the two movies discussed earlier (the fi rst season of the Flying Circus was watched by only three percent of the national audience, compared to twenty-two percent for the popular comedy Dad’s Army), but it clearly did indicate that—among a certain type of viewer at least—the status of “Jerusalem” as kitsch could not be in doubt. In the sketch, a newlywed couple are attempting to buy a bed, but every time they mention the word “mattress” to the assistant, Mr. Lambert, he climbs into a chest, pulls a bag over his head, and breaks out into the fi rst verse of the hymn. The humor is in part a non sequitur of absurdist comedy, but it also operates as a metonym for those parts of the British Establishment that preferred to pretend that the so-called permissive society of the 1960s was simply not taking place. Although not actually seen by many people at the time (though the audience was still larger than that for Watson’s film), it is the Monty Python sketch that serves as a better illustration of what Sinclair considers to be the decline of “Jerusalem” into a heritage token. Certainly throughout the 1970s, there were few interpretations as dissonant or critical as The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner or Privilege. This is the period during which album versions of the hymn by brass or military bands begin to appear in ever greater numbers, using the arrangements such as those by Ronald Hamner (1967) or Sydney Herbert (1929, the version used in the 1996 film Brassed Off ). Brass instruments only evolved slowly during the nineteenth century, so much so that in 1936 J. H. Elliot could describe “serious music for brass . . . as yet in its infancy” (887). Nonetheless, brass instruments had commonly been used in village and military bands, and by the late nineteenth century brass bands had become increasingly popular in coal mining areas. By the 1930s and 1940s, argues Dave Russell, miners probably formed the largest single occupational group among bandsmen (77), although throughout the twentieth century the industrial and political wings of the labor movement rarely mentioned such bands in contrast to artistic and literary expression. One reason for this, suggests Russell, is that despite the centrality of such bands to miners’ musical culture, the hierarchy of that movement was attempting to create an “oppositional popular culture” based on sport, theatre, cinema, and choirs that was ignorant of indigenous working-class traditions or viewed such brass bands as essentially apolitical (119–20). Yet, although such bands were viewed as kitsch, performances of “Jerusalem” by these groups are better seen as part of the formation of local interpretive communities similar to those of women conductors and choirs that were part of the Women’s Institute.

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MENTAL FIGHT In terms of less localized, more commercially oriented pop culture, during the 1970s probably the most well-known version of the Blake-Parry hymn was that included on the 1973 album Brain Salad Surgery by Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. “Jerusalem” did have some sporadic popularity with prog rock bands during this period (Tim Blake of Gong and Hawkwind, for example, very loosely based his solo 1978 album, Blake’s New Jerusalem, on the hymn), but following their highly successful U.S. tour in 1974, for most people—at least in the United States—the version of “Jerusalem” that they were most likely to have heard was the Moog-synthesized rendition by ELP. The most significant oppositional pop culture movement of the 1970s, punk, had very little to do with “Jerusalem” during this period, probably because for most listeners it was so clearly associated with Last Night of the Proms, faintly nostalgic brass bands, or high-pomp prog rock bands such as ELP. That such a quintessentially English band as the Sex Pistols, always so keen to stick a boot into the Establishment with songs such as “God Save the Queen” and “Anarchy in the UK”, had nothing to say about “Jerusalem” is perhaps indicative of the cultural horizons into which it had been successfully assimilated during the 1970s (although Malcolm McLaren was a fan of Blake’s art at least while studying at various art colleges such as St. Martin’s, Harrow, and Croyden during the 1960s). This contrasts greatly with the appropriation of the hymn during the 1980s, in part greatly stimulated by the election success of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and the establishment of “Thatcherism” as a new and radical neoliberal conservatism. It is during the 1980s and 1990s that, in England at least, “Jerusalem” becomes a contested cultural battleground once more, with post-punk versions vying— not always unsuccessfully—against the wider mainstream of “traditional” views (actually themselves the invention of the 1980s, which associated both Blake and Parry with a particular view of Englishness) of the hymn. One of the most important initial blasts in this later culture war for “Jerusalem” that emerged during this period was the film Chariots of Fire. As Jason has indicated elsewhere (Whittaker, “Mental Fight” 263–66), Chariots of Fire, directed by Hugh Hudson and produced by David Puttnam from a script by Colin Welland, is an exemplary case of the rapid transformations of receptive horizons that can occur in the contextualization of a particular text. For the director, producer, and writer, the release of the biographical sporting drama representing the struggles of Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell to achieve victory in the 1924 Olympics in April 1981 was a clear example of a liberal reaction against the Establishment, one in favor of a more inclusive vision of society. Yet after winning four Oscars, including that for Best Film, in March 1982 and before its re-release, the Falklands conflict completely changed the atmosphere of British society—and regardless of the liberal proclivities of its production team it was heavily marketed

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as a film of nationalist achievements that would draw upon a patriotic spirit in the very corporeal fight against a new enemy. As such, the film quickly came to be seen by many critics as Thatcherite and neoliberal in its agenda, so that John Hill several years later could see it as evoking “a number of the ‘traditional’ values similar to those that Thatcherism was seeking to revive” (1990, 21), such as competitiveness and heroism. Certainly it ranked with Last Night of the Proms as perhaps the most widespread mediation of “Jerusalem” throughout the 1980s, and, for all its critiques of upperclass attitudes to such things as race and class, became clearly defined by most viewers alongside the new conservative status quo in Britain—not least because Margaret Thatcher herself shared many of its suspicions regarding anti-Semitism and the privileged position of an old Tory hierarchy. Yet, whereas Chariots of Fire defi ned “Jerusalem” for much of an English audience at least in the early 1980s, alternative—more oppositional— versions had already begun to appear, redefi ning “Englishness” in the contexts of punk. Still one of the most astonishing in its effects is that produced by Mark Stewart and the Mafia in 1982. Stewart began his musical career with a post-punk band, the Pop Group, which formed in Bristol in 1978. After critical success but commercial failure, the Pop Group split in 1981 and Stewart began to collaborate with members working for the record label On-U Sound Records as Mark Stewart and the Mafia, specializing in a dub style that owed as much to punk and New Wave as it did to more traditional artists such as Lee “Scratch” Perry. As well as working as a solo artist, Stewart has also made records with a variety of others since the 1980s, including Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, Massive Attack, and Primal Scream. With such a lineage, it was inevitable that his rendition of the famous Blake-Parry hymn would be extremely unconventional. “Jerusalem”, a double-A side single with “Liberty City”, was Stewart’s second release after leaving the Pop Group. Dave Furgess (reviewing the 1985 album As the Veneer of Democracy Starts to Fade, in 2001) describes Stewart as “one of the true giants of contemporary music”, being one of the main figures who virtually reinvented dub music. Many of the features of Stewart’s dub style, especially the stripped-down drum and bass reggae backing and his beautifully discordant, pained vocals, feature on “Jerusalem”, which also mixes in ironic samples in a fashion that is exceptional in Stewart’s early work at least. Stewart sings Blake’s stanzas in reverse order, creating a sense of England’s green and pleasant land turned upside down. His shriek at the end of that initial verse also introduces another element that is continued throughout the song, the segue into one of several samples that are scattered amidst it, bones of the carcass of the hymn’s twentiethcentury history and drawn from more familiar settings such as Last Night of the Proms and brass band arrangements. These samples offer a mental fight for the song’s very DNA. Last Night of the Proms, of course, remains most familiar to many listeners, and it is

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easy to imagine Stewart’s sneer of disgust as he spits out Blake’s words in the face of the rousing imperial values of Elgar’s bombastic arrangement of Parry’s original, simpler hymn. It is hard now not to listen to the brass bands without a sense of nostalgia, but, at the time, they at least had some immediate and vivid connection to a tradition—however invented—that linked workers in Britain to the collieries and manufactories that were the backbone of England’s dark Satanic mills. Nonetheless, the lack of warmth in Stewart’s voice, the absence of traditional pride and empathy, creates a distance that gives this particular version of “Jerusalem” its continuing power to shock. This is a statement of a nation, but it is a Jeremiad, a warning of the disasters to come and a lamentation of the sordid state, prophesying its downfall in wickedness. Stewart as sarcastic seer divines a Britain rotten and yet through his thin, reedy voice come fl ashes of strength. The desire to build Jerusalem ends with an agonized screech, but the demand to “Bring me my bow of burning gold” and declaration that he “will not cease from mental fight” are uttered with fierce determination. An added significance here is that the fi rst and second verses are implicit throughout the song, indicated to the listener by instrumental samples. Stewart sings only the fi nal two stanzas, and one immediate effect of this is to dechristianize the poem: we are no longer concerned with Christ’s putative visit to Britain. Instead, Stewart focuses entirely on the images of combat and building that constituted the conclusion of the poem. Towards the end of his own song, his words disintegrate into almost inchoate phrases, fragments of Blake’s original that function as a dissonant counterpoint to the original forceful and determined invocations, aware perhaps of the coming wars that would reshape Britain over the following decade. Another highly idiosyncratic version produced during this period was that by Mark E. Smith and The Fall, which was included on the 1988 album, I Am Kurious Oranj, which is also discussed in a later chapter as it was spliced with clips from the 1976 film produced for the Tate Gallery as part of a mashup. Forming in 1976 in Manchester, The Fall released nearly thirty studio albums in the intervening period as they moved from punk through a variety of musical styles, with Smith remaining the only really consistent factor in the group during that period. In an interview with The Daily Telegraph in 2008 to promote his book, Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E. Smith, journalist Nicholas Blincoe suggested that a better title would have been “contrarian”, and it is Smith’s contrarian character that provides some insight into the minor, but surprisingly persistent, influence that Blake has played throughout his career. A profi le for the NME in 1993 listed Blake as one of Smith’s heroes: He [Blake] was a real workhorse for his time. I thought he was great, especially what he did and how he managed to do it for that period of

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Along with Sergeant Brownhill (Smith’s grandfather) and the painter Pascal Legras, Blake was one of Smith’s heroes ranged against his villains: British television in the 1990s, alternative comedians, and mature students (“There’s nothing worse than a half-educated man. Never forget that”). Smith’s approach is studiedly slapdash—there is, after all, nothing worse than a half-educated man, and Smith famously did not read his own “autobiography” that debunked stories about the lead singer of The Fall without providing alternative foundational myths. The interview draws attention to what is appealing to him about Blake: the artist’s work ethic and his talent for the grotesque. This casual appreciation, however, cannot completely cover what Richard Barrett has rightly identified as Smith’s autodidactism, a tendency Barrett believes Smith shares with Blake and that has also been a strong tradition of British workingclass life. Whereas Blake crops up repeatedly in interviews with and comments by Smith, his strongest influence is on “Dog is Life / Jerusalem”. I Am Kurious Oranj (as well as a separate single) was written as the soundtrack to a ballet of the same name by Michael Clark & Company. Several reviewers of the time observed that this album came during one of The Fall’s more accessible periods, although the inclusion of the Blake-Parry hymn, supposedly intended as a celebration of the accession of William of Orange, has more than its fair share of sly obscurities, typical of Smith’s work. “Jerusalem” has the signature feel of a Fall track: the sense of always being about to fall into chaos with Smith casually riffing Blake’s lyrics over a contrastingly tight bass. Although Smith’s voice provides a distinctive feel to the track, it could almost be a conventional rendition until he launches into a bizarre and apparently meandering diatribe in the middle of the song. These lines—about an incident with a banana skin being the fault of the government—bear no apparent relation to Blake’s vision of Jerusalem. Why would a pratfall deserve a million quid? But of course, such a question is deliberately obtuse: a pratfall deserves nothing other than mockery, and Smith’s humor is self-knowing when he mocks the narrator of this diatribe as “a semi-artistic type person” who resolves to emigrate to Sweden or Poland where he will be “looked after properly of the government”. The contrast between him and this feckless scrounger becomes clear when Smith returns to Blake’s words.

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By the end of this version, the shambolic, comic voice has gone. Instead Smith is determined, assured, as he calls for his bow of burning gold. Smith has often been criticized by those on the left for his un-PC views, which appear to flirt with right-wing tendencies, but it is probably more correct, as Barrett observes, to see this as a long tradition of attacks on welfarism that share a working-class distrust of state-sponsored dependency. This version of “Jerusalem” seeks to no more make a million pounds from slapstick than it does celebrate the radical Protestantism of William of Orange. Rather, what Smith takes from Blake is the artist-poet’s curmudgeonliness, his crankiness, what W. J. T. Mitchell once referred to as the “dangerous Blake” that we often neglect at our peril, the lunatic shouting in the street who may suddenly prophesy in clear and lucid tones. The social co-production that “Jerusalem” encourages, then, can be seen to take some surprising turns, and there is the danger that these discussions of the mediations of this hymn have concentrated precisely on the politics of culture jamming mentioned by Jenkins, which could be seen as preferring ideological and aesthetic purity to cultural transformation. Yet this chapter has been at pains to consider kitsch “Jerusalem” and ruralconservative “Jerusalem” as much part an act of social co-production as punk and post-punk versions. What, then, to make of one of the most disturbing reappropriations of the hymn, the adoption of “Jerusalem” by the British National Party (BNP) during the 1990s? Before Nick Griffi n’s assumption of the leadership of this far-right group in 1999, which was followed by a subsequent “modernization” of the party to make it more appealing to voters, the Blake-Parry hymn had little appeal to its members. Blake in particular was simply too clearly antagonistic to far-right nationalist aims, but also the early foundations of the National Front in the 1980s under John Tyndall had tended to emphasize Nordic and Germanic mythologies and cultural heritages in contrast to the Christian Israelitism espoused by Blake’s words. During the early years of the twenty-fi rst century, however, the party abandoned its traditional anti-Semitism—in some cases even becoming pro-Zionist—in order to pursue a more directly Islamaphobic agenda. 2 As such, the rejection of anti-Semitism and a shift towards a more overtly Christian stance made the party more amenable to that stalwart of the British Establishment, “Jerusalem”, as much a part of British identity as the Spitfi re and Marmite (two other brands that did not particularly appreciate being connected to the far right). The change had actually begun to occur in 2000, when Griffin sang the hymn, along with “God Save the Queen” and “The Star Spangled Banner”, alongside the former leader of the Ku Klux Klan at a meeting of the American Friends of the BNP in Virginia (Goodwin 2001). A year later, the attacks on the World Trade Center would complete the process that Griffin had initiated, diverting attention away from Zionist targets and towards Islam. From this time onwards, aided in part by its popularity as a sporting anthem, “Jerusalem” was regularly sung by

90 William Blake and the Digital Humanities members of the party, including when Griffin led supporters in a rendition following his release from bail in 2005 after being charged with race hate offenses. Blake, of course, is not the only figure or motif to be so invoked by the far right, taking his place alongside Shakespeare and Arthurian legends. What is different in this appropriation, however (and not available in visions of Shakespeare or King Arthur), is how a popular notion of Blake as the radical outsider can be harnessed by the BNP. The tactical uses of “Jerusalem” will inevitably involve scholars drawing up battle lines against groups that create a new object that demands mental fight—and in a few cases those forces will extend far beyond the polite conflicts of other scholars or the dismissive aspects of kitsch, which, for all cultural commentators’ dismissal of high versus low culture, remain objects of derision. The Blake-Parry hymn has long been one of the most contested examples of zoamorphosis in action, and in some of its manifestations at least will continue to demonstrate the problems for any critic engaging in reception studies in any shape or form. What is important about our argument here—and, indeed, with regard to “The Tyger” to a lesser degree—is that when conflict emerges around the deployment of one of Blake’s texts as a creative object within new networks, our own contradiction must avoid the temptation to rush towards a hierarchy of ontology in which, somehow, mystically, our version of “Jerusalem” is more real than that of the opposition. Among other things, this brings with it the danger of a solipsism in which a radically damaging idea, such as the far-right nationalism of the BNP, is not recognized for the reality that it is. Nick Griffin and other members of his party may not “know” Blake as thoroughly as those working in Blake studies, but the effects and consequences of their constructions can be much more wide-ranging on certain popular levels. As a line of attack, Shirley Dent’s observation that the far-right appropriation of “Jerusalem” and deployment of it within a new network of radical nationalism are actually closed, paranoid, and ultimately fragile (Dent 60-62): “Jerusalem” may not reify into precisely what we as authors would like it to mean, but our pleasure in its unfolding lines of flight means that we shall never tire of acts of détournement in the face of the most regressive recuperation. “The desire to create, the desire to love and the desire to play interact with the need to eat and find shelter, just as the will to live never ceases to play havoc with the necessity of surviving” (Vaneigem 106). Zoamorphosis never stops (sometimes an unfortunate fact, for who would not like to fix Blake’s meaning in a location that is more comfortable to us?), and it is this constantly shifting series of co-productions that means that objects such as “Jerusalem” can never be confined to those whose “whole delight is in Destroying”.

4

Digital Creativity Teaching William Blake in the Twenty-First Century

As the previous chapters have shown, the phenomenon of zoamorphosis complicates how people respond to William Blake. On the one hand, it is quite common to see Blake in culture. On the other hand, he often appears in ways that have little to do with the history he shared with other Romantic poets or the political and religious commitments he mentions in his work and his letters. This contradiction is often, of course, frustrating to scholars who study and teach Blake. As we mentioned in the introduction, Morris Eaves describes many of these contemporary adaptations as “white noise”. And, as we replied, we love the white noise, but how does this love translate into anything like a pedagogical program or curriculum? Teaching William Blake’s work is an often complex task of finding the ways he both does and does not fit the British Romantic period. The Songs of Innocence and Experience, the America and Europe prophecies, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, along with the Religion books are generally useful for illuminating the Romantic period and its many political and religious controversies. Milton, Jerusalem, and The Four Zoas are much more difficult to justify as useful texts for literary history. It might be, as John Grant and Mary Lynn Johnson suggest about Milton in the second edition of Blake’s Poetry and Designs, that for the later prophecies “most of the plot is impossible to follow” and “the characters are almost as hard to keep straight” as “characteristics [are different] in different circumstances and on different planes of existence” (145). The legendary difficulty of Blake’s work is partly the point of studying him. Yet the poetic and visual complexities of his work often make including him in survey courses more trouble than it is worth, especially for undergraduates studying literary periods. The problem with teaching Blake’s later prophecies presents an opportunity to rethink Blake’s role in humanistic education, offering not only a role for technology but also a shift to creativity as an outcome for courses integrating Blake’s work. The difficulty of Blake’s texts offers a great example of the limitations of teaching British Romantic literary history as the primary outcome for Blake courses. Literary history, as Gayatri Spivak has argued, is often mired in area studies and—as it is usually practiced in literature departments—does not adequately represent the complex transnational

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identities emerging in an era of globalization.1 Do students in Japan need to understand Blake’s work solely in regards to his position in British Romantic history? Or could they study, as Ayako Wada points out, the impact of Blake on Japanese artists like Soetsu Yanagi and the Shirakaba Group?2 Further, studying what was written in a given period is not the same as studying what was read during that same period or what was inspired by reflecting upon a specific period or artist from the vantage point of future readers. Both the reading and writing practices of a historical period constitute literary history, and yet the vast majority of English departments focus on analyzing writing as representative of cultural and ideological trends within a given historical period. The study of Blake’s reception has itself complicated the traditional historicist representation of Blake’s work. If Blake’s ideas are mingling with music, comic books, poetry, and fi lm in multiple historical periods, does it make sense to confi ne Blake to a single historical period? And if not, how do teachers historicize Blake in light of his reception? All of these questions suggest that new forms of treating Blake in humanities courses are needed. Further, the narrative complexity of Blake’s work undermines a traditional model of close-reading as it is commonly practiced in literature departments. Whereas Blake is often cited as someone who enjoys obscurity (“That which can be made Explicit to the Idiot,” he argues in a letter to Reverend Trussler, “is not worth my care”), Blake is also not invested in fi nding or institutionalizing underlying meanings (Erdman 702). Donald Ault has shown with reference to The Four Zoas that Blake’s “text announces, through a disparity in names, a radical unresolvable disjunction between its totality and its divisions—that its parts do not add up to a whole; or that its parts exceed the whole; or, perhaps, that the very possibility of the poem’s existing as a coherent, closed totality is a fundamental problem that the poem is addressing” (xiii). The obscure operates in Blake’s work not as a means for preserving an occult underlying world that is alienated from students, but as a lure to get his readers to move beyond a strict close-reading model and start the zoamorphic process of creating their own work. For Blake disparity and obscurity are, in other words, imaginative precursors for conceptualizing creativity as a pedagogical model. A number of recent writers have extolled the value of teaching creativity as an important addition to a traditional humanities curriculum. Cathy Davidson, Daniel Pink, and Howard Rheingold have all written about the importance of teaching creativity as an urgently needed twenty-fi rst century literacy.3 As the world gets more and more complex and divisions between nation-states erode, new forms of working together to solve large-scale ecological, political, economic, and social problems are needed. Further, creativity needs to be applied to contexts beyond creative writing and studio art. For example, applying the creative manipulation of discrete entities to discourses like political science could foster new approaches to problems like campaign-fi nance reform. It is our position that English departments

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should throw away their old identity as gatekeepers of culture and embrace the teaching of creative literacy mediated by digital technologies. English and comparative literature are uniquely qualified fields in which to teach creativity, because they can draw upon numerous histories of creative expression from around the globe and show how creativity shaped and was shaped by particular historical and social circumstances. We demonstrated in the introduction how Blake’s dedication to using history as a source for creativity and inspiration exceeds whatever meaning, historical or literary, critics fi nd in his work. Digital creativity applies digital technology to the process of teaching our students creative expression. It provides the means for students to engage creatively with literary texts. If we want our students to learn how to use digital media effectively, meaning in ways that benefit them politically and professionally, then we need to teach them the value of understanding how things are made, and provide them with creative outlets to inspire them. In this vein, William Blake’s dedication to controlling all aspects of his artistic process—including his well-documented invention of a new method of relief etching—can provide inspiration for students wanting to understand how to work creatively with digital tools. This chapter will use William Blake to illustrate one method of teaching digital creativity: the application of multimodal and digital communication to give students methods for inventing new approaches to old problems. My approach to digital creativity is in line with what Paul Fyfe identifies with the digital humanities as “something you get your hands on, deal with in dynamic units [and] manipulate creatively.” Teaching digital technology and creativity can help students understand their own imaginative potential.

MULTIMODALITY AND PARTICIPATION Blake is a perfect exemplar to help students understand digital creativity and the potential of literary history to address the emerging needs of students to critically understand technology. The first way to understand digital creativity is to have students reflect on, and practice, multimodal communication. Creativity in the digital world is articulated through various forms of collaborative participation in social networks: from gathering data on the specific “likes” of a Facebook posting to visualizing the Twitter chatter from the Occupy Wall Street movement. As scholars like W. J. T. Mitchell and Saree Makdisi have demonstrated, Blake is a thoroughly multimodal artist whose work—in the words of Makdisi—is “an unleashing of signifying potential in as many different forms (verbal, visual, material, spiritual) as possible, bypassing, we might say, the individual consciousness and instead ‘rouzing’ the sub- or trans- or meta-individual ‘faculties to act’” (Impossible 240).4 Blake’s work is multimodal in its formal properties and in its ontological potentialities. Makdisi imagines signification

94 William Blake and the Digital Humanities in Blake’s work fracturing and multiplying the consciousness of readers, but the signifying potential of Blake’s work also entices creative expression. The movement from one media form to another in Blake’s work is not simply a cause for reflection or critique, but is also an opportunity for creativity. I modeled this creativity by combining different media forms and asking my students to move from one to another. My course “Blake 2.0: William Blake and Media” was designed to use digital technology and multimodal communication to give students new insights into Blake’s life and world, and to inspire students to participate in Blake’s signifying potential. I wanted to teach students how to understand the sources Blake used in his work and the artists who adapt Blake in their own work, and combine the two to inspire their digital creativity. The course description reflected my own ambitions for understanding Blake’s reception. I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another mans’ exclaims Los in Jerusalem. Ignored during his time, or worse, laughed at, called eccentric and even insane, William Blake likened himself to a Biblical prophet, told stories of conversations he had with the dead, and saw angels in trees. While he did not enjoy the same fame during his life as fellow Romanticists Lord Byron and William Wordsworth, Blake has inspired creative responses in the twentieth and twenty-fi rst centuries that eclipse either poet. Indeed, the popularity of his work might be second only to Shakespeare, the Bible, and John Milton. I taught my “William Blake and Media” course as a version of what Georgia Tech’s Writing and Communication Program calls a “WOVEN” curriculum. Postdoctoral fellows in the program at Tech are asked to teach students not only written communication, but also oral, visual, electronic, and non-verbal modalities. WOVEN rests upon the idea that students need to understand the entire emerging media ecology, rather than just learning writing. Further, the WOVEN curriculum argues that the best assignments are those that mix media.5 Why, for example, limit assignments to essays when you can incorporate writing into a visual presentation that illustrates how the visual and the written work together to create meaning? Writing figures prominently in our curriculum, but we also recognize that the jobs of the future depend upon students understanding the social skills needed to manage a blog, the sense of visual design needed to present posters and other digital images, the audio talents needed to record and edit podcasts, the digital skills needed to create web sites and wikis, and the presence needed to effectively give speeches and talks. The WOVEN curriculum imagines all of these skills as falling under the heading of multimodal literacy, which includes both critical analysis of media texts and thoughtful and effective participation in a variety of communication modalities. Rebecca Burnett and L. Andrew Cooper discuss

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the way modality and medium work differently in a WOVEN curriculum. “If a mode is a form and a medium is a means, the two quite naturally go hand in hand: writing as a mode (the combination of symbols, often alphanumeric characters, and spaces to form units of meaning such as words and sentences) doesn’t exist until you put it into a medium (such as the paper or Web page on which the combined symbols appear).” Courses in the WOVEN curriculum reflect on how, for example, writing on paper is different from typing, which is different from word processing on a computer. Courses on adaptation work quite well in a curriculum emphasizing modal and medial difference. One of my fi rst multimodal courses asked students to read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Richard Peake’s theatrical adaptation Presumption, or the Fate of Frankenstein while watching one of the several film adaptations of the novel. I asked students to consider the historical moment in which each version of Frankenstein existed along with the technological constraints involved in each re-creation. One of my students argued, for example, that the James Whale version of Frankenstein differed from Kenneth Branagh’s, in part, because of very different film technologies: cameras, makeup, and sound. The Frankenstein assignment taught students to look at history and modality as helping to defi ne the choices involved in creative endeavors. The portion of the curriculum devoted to electronic communication is particularly important to my course on William Blake because digital networks are constantly in process. How does one critically analyze, for example, a digital resource like a blog post? Is a post simply the post, or does it include the comments as well? How do you understand the context of an image archived on a Tumblr page and then reblogged on another site with an entirely different context and theme?6 Social networking sites give users the ability to participate in conversations, responding to authors who—in turn—respond back. These responses can become an important part of the original text, as authors revise, republish, and transform the text to incorporate criticism and additional material left by commenters. To understand participatory networks, students need to thoughtfully engage in those networks. Understanding, for example, privacy issues on a Facebook page requires not fully abstaining from creating a Facebook account, but culling through the site’s labyrinthine layers of privacy settings and picking the one that best serves the needs of a specific online identity. Henry Jenkins and the coauthors of a MacArthur white paper devoted to the “emerging social practices” associated with digital literacy, called Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, list three reasons why digital participation is an essential skill to learn (12). First, they suggest that a rising participation gap exists in our society. It is much easier to access and participate in some areas than it is in others. Second, they note that students do not have the critical awareness to understand what they are doing when they publish online, and fail to understand online interfaces and games as rhetorical constructions. For

96 William Blake and the Digital Humanities example, they reference a 2004 study by Squire in which students playing Civilization III in a world history class “lacked the vocabulary to critique how the game constructed history, and [ . . . ] had difficulty imagining how other games might represent the same historical processes in different terms” (15).7 Finally, they argue that students do not have a sense of the ethical and behavioral norms that are appropriate in networked environments. How should students consider the rhetoric of work they make public by featuring it on their blog? Instead of shielding students from the complications of online exchange, the MacArthur white paper suggests that constructing assignments in which students are participating directly in public conversations about important topics helps them to understand the rhetoric, politics, and ethics of their increasingly public lives. I emphasized digital forms of participation by having my students engage in a Twitter backchannel. Students were asked to tweet at least three times in one class session and three times outside of class per week. The constant backchannel allowed my students to collaborate on understanding their readings and discussions in class. It also gave my students a better and more nuanced understanding of core concepts, encouraged experimentation, and allowed me to have instant feedback concerning how students were doing in the course. More broadly, Twitter allowed my students to realize that classroom discussion could be about experimenting with ideas rather than worrying about the accuracy of those ideas. One of my students, Pamelasara Head, remarked that “[i]t doesn’t matter what I say personally, because I know that someone will respond to me and correct me if he or she feels I need to be corrected. And I learn something rather than spend so much time worrying that I’m not right” (“Digital Pedagogy”). I argue that Twitter not only takes the pressure off of students, but also actually increases reading comprehension and models digital literacy and creativity by making students aware that their thoughts have resonances outside the classroom. One critique against using Twitter, or other modes of social networking, in education involves the question of deep attention. Specifically, Nicholas Carr has argued that the Net re-creates other mediums “in the Net’s image” by “inject[ing] the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads and other digital gewgaws” and “[t]he result is to scatter our attention and diff use our concentration.” I would argue that this diff use form of attention engages an entirely different set of cognitive abilities that can give students a collective, and deeper, appreciation of difficult or esoteric texts.8 As an example, I’d like to reference a set of tweets my students produced during the course. @ELbaz90—Did he who made the lamb make thee? #wb1102 @sohanchatterjee—the church walls are blackened because they ignore children. glad im living in 2010 #wb1102

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@jwu74—Epic poem, Jerusalem: If men would become loving and self-sacrificing, what they would “see” would be loving, giving world #wb1102 @jlee483—Infant Joy/Sorrow really got me thinking: who would know a cute baby actually suffers this much since the second he/she was born #wb1102 @lstauss3—@crape3 Songs of Innocence is defi nitely better, the world is depressing enough I like to read about happy go lucky not down and out #wb1102 @BoweiDangerOki—Was blown back by the descriptiveness of the angel and how John fell in awe “and his face was like the sun shining at full force” #wb1102 @Oh_rain—I wonder if Blake saw a little bit of God in us just as he saw angels in grees. Haha, this man has beyond x-ray glasses! #wb1102 I picked these tweets specifically to show different ways students used Twitter to respond to Blake in the course, and how the constant backchannel offered opportunities for students to challenge and transform their initial interpretations of the material. At the top, a student quotes Blake’s “Tyger”, indicating the impact that line had on her understanding. The second tweet includes a reflection based upon Blake’s “London”, relating the “chimney sweeper’s cry” to “ev’ry blackning church appals.” The student remarks “glad I’m living in 2010,” illustrating both his astonishment at the fate of children in Blake’s “London” and his lack of understanding the contemporary analogues to the chimney sweepers in Asian sweatshop workers and child prostitutes. One student reacted to this tweet in his fi nal project by creating a Prezi poem entitled “Atlanta”. Prezi presentations zoom in and out of different sections in an “infi nite canvas”, rather than focus on a series of slides like PowerPoint. The student decided to use a photograph of Atlanta as the frame and zoom into different sections to visualize the invisible suffering occurring in the city. The visual metaphor recurs in two other tweets in the selection. In the reaction to Jerusalem, one of the students realizes the connection between visual imagination and being that is so central to the poem. Further down, another student comments on Blake’s “x-ray glasses” as a way of understanding Blake’s ability to see truths that other people don’t. The visual metaphor also recurs in the tweet reacting to John of Patmos receiving visions from God in the Book of Revelation. Twitter allows students to take individual reading experiences, share them, and create a network of allusions and interpretations that transform original insights, challenging, sometimes correcting, but usually enriching the

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resulting conversation. In an evaluation written about the Blake class, my colleague Regina Martin was astonished at how a constant Twitter backchannel supplemented the conversation in the classroom. She said she noticed that students “regularly refer” to specific poems, specific images, specific characters, and specific passages to support their arguments and to suggest new lines of inquiry. The thoroughness with which students have engaged with Blake’s poetry in the class is likely the result of Roger’s use of a class blog and Twitter.” Evaluating Twitter is, of course, a challenge. How do you grade tweets? Twitter did not figure into my course as a formal assignment. I used it only as a supplement to classroom discussion. Jesse Stommel, on the other hand, has developed an assignment called “the Twitter Essay”, in which he requires students to “condense an argument with evidential support into 140 characters” that is “unleash[ed] upon a hashtag (or trending topic) in the Twitter-verse.” Stommel’s assignment is particularly useful in forcing students to be concise, and to say something substantial in few characters. For a more general backchannel, I found David Silver’s distinction between thick and thin tweets to be useful in my course. Silver distinguishes between thin tweets, those that carry only one level of information, from thick tweets, those that carry two or more levels and often include a link. As an example, “I went to the store,” would have only one level of information. A tweet responding to a reading, like many of the tweets described earlier, and engaging in a longer conversation among peers would have two levels. Kelli Marshall uses a tweet by Mark Sample to illustrate four levels of information. “Want to use Twitter with your students? @ ProfHacker covers 6 things to consider when teaching with Twitter: http:// bit.ly/9xAX9w.” Sample’s post, according to Marshall, targets “those who use (or are thinking of using) Twitter in the classroom,” “references and directs followers to a Twitter account called @ProfHacker,” “summarizes @ProfHacker’s article,” and “provides a link to the article.” Silver’s distinction helps give a framework for showing students how tweets can be useful, even if they are concise, and offers a model for becoming more useful to their peers and the wider Twitter community. The ephemerality of tweets is also a problem. I had archived the entire Twitter stream from my course on an online service called TwapperKeeper. On March 20, 2011, TwapperKeeper was forced to discontinue its exporting and downloading services, because it violated Twitter’s terms of service for its API.9 Several potential replacements for TwapperKeeper emerged after the company stopped offering archival services. YourTwapperKeeper allowed individual users to download an instance of the site, but they were required to run it on their own servers. Martin Hawsky developed a Google Spreadsheet formula that archived tweets based upon user or hashtag. More recently, Scott Turnbull and I have been developing a project based upon archiving tweets associated with the Occupy Wall Street movement, using a program Turnbull created called Twap. Twap uses the

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programming language Django and queries the tweetstream API for tweets categorized by hashtag.10 Each one of these solutions does not, however, replace the ease or the convenience of TwapperKeeper. Its demise, in fact, caused Audrey Watters to suggest that the shutdown of TwapperKeeper could have serious repercussions for scholars and researchers who use the program as a source of data, “as they will no longer have the ability to collect or export datasets for analysis.” The difficulties encountered with Twitter also point to a larger controversy within the digital humanities community, one that scholars who understand William Blake’s struggle with publishers can help illuminate. How much should researchers and teachers rely upon proprietary software? I do know that Twitter’s willingness to change its API policy forced me to approach writing this chapter differently. I could not, for example, cite large samples of student tweets, because those are no longer available to me. Who knows how many scholarly projects, dissertations, and classroom assignments were ruined because of company policy? And if we are depending on Twitter for our data, what does that say about academic freedom? I argue that a focus on digital creativity, threaded through Blake’s own experiences with self-publishing, can help us raise a generation of digital humanities thinkers who are committed to keeping control of the digital tools they use in their own projects.

ECOLOGICAL HISTORY As we argued earlier in the chapter, the history of Blake’s reception complicates any single form of periodization we might place on his work. How does Blake’s form of interrogating history impact the way teachers present literary history, and what role does creativity have in teaching history? I decided to move my students through these questions by overloading them with historical information, and asking them to “fi lter” the information and produce a more nuanced sense of digital history that could be combined with Blake’s understanding of creativity. In the process, students began to understand how creativity figures into history in a digital age, and used digital tools to reproduce their own class account of Blake’s place in the Romantic period. The fi rst unit of my “Blake 2.0: William Blake and the Digital Humanities” course focused on what I called “William Blake and Religion”, which asked the question: how do we understand Blake’s ideas about religion? Is Blake advocating for Christianity? And if so, what kind of Christianity? The unit began with readings from Blake’s life, poems from Songs of Innocence and Experience, and the two religion pieces All Religions Are One and There Is No Natural Religion. As we engaged with the various ways Blake discusses the “poetic genius”, I asked students to read Ezekiel and St. John’s Revelation. It slowly became clear to the students that Blake

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borrowed imagery from the two Biblical sources, transformed and then inserted the imagery into his own work. The students and I compared those historical sources with texts from other religious traditions that Blake could have read and whose images and ideas appeared in his work. For example, David Weir has argued that although it was difficult to determine “precisely which sources” Blake mined for the Hindu ideas and images that appear in his work, it is likely that he read the Orientalist works of Joseph Priestley, Thomas Moore, and William Jones (46). I introduced my students to the work of Priestley and Moor, while giving them a selection or two of Jones’s “Hindu Hymns” to analyze for Blakean imagery. In his prologue to the “Hymn to Narayena” Jones sketches a Hindu conception of pantheism that is strikingly close to Blake’s discussion of the poetic genius. the whole Creation was rather an energy than a work, by which the Infi nite Being, who is present at all times in all places, exhibits to the minds of his creatures a set of perceptions, like a wonderful picture or piece of musick, always varied, yet always uniform; so that all bodies and their qualities exist, indeed to every wise and useful purpose, but exist only insofar as they are perceived. (302) Obviously, the history of pantheism is broad, and includes many more thinkers than Blake and those who follow Hinduism. But considering how Weir makes connections between Blake’s work and his reception of Hindu religion—especially when he admits that those connections are speculative— created a fascinating discussion in the course about how history is written. One student, whose family practices Hinduism, had difficulties accepting that Blake’s vision was the same as either the description Jones gives of the hymn in his collection or Hinduism itself. He particularly disagreed with the reduction of Hindu thought to Blake’s conception of the poetic genius, an idea he felt could just as easily come from Blake’s reading of Plato’s Forms. His concerns mirror Tristanne Connolly’s criticism that Blake critics who see his thought as equivalent to Hinduism are like “Enlightenment mythographers”. According to Connolly, these mythographers create connections between very different sources “based on the Judeo-Christian idea of a singular origin, which “enables them to fi nd continuities between different systems; those continuities arise from connection to the pure source from whence all other systems spring” (“Authority” 145). Students also wondered why we read the works of a British author about Hinduism, rather than primary sources like the Bhagavad Gita or the Upanishads. When I replied that these were the texts that Blake most likely read himself, they responded with an even more fascinating question: is it more important to understand what Blake thought of Hinduism or Hinduism itself? After all, very few of these students had taken an introductory course on religion. For most of them this was the fi rst time they had

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encountered Hindu thought at all. This question struck at the heart of my humanities training, forcing me to confront why we taught literary history. If I argued that Blake’s understanding of Hinduism was more important, I would relegate history to a series of perceptions and impressions whose importance was limited to Blake’s celebrity. In other words, my course would be completely contingent upon Blake’s canonization among the figures studied in literary history. On the other hand, if I agreed that a formal introduction to Hinduism was important before trying to figure out Blake’s understanding of Hinduism, I would be giving a preference to historical events above and beyond the relationships that constitute them. History, I would later argue, is constituted by relationships: between people, between people and tools, between people and environments, and even between worlds and entities that are often not seen by human eyes. “How do you know,” Blake writes in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way,/Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?” (7; E35). I didn’t know it at the time, but my students were leading me to think about literary history and reception as an ecology. As Timothy Morton has shown, ecological thinking is a thinking based upon the interplay between individual actors and their relationships. It is a thinking that is active, intertwined with doing and creating. Ecologies aren’t limited to natural ecologies. There are media ecologies, economic ecologies, and literary ecologies. Ecologies form in relationships between galaxies, in the interplay between concepts, in all of the objects and lives and sounds we encounter. Ecology “includes all the ways we imagine how we live together. Ecology is profoundly about coexistence. Existence is always coexistence” (Ecological 4). The fact that I was teaching a course about Blake—or Hinduism, or film, or digital technology—was less important than the way I taught it. Deducing Blake’s intention, or what exactly Blake did while Marie Antoinette was walking up to the guillotine, or Blake’s secret thoughts about Hinduism, was secondary to examining, defi ning, creating, and taking responsibility for the relationships the class made with Blake. I wanted my students to understand that history isn’t something that should be read passively. Rather, an ecological and digital approach to literature required participation and creativity. Participation formed part of the reason why I had them engage in a Twitter backchannel in the course. Creativity required an entirely different approach to historical thinking that we aligned with Blake and several of his critics—notably in the realm of his relationship to Buddhist thought. The fact that Blake has been associated with Buddhism by several authors, yet another example of Connolly’s mythography criticism, was not important to our class. We looked at the interesting fact that critics—our examples were Nelson Hilton and Mark Lussier—have made this association in the absence of any historical evidence. Hilton, in “Blakean Zen”, approaches the comparison in the most implicit way possible. Although the essay is a reading of The First Book of

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Urizen and references Zen in the title, the word appears only once in the essay—and even then, only as a simile. Hilton references the overdetermination of knowledge systems in Blake’s work, identifying it as “[t]his zenlike experience”, which is “more arresting than a thought or reflection” and “becomes Blake’s inestimable gift to the reader” because it “continually overloads his or her system, vividly indicating that the system needs reorganization” (185–86). In “Blake’s Early Works”, Hilton’s contribution to The Cambridge Companion to William Blake, he associates “Blake’s aphoristic genius” with “what might be thought of as an inter-related collection of ‘koans’—those zen word viruses or instructional devices designed to cut through the muddled perception of everyday language” (203). Still, Hilton’s “Blakean Zen” is a deconstructive tour de force that many of my students found extremely difficult to read, understand, or compare to the Buddhist concepts we were discussing in class. The essay makes absolutely no mention of Buddhism at all, and yet, I suggested, this was the most Buddhist (or Blakean) thing about the essay: Hilton creatively changes Buddhism in the very act of using it to explain William Blake’s work. Mark Lussier addresses Blake’s spectral association with Buddhism more directly by admitting that he charts “the development of critical coincidence without direct ‘influence’ at different temporal moments” (Dharma 6). And Lussier also develops an ecological form of thinking when he argues that Blake encourages “dynamic dialogic exchanges extending to and from all that exists beyond the self” (“Ecological” 259). More interestingly, Lussier recalls that “almost every semester” he teaches The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and “students invariably raise the question of his influence on Nietzsche (which was non-existent) and his knowledge of Buddhist thought (which was impossible)” (Dharma 69). Lussier explains the association through a shared reliance on the aphoristic literary tradition, yet I questioned my students about the value of making an association that was not historically accurate. What knowledge can be derived from Hilton’s argument that Blake’s work “might be thought” as being like koans or from Lussier’s notion of a “critical coincidence” between Blake and Buddhism? The Buddhist section of my course quickly became stranger than our discussions about Hinduism or Christianity. At least for the latter two religious traditions, students could point to historical evidence that Blake read sources associated with them. As Lussier argues in his historical introduction to the Romanticism and Buddhism volume on Romantic Circles, Buddhism was not formally separated from Hinduism for British subjects until Brian Hodgson’s publication of “Sketch of Buddhism” in the 1829 issue of Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland—two years after Blake’s death. Students were not, in other words, learning about the history of Blake’s thought nor were they learning comparative religion. This problem, understanding the outcomes of a course that considers an ecological approach to history, forced me to develop a pedagogy that fuses computational approaches to historical material with a creative

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understanding of making history. Computationally, historians have become interested in the idea of what Peter Turchin calls “cliodynamics”: a study of long-term historical trends.11 Turchin suggests that cliodynamics is based heavily upon nonlinear dynamics: Human societies and states can be modeled as dynamic systems, consisting of parts that interact with each other. Furthermore, states are part of an international system, which adds another level of complexity. The key concept here is dynamic feedback. A change in one component of the system has an effect on another, but the change in the second might in turn affect—feedback on—the fi rst. (10) Turchin’s understanding of dynamic feedback adds a new level to approaching Blake’s historical ecology. Blake is famous for being a thinker of systems. His description of Los in Jerusalem, for example, has often been cited to indicate Blake’s own understanding of his artistic mission: “Striving with Systems to deliver Individuals from Those Systems” (11.5; E154). This description of Los foregrounds participation within a particular system as a necessary step in changing that system. The [First] Book of Urizen expresses this feedback dynamic quite literally by demonstrating how the Eternal’s fear forms Urizen as an abstraction who, in turn, crafts laws that sew together the sinews, bones, and nerves of individual bodies. “Lo, a shadow of horror is risen in Eternity” is uttered by an unnamed voice (presumably the Eternals), and Urizen’s spine is described as “Like the linked infernal chain” (3.2; E70/10.37; E75). My students saw the universe created in Urizen as a system growing ever more complex as discrete entities within the system acted and were acted upon. Blake’s approach to history also incorporated this sense of a dynamic feedback. When he mentions his brother Robert in a letter to William Hayley on May 6, 1800, he says that although he died thirteen years ago “with his spirit I converse daily and hourly in the spirit, and see him in my remembrance, in the regions of my imagination. I hear his advice, and even now write from his dictate” (Erdman 705). Blake’s conversation with his dead brother mirrors the conversation he has with the past in his work: both are dynamic and participatory engagements with history. Robert obviously impacts Blake, but Blake is indicating that his memory impacts the dead Robert as well. This takes on another level of importance in Milton, where the present dynamically changes (and, in Blake’s terminology, redeems) the past. Blake depicts memory as a state ripped from imagination by reason. Imagination, conversely, is a dynamic process. The Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself Affection or Love becomes a State, when divided from Imagination The Memory is a State always, & the Reason is a State Created to be Annihilated & a new Ratio Created. (32.32–38; E132)

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As “Human Existence”, the imagination is an always-changing relationship, and human concepts like love become states only when divided from the imagination. A memory based upon ecology would demonstrate the way that imaginations help construct history and historicize the larger processes that help shape the imagination. As they started thinking about Blake’s work as a complex dynamic ecology rather than a static written work, my students became more comfortable with provisional interpretations that did not give a fi nal answer but rather played with a system that was already in the process of transformation. I wanted to reflect the dynamic historical feedback of Blake’s work in the course by engaging in a collaborative student-led project that emphasized a creative approach to history. In my mind, history couldn’t be a discourse delivered from the teacher into the brains of a student population. It needed to be crafted. My students felt the same way. As we began to read Milton, the most complicated piece we would discuss during the semester, one of my students asked whether I knew of a guide that would help him understand the poem. Guides do indeed exist for Blake’s work, perhaps the most popular being S. Foster Damon’s A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake. We used Damon’s guide towards the beginning of the class, because it gives a quite powerful anchor for the slippery ideas Blake presents in his work. As the semester wore on, however, students started becoming less and less satisfied with the ideas Damon presents in his dictionary. I decided that students in the course should create a collaborative guide to Blake’s Milton in order to place them at the center of his world. I used the online GoogleDocs tool, which is an online word processing application that has the added benefit of allowing users to collaboratively author documents simultaneously. My students were initially quite astonished at the process of collaborative writing. But eventually, they learned that they could add to and transform the defi nitions of other students in the course. This led to insightful interpretations of the text, and also showed students that they could take control of the knowledge being presented in the course. Knowledge in our course was always provisional and open to revision and transformation. The provisional aspect of knowledge construction became particularly evident when students discussed the image of the foot in Blake’s Milton. The foot is an important figure in Blake’s poem because Milton merges with Blake through his tarsus: Then first I saw him in the Zenith as a falling star, Descending perpendicular, swift as the swallor or swift; And on my left foot falling on the tarsus, enterd there; But from my left foot a black cloud redounding spread over Europe. (15.47–50; E110)

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Students were obviously perplexed as to why Milton enters Blake’s body through his foot, and the typical sources I appealed to for explanation (such as recalling David Riede’s suggestion that it refers to the conversion of Saul of Tarsus) did not satisfy them (261).12 On the GoogleDoc, students started comparing different kinds of feet—even reptilian feet—and made connections to earlier texts we read in class. For example, the reptilian foot became associated with the “reptile forms shrinking together” from Urizen. All sorts of fascinating questions emerged out of the largely comical comparison students made between human feet and reptile feet. Students suggested that human feet are “similar to William Blake’s foot, as he was human . . . so we are led to believe.” By contrast a reptilian foot is “[n]ot to be confused with a human foot. Except in the book of Urizen, where human feet are described as reptile feet.” In the Book of Urizen, the human form is largely described as reptilian and viewed with disgust by the Eternals who compare the narrowing, limited forms to their own eternal and omnipresent life. In Milton, the merging of Blake and Milton is seen as a form of self-annihilation, in which the self-righteousness of the ego is transformed by mutual forgiveness. Blake uses the image of the reptile to represent the nastiness of individuality. Yet his construction of humanity is perplexingly complicated and contradictory, often merging with images of animals and plants. We spent a while unpacking the limitations surrounding how our culture conceptualizes human experience, and the way the category of the “human” enables all sorts of atrocities—from genocide to factory farming. Students began thinking about how the human and humanism impacted their own self-identity and the way they conceptualized their relationship to the world around them. All of these questions were, for me, a generative and dynamic discussion revolving around Blake’s approach to history and the human body. The GoogleDoc assignment encouraged ecological thinking about history: a thinking that actively seeks relationships between the present and the past and requires participation. It reflected Blake’s belief that history is composed and recomposed by people participating in its construction. This question of participation became even more urgent as we started to think about the fi nal portion of the course. In order to understand Blake’s approach to dynamic ecological history, students needed to take a more direct approach to digital creativity.

CREATING YOUR OWN BLAKE The creative turn in my course felt very different to me than the many creative writing courses being taught in my department. Literary works are often read in creative writing courses as exemplars of a particular type of creative expression that should be imitated in the students’ own unique way.

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I wanted to engage students in creative forms of thinking, in which they made connections between the ideas we studied during the course and the contemporary issues they encountered everyday. In other words, I wanted students to use creativity to make Blake relevant today. The description of the fi nal project reflects my desire for a broader conception of creativity based on Blake’s own ideas about history and the imagination. As we’ve studied in this class, Blake adapted the words and images of earlier thinkers and has been—in turn—adapted by musicians, visual artists, filmmakers, and other figures. These adaptations are usually not about fidelity or accuracy. Blake, for example, uses images from the Bible but reinterprets them in his own context. Likewise, Jim Jarmusch uses lines from Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence” and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell in Dead Man but in the context of postmodern American cowboy cinema. For this fi nal project, I will ask you to adapt Blake’s work in one of the following media: visual art, comics, podcasts, music, film, poetry, or short stories. The adaptation must incorporate an image, a quotation, a character, a place, or an idea from Blake’s work. The medium, the content, and the way you appropriate Blake’s work will be up to you. However, I will require that you provide 1) a written explanation of what you appropriate from Blake’s work, its meaning, the context in Blake’s work where it was originally found, and the way your appropriation changes this meaning and 2) An oral presentation/ performance in which you explain your project to the class. The students showcased a huge range of work, from a short story where an astronaut discovers a new work of Blake’s on the moon to a poster depicting the “fearful symmetry” of the tsunami and nuclear disasters in Japan during spring 2011. They also provided particularly powerful descriptions of how Blake’s work impacted their creative vision. Oliver Moreno, for example, describes the process of creating new illustrations for Blake’s The Books of Urizen: his comic book adaptation of the illuminated book. I tried to capture some of the imagery Blake used, and its perplexing nature. How do you imagine a world with no boundaries, laws of physics, or space? [ . . . ] From reading a book on Blake’s watercolors and paintings and reading Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake by Northrop Frye, I decided I really wanted to capture the living symmetry of his characters as seen in my own vision. I wanted to make works of art that were not just characters or collections of characters, but events depicted with lines that merely provide identities for the characters. The characters are seamed into the larger objects. There are a number of elements that are interesting about Moreno’s description. First, he chooses to express an already abstract and complex narrative

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completely with sequential art. Next, he suggests that the art depicts not just characters but events as they are realized in characters. By focusing so much on the visual elements of the story, he provides a powerful argument for the transformative impact of vision and its ability to morph individual experience. He mentions, for example, that the characters were seen in his own perspective, and yet he also implies that individuality is secondary to what occurs in the narrative. Characters are bound together by these events and form larger aggregates or assemblages. Considering the focus on the “withering” of the Eternals into a human form, Moreno’s interpretation inverts Urizen’s entire plot by suggesting that none of the individual characters gain meaning until they are enmeshed in the collective experience of particular events. He is also making a larger point about his artistic process. Whereas the vision is “my own”, the creative act is also symmetrical—in that it folds together Blake’s characters with this vision. Meaning for Moreno is a fearful symmetry of characters colliding together with visions and events across multiple points in history. The theoretical insight Moreno provides for his work impacts most of the other projects that were completed during the fi nal part of the semester. Consider, for example, Alex Oxford’s “Binded with Briars”. Oxford was a provocative student throughout the class, and identified with Blake almost instantly. He is also a multi-talented artist and community

Figure 4.1

Alex Oxford. Binded with Briars. 2011. Photograph. Atlanta.

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activist. On March 16, 2009, he led a group of gay marriage advocates in a rally at the Georgia state capitol to protest the first anniversary of California’s Proposition 8. Even before my class, Alex had shown a passionate commitment to the LGBTQ cause and a willingness to participate in an active struggle for his rights. His final project reinterpreted Blake’s “The Garden of Love” in the context of sexual freedom. Oxford explains that whereas Blake’s poem focuses on “sex, which he believes the church is attempting to squelch,” his work doesn’t focus on “a priest doing the binding, but rather a lover for their own pleasure.” Further, he asks a powerful question that was very relevant to our course: “[W]hat ought to be more deviant in society: A priest forcefully attempting to convince the public on the immorality of sexual acts, or the engaging of sexually creative acts out of pure will?” The image has a golden tint that gives it an unearthly quality, almost as if the scene emerged from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and dealt with fairies and gods. Oxford explains this quality by referring to the Photoshop work he did on the photograph ‘to make the model [ . . . ] appear human but also possess qualities of stone in order to hold fast to Blake’s original stone slates.” Oxford associates the mythic quality of his vision with the materiality of Blake’s work, even as he conflates the stones appearing in the illuminated books with the copper plates Blake etched to create his prints. Oxford’s broader point reflected many of the more nuanced claims about materiality made by Blake in his work. Oxford merges, for example, conception and execution by literally “bathing” the figure in the stone and gold tint that forms the material foundation of Blake’s words and images. Binding occurs on two levels. First, the figure quite obviously is bound with the briars of a rose. But he is also immersed in Blake’s poetry, as it forms a golden shell and glistens in the sun. Oxford imagines the relationship between himself and Blake in sexual terms, in the same way that his vision of sexuality hinges on the question of oppression or freedom. Is he bound by Blake’s imagination like a slave? Or is the material being used to bind Oxford and the figure an act of reciprocal transformation, leading to pleasurable creativity? The deliberate switch from Blake’s form of sexual oppression to Oxford’s vision of bondage as pleasure creatively invokes some of the speculations made in Helen Bruder and Tristanne Connolly’s introduction to Queer Blake—especially the suggestion that the “binding with briars/joys and desires” juxtaposition “may be more complicated than it seems (are we meant to take the speakers in Experience straight?) when considered alongside ‘My Pretty Rose Tree’: just how delightful is it that ‘her thorns were my only delight’?” (6). The combination of “only” and “delight” reinforces the idea that binding can invert the pain/pleasure dynamic. The narrator of “My Pretty Rose Tree” laments the fact that, without the petals of the rose, the only source of delight are thorns, but this act radically questions the pain associated with the thorn. The pain experienced by the narrator is a source of creativity, transforming the thorn into a delight. Oxford’s image suggests that pleasure is an act not simply of consuming something

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attractive, but of actively engaging within particular limitations and bindings in order to physically transform the site of creativity. One of the more socially aware projects that take seriously the realities of limitation and imaginative transformation was Kaylee Goss’s Pity. Goss works with Emmaus House, a homeless shelter in Atlanta. She was touched by Blake’s line “Pity would be no more/ if we did not make somebody Poor” from “The Human Abstract” and decided to use the line to address the complex politics of monetary donations given to the house and the social distance placed between the homeless and the middle class. Her creative project took the form of a donation dish she crafted to look like a human face without a mouth. On top of the space where the mouth should be are written the words “No More”. Goss reflects on the contradictions surrounding pity and how her work enacts those contradictions. “I [ . . . ] agree with Blake’s idea that humans can only know through the suffering of others, but pity can help inspire people to give donations.” The physical interpretation of the face was taken from “The Divine Image”, especially as it visualizes pity as having “a human face” (DivineImage 10; E12). Goss argues that the face “is intended to create emotional impact” and it “reaches out to the audience in a way that motivates them to donate to those in poverty so that we no longer need pity.” Visually, the face emphasizes the relative silence of those in poverty, and it materializes the circulation of money as fi lling the void of that silence. Goss is a pragmatist, as she suggests that eliminating “poverty and pity is impossible” but that she attempts to “create better living situations for those in need, not a perfect world.” The tension between Blake’s utopian argument about the end of pity and Goss’s much more pragmatic argument about creating a better situation for a particular set of people is powerfully reflected in the absence of a mouth on the face. Are we to believe that money can make poverty speak? To what degree does Goss’s pragmatic view attempt to speak for poverty in its attempt to make things better for them? Goss’s work, however, also connects with Blake’s own experiences with impoverished groups of people. Debbie Lee has reconstructed several of these experiences, including the fact that in 1785 Blake lived next to St. James Workhouse, in which she recounts “the stench was hardly supportable, poor creatures, almost naked, and the living go to bed with the dead” (132–33). Lee also mentions Blake living across the street from a chapel for female orphans in his Lambeth home and hearing their cries echoing each night, as well as being close to the Lambeth workhouse, where orphans and single mothers appealed for respite from the horrific everyday reality of starvation and exposure. I was impressed with the functional nature of Goss’s piece. She placed the bowl at Emmaus House, along with quotes from “The Human Abstract” and the Innocence version of “The Divine Image” in order to show the interconnections between awareness of poverty and actually helping those in need. Imaginative transformation for Goss takes Blake’s utopian vision of a world without pity and shapes it into a real intervention in a specific

110 William Blake and the Digital Humanities place. Because we have little evidence that Blake himself worked in any of the places Lee describes in her essay, the question remains whether Goss’s pragmatic approach to a Blakean method of addressing poverty is more (or less) effective in achieving results than Blake’s own form of railing against the suffering of chimney sweepers and orphans. Of all the projects presented at the end of the semester, Charles Hancock’s Blakean meme project most effectively underlined the oppositionary character of Blakean adaptation. One day, I had off handedly compared Blake’s artistic method to the circulation of memes in digital culture. Lee took issue with my comparison of the meme to what Blake accomplished, saying that memes could be considered “a bit shallow”. Nevertheless, he accomplished a powerful critique of Blake’s persona by imagining him in various different cultural personas—perhaps most interestingly as a hipster.

Figure 4.2 Charles Hancock. My Deities Are So Obscure, I’m Basically Their Biggest Fan. 2011. Digital image. Atlanta.

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Hipster memes are very popular on Facebook and Twitter, famously in the form of “hipster Ariel”. Screenshots of Ariel from The Little Mermaid are photoshopped with glasses and quips that jab at both Disney’s film and hipster culture. “Under the Sea But in an Obscure Part You Haven’t Heard Of”, for example, humorously compares the Disney song with the tendency of hipsters to like being inaccessible and obscure. Hancock’s adoption of the meme looks more closely at the parallels between Blake’s adoption of obscure British myths and his marginalization. Blake, it seems, ineffectually tried to get ahead of the antiquarians operating during his time, and produced a mythical system so obscure that he is the only one who can understand it. Hancock also experimented with the trollface. Trolls are people who scour Internet comment boards and produce provocative comments with the sole intention of making other people frustrated and angry. The trollface is a visual representation of what someone might look like when engaging in trolling. Hancock’s comic addresses quite effectively Blake’s tendency to constantly reinvent his creation story by replacing one deity with another. Further, he uses a sketchy expressionist visual technique to illustrate the growing frustration of his audience. In the description underneath the image, Hancock writes “Trollblake, oh you.” The critique is rather harsh, but also creates a parallel between the fascination and annoyance many people feel when encountering a troll and the ambivalence some people experience when reading Blake’s more complex works.

Figure 4.3 Charles Hancock. Urizen Is God, Now Los Is God. Digital

image. Atlanta.

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Hancock had many really pointed memes in his project, but perhaps the most critical would be his short comic strip based upon the strange disjunction between the ferocity described in Blake’s “Tyger” and its comparatively mild visual appearance.

Figure 4.4 Charles Hancock. Derp. Digital image. Atlanta.

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Hancock didn’t base this image on any particular meme, but he wrote that he “had to work it in.” Further, he felt that “[t]he tyger’s always looked a bit silly.” I found Hancock’s meme project to be very unique because it, in his words, eschewed a deep engagement with a single line from Blake’s work and instead focused on a “surface level survey” of several images and quotes that he found particularly productive for his own work. The result is a really powerful flattening of Blake’s work into some of the most superficial conversations that occur on the Web. In my mind, Hancock’s work forms a really effective response to Internet critics like Mark Bauerlein who lament the end of deep attention and the rise of what he calls the “dumbest generation” by uncovering stupidity in one of the most obscure and presumably “deep” figures in British literary history.13 As we saw from the few examples listed here, the fi nal project engaged students in a dynamic historical process, and each of them articulated their collaborative relationship with Blake in creative and personal ways. Oliver Moreno formed a theory about symmetry to conceptualize inspiration, comparing his images of Urizen to a symmetrical fold between Blake’s characters and his visual perspective. Alex Oxford applied what he saw as the material texture of Blake’s plates to enhance his photograph and illuminate the creative possibilities of binding. Kaylee Goss, in a move that mirrors Milton’s confl ict with Urizen, molded her debate with Blake out of clay and questioned the practical value of Blakean expression. Finally, Charles Hancock rejected the complexity and difficulty usually associated with Blake, flattening them into a series of superficial observations about digital culture. In my mind “Create Your Own Blake” encouraged students to concretize their semester-long encounter with Blake as a historical process that required them to participate in an ongoing conversation.

LITERARY CULTURE AS A PARTICIPATORY DYNAMISM In a recent lecture titled “Seeing Time,” University of Richmond President Edward Ayers outlined the application of the digital humanities to what he called “social history”. Social history treats historical discourse as a folksonomic phenomenon, constructed more by the lives of everyday people than the decisions of governments. The digital humanities makes this access even more widespread and also allows us to visualize with greater specificity the movements and lives of ordinary people. One example is Voting America, created by the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond, where Ayers serves as a senior research fellow. Voting America visualizes voting patterns from the 1840s to the present, showing, for example, patterns that help explain when and how Southern voters stopped voting for Democratic presidential candidates and embraced Republican ones. As he explained the importance of the digital humanities to social history, I wondered what the digital humanities could offer literary studies. Reflecting on my course has forced me to realize just how important Blake’s

114 William Blake and the Digital Humanities understanding of a participatory form of collaborative creativity is to the practice of the digital humanities and the future of the teaching of literature in the academy. Several studies have mentioned the short- and long-term drop in students who pick English as their primary major. Recently, The Cornell Daily Sun reported “37 percent fewer degrees” in English graduating in 2011 from Cornell, when compared to 2006 figures (Ryan). Those who do pick English often pursue a double-major in another department. The experience gathered from my course suggests that in order to take full advantage of the networking possibilities in the digital humanities, literary studies should switch its focus from teaching a canon or a history to teaching a form of participatory engagement with literary culture. Understanding, for example, history as a dynamic system including feedback loops and long-term trends encourages students to consider their own relationship to literary works and their responsibility to cultivate a relationship that is participatory. Students need to understand that they are not simply studying a dead history that describes experiences entirely alien from their own, but they are engaging in a constantly changing and dynamic economy of actors and relationships. Some of these relationships are alien and strange. Other relationships come to our attention through a long history of unknown or misunderstood mediums of transmission. By participating in this history, students can start to see their own stakes in social and cultural debates and productively contribute to literary history. The study of literature should focus on literary history as a participatory dynamism. Knowing Blake’s work and life isn’t enough anymore; teachers and students need to take the knowledge they gain from Blake’s work and apply it to make the communities and spaces they inhabit better. Why end a class discussion on the plight of chimney sweepers in eighteenth-century London, when you could take Blake’s work as a provocation for designing a service learning project geared at helping the homeless? Why talk about Blake’s artistic style when you could have students make their own work inspired by Blake and hold a public exhibition? Any humanities education worth funding needs to engage with the public on some level. Whereas the practice of social history has given historians a concrete method for including the public in its study, the exclusionary and class-driven narrative of literary studies makes incorporating the public humanities more difficult. We can, however, fi nd new connections by stepping outside our comfortable bubbles of research and following the twisted, sometimes submerged, and labyrinthine paths forged by everyday people encountering the oddity of William Blake and making it their own. Students can, likewise, teach us a thing or two about Blake by remaking him in their own image.

5

Blake and His Online Audiences

EVERYDAY BLAKE The previous chapter emphasizes Blake as part of a participatory dynamism in education, but everyday Blake is also alive and well among various other audiences, online as well in more traditional media. A relatively early attempt to connect Blake with the quotidian—and almost unique in Blake studies until the past decade—was Christopher Burstall’s documentary produced for the BBC Omnibus series in 1967. Tyger, Tyger: An Enquiry into the Power of a Familiar Poem was one of a series of programs produced by Burstall designed to make the arts more accessible to a wider audience during the 1960s (others included documentaries and fi lms on H. G. Wells, Auden, Vermeer, and Turner). As the fi rst television program dedicated to a single poem, Burstall conducted a series of interviews with various public figures including Kathleen Raine, Robert Graves, Adrian Mitchell, Richard Hoggart, and Stuart Hall, as well as schoolchildren from the Manchester Grammar School and St. Christopher School, Letchworth—who often provided the most illuminating responses to the poem, particularly when compared to the contrarian and apparently obtuse reaction of Graves as discussed in Chapter 2. Burstall’s documentary was by no means a systematic audience research project, but it still remains almost unique as an example of dealing with how members of the public read Blake, extending the horizon beyond the professional circles (whether academics or creative artists) who have been the main focus of reception studies beyond the rather narrow audiences that he engaged with during his lifetime. Considering the period in which the program was made, unsurprisingly Burnstall provides an untheorized and rather generalized framework in which to situate people’s responses, generally seeing it as self-evident that Blake’s work is great art but also recognizing the significance of its popularity. One of the most important recent contributions to Blake’s reception among a wider audience is Mike Goode’s article “Blakespotting” (2006). Goode considers how such appropriations may be seen to do violence to the proverbs in limited historicist terms before realigning such historicist

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readings with a more sophisticated deconstructive approach that favors what Tony Bennett calls “reading formations”, those connections between readers and texts in specific contexts, and via Wai Chee Dimock’s challenge to provide a new kind of historicist reading that would accept a text’s openness to reappropriation (770–71). The particular value of Goode’s approach is that it in turn opens questions of Blake’s cultural value beyond the debates around Blake’s system that dominated so much criticism until the 1990s, as well as the extremely vital—but, to most readers, ultimately esoteric—discussions of Blake’s illuminated originals that have been the focus for so much research since. At the same time, he does not reduce Blake’s value to the simple consumption of the text, which has long been the staple of reception theory, but rather discusses the operation of Blake’s proverbs as falling into the category of what Michel de Certeau calls “tactics” (782). During Blake’s lifetime, the proverbs could operate radically without being visible to the authorities, and the semantic instabilities of the texts also mean that after his death people could use them without necessarily being aware of their subversive message. Blake’s words (and the same applies as much to his images) do not need to work in a system, but rather may be “poached”, to use Henry Jenkins’s term, as part of a popular tactics.1 As de Certeau observes, such tactics turn the order of things to their own ends “without any illusion that it will change any time soon”; they operate in an economy of gifts and according to an aesthetics of “tricks” and ethics of “tenacity”—that is, “refusing to accord the established order the status of a law, a meaning, or a fatality” (26). Although Goode draws upon poststructuralist and new historicist methodologies to inform his readings, in the end his study of such popular tactics still operates very much on the basis of the individual reader. His notion of Blakespotting has been extremely influential on our notions of everyday Blake, but as with the vast majority of literary-based reception studies his work is concerned with the response of the individual reader that also, in the end, cannot entirely escape the anxiety of how to determine value. He argues eloquently against the idea of an “initiated reader”, those creative and academic professional readers who are accorded special status depending on their scholarly or artistic activities, and also suggests that the radicalism of Blake’s work depends not on “an authorized form of radicalism” available only to a proper coterie of readers, but rather on its heterogeneity of meaning (Goode 783). Whereas agreeing with Goode on this, his observations depend on a certain blindness as well as insight as to the function of Blake’s texts and images within popular culture, and cannot entirely evade the suspicion that—after all—there is a “right” kind of radicalism as well as a “wrong” one. Thus “Blakespotting” ends with a reading of Jim Jarmusch’s wonderful film Dead Man as an example of a jeremiad against the nation that is somehow appropriate, whereas the proverbs on the walls of Donald Trump’s library are an example of how “the radical anticapitalist Blake is apprenticed to endorse the Trump lifestyle” (770).

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Politically, ethically, and aesthetically, as authors we may be on the side of Jarmusch against Trump in any fight of contraries, yet as three decades of neoconservative principles in practice have demonstrated all too painfully, “radicalism” may be a call to arms for elites and the right as much as for the masses. Goode ends with allusions to the rhizomatic nature of Blake’s proverbs extending through masses of readers, and—like so many Blake scholars and readers—he draws upon an ontology that is arboreal, where the solid roots of the correct reader oppose the apparently insubstantial trunk of the distributed masses. This is where Burstall’s documentary on “The Tyger”, for its manifold flaws, offers a different approach to Goode’s—and indeed the vast majority of literary reception theory—one that is particularly pertinent when dealing with the digital humanities. Burstall has his own preferences when interviewing different figures (as, indeed, do I as a viewer), although he is a professional enough presenter not to intervene directly in the responses given by those he interviewed. Literary scholars and critics are used to reading: television, by contrast, can be most effective when it is dialogic, interviewing members of an audience. One of the figures interviewed by Burstall is Stuart Hall, an early proponent for a reception theory that would engage with the varied opinions of a wider audience, work that unsurprisingly developed most actively out of his studies on encoding and decoding in television discourse. Hall was one of the fi rst theorists to forcefully propose not only that the message is neither transparent nor determined by the sender, but also that a mass audience cannot be seen as the passive recipient of that message (“Encoding”). There are considerable problems with Hall’s model, although he was to elaborate it greatly over subsequent decades, most notably his attempts to bind a complex series of signs as “codes” (that is formed by systematic elements rather than simply open to creative and more fluid and personal innovation) and also an overemphasis, as Graham Murdock observes, on rational responses rather than those based on pleasure. As various uses and gratifications models have long demonstrated, the masses may be anything other than helpless victims of the media, using it for a range of satisfactions that are not always approved of by Marxist and postMarxist critics. Nonetheless, it is itself both pleasing and appropriate that a theorist who had such an important role in demonstrating that distortion is not a failure of audiences to understand messages “correctly”, but is a determining factor of communication itself, was also one of those chosen by Burstall to address the responses elicited by Blake’s “The Tyger”. When asked how much the poem means to him, Hall replies: A lot, and it’s difficult to tell why that’s so. It matters because it’s got so much force, and the force I think comes from the fact that it’s so hard—its images are so hard. They’re gemlike, they’re like rock almost. And I think the power of the poem comes from the fact that although its surface and its images and so on are so fi rm, yet they reverberate

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In contrast to literary theory, television studies have long had to engage with the audience as a mass that is more meaningful than the solitary reader. Whereas the professional—or, to poach Goode’s term, initiated—viewer may have valid insights into the meaning of American Idol or the opening ceremony of the Olympics, he or she more clearly has to participate in a public sphere, however compromised, that subjects his or her voice to a wider range of discourses. Of course, there has always been the fear of the masses, huddled or otherwise, a reaction that was as prevalent among theorists of the Frankfurt School as it was among followers of Leavis, but as John Fiske demonstrated in his seminal study of television viewing at the end of the 1980s, if the TV audience can be dissolved into single viewers these individuals must then be comprised into multiple viewing subjects in order to have any sense of what the text means to an audience. Rational determining moments, so beloved of the individualist reader, must also then deal with the emotive response(s) of the multitude. Traditionally, liberal-minded scholars have considered such responses with suspicion, and there may indeed be plenty of ethical and aesthetic reasons to engage cautiously with such a project; nonetheless, there cannot be an ontological assumption that somehow the atom is more valid than the mass of which it is a part: as Harman observes, rather than “objective nature filled with genuine realities and a subjective cultural sphere filled with fabricated fictions . . . [there is] a single plane of actors that encompasses neutrinos, stars, palm trees, rivers, cats, armies, nations, superheroes, unicorns and square circles” (Prince 188–89). In recent decades, audience research has been more productive in fields of mass media such as journalism and fi lm than traditional literary studies, but it is in the area of digital humanities that the gap between literature and other areas of communication studies may be closed, bringing as it does the responses of a wide range of readers to the attention of critics in a way that was not possible for earlier generations of scholars. There have been rare attempts to apply some of the techniques of quantitative research familiar from mass communication studies to Blake. In an article entitled “British Romanticism as a Cognitive Category” in 1997, Alan Richardson conducted a survey of anthologies of Romantic poetry from the early part of the twentieth century to the 1990s. According to Richardson, Blake supplants Walter Scott as the best represented poet only after the “big five” in the 1960s, and during the 1970s surges ahead in terms of popularity (surpassing Keats), but then begins to decline in the 1990s. As Richardson observes, in the particular market of anthologies aimed at students of literature, “[o]ver the long term, Blake emerges as an important Romantic poet but ultimately fails to achieve prototypical status.” Although there is a considerable amount of variation from anthology to anthology, Blake

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falls short of the average pages allocated to the other five who always dominate such publications. Mark Lussier (“Postmodernity”) comments on Richardson’s research that “the implication is that Blake has begun a slow slide into critical erasure within secondary and post-secondary education” (152). As Lussier points out, this cognitive model—which appears to contradict the widespread evidence of Blake’s popular influence in other spheres— stems from the narrowly conceived test environment, and very different results would have been accrued had Blake been measured against, say, Wordsworth or Byron in the fields of comic books, pulp fiction, and advertising. Richardson’s approach is valuable, however, in terms of identifying how a quantitative approach to literature can challenge widely held assumptions regarding readers’ relations to texts. The spread of such texts digitally frequently simplifies tasks undertaken by scholars such as Richardson (while, admittedly, introducing other aspects of complexity), enabling various types of text mining that, as Ted Underwood points out, humanists need to understand to move beyond the theoretically and hermeneutically naïve approach of selecting key search terms (“Humanists”). One of the problems of looking simply for such selected search terms, as opposed, say, to semantic clustering, which groups such things as trending topics in Twitter, is that it presupposes that the scholar knows what he or she is looking for. As Underwood points out, ultimately this may serve as a means of projecting contemporary assumptions rather than analyzing data patterns as they emerge. Franco Moretti in Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History makes the provocative assertion that the methodological practices of literary studies, developed during a period when texts were not abundant, are inappropriate for the post-scarcity era of digital reading. More provocatively and pithily, in an earlier article he remarks: “At bottom, [close-reading is] a theological exercise—a very solemn treatment of very few texts taken very seriously—whereas what we really need is a little pact with the devil: we know how to read texts, now let’s learn how not to read them” (151). Learning how not to read texts is precisely the kind of statement that will infuriate those teachers seeking to engage students with complex and difficult texts in a world full of smartphones, tablets, video games, and digital channels. As we have already seen, there are immensely creative ways to engage students that do not bracket off literature from the rest of everyday life. Moretti’s use of quantitative methods more familiar from the social sciences in literary studies is particularly useful in the context of understanding how Blake operates online; it removes the tried and tested hermeneutic techniques that the initiated reader inevitably brings with him or her. Again and again, Blake scholars know what we are looking for and so employ naïve text mining methods at best: we fi nd Blake’s radicalism and creativity wherever our gaze falls, and so we fail to see how Blake is actually used online. Yet just as Blake was constantly engaged in a creative

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process of distortion and mediation with the Bible and Milton that initiated readers of those texts would have failed to recognize as belonging to the original—what we have called in this book zoamorphosis—so text mining social media networks such as Twitter or the Web more generally expose the fact that whereas Blake may be declining in the secondary and postsecondary educational environment, outside of school and academia he is being deployed in a host of ways that, for better or worse, treat the experiences of initiated readers as largely irrelevant. Elsewhere, and in environments not exclusively digital, I have referred to this as the “Blake brand”, a readily accessible logo for a particular type of visionary poetics and art that, ironically, may sometimes be closer to Blake’s original activities as an enterprising freelance on the fringes of the London art scene than the weighty, canonical interpretations that have been overlaid on him since. As Stephen Ramsay remarks, in a discussion of what he calls “algorithmic criticism” (which shares some aspects with text mining as used throughout this chapter), “[i]n an age when the computer itself has gone from being a cold arbiter of numerical facts to being a platform for social networking and self-expression, we may well wonder whether those new kinds of critical acts are in fact already implicit in the many interfaces that seek only to facilitate thought, self expression, and community” (Reading 81).

TO SEE A WORLD IN 140 CHARACTERS: BLAKE AND TWITTER

@kgs–what a pleasure to encounter William Blake, who could make 140 chars sing.

Research into the use of Blake quotations on Twitter began in part from some of the responses I began to receive when posting daily quotations from Blake’s work to Twitter in 2009. The appeal of Twitter is frequently hard to explain to those who have not been bitten by this particular bug (and, indeed, for a long time I remained a skeptic regarding the value of microblogging in 140 characters, never having been a particularly heavy user of texting). Nonetheless, it became apparent to me within a few months that not only would tweets I made around Blake be taken up and retweeted with considerable alacrity, but also regular searches for information about the poet and artist on the social networking site revealed an extremely large number of users who were interested in the artist in some shape or form. As such, this particular piece of research into Blake postings on Twitter took place between June 13 and December 11, 2010, providing a six-month collection of quantitative data on the use of Blake on the social networking

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site, the assumption being that this was a substantial enough period of time in which any statistical anomalies could be recognized and accounted for. The method for collecting data was simply to count each day how many times a quotation referring to William Blake appeared on Twitter, as well as to note the particular quotation used. The tweet had to include the words “William Blake”, the relevant search term, which does underline that despite the subsequent text mining this method does begin with simple searching, although with a net cast as widely as possible. Obviously a limitation of this approach was that it would not include any quotation that repeated Blake’s words without his name attached (thus, for example, citations from @Blake2_0, usually prefaced with the phrase “Blake quote of the day”, are not included in these results). In addition, data does not include any tweets simply referring to or commenting on Blake: those listed were deliberately restricted to quotations only. As such, even in this limited time period of six months, this research did not attempt to reference all mentions of Blake on Twitter, although even with these limitations in place it produced a series of fascinating results into the everyday use of Blake in one medium. As well as noting Blake quotations, on a daily basis a simple count was made of all quotations ascribed to the other five of the “big six” of Romanticism.2 The limitations of this process should also be clear: a more extensive data set would also compare appearances of Blake alongside other popular literary figures or texts, such as Milton, the Bible, or Shakespeare. In this set of results, however, the fact that Shakespearian quotations on Twitter proved to be approximately six times more common than even the highest number of Romantic references, whereas those from the Bible were at least twenty times greater in number in the few control sets undertaken, proved to be too labor-intensive to collate. The results of weekly citations of the Romantics on Twitter during this six-month period can be seen in the chart here:

Figure 5.1 Weekly citations of six Romantic poets over a twenty-seven-week period.

122 William Blake and the Digital Humanities In descending order, the fi nal number of quotations for each of the six poets is as follows: Blake

17,970

Byron

13,688

Coleridge

7,744

Wordsworth

7,350

Keats

6,715

Shelley

2,859

In terms of these bald, headline figures, Blake is clearly the most referenced poet of the big six on Twitter, followed relatively closely by Byron, who in turn is cited approximately twice as many times as Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Keats—with Percy Bysshe Shelley in a very distant sixth place. In terms of the interpretation of these simple statistics, we must be very careful not rush to unverifiable conclusions. Thus, for example, it is tempting to state simply that Blake is the most popular of the Romantic poets on Twitter, and, although that may certainly be the case, it is not justifiable on the basis of these figures alone: drilling down into the statistics for individual Blake quotations, for example, makes it quite clear for reasons that will become apparent that in many cases the referrer has not read Blake but is responding to a particular line in a tweet, and indeed the same applies to the other poets. Nonetheless, it is hard not to reach the slightly unfortunate conclusion that of the six writers Shelley is the least popular and perhaps the least read: certainly, across the six-month period under consideration, he is consistently the least-cited poet on Twitter. Yet these headline figures also conceal another statistic that is relevant here: of the tweets citing Byron, 2,610 of them are retweets of the quotation, “Always laugh when you can. It is cheap medicine”, accounting for more than nineteen percent of the Byron citations during this period. Indeed, this along with three other quotations—“Each kiss a heart-quake” (384), “In solitude, where we are least alone” (918), and “sobre los perros, dijo: poseen todas las virtudes del hombre y ninguno de sus defectos” (396)—account for nearly a third of the Byron citations that appear on Twitter (Byron, incidentally, being the most popular poet to be quoted in a foreign language). Similar patterns emerge with all the other poets: thus, for example, a single quotation by Coleridge, “Advice is like snow; the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon & the deeper it sinks into the mind”, accounts for more than a tenth of all citations (720), and “Our sweetest songs are those that tell of the saddest thoughts” (324), the same for Shelley. The reason why this is significant is that the most popular citation by Blake, “It is easier to forgive an enemy than a friend” (1,471), whereas the second-most popular quotation from the Romantics on Twitter during this period, is still considerably less than ten percent of all Blake quotations. Certainly, as with “No bird

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soars too high if he soars with his own wings” (821) and variations on “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infi nite” (780), there are quotations that recur, but equally apparent is the wide variety of citations from Blake’s work that are tweeted. With the other Romantics, no more than fifty quotations appeared during this period—and in most cases, the figure was much less. A total of 397 different citations were attributed to Blake: a number of these were incorrect and some were variants, yet nonetheless these do not account for much more than ten percent of the total and certainly he is the most widely cited of the big six in the range of quotations as well as volume. It is from this moment forward that analysis of the statistics collated must be approached with some caution as a few observations must inevitably be based on more subjective interpretation. What should be clearly noted, however, is that we are here clearly dealing with the wide reading referred to by Moretti at the beginning of this chapter rather than a deep or close-reading. As such, in no circumstances should the range of quotations by Blake tweeted indicate any real familiarity with Blake’s work: many are retweets (837 direct retweets in the case of “It is easier to forgive an enemy than a friend”, with many more copied and pasted or retweeted indirectly), which proves nothing more than the fact that someone read a tweet and liked it. Yet sometimes, a citation such as “But in the Wine-presses the human grapes sing not nor dance: They howl and writhe in shoals” (The Four Zoas 136.21–22; E123) or “Eternity exists and all things in eternity, independent of creation which was an act of mercy” (A Vision of the Last Judgement E562)—each admittedly tweeted only once—indicates that at least some readers citing Blake probably do have a familiarity with his work beyond the most obvious sources. Nonetheless, in general a tweet by no means demonstrates that a person has read anything more of Blake’s words than that individual quotation, although it is interesting to draw some general conclusions about the prevalence of Blakean texts on Twitter during this period. In purely quantitative terms, the vast majority of citations are drawn from two texts—The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (4,523 or just over twenty-five percent) and Jerusalem (1,889 or just over ten percent). These two books are then followed by The Songs of Innocence and of Experience (871) and Auguries of Innocence (547), with Blake’s other illuminated books and writings (including a significant number from his letters and annotations as well as extracts from the Notebook) furnishing other quotations used. That The Marriage should be the most widely used text to be quoted on Twitter, both in volume of quotations but also the number of citations provided, is hardly surprising: with its proverbs of hell, which provide most of the quotations regularly used by people, it is a text almost created for the peculiar limitation of 140 characters. That it is followed, however, by quotations from Jerusalem, or the Emanation of the Giant Albion rather than much more obviously popular texts such as the Songs or even

124 William Blake and the Digital Humanities one of the shorter prophetic works, such as Visions of the Daughters of Albion, is much more unusual. What these bald statistics do not demonstrate is that suddenly Blake’s most ambitious, complex, and difficult text has suddenly been taken up by a mass readership; as with phenomenological models of reader response that sought to make the leap from what was reported by the reader to what he or she was actually thinking while reading, this is one conclusion that goes too far. In any case, skepticism about how many people are actually reading Jerusalem also stems from the fact that the volume of tweets almost entirely consists of four quotations: “It is easier to forgive an Enemy than to forgive a Friend” (J91.1; E251; 1,471 tweets); variants on “I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Mans” (J10.20; E153; 398 tweets); “I am in you and you in me, mutual in love divine” (J4.7; E146; 108 tweets); “The glory of Christianity is, To Conquer by Forgiveness” (J52; E201; 83 tweets). Jerusalem is probably Blake’s most impenetrable text, and in the vast majority of cases it is safe to assume that these are readers who, in Moretti’s words, have certainly learned how not to read this text. The appropriation by Twitter users is to affi x on a particular meme and to propagate it. Yet before rushing towards a thoroughly posthuman archaeology of this process, it is also worth considering that one of the values of this methodology is that it offers digital humanities some tools and insights into textual mass audiences and mass media. Consider the single most popular Blake quotation to appear on Twitter during the period of this survey: “It is easier to forgive an Enemy than to forgive a Friend”. The repetition of this quotation is far from surprising on a social media site. As Leskovec, Huttenlocher, and Kleinberg observe, although most studies on social media have tended to focus on the positive aspects of networking sites in terms of connecting users to friends, fans, and followers, negative relations are equally significant in a medium that is as much filled with controversy and disagreement. Developing their arguments from structural balance theory (which suggests that networks develop where there is a prevalence of positive relations between participants), the authors suggest that a more accurate theory of what they call “signed networks” should deal as much with status as balance, which allows for more hostile networks to continue to exist in which participants will connect to other users of perceived higher status in spite of negative reactions. Despite Facebook’s attempt to reconfigure the world of online connections entirely as a world of mutual friends, Twitter’s more neutral description of followers could be more fitting for the ambivalent, even anxious, world that many users occupy online. Indeed, in online theory (or, perhaps more accurately, online marketing) the focus on social media as a positive network of unambiguous relations in recent years has forgotten the often more interesting sphere of conflict that was the focus of earlier research in the 1980s and 1990s, of which Mark Dery’s appositely titled collection Flame Wars is an excellent example. The repetition of Blake’s quotation tells us very little

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about Blake, but it offers a pithy summary of many users’ experiences of social relations, both online and physical. Whereas citations from Jerusalem are largely fortuitous—viral memes, selections, and swarms that could be used to demonstrate wider appropriations of the Blake brand into popular culture but that do not indicate any deeper reading of Blake’s epic poem—the picture is not quite so clear from the most widely cited work on Twitter, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. As has already been noted, this singular work is particularly well placed for dissemination via Twitter. Certainly, as with Jerusalem, nothing more can be determined from the appearance of certain Proverbs of Hell other than a superficial engagement with that particular aphorism. Thus the most commonly cited proverb—“No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings” (MHH7; E36)—is commonly used as an aspirational quotation in a wide variety of circumstances, whether to encourage excellence in working or sporting environments, or as a motivational quote for online social marketeers. The number of retweets, as with the friendship quotation from Jerusalem, is probably a good indication that many of those who deploy this line know little more, if anything, about Blake’s works. Yet the sheer variety of citations from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell indicates a much deeper engagement with this text by Twitter users than for Jerusalem. Whereas there have been gimmick-led attempts to rewrite Shakespeare for Twitter, it remains the case that a substantial proportion of The Marriage was spontaneously reproduced on the social networking site during the period of this study, and this is one example of how this very slender volume is incredibly influential on a much wider population than its reception during Blake’s lifetime would have led one to expect. Moretti’s pact with the devil is clearly at work in this wide reading of Blake’s work, but it is also appropriate that The Marriage should be retweeted so widely in other respects. Theoretically, it was possible to read one hundred extracts from Blake’s text purely by following Twitter: such an act would, of course, be extremely difficult and even more perverse, but it draws attention to fundamentals of the notions and ideology of reading that are being challenged in the twenty-fi rst century. For the past twenty years, Joseph Viscomi has led the challenge that we have been misreading Blake in terms of his production processes, and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell has been one of his most important texts in demonstrating this fact. As Viscomi has observed (1998), what has been regularly read as a book began as a pamphlet to which parts were added and shuffled around, creating a Menippean satire from the constituent components of this most valuable contribution to Blake’s “Bible of Hell”. If the godly books of brass created by Urizen are static objects that reify the laws of god, priest, and king, then the chaotic discordium envisaged by Blake within The Marriage is perfect as a tool for the disruptive swarm of the digital age. Although not dealing with The Marriage directly, Jason Snart (2006) offers a useful insight into the reading processes required for engaging with such media when he describes

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the experiences of Blake-as-reader and Blake-as-writer in his marginalia: Blake’s “forced disruption, discontinuity, and incommensurability” are an important motive to provide a creative art that would “reflect and embody the experience he had of being in the world and that would communicate the primacy of the individual imagination” (40). In The Wond’rous Art: William Blake and Writing, John B. Pierce offers a view of Blake’s “infernal scriptorium” that posits writing and reading as social rather than solitary activities, part of what Georges Poulet calls the “phenomenology of reading” in which the transformative effect of speaking aloud graphical marks, for example, necessarily transfers a visual experience into an auditory one: we cannot help but transform the text by the simple act of reading, and in the case of Blake freeing writing from “principles of objectivity, abstraction, passivity and exteriority”—the fi xed text of Urizen’s books of brass—enable it to become “the instrument for expanding human perception” (146). Pierce sees Blake as emulating verbal exchange in an “orality of Eternity” that reduces the tendency to abstraction. Although Pierce’s reliance on Walter Ong could be supplemented with Bakhtin’s dialogic theory, or indeed Angela Esterhammer’s work on the function of performative language in Blake, the notion of Blake as an oral communicator, engaged in dialogue, conversation, and exchange (dealt with more recently in the introduction to Sarah Haggerty and Jon Mee’s collection, Blake and Conflict) is a useful one here for considering the chaos of the experience of reading The Marriage online in this format. From traditional humanist perspectives, the text gleaned from Twitter must appear inevitably impoverished, lacking the context of Blake’s other lines let alone the illuminations of his substantial work: yet as part of a global conversation—one admittedly producing a great deal of noise as well as communication—it is heartening to see that Blake remains a vital part of contemporary discourse. Of course, when Blake is invoked within this discourse, he is not infrequently misquoted. For anyone at all familiar with Blake’s works, tweets ascribed to the poet such as “Ability may take you to the top, but it takes character to stay there” (actually from the basketball coach, John Wooden, in his book The John Wooden Pyramid of Success) are immediately recognizable as wrong. This particular tweet, attributed to Blake, appeared fi fty-six times during the period under consideration. Likewise, “The essentials to happiness are something to love, something to do, and something to hope for” was retweeted twenty-seven times. Most other misattributions, such as “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” (Margaret Wolfe Hungerford) or “the friend is the man who knows all about you, and still likes you” (Elbert Hubbard), appeared only once during the period and are clearly simple misattributions. In fact, there were few outright mistakes with Blake quotations—perhaps not so surprising in a cut and paste digital age—although this is to ignore the numerous minor misquotations or paraphrases (“When the doors of perception” instead of “If”, or “mutual

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in divine love” instead of “love divine”, although one can almost recognize “A good local pub has much in common with a church, except that a pub is warmer, and there’s more conversation” from “The Little Vagabond”). One example of misprision that was extensively repeated online was the tweet “In the universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between, there are doors”. This quotation, which appeared 163 times during the period in question, was always attributed to Blake despite the fact that he never wrote such words. It was originally tweeted during this time by @gassho, a Twitter user who regularly provides inspirational tweets dealing with meditation, spirituality, and vegetarianism, but as it was frequently taken up and retweeted by various other sources he was almost certainly not the original source of this misattribution. Indeed, the misattribution regularly appears on web sites from 2009 at least. The intriguing nature of this particular tweet is that it sounds as though it could be Blake’s words, and is clearly an approximation of the lines from plate 14 of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infi nite” (E38). The quotation is sometimes attributed to Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, published in 1954, but actually was by Jim Morrison in a magazine interview (qtd. in Burt 42). The connections between the Doors and Blake via Huxley are well known, having most recently been explored by Tristanne Connolly (“Blake and Jim Morrison”), and as such the act of misprision follows a certain logic in easily decontextualized online environments, Blake being read through the prism of Morrison (and Huxley). Although I have deliberately invoked Bloom’s term of misprision, this should not be taken as an example of the anxiety of influence: rather than a “strong” (and thus, in Bloom’s term, a creative) misreading of the poetic precursor, this is rather “weak” misprision that may be seen as an example of relative ignorance. Yet even then this desire to attribute the quotation falsely to Blake is significant: scholars of Blake have much more clearly defi ned notions of who and what Blake is in contrast to the fuzzy logic that often motivates the wider public. Such a statement is not to defend this ignorance, but rather to use online and social media as a route into understanding how Blake is used by that wider audience. This becomes most intriguing—and, for me, most problematic—when Blake is deployed tactically to support notions and campaigns that are contrary to my own clear and reified views of the poet and artist. Thus, for example, the phrase “No bird soars too high[,] if he soars with his own wings” is frequently employed by online marketers to sell a wide variety of products from self-help books to foreign exchange (forex) software. This particular usage is itself hardly new, and Mark Lussier (“Postmodernity”) has previously examined the Nike “Wings” campaign from 1989, which showed the basketball player Michael Jordan with arms outstretched, the proverb of hell printed underneath. Indeed, so successful was that poster

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that a sample poster is now housed in the Library of Congress permanent collection, demonstrating that, despite his problematic relations as an art entrepreneur during his lifetime, Blake has frequently proved a successful advertising copywriter after his death. Perhaps a somewhat more disturbing use of Blake is as pornographer, although the collections Blake, Gender and Culture and Queer Blake have returned attention to various aspects of Blake’s attitude to sexuality that, as with Marsha Keith Schuchard’s earlier Why Mrs Blake Cried, should remind us that his sexual experimentation was frequently more extreme than that of his contemporaries. The quotation “Embraces are cominglings from the head even to the feet, and not a pompous high priest entering by a secret place” (taken from Jerusalem 69: 43–44; E223) appeared only twenty-one times on Twitter, but every single usage was to promote a pornographic site or video, most commonly from the account of @kamalbarryXXX promoting the work of adult actors and directors such as Shy Love and Rob Black. (Barry is a somewhat literate sex promoter, regularly including citations from a range of writers from, bizarrely, Jane Austen to Henri Lefebvre.) This usage of Blake can be most significant with regard to the possibilities of reading Blake via social networking sites such as Twitter. Observations on the status of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell via Twitter are important for drawing attention to the ontology of the text: to encounter Blake via Erdman’s excellent edition of the complete poetry and prose or via the Blake Archive is preferable for scholarly purposes, although these are of course substitutes for Blake’s originals, which occupy an almost unique place in literary studies. To return to the original source, whether copy K in the Fitzwilliam Museum or Copy D in the Library of Congress, is not possible for the vast majority of readers of Blake, who encounter his poetry— for better or worse–via a medium such as Twitter, just as they encountered his text in fragments via television, radio, magazine citations, or posters beforehand. This “torn book” (after Snart) constitutes an engagement with Blake that is closer to oral literacy than the studies of literature traditionally carried out in academia. In turn, it posits the possibility of a wider phenomenology of reading that has the potential to outline some aspects of the experience of reading Blake, although the difficulties of such a phenomenology of reader responses (in which such a response must inevitably be played out through the différance that exists when the reader writes down his or her reaction) have long been recognized. The conclusions of this particular section, therefore, are much more tightly circumscribed: on one level they may appear somewhat limited, and indeed some of the more creative appropriations of Blake will be considered in the following section. However, what this reading of Blake on Twitter demonstrates is some of the potential that is opened up in digital environments by treating Blake as a mass media phenomenon—for this is what, on several levels, his art clearly is. This chapter began with a reference to Burstall’s documentary on “The Tyger”, the fi rst significant attempt to deal

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with Blakean reception on the level of mass reception, but, as we have seen in the chapter on the Blake-Parry hymn “Jerusalem”, this has long been a text that is much more important outside the contexts of the individual and isolated reader engaging with the Preface to Milton. As such, this research is offered in part as an example of the quantitative, empirical research that has become increasingly common in fields such as television and journalism studies, but that the Internet generally—and social networking sites in particular—now opens up for literary studies as well. As academics and scholars, we frequently have our own assumptions about how a particular author is (or should be) received, and for perhaps the fi rst time in the history of reading it is now possible to test some of these assumptions against a much wider data set of readers.

GLOBAL BLAKE This quantitative and empirical information gathered from Twitter began to test a particular hypothesis, that, despite an apparent decline in terms of his importance as a Romantic poet at least in academia, Blake was the most popular of the “big six” to be quoted on the social networking site, which in turn represents one of the ways in which his work has permeated the fabric of daily life to a lesser or greater degree. At the same time as this data was collated, a much wider data set was being collected, drawing together references to Blake in a period of just over a year (from February 2010 to May 2011) in order to gain a sense of how Blake was used across various online resources worldwide. This wide reading used a Google alert to report each day with a count of the number of web links made. After stripping out those links that directed simply to copies of Blake’s works for sale (for example, via Amazon or Abe books), the results were entered into a database to build up as complete a picture as possible of Blake’s digital presence during 2010 to 2011. Whereas the number of citations online could vary considerably (between one and twenty references a day), an attempt to collate as complete a data set as possible should not be seen as utterly exhaustive. For example, alerts were for searches in English only, so daily activity online in other languages would not show up in these results. The limitations of collating true data on how Blake is used globally extend beyond linguistic issues, although undoubtedly these are the most significant. It was during this period that the United States was overtaken by China as the most connected country online, reaching 513 million users by the end of 2011. Whereas American and most European media have been rapidly digitizing since the mid1990s, in countries such as India print remains much more important for English language papers as well as Hindi. Nonetheless, the database of 2,398 entries represents a substantial overview of how Blake is disseminated and used online, representing the appearance of his works on a wide

130 William Blake and the Digital Humanities number of web sites, online newspapers and magazines, blogs, forums, and digital broadcasters. Once data was compiled it could be queried to provide top-level data in terms of where and when Blake citations appeared, the results of which are as follows: Africa Asia Australasia Europe

21 (0.87%) 106 (4.42%) 71 (2.96%) 83 (3.46%)

North America

113 (4.71%)

South America

10 (0.41%)

UK United States Not given

547 (22.81%) 1,187 (49.50%) 260 (10.84%)

In terms of location, that nearly one half of citations came from the United States and nearly another quarter from the UK is not surprising. Indeed, of the ten percent of citations for which it was not possible to determine a location, it is likely that most of these references were on web sites based in the UK or United States. It would probably match most people’s expectations to see that Blake is not widely cited in Africa and South America, although searches in Spanish and Portuguese might have changed the percentage slightly for the latter. It should be noted, however, that Blake is clearly a poet who has a more significant presence, however small, in Asia, with more citations at 4.42 percent than for Australasia and Europe. The main reason for this is India’s English-speaking and reading traditions, with the majority (although not all) such references coming from the subcontinent. Thus for example, on May 2, 2011, Vithal C. Nadkami invoked Blake when discussing the state of India’s tigers in The Times of India, whereas Madhusree Chatterjee reported a Commonwealth festival in which Blake and Shakespeare took center stage in the Thaindian News on October 12, 2010. In addition to determining where Blake was being used, this kind of text mining also makes it possible to track in what ways his work was being used: Academic Arts Biography

77 (3.21%) 448 (18.68%) 97 (4.05%)

Books

198 (8.26%)

Film

123 (5.13%)

Blake and His Online Audiences Music

257 (10.72%)

Other

141 (5.88%)

Photography Poetry Politics/Economics Religion/Psychology/Philosophy Society Sport

131

66 (2.75%) 434 (18.10%) 104 (4.34%) 281 (11.72%) 135 (5.63%) 37 (1.54%)

The academic use of Blake online (which, in this case, refers to notifications of new papers dealing with scholarly aspects of Blake’s work and such things as lectures or public talks) not surprisingly forms a very small part of the activity of everyday Blake. Much more common is the use of his art and poetry in contexts ranging from simple usage of a single quotation or image to more extensive discussions of the significance of such works. Where Blake is also popular is in the fields of religion, psychology, philosophy, and music. Allusions to Blake in the fields of psychology and spirituality range from brief citations in order to reinforce popular self-help instructions (for example, the use of the quotation “Exuberance is beauty” in an article entitled “8 Tips for Boosting your Energy RIGHT NOW”) to a detailed review of Laura Quinney’s William Blake on Self and Soul on the Metapsychology book review site. The high number of citations around music may be an anomaly caused by the fact that during the period under review the jazz artist Esperanza Spalding released an album, Chamber Music Society, which included a version of Blake’s poem “The Fly”. Nonetheless, even with this taken into account it is clear that Blake’s poetry is regularly performed in musical settings, whether at a music festival in Illinois, sung as “Jerusalem” at the royal wedding of Kate Middleton and Prince William, or as an influence on the rapper Dizzee Rascal. In terms of sports, many references were to the use of “Jerusalem” in football or the Commonwealth Games in October 2010. Politically and socially, by contrast, Blakean references cover a wide range of responses, whether right-wing attacks against the political breakup of the United Kingdom and handwringing over the use of “Jerusalem” in gay weddings, or liberal expressions of concern regarding perceived failures of the Obama administration failing to deliver a more left-wing agenda. Taking one example of an everyday global Blake made accessible to us via the Internet, the infidelities of the golfer Eldrick Tont “Tiger” Woods provided an opportunity for Blakean allusions that media commentators, whether in newspapers or blogs, could not resist. The basis for the link was often no more than the fact that Blake wrote a poem about a tiger (or tyger) and Woods’s nickname, thus providing a variety of puns so appealing to

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newspaper copy editors and journalists for a century or more. In the days and weeks following the revelations around the sportsman’s private life, headlines appeared such as “Tiger Woods, burning bright” (Santa Cruz Sentinel, The Economist, Media Life, and many others), “Tiger doubles not burning bright” (The Australian), “Tiger Woods brand still burning bright for top golfer’s sponsors” (The Scotsman), and “Tiger, Tiger, turning contrite” (The Guardian). This connection was not itself new: The Independent ran a story on Woods in 1994 with the headline “Young, gifted and black: Tiger’s talent burning bright”, as did The Economist in 2001, headed “Tiger, Tiger, burning bright: The wonders of Mr Woods”, followed in 2002 by The Telegraph‘s “Tiger still burning bright”. Such allusions, however, proliferated in early 2010, contributing to the chatter of the media in all its various aspects. This endless punning itself on one level can be seen as displaying little more than lazy and slipshod journalism—an endless recycling of headlines from competitors—but the fact that Woods’s personal woes slip so seamlessly into a route laid down by Blake’s poem indicates two things: fi rstly, it is testament to just how popular and well-known the Blake poem is (after all, most commentators refer to Blake rather than, say, Kipling— although of course Kipling’s “Tiger! Tiger!” has its source in “The Tyger”; likewise, I have yet to fi nd a more esoteric reference to Alfred Bester’s sci-fi novel that shares its title with Kipling’s story); secondly, and more significantly, once the connection is made it transforms the story of Woods. The Washington news site The Hill, for example, runs the headline “Tiger, Tiger, burning bright: The agony of defeat and the emptiness of victory” (April 13, 2010) in which it depicts Woods as a figure from a modern morality tale with the observation: “It’s a little scary how often real life serves up these tidy morality plays. It almost makes you wonder if life has meaning after all.” Robert David Jaffee on The Huffi ngton Post also produced a witty article (“Tiger, Tiger, and the Fearful Asymmetry of Celebritydom”) that began: Though Tiger Woods has burned bright over the years, William Blake did not have the golfer in mind when he wrote “The Tyger.” Nor would Blake have compared Woods to the Lamb later in the poem. In his title character, Blake, the great Romantic poet and painter, was invoking one of the most fearsome creatures on the planet as an exemplar of the sublime. But what could be less sublime than watching the robotic Woods, sans wedding ring, read from prepared remarks like a bad actor? (Jaffee 2010) Woods’s nickname was obviously meant to evoke the ferocity and courage of the tiger without any reference to Blake, but the connection with “The Tyger” brings with it expectations (fulfi lled or thwarted) of sublimity, because Blake’s beast has, indeed, burned more brightly than

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any other in literature. It has long been recognized by journalism commentators that the production of news is the result of factors that are formulated as much by social and organizational factors (such as the requirement to produce set amounts of copy on a daily and weekly basis, as well as deal with the input and expectations of various internal and external constituents and gatekeeping bodies). Blake’s poem, then, operates as an entry point for the reporting of this particular incident, serving a vital if apparently trivial function of providing a headline. Once invoked, however, the presence of “The Tyger” can also be seen to transform that reportage. This incident also prompted a considerable number of rewrites of the original poem, ranging from gentle digs to the obscene or those touching upon race (many of those writing on blogs being let loose from the moral and professional constraints under which mainstream media have to operate). One fairly typical example is as follows from the Huffi ngton Post: Tiger, Tiger, taking flight In thy Cadillac at night, What immoral hand or thigh Could make thee drive it so awry? In what lurid garb or guise Burnt the fire of her eyes? With what cheek dare she aspire? What the hand dare sieze thy fire? And what temptress, & what tart Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when she vexed its steady beat, Whence came all its fevered heat? Whence the frenzy? Whence the pain? In what sandtrap plunged thy brain? And what rough or water hole Could ensnare thy noble soul? When thy fans throw down their cheers, And water fairways with their tears, Wilst thou smile their looks to see, As thou steps’t up to the tee? Tiger, tiger, taking flight In thy Cadillac at night, What immoral hand or thigh Dare make thee drive it so awry? (Heffernan 2010)

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This version is particularly appealing because it shows a familiarity with Blake’s poem in terms of its structure and motifs. Rather than following Jameson’s notion of postmodern parody as empty pastiche, this particular doggerel is better viewed via Linda Hutcheon’s ideas on parody as both deconstructively critical and critically creative (2002). The Huffi ngton Post parody is far from unproblematic (whereas it avoids some of the grosser racialized representations of other blog posts, its mockery of Woods undoubtedly carries some unfortunate elements of the noble savage, and the selection of “tart” to rhyme with “heart” cannot avoid being sexist), but it does demonstrate how such parody may contest the often-bland representations of personal power politics, while also, as Hutcheon argues, critiquing notions about artistic originality and uniqueness. What is probably unusual about this parody is that rather than directing its humor at a historical figure and form of representation (Blake and his song), the historical format is used instead to subvert a powerful—and hitherto popular— person and context (Woods and his sponsorship). Even at its most familiar, there is something fundamentally radical about Blake’s art that invites its appropriation in the service of subversion. “The Tyger” emerges as one of the most popular sources for citations online during this period, being referred to ninety-two times, in articles ranging from the announcement of a new CEO for the India company Genpact (due to the providential fact that the new incumbent was Tiger Tyagarajan) to references in a CBS police procedural drama, The Mentalist, and calls for a renewed effort to save the tiger in Nepal, Thailand, and Indonesia, including a joint article by Leonardo DiCaprio and Carter S. Roberts in The Washington Post (“If we save the tigers, we’ll save the planet”, November 7, 2010). Another even more widespread source of Blakean citations online during the period was “Jerusalem”, which was referred to 165 times during this period. Those quotations ranged from accounts of its use in the royal wedding of April 2011 to reviews of Jez Butterworth’s play Jerusalem. One particular example, however, indicates how text mining can draw attention to how Blake is widely used in a way that can contradict the easy assumptions of humanists involved in the digital public sphere. Stories about how “Jerusalem” could become the preserve of homosexual civil partnerships in the UK show how potential memes spread online, although in this particular example more traditional media in the form of newspapers and television also had an important role to play. The story was broken by The Telegraph on May 19 by James Kirkup, writing under the headline “Blake’s Jerusalem ‘reserved for homosexuals’”: Chris Bryant told the Commons that Government plans to allow same-sex marriage ceremonies in church could unwittingly create unequal rules on the song, which was performed at the Royal wedding last month.

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Mr Bryant said that for heterosexual couples getting married in church, “many clergy will refuse to allow it to be sung because it’s not a hymn addressed to God.” The same couple having a civil service would also be preventing from playing or singing the song because of its religious aspects. By contrast, Mr Bryant said, Government plans to allow same-sex ceremonies with “a religious aspect” could allow the song at homosexual marriages. Kirkup’s article, as well as providing a little more background on the genesis of the hymn and its controversy in some Anglican circles, also made the observation that Bryant, MP for Rhondda, is himself homosexual and was formerly an Anglican priest, a detail that was significantly lacking in many subsequent reports. As such, Bryant appeared to be trying to make a general point in favor of the hymn (with, perhaps, a gibe at his ongoing struggles within the Anglican church around homosexuality), although posts to the Telegraph article seemed to indicate that the reception of the reported speech by many readers was an attack on “political correctness”, with a few being ready to engage in homophobic remarks as well as declarations around Blake’s patriotism. Left-leaning British newspapers such as The Independent and The Guardian did not carry the story at the time, although the Daily Mail did include an article on the same day. Observing how popular the Blake-Parry hymn has become, it expanded on a theme included in the Kirkup speech, that plans to allow “religious aspects” into gay civil partnerships will be one reason why “Jerusalem” could become popular: it was this proposal, rather than Bryant’s open homosexuality (also noted by the Mail) that would be so provocative to traditional conservatives. By the next day, a rash of blogs had broken out in fury at the story. Australian blogger John J. Ray repeated the Daily Mail article under the title “Once again homosexuals get a better deal in Britain”. This version added nothing particularly to the story itself, but did transfer it to a more acutely right-wing context than the newspapers that had carried the story originally in the British media. Sites such as The Awl asked, “Will the Gays Get Jerusalem All to Themselves?”, while also including a version of the hymn as sung by the pop group Fat Les in 2000 (it being uncertain at this point whether the editors of the site realized that this version is sung by the London Gay Men’s Chorus as well as a community gospel choir). Online magazines such as Christian Today tended to repeat the salient features of the Telegraph and Mail articles, generally reiterating fear and opposition to plans allowing gay civil partnerships in weddings. Virtually the only site to take a different stance was, unsurprisingly, Pink News, with a number of commentators expressing surprise that the magazine was using the Mail as one of its sources, and many more being irritated with Bryant for getting sidetracked on a minor matter when the real issue was greater equality and recognition for gay weddings.

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Ever since the publication of Christopher Z. Hobson’s Blake and Homosexuality in 2000, there has been a minor theme in Blake studies examining queer aesthetics in relation to his works, the most substantial contribution being Queer Blake. Although there are debates among “initiated” readers as to the extent to which Blake engaged with outright condemnation of anti-homosexual attitudes of his day, the current trend in Blake studies does seem to track towards the acceptance that what Hobson calls the “sexual commonwealth” was open to a much wider congregation than would be accepted by the Christian right, and it is widely recognized that he has been especially influential on generations of homosexual writers, artists, and fi lmmakers, particularly for his condemnation of the “Moral Law” in his later works. By contrast, virtually every story that appeared online dealing with this topic took a negative stance towards gay marriage and civil partnerships and, more importantly, assumed that the author of “Jerusalem” would have shared that approach. For many academic readers, this particular example would demonstrate immediately the dangers of Blake being used by the uninitiated, those readers who fail to see some of the moral complexities or oppositional politics of the poet’s original works and, perhaps more to the point, would not care about such attitudes even were they pointed out. With regard to the hymn itself, as we have already seen, “Jerusalem” online is just as likely to be a preserve of the far right as of the liberal left. As such, this could be positioned as the struggle between enlightenment and ignorance in which the attitudes and responses of those who hold up Blake as a force for repression and conservatism are to be cast out into the darkness. The reasons for drawing attention to this particular negative pattern, however, which can be revealed only through the text mining and quantitative methodology employed in this instance, are twofold: fi rst of all, it draws attention to an important flaw in the looser deconstructive techniques used by scholars such as Goode, which can tend to reinforce assumptions regarding the “radical” uses of Blake’s words, that the poet’s original meaning must—somehow—remain effective within repeated iterations. Blake, unfortunately, is as liable to recuperation as any other writer, and there is no intrinsic quality within his texts and art that can prevent him being used for reactionary purposes. The second point is related to the first but demonstrates the importance of these quantitative techniques of “wide reading” that have been espoused by Moretti and others. By focusing on a few important texts and reading them in detail, scholars are in danger of reinforcing a narrow perception of what is ontologically, aesthetically, and ethically valid in the field of literary studies. I would not generally recommend a close-reading of the various right-wing blogs that espoused an inflammatory and homophobic interpretation of “Jerusalem”, and yet without the mapping of patterns that becomes available from text mining and semantic clustering, it is more likely that I would not even be aware that such readings were

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circulating and in operation. As with the Twitter analysis, such quantitative approaches are limited in what they can tell us about the meaning of the text, yet with regard to Blake in particular and for literary studies more generally, they are immensely important in providing insights into how a text is used on a wider social scale. The virtual Blake discussed in the fi rst chapter is being reconstituted in a variety of new formats and situations in the online environment, as indeed he has always been reconstituted in print culture since the mid-nineteenth century. Whereas the reformulations taking place will often provoke Blake scholars (quite rightly) into an attitude of “mental fight”, the vast array of appearances of this once obscure poet also demonstrates the vitality of everyday Blake. He is used tactically in ways that will often be directly counter to whatever intentions we may wish to ascribe to him, but the virtual plane of consistency, which is then populated by objects, should never be taken as anything other than a contested site. Engaging with everyday Blake is a call to commitment, the realization that as digital humanists our struggle often extends far beyond the polite culture that print had become for many of us by the end of the twentieth century: in some respects, it is closer to the pamphlet wars of the 1790s in which Blake’s own poetic manifestos are often placed by scholars. Although he could not have approved of every use to which his words are turned in the online culture wars of the twenty-first century, it is a fighting public sphere that he would have recognized.

6

Folksonomies and Machine Editing William Blake’s New Aesthetic on Flickr, Wikipedia, and YouTube

Paul Langland’s short film “Jonah” powerfully elides the distinction between nature, technology, and culture. First released in 1989, it was one of the first films that made artistic use of the burgeoning technology of magnetic resonance imagery (MRI). The film features a continuous scan of a human brain, as Langland eats, drinks, and sucks his thumb. Audiences can see muscles as they contract, food as it slowly creeps down the esophagus, and blood vessels as they bring vital nutrients to the brain. Langland’s film also dissolves from normal photographs of his face to the MRI and back again. The shifts are particularly poignant and disturbing, as they show our bodies as simultaneously subjects and objects: as persons and as merely a set of physical functions. Towards the end of the film, the MRI images fade from a close-up shot of Langland’s head to Blake’s 1805 painting “God Blessing the Seventh Day”.

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Figure 6.1–6.4 Screenshots from Jonah. Dir. Paul Langland. 1989. Film. All original materials, the video, the press, and other items connected with the piece are copyright 2011 Paul Langland.

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Langland mentions the “hero’s quest” and “Blake’s God” to reinforce his vision of the MRI as a quest for the individual, heroic imagination. Technology enables a voyage into the dark recesses of our own body. What had previously been hidden and dark is now seen as a space for revelation. In a statement about the film, Langland mentions that his original inspiration came from the artistic aspects of scientific theory, in particular the strange conclusions of quantum mechanics. “My impulse,” he explains “was to point to the illogical yet proven aspects of quantum theory, and how math and science was entering a realm of subjective creative reality, in some regards similar to the creative arts” (qtd. in Belonsky). Blake, of course, has often been invoked in many accounts of quantum mechanics. Mark Lussier has shown how, for example, “the citational presence of Blake within the theoretical physics [ . . . ] points to a bridge across the disciplinary divides of the academy and of the culture” (161).1 Similarly, Arkady Plotnitsky has pointed to a “shared historical genealogy” of the concepts between Blake and quantum physicist Niels Bohr. 2 Langland’s piece definitely points to the “Sweet Science” mentioned by Blake at the end of The Four Zoas and invoked by Lussier at the end of his article. Yet Langland’s piece takes the association between Blake and science into a different dimension by bridging artistic adaptation with biological and technological adaptation. Langland does this by showing the imagination to be a biological and technological act. The use of MRI technology, in fact, mixes Blake’s artistic perspective with that of an object: the machine. Is the imagination Langland references his, the computer’s, or a by-product of the biological processes happening in the brain? By merging all three perspectives, Langland creates an artistic network between them, illustrating that there might not be that much difference between the creative activity of a canonical Romantic poet and the seemingly mechanical processes of the machine or the blood flowing through vessels in the brain. Langland’s invocation of the MRI machine in describing quantum reality and Blake’s imagination perhaps unwittingly imagines how creativity might be a technological and a biological activity. As such, Langland’s MRI acts as a powerful introduction to the strange world of folksonomy and its role in the future of the Blake digital archive. In this chapter, I show how folksonomy fundamentally changes the role of archiving Blake online by constructing the imagination as an evolutionary adaptive characteristic associated just as much with the perceptive ability of animals, machines, and objects as it is with human genius. I illustrate examples of this adaptive characteristic by turning to three folksonomic sites: Wikipedia, Flickr, and YouTube. Blakean adaptations on these sites challenge the separation between nature and culture that characterizes many of the taxonomic editorial theories of the past. In chapter one, Jason showed how the creative editorial process begun by Rossetti and Gilchrist is still on display in the more contemporary editions of Erdman, Johnson, and finally the online William Blake Archive. This genealogy would suggest that the editor, no less than people, machines, and tools that collaborated in making Blake’s illuminated manuscripts, has

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a creative stake in transmitting and reinforcing Blake’s ideological and ontological existence as an author. Jason’s critique of McGann’s notion of social text editing and the curious way that Blake somehow becomes exceptional in McGann’s theory is key here, because McGann imagines a social context as encapsulating or framing social association. In McGann’s view, social context forms a bubble around relations and sees that bubble as ontologically prior to the associations it contains. Once an author like Blake—whose personality demands being counted as exceptional—steps into a theory that prioritizes social context, the central question becomes whether Blake is truly an exceptional individual. Is he, on the one hand, a Romanticized genius who strides above the social and historical contexts theorists cobble together to explain him? Or, on the other hand, is he all-too-common? Neither answer seems fully sufficient to explain Blake’s life or the work he produced. Bruno Latour has suggested a third option: that “there exists no society to begin with, no reservoir of ties, no big reassuring pot of glue to keep all those groups together.” Society, in fact, “is not a building in need of restoration but a movement in need of continuation” (Reassembling 37). Graham Harman, in his reading of Latour in Prince of Networks, develops this point when he notes that “[s]ystems are assembled at great pains, one actant [actor] at a time, and loopholes always remain. We are not pawns of sleek powermachines grinding us beneath our heels like pathetic Nibelungen. We may be fragile, but so are the powerful” (22). Society is nothing more than a collection of stuff: bodies, technologies, subjectivities, concepts, and relations. Power isn’t an abstract entity, but is caught up in building, maintaining, and destroying the relations that make up society. As a theory of literary creativity, McGann’s social text theory ignores the constant effort needed to maintain social associations. Analyzing the social text means recognizing the vast networks of objects and relations that transmit a cultural artifact from one space to another or from one historical moment to another. Should we see non-human objects, like the cement of roads that we drive upon to move books, as essential parts of the social text? And, in this environment, does “text” remain the most appropriate metaphor for the collections of relations that circulate cultural ideology? Latour’s invocation of the sociologist of the social vs. the sociologist of associations is particularly apt here. Whereas he argues that the sociologist dedicated to social forms fantasizes about having “a master vocabulary which acts as a sort of clearing house for instantaneous exchanges between goods that all share the same basic homogeneous quality”, sociologists dedicated to objects and actors have no homogeneous starting point (36). This is a huge problem for the future of the collected edition, because it suggests that no text exists as such.3 For Blake, this means that he emerges as exceptional due to his ability to leverage the social networks he encountered during his life and his posthumous tendency to form social associations that carried his work to readers after his death. Of course, Blake’s exceptionality is also predicated upon the legions of fans, professional critics, and artists who edited, translated, curated, and archived his work, and it disappears once those legions abandon

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their project. The complicated process of forming associations between social actors articulated by Bruno Latour means that traditional social text theory, and the editorial apparatus that emerged from this theory, is not sufficient to understand the presence of figures like Blake in online environments. To truly take advantage of the idea of an active set of social associations, we must turn to a better understanding of folksonomies, machines, the New Aesthetic, and the way these actors impact the construction of Blake in digital media.

FOLKSONOMIES AND MECHONOMIES, OR THE NEW AESTHETIC A folksonomy is a collaborative system for the classification of things. Derived as a portmanteau combining taxonomy with people, folksonomy emphasizes the way individuals tag social media objects by “liking” them or by using a specific word to describe a post on a blog. Isabella Peters explains that folksonomic methods of organizing information emerged due to the “heavy growth of user-generated content” (1). Social bookmarking sites, like Reddit and del.ic.ious, were the first to employ folksonomic methods of organization to organize and promote certain forms of information. These sites, according to Peters, enabled “users to store and publish their own information resources as well as to index these with their own customized tags” (1). Thus the indirect cooperation of users creates a folksonomy for each collaborative information service comprising each individual user’s tags. Deli.c.ious had a particularly important role in the development of folksonomy. Released in 2003, it allowed users to bookmark important sites and archived the bookmarks on a publicly accessible wiki. Since the release of social bookmarking sites, folksonomy has become the driving editorial function of the emergent social and semantic Web. Google, for example, made its money after patenting a search engine called PageRank, which is an algorithm that bases a web site’s rank on search returns by calculating how many people visit a site in a given period of time. How does this calculation, ideally, work? Sergy Brin and Lawrence Page cite the example of a web surfer “who is given a web page at random and keeps clicking on links, never hitting ‘back’ but eventually gets bored and starts on another random page. The probability that the random surfer visits a page is its PageRank.” Further, they mention that “a page can have a high PageRank if there are many pages that point to it, or if there are some pages that point to it and have a high PageRank.” PageRank works by continuously calculating the amount of activity on and links to different web pages, and reordering ranks accordingly. By employing PageRank, Google is able to calculate which pages are actually important to users. Earlier search engines used hierarchical indexes constructed with the help of web-crawlers: computer programs that travel the Web looking for appropriate sites that can be indexed and ranking them according to the internal policies of the company who hosted the site. PageRank was a game-changer

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for the Internet, because it made the Web a truly social space. Rather than depending upon an already constructed index, Google imagined the Web as a perpetually transforming space and automated the process of representing that transformation. Folksonomy also operates, albeit in an edited manner, on Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger conceived of Wikipedia as an encyclopedic response to Ward Cunningham’s WikiWikiWeb. Cunningham describes the wiki as “a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser,” and suggests that the open-editing technology found on wikis “encourages democratic use of the Web and promotes content composition by nontechnical users.” In practice, Wikipedia found it difficult to fully employ Cunningham’s vision of open-editing, because popular articles would often become the targets of editing-wars. A most famous example of an edit-war can be found on the Iraq War page. Debates over policies, the causes of specific conflicts, and the actions of specific actors were the target of a huge amount of writing, editing, deleting, and revising. Arguments over controversial issues occur on publicly visible but separate “talk pages” that archive the debates. As an illustration of just how much content the process of editing the Iraq War page generated, James Bridle published a twelve-volume historiography of “every edit made to a single Wikipedia article, The Iraq War, during the five years between the article’s inception in December 2004 and November 2009, a total of 12,000 changes and almost 7,000 pages.” Wikipedia obviously cannot display all of these contradictions and debates on the main article page, especially if they want to encourage a meaningful narrative about the entry. Wikipedia’s page for “William Blake”, by contrast, has about 5,477 revisions—the majority of them happening in 2008. Pages associated with Blake’s mythology (including character pages on Urthona, Los, Tharmas, and others), his prophetic books (America: A Prophecy, The Book of Urizen, Visions of the Daughters of Albion), source articles (full-text reproductions of his poems and prophetic books, the second edition of Gilchrist’s Life of William Blake, Swinburne’s William Blake A Critical Essay, and T. S. Eliot’s essay on “Blake” from The Sacred Wood), media fi les (illuminations and sketches from his works, audio readings of his work, and photographs of his gravesite), and a page documenting the adaptations of his work by other artists. Wikipedia acts as a folksonomic media collection of articles by and about Blake. Folksonomy works on a number of levels on the Blake page to produce an actively changing set of associations around Blake’s life and work. These changing associations can be viewed on the talk pages, where the majority of the edits are focused on minor problems with quotations and discussions of repeated information. On November 3, 2008, for example, P. Ingerson performed what is known as a reversion of Wikipedia in order to recover a lost set of information. Every version of Wikipedia is archived on the site, so it is quite easy to erase edits by recovering an earlier version of the page. P. Ingerson says that he reverted an edit made by another user “to remove possible ambiguity: it was God

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putting his head against window, not Blake.” Copy editors also take pride in catching mistakes quickly, and get annoyed when the community is not as efficient as it could be. WickerGuy notes that a selection of material he erases “is an exact word-for-word copy of material ready in the death of Blake section which is where it should be. This was not caught in three days??” As an evolving editorial space, the Blake Wikipedia page does not depend upon updates as much as instantaneous revision, talk, and more revision. Sections are created when enough material exists that it needs to be placed in a separate heading. When material exceeds the amount usually placed under headings, a separate page is made for the material. This happened with the “William Blake in Popular Culture”, which originally existed as the “Blake in Film, Music, and Literature” heading. Paul Barlow moved the material to its current page in 2007, and the page eventually added headings for “Literature”, “Visual arts, comics, and graphic novels”, “Television”, “Films”, “Music”, and “Games”. The Blake Wikipedia page is also a powerful hub for both academic and non-academic fans. When I coedited a special issue of the comics journal ImageTexT on “William Blake and Visual Culture”, I found that adding a link to the Blake Wikipedia page increased the traffic to my collection. I also found that several comic fan blogs would cite or reference my collection, and this would in turn cause my work to show up in unexpected places. Broken Frontier, a comic fan site, mentioned my issue among its best Comic Scholarship post at the end of 2007. Further, an edited collection on the African-American comedian Dave Chappelle made mention of my article. I don’t know that I can attribute all of these phenomena directly to the links I wrote on Wikipedia, but I do know that the convergence between the academic and the non-academic on Wikipedia creates new forms of association that would be impossible otherwise. One example is the way my essay found its way on a fan site counting down to the Watchmen movie in 2009, in a high school essay on Alan Moore that received a D-, in dissertations on Moore, and on listserv discussions about parallax in addition to scholarly books and collected editions on Blake. I mention my essay not to promote it as a particularly good piece of scholarship, although I still like parts of the piece, but to suggest that Wikipedia provided a nascent platform for promoting accessible scholarship that fan and non-academic communities can access and use in their own work. Probably because of this curious mixture of audiences, the talk pages on Blake’s Wikipedia entry are particularly susceptible to vandalism. On October 4, 2009, a vandal with the IP address 79.54.71.90 replaced content with “he was gay?yuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhg’)”; on October 20, 2008, 90.219.146.89 replaced a section of text with “William Blake Sucks :D;” and, on September 27, 2009, 96.244.19.136 added “stupid”. These examples of vandalism stretch throughout the talk pages, and editors try to quickly revise the article so they don’t stay for extended periods of time. As much as it is a page in process, the Blake Wikipedia page

144 William Blake and the Digital Humanities also records edits in a palimpsest of corrections, vandalisms, and revisions. Whereas the William Blake page is obviously not as contested as the political conversations erupting on the Iraq War page or on pages devoted to presidential candidates, it demonstrates the evolving character of knowledge-production on Wikipedia. Blake’s history is subject to transformation at any moment, even if the kind of transformation occurring on Wikipedia is also subject to the editorial gaze of its users. The rate at which these changes and revisions take place, along with the dedication of its users to accuracy, is a testament to the power of the Wikipedia talk pages to inspire public debate around the articles on its site. RepublicanJacobite engages in a very controversial literary question when he, for example, criticizes claims made by an edit that labeled Blake as a proto-romantic. He claims, “[t]he Romantic period began before the 19th c.” In a way, Wikipedia’s approach to folksonomic review performs a version of what Kathleen Fitzpatrick has imagined as an open peer review process. In a white paper she wrote with Avi Santo, Fitzpatrick notes that open review models “a conversational, collaborative discourse that not only harkens back to the humanities’ long investment in critical dialogue as essential to intellectual labor, but also models a forward-looking approach to scholarly production in a networked era.” The Blake Wikipedia page remediates and models old critical debates, such as when the Romantic period began and whether Blake should be counted as a Romantic, but also shows how such debates contribute to a site representing collective knowledge over Blake’s life and work. The Blake talk pages engage with other theoretical questions crucial to crafting public knowledge about him. Paul Barlow makes several edits relating to Blake’s influence on popular music, noting, when responding to an edit that mentions Blake’s influence on composer Vaughan Williams, that the latter “set of his [Blake’s] songs, but he was commissioned to do so. Not really ‘influence’ as such.” The comment is particularly fascinating because it recalls arguments surrounding reception theory and popular culture that circulate in academic spaces but also does not explicitly rely upon these arguments. An important conversation in reception theory could, in fact, emerge that questions Barlow’s suggestion that only uncommissioned art referencing Blake counts as influence. The editors rely upon historical and literary knowledge when making claims about relevance on the page. Lithoderm argues on September 26, 2008 that “Blake attacks Druids as examples of natural religion in several of his writings; it isn’t mentioned in the article anyhow, so I don’t see how this adds to anything.” As a public archive of intellectual conversation, Wikipedia becomes a visible challenge to older forms of closed review scholarship. The talk pages also archive cheeky comments made by editors, like this one from Barlow, who notes that “tragically Britain lost the battle of Singapore. Doubless [sic] if Blake was there, things would have ben [sic] very different.” As a community, the Blake Wikipedia page intersects with the lived experience of the editors.

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Some of the edits are humorous and reflect the editors’ engagement with Blake’s material. DBaba is so enamored with Blake’s language that the editor “hope[s] this doesn’t make intro overlong, kind of fell in love with the quote.” Finally, WickerGuy references a particularly messy quote by saying that it “[l]ooks like the cat walked over the keyboard with less fearful symmetry than Blake’s tyger.” Yet folksonomy doesn’t, in itself, make up the entirety of what is occurring to knowledge production in an age in which machines are becoming increasingly responsible for mediating and editing work on sites like Wikipedia. As James Bridle points out, when introducing the ideas that are central to what he calls the New Aesthetic, two-thirds of the most active editors on the English edition of Wikipedia are bots or algorithms, and complete the majority of editing duties. According to him, these duties include preventing or limiting edit wars, fi nding orphan works, and adding signatures, metadata, and public domain imagery. Bridle sees this phenomenon as part of a larger historical shift, artistically expressed through a New Aesthetic, in which we are increasingly sharing our lives and our memories with “the technology, to some extent that we’re building, but to a huge extent [it] is also shaping the way we behave.” The New Aesthetic gained popularity primarily due to an article by Bruce Sterling and discussions at South by Southwest 2012. Bruce Sterling calls The New Aesthetic a response to the very real fact that “[w]e’re surrounded by systems, devices, and machineries generating heaps of raw graphic novelty. We built them, we programmed them, we set them loose for a variety of motives, but they do some unexpected and provocative things.” Examples include Bridle’s Tumblr page, in which Bridle says that he has “[s]ince May 2011 [ . . . ] been collecting material which points to new ways of seeing the world”; robot Flaneur, which features Google Street views where people are encouraged to wander around different cities as a twenty-first-century psychogeographer; and Robot Andre Breton, where randomly loaded pictures can be surrealistically altered using a set of drag and drop features. Bridle, Sterling, and the discussion panels at SXSW have largely concerned themselves with visual culture. The subtitle of the SXSW panel was “seeing like digital devices,” and certainly the term “aesthetic” invokes a certain visual sensibility. Folksonomic theory could learn from the New Aesthetic by recognizing the degree to which its processes are becoming increasingly determined by machines. We’d like to name such an organizational principle a mechonomy: a form of editorial curation that recognizes and exploits the emergence of the machine as an active agent. As we saw earlier, mechonomies are part of Wikipedia’s editorial process. But they are also a fundamental part of determining Google Search results and other folksonomies. One of the larger issues in folksonomic theory surrounds how common searchable terms emerge when people essentially choose their own tags. Harry Halpin, Valentin Robu, and Hana Shepherd demonstrate that folksonomies work because of a generative feedback cycle that stabilizes into a power law

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distribution. “[G]iven sufficient active users, over time a stable distribution with a limited number of stable tags and a much longer ‘long-tail’ of more idiosyncratic tags develops. One might consider this stabilized distribution to be an emergent categorization scheme” (220). This means that more popular tags tend to be self-reinforced by the emergent intellectual economy of members who use the site. In much the same way that we saw the informal methods of editorial policy exerted by Wikipedia users, the intellectual economy of folksonomies tends to reinforce informal community standards and marginalize idiosyncrasies. But, by focusing on just the social aspects of folksonomic theory, Halpin et al. fail to defi ne how feedback cycles are impacted by the technology used to generate the tags, and the machines that archive those tags years later. One powerful example of this phenomenon is the Wayback Machine, a bot that crawls Internet sites and archives them for future use. The Wayback Machine was created in 1996, named after the famous time-machine from The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, and initially started as a program that determined which web sites were worth archiving and which were not. According to Wendy Chun, this editorial process changed dramatically once archiving technology became more sophisticated. Chun points out that the newer version of the Wayback Machine, which emerged in 2011, has “solved the extremely time-consuming task of selecting the enduring from the ephemeral by saving everything” (138). Users are able to search for favorite sites by simply entering in the URL. The data center of the machine is massive. An article by Lucas Mearian in ComputerWorld from 2009 mentions that over 85 billion sites had been archived, which translates into roughly “three petabytes of data, or about 150 times the content of the Library of Congress” and “is expected to grow by 100 TB [terabytes] per month now that it’s live.” The processing power of that much data is difficult to imagine, but a petabyte is about one quadrillion bytes, whereas a terabyte is one trillion bytes. Lawrence Lessig argues that the vast amount of data compiled by the Wayback Machine could revolutionize our understanding of the past. The application is “a hint of a world where this knowledge, and culture, remains perpetually available. Some will draw upon it to understand it; some to criticize it. Some will use it, as Walt Disney [or William Blake?] did, to recreate the past for the future. These technologies promise something that had been unimaginable for much of our past—a future for our past” (114–15). Now, consider the archival capacity of the Wayback Machine operating along with new approaches to information retrieval in what has come to be known as the Linked Open Data (LOD) movement. LOD is currently a method to publish data in an RDF (Resource Description Framework) standard to make it easier to be read and linked by machines. Most people do not yet fully understand what a completely integrated LOD dataspace could do. RDF is a very basic format, consisting of URIs (unique resource indicators) that tell networks what to do with the information provided.

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URIs indicate unique objects in much the same way that URLs (unique resource locations) indicate unique locations. The most basic form of RDF is known as a FOAF (friend of a friend): a web ontology that basically describes a person, their contact information, and potential friends. For example, if we wanted to identify “William Blake” with the email address [email protected] and a friend named Henry Fuseli, we’d get the following code.





William Blake Mr William Blake 5a7b5d1a69365bf878f15fe4ecb1e4834479cd df

Henry Fuseli e75801699a878b73d532e2bf98a99036d cb2d32c

The string looks complicated—let’s look at what it actually communicates. The syntax and schema of this particular FOAF are associated with a security layer that, according to Sun Microsystems, was originally presented at the W3C Workshop on the Future of Social Networking held in 2009 in Barcelona, Spain. Henry Story, in his presentation for the W3C conference, argues that this security layer provides a “maximally flexible way” of allowing only certain members of a group to have access to particular portions of personal information encoded in a FOAF. Many of the prefi x schemas that are listed in this string derive from URLs and web sites associated with

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that conference. You can also see that the “generator agent” of the FOAF is Leigh Dodds, developer of the FOAF-a-matic—an online form that helps you easily describe yourself in RDF. Most of the rest of the code is generated from the information provided in that form. The “personal profile document” lists “Mr William Blake” as the name associated with the FOAF, and distinguishes between Blake’s given name “William”, and his family name “Blake”. Each individual “sha1sum”s relates the name with a URI number. It is this number that FOAF associates with the name. What can be done with RDF, FOAF, or Linked Open Data? Like the Wayback Machine, LOD reconceptualizes the archival capabilities of the Web by looking beyond earlier gatekeeping notions that picked some pieces of data as important for preservation and rejected others. Tom Health and Christian Bizar describe Linked Open Data as constructing a “global data space”, that “presents a revolutionary opportunity for deriving insight and value from data. By enabling seamless connections between data sets, we can transform how drugs are discovered, create rich pathways through diverse learning resources, spot previously unseen factors in road traffic accidents, and scrutinize more effectively the operation of our democratic systems.” Consider what it might mean to translate Blake’s entire poetic and visual work into RDF triples, and then integrate them with networked databases found on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites. What new insights about how Blake’s work connects with contemporary audiences could be gleaned when archives are seen as constantly changing, modular dataspaces, tagged folksonomically, that archive everything and emerge in the moment they are called up by an interested user—machine or human? “What are we doing,” James Bridle asks in “We Fell in Love in a Coded Space”, “when we tag something?” If we consider this question in light of applications like the Wayback Machine or LOD, it becomes even stranger and more urgent. We propose looking at Blake’s appearance in online communities like Flickr and YouTube to see how their folksonomies are paving the way for the bold new future imagined by mechonomic open data environments. Our purpose is to identify folksonomic forms of cultural production in specific digital environments and show how they challenge the line separating nature from culture and, further, show how mechonomies are organizing and subtly influencing the remediation of Blake in these spaces. Ultimately, we show how Blake’s appearances on YouTube and Flickr are illustrating how the structuring of folksonomies by mechonomic practices blurs the line separating the human from the non-human.

BLAKE FLICKR’D Perhaps the most easily recognized analogue to Bridle’s New Aesthetic in the realm of Blakean remediations is found in William Daniels’s William

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Blake II. Daniels’s Blake series reproduces Thomas Phillips’s 1804 portrait of Blake twice, making his subject look like an undead robot. Daniels creates maquettes out of older portraits, photographs them, and then paints over the photographs creating a layered effect that surrounds his original subject and evokes a figure who is alien and strange. The description of William Blake II on the Saatchi Gallery web site calls it “uncanny in its decrepit, post-apocalyptic semblance,” and as “a zombie-like effigy, an homage to a hero that is both futuristic and decayed.” Clearly, the decayed texture of the subject makes William Blake II aligned with steampunk or gothic science fiction, where technology is no longer shiny and new, but a pile of crumbling, obsolete, or decayed rubbish. In a larger sense, however, the combination of materials and the zombie aspects of Daniels’s William Blake series envision a moment in the future

Figure 6.5 William Daniels. William Blake II. 2008. Oil on board. Saatchi Gallery, London.

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in which the robot takes the place of the human artist as bearer of the imagination. One could imagine The First Book of Urizen as a sciencefiction adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, where the robotic Blake himself scribbles down iron laws that are to be followed by every artificial intelligence that followed. Daniels’s Blake series also constructs a powerful response to the separation of nature and culture found in many editorial theories animating McGann’s “social text”. What kind of social context envelopes William Blake II? The artistic process used by Daniels to create his portraits constructs one physical context after another: paint envelops photograph, which aesthetically envelops the maquette, which, in turn, stands in for the Phillips portrait. And what knowledge about Blake does the Phillips portrait give us? Whereas Gilchrist remarked that the Phillips portrait “caught from Blake’s looks [ . . . ] that rapt poetic expression,” we also know that Catherine didn’t like the portrait and thought it said nothing interesting about her husband. The Daniels portrait materially rejects the expectation that anything exists below the multiple layers of aesthetic construction—and yet it is the construction itself that the portrait highlights. There is, in Graham Harman’s words, “an infi nite regress of parts and wholes” (qtd. in Bentley, William Blake: The Critical Heritage 37). The social text in the Daniels portrait is less important than the way relations between different pieces of rubbish conspire to create Blake as a robotic object while also rejecting any fi nal layer of significance. This approach combines parts and wholes until Blake emerges as an uncanny mixture of other things, all of which also vie for our attention. The mixing of genres in “punk”, and its consequent erasure of distinction of the human, the natural, and the machine, abounds on many of the references to Blake on the Web. Consider, for instance, this pitch for a short story by Derek C. F. Pegritz called “Blakepunk”. Pegritz originally made this pitch in the comments section of a 2007 article in Wired called “Make Way for Plaguepunk, Bronzepunk, and Stonepunk”. By the late 18th century, the American Revolution was fought with “lux-vent” (laser) tanks, nuclear weapons, and William Blake is an angel-possessed warrior in the post-nuke remains of London, leading a crack squad of cybernetic poet assassins to eliminate the Mad King George’s army of interdimensional Machano-Hessian soldiers before they can take back the ruined city from the Congress of Liberators, led by the ghost of Mary Wollstonecraft and her half-machine husband William Godwin. Pegritz has yet to complete the story, and in all probability he was making a sarcastic caricature of the explosion of punk storytelling in general, but the combination of angelic imagery, lasers, gothic horror, cybernetics, and

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H. P. Lovecraft–styled weird fiction points to a comically complex narrative ecology that mimics a New Aesthetic approach to Blake’s story. Narrative elements are not treated as pieces of a stable social text, but are rather dealt with experimentally, in ways that construct creative opportunities for each genre covered. We suggest that both examples provide an aesthetic response to a world where computers and folksonomies are increasingly determining archival choices. In William Blake II, Daniels combines various materials and their physical interrelations to provide the foundation for the layered production of an overall artistic effect. “Blakepunk” assembles, seemingly at random, a set of different interrelated elements and creatively manipulates them. The effect is comical, yet also is an aesthetic articulation of the degree to which the random tags motivating folksonomic forms of collection have infi ltrated our collective imagination. As we have mentioned in past chapters, Blake’s artistic process mixes discrete elements into a new creative vision, yet if we venture into the complex folksonomies of Flickr and YouTube, we’ll fi nd a much stranger and more accelerated form of mixing heightened by the constant sharing and posting occurring on each site. Flickr began in 2004 as a photo-tagging system that emerged out of a massively multiplayer online game called Game Neverending. An August 5, 2011 report mentioned that over six billion photos had been uploaded to the site. These photos are manually uploaded by computer operators, but also posted via photo sharing applications like Instagram, which enables iPhone cameras to easily capture and share images. Flickr organizes its photos through a series of tags and fi lters. Users are also able to fi x what level of copyright they want associated with their images, and also search for freely available images to add to their blogs or Tumblr feeds. Flickr is more interesting for our purposes than competitors like Picasa or Photobucket, because it is freely available and does not require a desktop application. The open infrastructure of Flickr, furthermore, encourages sharing and circulating images to several different devices. Most recently, Flickr has created an app on the iPhone that makes this process even easier. In terms of understanding the emergent mechonomy associated with William Blake, Flickr seems like an ideal choice. We’d like to offer a few examples of the images that currently exist on the Flickr network, with the proviso that these images can be deleted or moved frequently. This is yet another difference between traditionally conceived archives and folksonomic collections. Folksonomic collections are often housed on several different servers, and depend upon the construction and maintenance of specific tags in order to produce results to different searches. There is no specific collection per se, simply a set of results that emerge in the act of a search. Typing in “William Blake” (with quotation marks) on April 28, 2012 at 2:42 p.m. EST produces a wide variety of

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images. The third page features “quantify the kingdom (take on William Blake’s ‘Newton’)” by Nick Paliughi and Sienna Anya. The piece is a powerful collage combining the rock, stars, and posture found in Blake’s “Newton”, but retaining an effect that actually enhances the visual impact of the original. In the description, Paliughi notes that the piece is “[a] take on William Blake’s awesome ‘Newton,’ where the scientist is shown hunched over with a compass, ignorant of the splendor around him as he measures and quantifies . . . kind of like me on the computer!” Whereas the piece contrasts splendor with the instrument of the scientist (the camera) and the object of inquiry (the cityscape beneath him), Paliughi admits the essential role of the instrument in creating the collage. Further, the collage works to disrupt normative conceptions of nature by throwing discrete elements together almost haphazardly: combining the choral textures found in Blake’s painting with cameras, starfish, moons, and visible bits of paper. Newton’s body is even more bizarre, with numerous hands and fi ngers that seem to grow from every part of his body. It is clear that the image incorporates a photograph of a nose to represent Newton’s foot, and the strange conglomeration of both these forms causes different questions about the rest of the body. Is that a back that connects Newton’s leg with the over-large hand positioned around his shoulder? Are we to suppose that the fi lm camera is a distinct object from his neck, or are they the same? The splendor that appears in the image is a monstrous yet beautiful growth that never conforms to the measure mentioned in the description. Blake’s compass is replaced with a film camera, and its status as a measurement is complicated by the fact that the artists are, themselves, taking photographic “measurements” and then juxtaposing them in odd and beautiful ways to create his collage. Is Paliughi a scientist? A filmmaker? An artist? Is the image a self-portrait? All of these possibilities seem reasonable. Inasmuch as the “splendor” Paliughi mentions is ignored, it is also being re-created by the film camera. The distinction between natural splendor and filmed artifice quickly breaks down by the very nature of the collage technique used to create the image. Ecologically, nature is a collage, and splendor is created by the physical and artistic interactions of many different creatures, objects, forces, and measurements. For us, it is this ecological aspect of the collage that makes the Newton image so compelling. Despite distinguishing between splendor and measurement in the description, Paliughi and missprecarious’s image throws so many heterogeneous elements together that it becomes difficult to distinguish the natural from the artificial or the measured from the unmeasured. All of them exist in the same precarious yet strangely alive ecological glob. A similar juxtaposition occurs in Karen Tregaskin’s “Eternity in a Grain of Sand”, a Blakean image celebrating the Hadron supercollider. Tregaskin mentions that there is something very Blakean about the idea that “once they get the protons spinning [in the Hadron collider] round and round, this huge amount of energy flying around 27 km of tunnels . . . there will still only be enough matter to fi ll one tiny, fi ne grain of sand.”

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Tregaskin is referencing a quote on Wikipedia, in a section that describes the operational challenges of the supercollider: Loss of only one ten-millionth part (10–7) of the [supercollider’s] beam is sufficient to quench a superconducting magnet, while the beam dump must absorb 362 (87 kilograms of TNT) for each of the two beams. These energies are carried by very little matter: under normal operating conditions (2,808 bunches per beam, 1.15 x 1011 protons per bunch), the beam pipes contain 1.0 x 109 gram of hydrogen, which, in standard conditions for temperature and pressure, would fi ll the volume of one grain of fi ne sand.

Figure 6.6 Karen Tregaskin. Eternity in a Grain of Sand. 2008. Digital image.

154 William Blake and the Digital Humanities The Hadron supercollider generates immense amounts of energy in order to propel particles to high speeds, with the purpose of creating effects that scientists can analyze in order to understand fundamental laws of physics. Specifically, they seek to fi nd or not fi nd the Higgs Boson: a hypothetical elementary particle that might explain why mass exists in the universe. The acceleration of these particles forms the beams mentioned in the quote earlier, and the “grain of sand” mentioned is the amount of hydrogen it takes to produce the particle beam—in this case, enough to fi ll a single grain. Whether Eternity, or simply knowledge of a fundamental particle that may or may not exist, emerges from the imagined grain is under question. Yet, the supercollider has been implicated in several strange events that could also be described as Blakean. Luis Sancho and Otto Rossler filed a lawsuit in 2008 to halt the supercollider before it was turned on. In an article for Harper’s Magazine, Sancho mentions that the supercollider could “produce two kinds of dark matter—black holes and strange, ultradense quark matter—that are extremely dangerous, as both have been theoretically proven to swallow in a chain reaction the entirety of Earth” (28). Sancho and Rossler engendered a good amount of public fear with their lawsuit, but popular and scientific imagination surrounding the supercollider was also magnified in November 3, 2009, when a baguette dropped by a bird caused the machine to overheat and shut down. Two scientists, Holger Nelson and Masao Ninomiya, interpreted the incident, and the string of events thwarting the continued search for the Hoggs Boson, as an ominous warning from the future. In “Search for Effect of Influence from Future in Large Hadron Collider”, Nelson and Ninomyia assert that “the potential production of a large number of Higgs particles at a certain future time would cause a prearrangement such that Higgs particle production can be avoided” (920). Nelson and Ninomiya’s article imagines a scenario in which a group of Higgs particles travel back through time and influence causation in the present, potentially causing periodical shutdown events of the Hadron. Tregaskin’s image combines these strange theories and mythologies surrounding the Hadron with the imagination of Blake to weld his poetic insight to the potential realities being uncovered by the supercollider. Perhaps most interestingly, the circular design of the compact muon solenoid (CMS) is visually compared with the rays of the sun and the helixes of a DNA sequence. Presumably, the visual comparison is meant to evoke a visual sense of enlightenment. More generally, the visual comparison explodes the distinction between nature and culture in much the same way as the quote. The machinic parts of the Hadron collider are the site for the display of massive physical forces meant to uncover fundamental questions about existence: the meaning of life wrapped up in DNA, the mysteries of knowledge highlighted by the rays themselves. Whereas the cartoony style of Tregaskin’s print is much more smooth and bound than the gelatinous blob of the collage, the tension and the history it evokes portray a world where machine becomes nature and birds time-travel.

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Both images present us with visions in which the strange and organic perspective of the machine creates startling effects in a world that we had previously thought could be defined with a clear separation between our social existence and the technologies and organisms surrounding us. Birds are suddenly seen as conscious defenders of the space-time continuum. Rocks and starfish blend seamlessly into the concrete and steel of the urban skyline. Flickr’s form of folksonomy and its reliance upon machine methods of distribution and networking bleed into Blake’s cultural representation, as well as our understanding of his connection to technology. Flickr “sees” William Blake as an apocalyptic inhuman algorithm mashing and remixing the forms of the past with the technology and natural ecologies of the present.

YOUTUBE AS ECOLOGY Folksonomy on Flickr collaborates with Blakean remediations networked on the site to construct a very different understanding of archiving: one focused on a reliance on machine editing, the search, and the tag rather than editorial policy or taxonomic control. Images persist on the site perpetually, and yet are more available the more people interact with them by manipulating, embedding, or retagging them in different contexts. Further, all of these actions are mediated by a machinic apparatus that is increasingly making editorial decisions about communication between human users. YouTube operates on similar principles, yet much of the critical work done on the site focuses almost exclusively on the dialectic between the individual and the capitalist ideologies that support YouTube’s apparatus. Jens Schöter criticizes YouTube for being a digital instantiation of postmodern capitalism, calling it “a mapping of collective scopophilic and invocatory desire, which can (and will) be exploited by the advertising and entertainment industries” (341). Michael Strangelove takes a more nuanced approach by suggesting that ideology “is never uncontested” and that YouTube “is a cultural field where we participate in ideologies and also express our resistance to domination” (16). Each of these accounts is essentially true, and yet neither fully accounts for the machinic influence of algorithmic editorial control or the tendencies of folksonomy to blur the line separating the natural from the cultural. In fact, the most interesting experiments using Blake’s work on YouTube have reflected on this emergent awareness, often invoking imagery similar to Blake’s in The First Book of Urizen, in which womb-like roofs, books, metal, branches, nerves, and organs are mixed together. Life in cataracts pourd down his cliffs The void shrunk the lymph into Nerves Wand’ring wide on the bosom of night And left a round globe of blood Trembling upon the void. (13.55–59; E77)

156 William Blake and the Digital Humanities Take, for example, RelioBS’s “Human Nature”, which juxtaposes lines from Blake’s “Human Abstract” written in the description of the video with animation from The Animatrix (2003) and music by Canadian band Olson. Of particular interest to “Human Nature” are the lines from Blake quoted in the description of the video that describe the “fruit of Deceit” and the tree of mystery that grows “in the Human Brain.” Trees and fruit are imagined as a nervous system and a maggot-infested heart, and these images coexist with sequences in which we see a close-up image of a damaged android or cyborg head and a woman who is beaten, revealing that she is in fact an android. The video illustrates some of the transformations occurring in both Urizen and “The Human Abstract”, as each questions the line separating the natural from the mechanical, or the embodied from the abstract. One scene in “Human Nature” includes a far distant shot establishing a giant mass grave of androids, with workers shoveling and throwing artificial corpses into the grave. Another focuses on a somewhat abstract representation of network cables and screens drifting down in a void. Still another visualizes an energy ball created by some anime goddess that fades into an MRI photograph of the human brain, then zooms into one of the neurons and makes the journey look like an electric cable or a the depiction of hyperspace in Star Wars—while we also see other tunnels branching off in different directions. Artifice is revealed beneath natural skin, the human body is visualized as an electric conductor, and human violence against artificial life is reminiscent of the genocides of the Nazis or the ethnic cleansing that occurred in the former Yugoslavia or Rwanda in the 1990s. Since The Animatrix was released in the early twenty-fi rst century, many of its viewers would naturally draw upon media photographs of ethnic cleansing when watching such scenes. Each of the visual images in the video reinforces a basic ambiguity involving the place of the human as a natural or artificial category. Are we, as the maggot scene seems to suggest, merely the product of parasites feeding upon whatever came before us? Are we dangerously oppressing new forms of life that are trying to make their own voices known? Is there a way to understand our culture, our bodies, and the ecologies we inhabit as part of the same overarching Latourian social process? “Human nature” reconfigures each of these visions into the same natural process: robots, mechanisms, and networks are just as natural as human beings, organs, and neural pathways. Intriguingly, some videos approach the question of artificiality by confronting directly the printed materiality of Blake’s work. Nuno Montiero’s “The Fall” showcases animated versions of Blake’s illuminations. By using animated versions of Blake, Montiero heightens the artificiality of the images. Each of them becomes a modular puzzle piece made to fit with pieces from other works in Blake’s oeuvre. The video punks Blake’s visual style, lifting specific illuminations from their poetic context, shuffling them, and making

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them fit in entirely new creative spaces. Visually, it is a remix of a similar film that Shelia Graber made for the Tate Gallery as part of its 1977 Blake exhibition. Instead of using, as the Tate Gallery did, Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, Montiero’s video features The Fall’s song “WB Lyrics” from the album The Unutterable Plus. The result is Blake’s archive as an animated music video, in which each specific work becomes another way to visually express the song. Especially interesting is the way the video treats Blake’s “The Ancient of Days” from the frontispiece to Europe. “The Fall” is a patchwork of still images animated to coincide with the beats and melodies found in its accompanying song, “WB Lyrics”. We’re introduced to several of Blake’s most popular illuminations as two-dimensional cutouts dancing within the three-dimensional video. Urizen, in the foregoing set of screen shots, looks more like a drummer than a god, as Montiero forces him to pound his compass down in synch with the music. By animating the images, Montiero also morphs different images into one another. One example in the video of this visual metamorphosis is a close-up of the fi nal print from Jerusalem, with God embracing Albion. This image changes into Jesus on the cross, with a mourner or celebrator mimicking Jesus’s pose beneath him. Finally, these figures shift into Blake’s Glad Day, in which—as many scholars have already noted—Da Vinci’s Vitrivian Man smashes out of the measurement that had previously bound him. The metamorphosis and animation of different Blakean visions engage in the stillness of the originals, frozen as they are on single pages of the illuminated books, but also dynamize them by using Blake’s own motion lines to heighten the sense of movement. The effect is alien and haunting, and adds another layer to the tension between artifice and nature already found in other YouTube videos referencing Blake’s work. The lyrics from the band The Fall, where Montiero gets his title for the YouTube video, underscore a fundamental trembling between different natural and cultural forms. Oh Citizens of London Enlarge thy countenance From the flaming wind hairs of thought In his forehead Cities, here, clash with facial expressions, thinking, flame, wind, and foreheads. When combined with the way motion lines are used by Montiero to complement his animation, the reference to thought as “flaming” and “wind hairs” emphasizes a connection between the physical world of nature and the social world of imagination and thought. The facial metaphors in the stanza enhance this odd conjunction, as Blake’s thought literally changes the physical features of the citizens of London—and, if we perhaps take the line of thinking even further—the concrete structures of London’s countenance itself.

158 William Blake and the Digital Humanities Blake inspires users on YouTube to open up alien worlds and embed his thoughts and images in new and strange physical spaces. In some cases, YouTube also gives opportunities for students to “punk” teachers of Blake. By “punk”, I’m referring to the idea that playing a popular joke can be called “punking”, a term associated most commonly with the hidden camera show “Punk’d”, hosted by Ashton Kutcher.4 “Art in Your Life—Final” documents the fi nal class of Aethelred Eldridge’s course on Blake. Eldridge has long been known as the founder of the Church of William Blake, which burned down in 2001. Eldridge spends much of his class time engaged in dramatic vocal readings of William Blake’s Milton, enacting Blake’s ideas and creating elaborate images based on Blake’s poetry. His fi rst AEthelgram, published in 1976, mentions that “Blake published to the Angels,” and urgently calls for the reconstruction of Jerusalem that “yet awhile, lies in ruins. And Hear again what will Be seen; The Serpent Temple writhing in the Dusty Clouds of Albion comes—through the invisible pricking up of Angelic ears must fail to catch the dronish Motor’s hum” (1). Eldridge has, unsurprisingly, been criticized by his students for the meaninglessness of his courses. In the video, a group of students records Eldridge in a church, his back turned towards the students, reading lines from Blake’s poem. Over the nine minutes, you can hear students snickering softly while shifting the camera position. The description of the video says that the fi nal of the course requires students to “[s]imply endure the madness of Aethelred Eldridge” and gives this description of his course: Just for a point of reference as to how officially out there this guy is, one of my buddies took one of his classes and for their fi nal exam they all had to drive out to a local park (Strounds Run) about 10 miles away. When the students got to the park, AE was mowing an enormous patch grass in the park with a hand mower. After eveyone [sic] signed the attendance sheet, he ordered the students to follow beyind him single fi le as he mowed. After about 5 minutes of the class following behind him, he told the student directly behind him to take the reins and keep mowing. Eldridge then proceeded to sprint back to his jeep and drive away at a high rate of speed, leaving the entire class walking behind one another as someone mowed away aimlessly. Apparently after 10 minutes of him having left, they all stopped and went home. No word as to the fate of the lawnmower, but if you signed the sheet you got an A. The comments section is fi lled with anecdotes surrounding Eldrige. One student mentioned that “he would SPRINT to the back of the lecture hall (wearing a burlap sack as a shirt, of course) and scream at the top of his lungs in student’s faces;” another discussed a fi nal in which Eldrige asked him to “take a rubber glove and stuff it” then “draw an eye on a ping pong ball and cut a hole in the palm of the rubber glove and position the ball so

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it was sticking out of the hole.” The student says that Eldridge told him that “we could run it over with our car for extra credit.” YouTube enables these audiences to reenact online some of the scenes in which Blake, too, became famous for his eccentricity. Recall, for instance, Robert Southey’s claim in 1830 that Blake was “so evidently insane, that the predominant feeling in conversing with him, or even looking at him, could only be sorrow and compassion” (qtd. in Bentley, Blake: The Critical Heritage 40), or Wordsworth’s exclamation upon looking at The Songs of Innocence and Experience that “[t]here is no doubt this poor man was mad” (qtd. in Bentley, Blake: The Critical Heritage 40). Considering these statements in light of the folksonomic theories we’ve uncovered in this chapter makes us wonder how “punking” teachers of Blake reconceptualizes the editorial theories of taxonomy. By uploading videos of Eldridge’s course to YouTube, these students are reinforcing and transmitting Blake’s authorial presence for their friends and future audiences who may have little to no interest in visiting The William Blake Archive. Videos taken by Eldridge’s students, and anecdotes related to his madness, become one of the mediums through which Blake’s work is transmitted to YouTube viewers. Is it true that the majority of Blake’s audience goes to sites like the Archive for their information about Blake? Or is there a much larger and distributed audience on sites like Flickr, Wikipedia, and YouTube who are, even now, reinventing what it means to read and relate to him?

SELECTING BLAKE The challenge of folksonomies and mechonomies to traditional understandings of the culture, along with their lines of connection between social and natural realms, radically transforms our understanding of adaptation and editing. Furthermore, this challenge reveals media production as an ecology in which editorial decisions are not made by individuals, but through a complicated process of seemingly random acts of selection. By decontextualizing Blake and placing his work into new spaces, media producers on Flickr, Wikipedia, and YouTube are helping Blake’s cultural influence survive an era in which digital technology is threatening older forms of communication. Authorial networks survive neither because of an innate genius that carries them through the ages nor because they are archived by academic critics who want to preserve the social text of the Romantic period. Blake is archived by billions of tiny acts of tagging, often by people and machines who don’t know Blake and could care less about his work. Most of these acts disappear or are drowned in the flood of information that circulates on the Internet. In other words, Blake survives because other actors invent new spaces for him by perceiving him differently. Levi Bryant, in a post on his blog Larval Subjects titled “Inventive Affect”, imagines a network model of evolutionary adaptation that invents

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“modes of sensibility and perception”, by which he means that “[p]erception doesn’t so much represent as invent through evolutionary processes.” For Bryant, an organism’s perceptive affects continually invent new forms of sensibility and reception. This invention happens at the species level, across different generations, and on an individual level. “In creatures like dogs, horses, octopi, certain types of computers, etc., inventive affects are not things that are simply ‘hard-wired’ and there from infancy (although there is this too). No. These passive affects, these forms of receptivity, are also acquired and invented over the course of the organisms life.” This means that there is no difference in kind between the biological process perceiving a new object and inventing a new way to represent that object in art. Every organism and species are continually inventing new ways to apprehend the environment around them, in conjunction with evolutionary needs for survival, and these inventions are just as much aesthetic as they are biological. Of course, Bryant’s reflections are based in large part upon Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution, where Bergson replaces the teleology sometimes associated with evolutionary adaptation with the idea that evolution “does not mark out a solitary route” but “takes directions without aiming at ends” and “remains inventive even in its adaptations” (58). More recently, Elizabeth Grosz has drawn upon Bergson to show how the body is “the ongoing provocation for inventive practice, for inventing and elaborating widely varying practices, for using organs and activities in unexpected and potentially expansive ways, for making art out of the body’s capacities and actions” (20). Natural selection illuminates one of those Blakean points of contact between an inventive scientific practice and an adaptive literary study: namely, that creativity is a flat plane that encompasses human art and genetic variation. Little wonder why Blake, according to Tristanne Connolly, “likens entering the text to entering the human body” (William 4). In the comments to Bryant’s post, Terence Blake wonders how this adaptive process impacts the concept of individual creativity or authorship, because it is probably “uncontroversial to say that ‘Freud’ was a particularly active nodal point in a collective intelligence,” considering the character of psychoanalysis as a group endeavor. But, he argues, thinking about Virginia Woolf as a collective intelligence might be another matter. Bryant responds that “Artists are invented by their work no less than modes of sensibility.” The response is particularly apt, because it refuses to subsume either the complex process of invention in a magical author or the quite unique inventions of Woolf in a primordial historical context. More broadly, however, consider how folksonomy makes visible the many different inventions occurring in the adaptation and remediation of literary authors. In as much as evolutionary adaptation presumes a form of invention that coincides with an organism’s survival needs in a specific environment, and which is (at least according to Bryant) mediated by selection, literary adaptation could also be imagined as a biological process whereby

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specific environments accept or reject attempts to invent new survival mechanisms. It would also help explain how, for example, a multimedia artist like William Blake survives online whereas other famous authors from the nineteenth century who are particularly wedded to print culture—say Felicia Hemans or Richard Marsh—have had a more difficult adaptive path. In the foregoing example, Blake’s imaginative erasure of the line between nature and culture provides a powerful connection to other media objects that may have obvious connection with Blake. One example this chapter pointed to was The Animatrix. Richard Dawkins’s account of a truly random process of adaptive mutation in The Blind Watchmaker helps us further develop a theory of literary adaptation that is non-teleological. Dawkins is responding to design and watchmaker arguments that presume intention and intelligence behind natural phenomena, because these phenomena seem to work so perfectly together. He illustrates the process of natural selection using the evolution of the eye as an example. Reducing it to its simplest form, at each one of the 1,000 steps (needed to evolve into an eye), mutation offered a number of alternatives, only one of which was favored because it offered survival. The 1,000 steps of evolution represent 1,000 successive choice points, at each of which most of the alternatives lead to death. [ . . . ] The wayside is littered with the dead bodies of the failures who took the wrong turning at each one of the 1,000 successive choice points. (313) In Dawkins’s vision, adaptation has no overarching purpose; it is simply a spontaneous response to one’s surrounding with no deeper meaning than a person correcting his or her balance in reaction to a shift in balance. The correction occurs at the genetic level, but it is—at its core—merely a reaction to a change in the environment. Selection weeds out those organisms that can’t react to the environment and leaves those who can. Dawkins’s vision of the littered dead marking the space of natural selection has analogues to what Margaret Cohen has called “the great unread”: the massive amount of literary books that simply disappeared in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 5 For every network like William Blake that survived, there are literary networks that have died and decomposed into the rubbish heap of the great unread. This disappearance has nothing to do with a deep insight into culture; rather it is merely an indicator of the ability of certain networks to adapt to innovations in the technology of communication and the political and social environments in which literature thrives. In fact, as we have argued in this chapter, technology and culture actually work together to provide different environments for adaptation. Adaptation marks an evolutionary space in which the environment allows some authors to remain in cultural memory, whereas others are forever erased. And the process of selection is supported by fans, material

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objects, and concepts that have—themselves—succumbed to death and decay. What would the size of the great unread look like if we expanded it to include all of the unpublished adaptations of other authors, fanfi ction, and live performances? Of course, the archival advances brought about by the rise of projects like the Wayback Machine, Linked Open Data, and GoogleBooks have drastically changed the way these processes of natural selection occur. As we have mentioned several times in this book, fi ltering and not preservation is the mechanism of survival. This reality becomes immediately apparent if we start a search for “William Blake” on YouTube and note the hundreds upon hundreds of individual videos, from lectures by random scholars to strange video projects created for undergraduate courses, VEVO-sponsored music videos of songs inspired by Blake, clips from fi lms that mention Blake, and uncanny “poem animations” featuring portraits of Blake whose lips have been animated to look like they are uttering the lines from one of his poems. YouTube archives the dead choice points of natural selection, while burying them in result page after result page. In all, fi fty search pages appear when I search for Blake—each one of them containing twenty-one videos. This adds up to about one thousand videos currently on YouTube that either mention or are inspired by Blake. On Flickr, this number is higher. There are over nine thousand individual images that are currently tagged “William Blake”. This does not include images that aren’t marked with both Blake’s fi rst and last name, nor does it include images that reference parts of his work without mentioning his name. Many of these images are archived versions of his illuminations, watercolors, and oils. But they also include successory posters that feature Blake quotes, artistic photoshopped images indebted to Blake’s visual imagination, visual recordings of pilgrimages to Blake’s grave, portraits of the indie band The William Blakes, an advertisement for Chesterfield’s 1780 William Blake Leather Couch, slideshows of the Blake project in Lambeth, and a series chronicling a tour of Blake’s images at the Tate. Each one of these mechonomic and folksonomic tags makes up one small part of an always emergent and ever-changing Blakean archive. This archive survives, or dies, according to the very real bodies that actually exist online—along with their ability (or inability) to transmit Blake’s ideas, his characters, and his biographies to different audiences, who may, in turn, tag, retweet, reblog, or otherwise pass on Blake to other audiences. As we saw in this chapter, Bridle’s question about tagging takes on an ontological significance if we take seriously the idea that the emergent Blakean ecosystem can exist without any taxonomic authorial intent or human editorial effort. Tagging enables the ecological network to fi nd new ways of referencing Blake’s work, fracturing yet also recombining the Blakean archive in strange and creative ways. If the New Aesthetic is focused on how the networking function of the Internet causes human beings to see things increasingly through the perspective of machines, then the New Aesthetic that

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Blake practices is one in which his own authorial persona as a folksonomy perceives and acts through GPS maps, YouTube and Flickr tags, algorithmic bots avoiding flame wars. All of these mechanical objects are, in turn, maintained by a process of selection or tagging that preserves some form of cultural expression while forever annihilating others.

Coda Dust and Self-Annihilation “[I’ll] shew you alive/ The world, when every particle of dust breathes forth its joy.” –Blake, Europe: A Prophecy (3.17–18; E60)

We have shown in this book that possibilities for Blake scholarship exist beyond the historical or close-reading apparatuses that have traditionally been employed by scholars. As our studies of the cultural analytics of the Blakean Twitter archive, the brief look into Blakean communities on Flickr and YouTube, and our philosophical reflection on Blake as an ontological network reveal, folksonomy has increasingly determined how Blake is understood online. We’d like to conclude by pausing for a moment over Blake’s remains, and use these remains to consider the place of literary studies in an age that is becoming increasingly dominated by the digital humanities. Radical Blake: Afterlife and Influence from 1827 begins by considering the industry that formed over stories of Blake’s death, and the book critiques the tendency of many historical scholars to “‘nail’ Blake’s death to material conditions,” comparing them to “the attempts to meticulously score through and hammer out copperplates in a reenactment of Blake’s working practice” as symptomatic of a hardheaded, scientific, materialism (13).1 One object of their critique is the article “Blake’s Death”, written by Joseph Viscomi and medical doctor Lane Robson in 1996. For all of their hardheaded materialist approach, Viscomi and Robson also venture into speculation when describing the fi nal moments of Blake’s life. After describing the development of abnormal coronary arteries and lungs, and a slow development of pulmonary edema for which he’d probably spend days in a semi-comatose state, they describe A believable scenario [where] Blake went to sleep, his breathing slowed, an episode of apnea developed, and he never breathed again. Alternately, Blake went to sleep, his breathing slowed, his blood oxygen level decreased, he experienced a heart attack, and he never woke up. (44) The article is a particularly powerful collaborative piece, because we are treated to arguments surrounding the medical details of their diagnosis along with the poetic irony that the chemicals used in Blake’s etching process might have contributed to his death. Yet the medical knowledge on

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display here is not without its own limits. Viscomi and Robson argue that Blake suffered from a form of irritable bowel disease, which sparked primary sclerosing cholangitis, leading to biliary cirrhosis, pulmonary edema, and ultimately death. Whereas it is certainly possible that acute copper intoxication resulting from the chemicals Blake used in etching could have contributed to IBD and PSC, there is no real understanding—even sixteen years after the Viscomi and Robson article was published—about what precisely causes autoimmune illnesses like the ones the authors claim Blake suffered from. 2 For us, this means that the Viscomi and Robson article is as much a product of imagination and speculation as it is an example of scientific materialism. As we have argued throughout this work, Blake’s work and memory demand some kind of creative response—even one that incorporates scientific and medical knowledge. Viscomi and Robson’s article also represents a turning point in critical appreciation of Blake as an author, for Viscomi and Robson argue that the same chemicals that led Blake to his death also created the plates that would form the material base for his illuminated books. What would it mean to give agency to the chemicals that helped to physically make Blake’s copper plates and the antibodies whose attacks on Blake’s colon and liver caused his illnesses, thereby impacting his creative process? Attacks of IBD frequently cause people to end work days early, but they also create a cycle of flares and remissions that impact the rhythm—if not the content—of work that people do. If we take Latour’s concept of the actant seriously, we should acknowledge all of the actors that—consciously, unconsciously, positively, or negatively—contributed and continue to contribute to the creative work associated with William Blake. Phillip Pullman’s young adult trilogy His Dark Materials is instructive in this case, because it acts as an allegory of the fate of the author in the wake of the digital humanities and sketches an alternate form of materialism that theorizes connection without the mediation of a single divine force. Pullman’s story is explicitly a rewriting of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, except that Milton’s God is transformed into a figure identified as “the Authority”: an angel who seizes control of the Universe simply because no one else is around to contest him. The Authority is represented on Earth by The Majestarium, which represses religious blasphemy and bears a large resemblance to the Catholic Church. Whereas Milton is the central inspiration for Pullman’s story, Blake plays a large part as well—not only in the frequent description of the authority as “the ancient of days”, but also in the several lines quoted from Blake’s work, the name Lyra (taken most probably from the title character of Blake’s poem “Little Girl Lost”), and the fact that Pullman recognizes Blake in his list of “three debts that need acknowledgement above all the rest” at the end of the third novel (1101). 3 Pullman’s trilogy ultimately espouses a spiritual atheism. This message is particularly embodied in the figure of Mary, a nun who gives up her religion when she starts researching particle physics, falls in love with one of her lab

166 William Blake and the Digital Humanities partners, and begins to feel guilty for indulging in physical pleasures. She asks herself, “Will anyone be the better for making me miserable?” And the answer came back—no. No one will. There’s no one to fret, no one to condemn, no one to bless me for being a good girl, no one to punish me for being wicked. Heaven was empty. I didn’t know whether God had died, or whether there had never been a God at all. Either way I felt free and lonely and I didn’t know whether I was happy or unhappy, but something strange had happened. (874) The emptiness Mary feels is reflected in Pullman’s description of the Authority. The central revelation of His Dark Materials is that the Authority has grown old and been replaced by a regent named Metatron. Metatron traps the Authority within a crystal, saps him of his youth and life, and consolidates power over humanity by forming laws with the help of the Majesterium. Lyra and Will discover the Authority on their trek through the world of the dead and decide to free him from his crystal prison. Pullman describes the Authority as “demented and powerless” who can “only weep and mumble in fear and pain and misery” (848). As Lyra and Will decide to free him from the crystal, they describe the Authority feeling “as light as paper” and say that he “would have followed them [Lyra and Will] anywhere [ . . . ] responding to simple kindness like a flower to the sun” (848). As soon as the Authority leaves the crystal, however, there is “nothing to stop the wind from damaging him, and to their dismay his form began to loosen and dissolve” (848). The Authority’s sheer frailty is only one of several stunning reversals of accepted theology. Angels are often described in the trilogy as weaker than human beings. Metatron, presumably the most powerful force in existence, is overtaken by Lord Asriel and his wife, Mrs. Coulter. In Pullman’s Universe, God can exist only as a tyrant, a feeble old man, or nothing at all. Pullman fully understands the difficulties of living with an atheist outlook. Mary ponders the loneliness of a world without divinity several times in the trilogy. When Lyra asks her if she misses God, Mary replies, “what I miss most is the sense of being connected to the whole of the universe” (875). This feeling remains with Mary in the next paragraph, when she describes feeling “loose and free and light, in a universe without purpose” (878). Even though Mary desires connection, Pullman shows that the connection promised by religion is a lie concocted by Metatron to maintain power. But he also contrasts this illusion with a more subtle and vulnerable form of connection found in the flows of what Pullman calls Dust. Pullman gets his notion of Dust from the Bible, a source he readily admits influences him. In an interview with Donna Freitas, Pullman associates Dust with the divine and calls our relationship with it a “mutually dependent one”. Whereas Dust is a “physical analog of everything that is consciousness”, Pullman sees its divinity as a form of dependence. “[W]e

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are each dependent on the other. Without us, Dust will dwindle away; without Dust, we will dwindle away.” In The Amber Spyglass, Mary sees an example of Dust’s dependency and interconnection. She notices that Dust is escaping, like a flood, out of the many windows to different dimensions throughout her world; yet she also notices that clouds, trees, and other phenomena are also trying to hold Dust back. “They were trying to put some barriers up against the terrible stream: wind, moon, clouds, leaves, grass, all those lovely things were crying out and hurling themselves into the struggle to keep the shadow particles in this universe, which they had so enriched. Matter loved Dust. It didn’t want to see it go” (880). Pullman in His Dark Materials admittedly anthropomorphizes matter, seeing it as alive, in love, and struggling. But Dust also forms a powerful metaphor for understanding a literary form of production divorced from the author as its single originator. Jane Bennett has advocated for what she calls a “strategic anthropomorphism”, and, in an interview with Peter Gratton on the blog Philosophy in a Time of Error, argues that “it’s a mistake to allow ‘mechanism’ to serve as a generalizable or all-purpose model for natural systems.” Likewise, it’s a mistake for literary critics to allow “discourse” and “history” to explain everything that occurs within a literary system. All too often literary criticism separates the study of authors and their culture from the many material objects that transmit a work to audiences. As Susan Matthews argues in her article on Blake and His Dark Materials, “Blake’s writing is not worried by large numbers” and Pullman uses this inclusive sense in Blake’s work to reimagine an “infi nite microscope” of matter that can “restore a sense of wonder at the created world” (215; 220). Matthews sees Pullman’s ontological argument fitting nicely with Blake’s understanding of a much wider audience for his work. We have shown in this book how a materialist approach to Blake includes both a larger understanding of his audience and a broader, collaborative understanding of artistic creativity. Because everyone and everything is composed of Dust, everything participates in Pullman’s lyrical description of the joy of being. Likewise, authority or authorship is ontologically distributed in His Dark Materials, only to be retroactively and violently attributed to a single group or group of figures after they seize power. In a more general sense, authorship is a designation that imagines clearly impossible forms of communication that border on telepathy, especially if that communication is with a single individual. Blake scholars are often guilty of this kind of imagined telepathy. Joseph Viscomi’s Blake and the Idea of the Book, for example, imagines entering “more deeply into Blake’s studio and mind than any work before it” (xxv). Pullman’s Authority, like the author, usurps the energy of a multitude who—in turn—sustains him. All that is left are distributed fan communities that fantasize having a telepathic relationship with a figure they imagine to exist. Without the parasitic influence of the Authority, Pullman shows us that only an ill-defi ned form of connection remains.

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DIGITAL LABOR AND ANNIHILATION This question of connection has many resonances in the postmodern capitalist world where the digital humanities exists. The digital humanities’ emphasis on building, its ethic of collaboration, and its attention to alternate forms of academic labor align it with the opportunities and challenges of postmodern capitalism. Natalia Cecire has rightly identified digital humanities work with “the ‘postindustrial’ feminization of labor,” specifically “the rise of contingent and modular work, interstitiality, the hegemony of immaterial labor, the monetization of affect.” And she has suggested that the digital humanities “is also the subdiscipline best positioned to effect change in that social form.” The challenges facing the digital humanities are well articulated by the three different forces of postmodern capitalism Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri articulate in their Empire trilogy: Empire, Multitude, and the Commonwealth. Empire is the postnationalist form of authority that works to extract money and power from the work of transnational associations. Hardt and Negri mention the World Trade Organization as an example. The multitude is a loose grouping that both sustains the parasitic Empire and works against it, a form of association that has little to do with traditional nationalisms. The Commonwealth, fi nally, is a concept that Hardt and Negri propose as an alternative to the false dichotomy of public and private space. Whereas public space denotes space set aside by the nation-state for a specific group of people, the common focuses on aspects of “social production that are necessary for social interaction and further production, such as knowledges, languages, codes, information, affects [in addition to] the practices of interaction, care, and cohabitation in a common world” (Commonwealth viii). The challenge, for Hardt and Negri, is for the multitude to build the common, apart from the comfort of the nation-state, and use it to contest the power of Empire. Pullman’s inclusion of Blake into a networked form of authorship associated with Dust’s sense of interconnection allows us to also consider how Blake might be used to change the culture of postindustrial labor, create a common space for the digital humanities, and to attempt to envision what place—if any—literary studies has in the future of the academy. Matt Kirschenbaum and Wendy Chun have already articulated some methods for reimagining the machinic labor of computation in ways that contest the screen essentialism that permeates thinking about new media.4 Kirschenbaum’s Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination devotes a chapter to what he calls a “grammatology of the hard drive”, which uncovers some of the essential mechanisms governing computational logic. Chun calls the idea of the black box a form of what she terms “sourcery”, which obfuscates the material function of computers and fetishizes software to the detriment of more complicated forms of understanding computational relationships. In each, an attempt is made to understand the labor of the digital humanities as existing not simply through human relationships,

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but between the hidden material mechanisms that transmit information and ideology. More importantly, however, the digital humanities is struggling to fi nd alternative forms of academic labor that contest the guild logic of tenure and yet also maintain a stable form of intellectual freedom. Some academics align themselves with what Bethany Nowviskie calls “alternateacademic careers” or “#altac”, and call for universities to recognize the labor that is hidden from much of the academic community under service expectations.5 Others call for an end of ignoring the willfully hidden plight of adjunct labor especially because, at least in English departments, they teach the majority of students who take classes. Finally, unconferences like THATCamp and Culture Hack Day seek to strike down divisions between academic, service, public, and private sectors by illustrating what kinds of work can emerge when collaboration becomes a priority.6 The digital humanities is positioned in the same place as the multitude with regard to the funding structures of academia: the field is in a unique place to form a common, interdisciplinary, and alternate-academic space that welcomes isolated and oppressed adjuncts who have been stranded by uncaring or ignorant departments. Yet the digital humanities also has the potential to make labor even more invisible. Undergraduates are becoming increasingly part of the scholarship that drives digital humanities projects, and yet they are also in danger of becoming second-class researchers as better-known scholars are more able to secure grants and receive credit for their work. It is difficult to imagine what place literary studies has in this new media and labor ecology. Elizabeth Cornell, in a recent post on HASTAC, laments that “[s]ometimes I think my dissertation on modern American literature has been a pointless waste of my time, particularly when I’m told that I really should know about algorithms cryptography, and so on.” She says that, on the other hand, “I am a much more analytical, imaginative, and knowledgeable person than I was before I started my MA almost ten years ago.” As we argued in earlier chapters, literary studies is uniquely poised to teach the traditions and histories of creativity in ways that other humanities fields—history, sociology—cannot. In order for the multitude to create the common, it needs to encourage creativity and be able to construct democratic spaces where creativity flourishes, a point made by Hardt and Negri in Commonwealth when they discuss the fact that “[c]ontemporary economists talk a lot about creativity, in sectors such as design, branding, specialized industries, fashion, and the culture industries, but generally neglect the fact that the creativity of biopolitical labor requires an open and dynamic egalitarian culture with constant cultural flows and mixtures” (148). What is required for democracy, Hardt and Negri offer, is an approach to creativity that ceaselessly mixes genders, races, identities, classes, and spaces—yet does so in a way that is always mindful of inequities and exploitations that can often be invisible. The digital humanities can, and should, provide this egalitarian space while also encouraging members inspired by literary

170 William Blake and the Digital Humanities expression to apply their skills in making that space more conducive to biopolitical, ontological, and digital creativity. The digital humanities can also help creativity break free of newer forms of privatization that take advantage of digital media to consolidate their economic and political power. In their most recent Kindle single, Declaration, for example, Hardt and Negri articulate “the mediatized” as a figure that is subject to the unending cycle of labor on the Internet. They ask whether it might be possible that “in their voluntary communication and expression, in their blogging and web-browsing and social media practices, people are contributing to instead of contesting repressive forces?”7 Declaration imagines mediatization as a form of subjectification in which participation is required and huge media outlets transform the living information of the multitude into the dead information of Facebook feeds and likes. Hardt and Negri’s analysis pinpoints several of the political stakes of the digital humanities in a globalized world.8 In the second chapter, they argue that people should become unmediatized, meaning not “ceas[ing] to interact with media” but changing our relationship to media. They list the new mobility offered by the Internet, imagining “swarm[ing] like insects,” “follow[ing] new pathways,” and “com[ing] together in new patterns and constellations”; and they identify using media as new tools for re-creating the self, by “ceas[ing] to be individual and constitut[ing] ourselves in relation to others, opening ourselves to a common language.” Finally, they list “Twitter, Facebook, and more generally the Internet” as “vehicles of experimentation with democratic and multitudinary governance.” Hardt and Negri see digital technology as a tool that can serve one of three masters: the public defi ned by the nation-state; the corporation defined by capitalist privatization; or the commonwealth defined by the multitude. We agree that the utopian commonwealth space Hardt and Negri identify in their fi nal book is a powerful image of what new possibilities could be enabled by the use of new technology to enable collaborative creativity. And yet we also feel that Hardt and Negri’s vision falls short of embracing a common that exists beyond the human social sphere. They cite, for example, Marx’s lyrical description of labor “freed from private property,” by suggesting that this state “engages all our senses and capacities, in short, all our ‘human relations to the world’,” and further identifies this description of labor as an “expanded form, crossing all the domains of life” suggesting that these “bodies can never be eclipsed and subordinated to any transcendent measure or power.” Yet, the human remains as a transcendent power that haunts their Marxist analysis of digital media. Marx’s celebration and conceptualization of labor depends upon a distinction between the human and the tool or the machine. In Capital, for example, he discusses how the machine dehumanizes labor by reducing people to worthless money. The whole system of capitalist production is based on the fact that the workman sells his labour-power as a commodity. Division of labor

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specialises this labor-power, by reducing it to the skill in handling a particular tool. So soon as the handling of the tool becomes the work of a machine, then, with the use-value, the exchange-value too, of the workman’s labor vanishes; the workman becomes unsaleable, like paper money thrown out of currency by legal enactment. That portion of the working class, thus by machinery rendered superfluous, i.e., no longer immediately necessary for the self-expansion of capital, either goes to the wall in the unequal contest of the old handicrafts and manufacturers with machinery, or else floods all the more easily accessible branches of industry, swamps the labor market, and sinks the price of labour-power below its value. (464) Of course, the distinction Marx makes between the craft and the good produced by mass manufacturer is important—and Blake critics like Morris Eaves have shown how Blake himself eschewed the mass-produced culture of printing and art for the individualized and artistic culture of craftsmanship.9 But we can also see that Marx is using the machine as something that separates the handcrafted industries from the mass-produced ones. Free labor thus takes on an organic and humanist character, whereas the tool and the machine represent the regularity and surplus value of capitalism. The challenge for constructing a Blakean account of labor in the digital humanities lies in refusing older industrial critiques of mechanized labor, in which the human and the organic are seen as ontologically prior to the machine and the tool. Blakean digital humanities must embrace, on the other hand, a networked understanding of creativity that includes humans, animals, insects, plants, and machines. Instead of swarming like insects, why can’t we be swarming insects? We might turn, for example, to Jussi Parikka’s account in Insect Media as a guiding metaphor for the development of technocapitalist systems. In his chapter on the film Tecknolust (2002), Parikka imagines desire as a mutating micropolitics that “not merely imitat[es] some animal or becom[es] an insect or a technological organism but individuating assemblages of insects, animals, technologies, sexuality” (194). Ian Bogost’s Alien Phenomenology also provides a different image of non-human labor. His chapter critiquing the social realism of the television show The Wire asks whether we can “even imagine a dramatic serial that delves deeply into the compression heat of a diesel engine combustion chamber, or the manner by which corn and sugar additives increase the alcoholic content of malt, or the dissolution of heroin in water atop the concave surface of a spoon, as The Wire does for the social and psychological motivations of junkies and drug dealers” (115). The fact that such a realism is difficult to imagine, Bogost argues, means simply that we need to expand our imaginative and creative faculties to embrace new forms of narrative. And, we would add, a failure to imagine non-human forms of labor means that we need a broader understanding of how creativity works, along with conceptualizing the political stakes of different categories of laborers: human and non-human alike.

172 William Blake and the Digital Humanities But where does this networked, decentralized form of labor leave literary studies—a field that has been traditionally characterized by hierarchy, individuality, and humanity? What would a post-humanist literary studies look like that recognizes the efforts of network tools like traceroutes to the creative production of The Rossetti Archive?10 We’d like to suggest that literary studies should embrace the awareness of network culture and the elision of difference between human and non-human actors to engage in what Blake called self-annihilation. For our purposes, self-annihilation is a literal dissolution of the self and the ego, driving a creative reorganization of past realities and developing a greater awareness of the networks that work together to engage the creative process. Self-annihilation is bold. It recognizes the past, but also doesn’t allow memory to dominate and corral inspiration. It tunnels through institutional, epistemological, and ontological divisions—mixing and assembling new conglomerations and associations. It has the courage to recognize the power of new technologies, and uses those technologies to imagine new ways to live and exist. It has the openness to investigate creative expression in the most unlikely places: in students, in machines, in animals, and plants, and in inanimate objects. And it applies everything to transform the mundane world into a utopian space: what Blake called Golgonooza, Beulah, Eternity. Milton’s speech about Eternal Death and self-annihilation in Blake’s Milton shows how self-annihilation rejects a nostalgic past for a past that is enmeshed in the networks of the present.11 To bathe in the Waters of Life; to wash off the Not Human I come in Self-annihilation & the grandeur of Inspiration To cast off Rational Demonstration by Faith in the Saviour To cast off the rotten rags of Memory by Inspiration To cast off Bacon, Locke & Newton from Albions covering To take off his fi lthy garments, & clothe him with Imagination To cast aside from Poetry, all that is not Inspiration That it no longer shall dare to mock with the aspersion of Madness Cast on the Inspired, by the tame high finisher of paltry Blots, Indefi nite, or paltry Rhymes; or paltry Harmonies. (41.1–10; E142) Casting off Blake’s own humanism, we can see how self-annihilation uses imagination to break through memory, poetic contrivances, and mockery. Blake’s poetic repetition bangs at the walls of selfhood, annihilating everything that limits creativity and transformation. On one level, this process works poetically, by announcing a dissolution of the author and by embracing more complicated readings of Blake’s poem by different audiences. But the ontological nature of self-annihilation is more powerful than poetry or writing. It assembles different modalities and materialities, from the rags of memory to the blots of paltry rhymes. Each object lines up in a flat ontology that annihilates the primacy of both addresser and addressee, opening old substances to new possibility.

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Further, Blake’s understanding of self-annihilation does not simply engage in it as an intellectual exercise. Mark Lussier shows that the process of self-annihilation bridges the worlds of thought and existence by “imping[ing] upon the fundamental relationship of mind and matter, because mental concepts exit the mind to assume concrete institutional bodies that impact corporeal existence, thereby compromising the primary ecological state of the primal subject’s unity” (Dharma 135). Self-annihilation has a multimodal ecology that moves between creative expression and concrete reality, individual and communal existence, and being and nothingness by taking advantage of any potential relationship as a means to dispel isolation. Finally, ontology is transformed from being unbreakable and inevitable and becomes yet another cloth that can be removed or exchanged, what we would call a modality. Blake urges us to cast off filthy, useless garments and be clothed with imaginative ones that encourage and cultivate our creative faculties. To be sure, self-annihilation does not mean wholesale destruction. Tim Morton has demonstrated how Western conceptions of Buddhist emptiness turn upon a fundamental misunderstanding of emptiness as nothingness fi rst exercised by Samuel Turner in Allgemine Historie and by Hegel in the Logic. Instead of nihilism, Morton explains that Buddhist emptiness sees reality as “beyond conceptualization—including the subtle conceptualization that holds on to that idea, in whatever form, as a thing to be known” (“Hegel”). This misconceptualization of emptiness and self-annihilation as destruction and nothingness, for us, reveals an obsession with conceptualizing origins that extends into notions of disciplinarity. Each thing must have an independent value, and that value must be assigned to an author, a creator, a movement, or an organization in order to have meaning. Blake’s understanding of self-annihilation, on the other hand, actively sees reception as an ongoing process that liberates both Milton and himself. As Lussier mentions, Blake establishes “a commitment to annihilation even at the position of authorship, and immediately precedes Milton’s full-plate grappling with the Urizenic element of selfhood” (Dharma 131). Blake’s understanding of self-annihilation embraces reception and collaboration as fundamental elements of creativity and intellectual production. What would it mean to annihilate literary studies? In a response to the growing popularity of the digital humanities at the Modern Language Association, Stanley Fish wrote a column in The New York Times wondering whether DH would be “the next new thing”, and reports that “[o] nce again, as in the early theory days, a new language is confidently and prophetically spoken by those in the know, while those who are not are made to feel ignorant, passed by, left behind, old.” Yet Ted Underwood’s response to Fish’s column suggests that the change is, at once, more and less radical. He argues that those who practice the digital humanities do not want to get embroiled in yet another institutional or disciplinary battle, and do not make claims about saving literary studies from anything. “But,”

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he argues, “reframing digital humanities in that way [as a movement to revitalize literary studies] would obscure what’s actually interesting and new about this moment—new opportunities for collaboration both across disciplines and across the boundary between the conceptual work of academia and the infrastructure that supports and tacitly shapes it.” Underwood’s comment here underscores the possibility that DH might not save literary studies at all; in fact, it might hasten its demise. The opportunities for sharing afforded by social media are changing how scholars communicate with one another, and this phenomenon will—no doubt—change the content of work emerging within academia. If, for example, researchers can collaborate with hundreds of scholars bridging nineteenth-century publishing, biology, and engineering, why continue to publish the same old monographs that focus exclusively on the literary merit of David Copperfield? Will literary studies survive these collaborations? Should it? Of course, literary studies has been obsessed with its own demise since at least the rise of a middle-class reading public in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and deconstruction and cultural studies are—themselves—only one of the more recent attempts to “revive” literary studies and show its relevance in a world that has grown skeptical about the value of an advanced degree in the humanities.12 John Guillory, Gerald Graff, Gauri Viswanathan, Gayatri Spivak, and Michael Berube—among others—have discussed the histories and potential roles for literary studies in the future.13 We only wish to note here the way that Underwood’s notion of collaboration complicates the idea of literary study as a single disciplinary enterprise, and that the digital humanities—in particular—shifts the question of disciplinary survival into another register: that of constructing new knowledges from the different types of relationships we can create in and around university campuses with the help of digital technology. We argue that the self-annihilation of literary studies brings with it new opportunities for experimenting with different kinds of disciplinary organizations: from, as we’ve seen in this book, connections to the public, to interdisciplinary assemblages, to the very real way that students contribute to disciplinary knowledge in classroom environments. Instead of engaging in the same salvific and mournful language employed by Fish and others to describe the emergence of the digital humanities, let’s see what happens when we take seriously and perhaps accelerate the demise of literary studies. Let’s cast off the filthy garments of our areas and see what hybrid beasts emerge from the interinstitutional collaboration of hundreds of different specialists working together to distant read and topic model millions of texts. Let’s read all published books that still exist from the nineteenth century, and stop attempting to make broad sweeping historical arguments based upon six or seven novels. Let’s remix and transform literature into experimental multimedia installations, where we could smell the streets of Nantucket before Ishmael boards the Pequot in Melville’s Moby Dick, or—as Hugh Crawford does with his students at

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Georgia Tech—make Henry David Thoreau’s cabin from Walden.14 Let’s stop reading about the building of Golgonooza in Jerusalem, and start actually building it.

THE REPUBLIC OF BLAKE Pullman’s characterization of a planned “Republic of Heaven” in the fi nal portion of His Dark Materials offers a powerful allegory to encourage this type of networked creative thinking in literary studies. Perhaps the most radical departure Pullman makes from Milton’s Paradise Lost is his description of heaven. Whereas the Majesterium promises a utopian afterlife for those members who follow their edicts and laws, Will and Lyra discover that the afterlife is actually a limbo where everyone who has died—righteous and evil alike—cohabit in misery. Lyra’s friend Roger, who is trapped in this limbo, describes their suffering: “[T]his is a terrible place, Lyra, it’s hopeless, there’s no change when you’re dead, and them bird things . . . You know what they do? They wait till you’re resting—you can’t never sleep properly, you just sort of doze—and they come up quiet beside you and they whisper all the bad things you ever did when you was alive, so you can’t forget ‘em” (774). Heaven is patrolled by harpies who torment the ghosts with threatening visions of Hell if they do not constantly show remorse. Pullman’s limbo is a kind of neoliberal Hell, where the promises of utopia and freedom are carefully managed into a prison of compromise that is held together by fears of being sent to a worse place. In the theatre version of His Dark Materials by Nicholas Wright, the angel Bathalmos compares heaven to a “prison camp” and the allusions to famous concentration camps— from Dachau to (anachronistically) Abu Ghraib—are hard to miss (157). The harpies in Heaven feed off of the misery they inflict on the ghosts, and are satiated by their own self-aggrandizing. When Lyra promises the ghosts a better place if they escape this limbo, one of the harpies replies, “from now on, we shall hold nothing back. We shall hurt and defile and tear and rend every ghost that comes through, and we shall send them mad with fear and remorse and self-hatred. This is a wasteland now; we shall make it a hell!” (912). Pullman’s limbo has resonances of the limbo featured in the fi rst book of Milton’s Paradise Lost, but it emphasizes that both heaven and hell must be built. The Republic of Heaven is Lord Asriel’s vision of an egalitarian space existing in the middle of everyday life because, as Will paraphrases him, “for us there isn’t any elsewhere” (907). This rejection of the “elsewhere” of heaven as an afterlife is repeated by Mary when she views the flood of Dust and the clouds springing up to protect Dust from leaking out into the multiverse. “Had she thought there was no meaning in life, no purpose, when God had gone?” Mary ponders, “Yes, she had thought that. ‘Well, there is now,’ she said aloud, and again louder: “There is now!” The Republic of

176 William Blake and the Digital Humanities Heaven, like Blake’s promise to “not cease from Mental Fight [ . . . ] Till we have built Jerusalem/In Englands green & pleasant Land”, emphasizes the here and the now along with the sense that participation, rather than simple righteousness or even critical awareness, determines who is free and who isn’t—who, in other words, collaborates to create the common, or languishes in a Hell of their own making. Yet, Pullman also expands the ontological meaning of participation in a particularly beautiful passage spoken by the ghost of a martyr in Limbo who realizes that oblivion is not nothing: Even if it means oblivion, my friends, I’ll welcome it, because it won’t be nothing. We’ll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves: we’ll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze; we’ll be glittering in the dew under the stars and the moon out there in the physical world, which is our true home and always was. (783) Pullman’s republic expands Hardt and Negri’s notion of commonwealth into what Levi Bryant has called a “democracy of objects”, which “attempts to think the being of objects unshackled from the gaze of humans in their being-for-themselves” (Democracy 19). Whereas Bryant is careful to point out that his argument “is not a political thesis that all objects ought to participate in human affairs,” Pullman’s construction of the Republic of Heaven is clearly a political argument in that it involves living (and dying) together. The common space Pullman imagines includes people, animals, plants, objects, and concepts: all of those things that collectively construct the world around us. The Republic of Heaven, in this way, recognizes an increasing awareness of networked and non-human agency bequeathed by the digital humanities. Yet it also illustrates the creative struggle that is involved in constructing and managing a collaborative and egalitarian space, where objects can mix in productive and novel ways. Pullman also makes us realize that William Blake—along with other actors that are human, non-human, living, and dead—is a republic, a democracy, a commonwealth, and an assemblage of Dust. If literary studies can, or should, survive its current incarnation as a curriculum based upon cultural and critical awareness, it needs to incorporate creativity and participation as a central part of its study. Alternatively, a creative attitude would allow literary studies to risk oblivion and take an active role in reconfiguring itself for a truly digital age. Should we, for example, seed corporate America with humanities PhDs in an attempt to challenge the current distinction between public and private space? Could gestures towards a creative commonwealth emerge out of open access to scholarship and data? The difficulty is that we do not know what the future brings. Whatever this future looks like, we should take an active and participatory role in crafting our republic, else we run the risk of lingering in the limbo

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of budget cuts, publishing and job crises, and casualized labor. We do not mean to suggest that a single messiah will emerge to lead us out of crisis and into a utopia of digital technology. Blake and Pullman have shown us that no messiah like this exists. Rather, we have to take up mental fight, marshal our creative faculties, and build a new republic that leverages the energy of our creative multitude.

Notes

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION 1. The walks are captured on Wright’s blog “L_O_S” (http://timwright.typepad. com/l_o_s/). 2. For more information on British psychogeography, see Sinclair’s Downriver, Slow Chocolate Autopsy, Lights Out for the Territory, and Liquid City. Alan Moore’s From Hell includes a chapter on psychogeography, and Voice of the Fire and the upcoming Jerusalem are both inspired by psychogeography. Moorcock’s Mother London is a classic of psychogeographical fiction. For criticism on psychogeography, see Julian Wolfreys’s Writing London trilogy and his article “London Khorographic.” Jason Whittaker has an article on Blake’s relationship to psychogeography called “‘Walking thro’ Eternity’: Blake’s Psychogeography and Other Pedestrian Practices.”. From Hell has inspired its own series of digitally mediated psychogeographic walks. Jason Mical, for example, wrote a post about his “From Hell Chapter Four Walking and Riding Tour” on his blog “A Yankee in London,” in which he photographed the contemporary versions of the locations mentioned in Chapter 4 of the graphic novel. 3. See Hockey’s “The History of Humanities Computing” for a more detailed history of the digital humanities and Busa’s role in creating computational scholarly approaches to the humanities. 4. More recent scholarly journals, like Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular and Southern Spaces, utilize the unique technology of online publishing to encourage scholarship in multiple modalities. Vectors features a dynamic and interactive approach to content. Southern Spaces creates a multimedia platform for their scholarship, placing images and text alongside video and audio fi les. 5. See also the MLA’s “Guidelines for Evaluating Work with Digital Media”,, which points out that “humanists are not only adopting new technologies but are also actively collaborating with technical experts in fields such as image processing, document encoding, and information science.” The guidelines say that “digital work should be evaluated in light of these rapidly changing institutional and professional contexts” and that departments must “recognize that traditional notions of scholarship, teaching, and service are being redefi ned.” 6. Ruskin and Morris were both influenced by Blake, and we argue that the values of craft and community Gauntlett identifies with Ruskin and Morris are also present in Blake’s work. According to Mark Douglas, Morris and Blake both “denounced the [ . . . ] ways in which specialization and the division of labour are antithetical to their multidisciplinary approaches to cultural

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7.

8.

9.

10.

Notes creativity” (122). Although, as Colin Trodd has argued, Ruskin rejected Blake’s “fragmented self” as an “aesthetic failure,” which Ruskin saw “as a “self-devouring imagination unable to express any sense of concrete, lived experience or record the true order of things,” Ruskin’s The Seven Lamps of Architecture also numbered Blake among (along with J. M. W Turner) the “two [geniuses] in the present century, two magnificent and mighty” (“Emanations” 42, qtd in William Blake: The Critical Heritage 83). Trodd also has a more comprehensive account of Blake’s growing status in the Arts and Crafts community of the late nineteenth century in Visions of Blake: William Blake in the Art World 1830–1930, where he shows how Victorian publications like The Century Guild Hobby Horse saw Blake as “a cultural prototype for the integrated artist-worker-designer” and “an entrepreneureditor of overlapping projects involving different forms of graphic, typographic, and literary creation” (160). In an essay for PMLA, Makdisi notes the unproductive alignment of Blake with the Romantic Period, saying that he [Blake] is in many senses closer to T.S. Eliot or Wilfred Owen than to Charlotte Smith or John Keats; visually, he has far more in common with Pablo Picasso and Edvard Munch than with Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds (the president of the Royal Academy, whom he so ferociously despised); aurally, he is close, on the one hand, to Beethoven (an almost exact contemporary) and, on the other hand, to John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, who ought, at face value, to have nothing to do with him; philosophically, he is far closer to Benedict de Spinoza than to his contemporaries Jeremy Bentham and James Mill; and politically he is the ally of Gerrar Winstanley rather than of Tom Paine (319). For detailed analyses of Blake’s influence on the twentieth century, see Shirley Dent and Jason Whittaker, Radical Blake; Roger Whitson and Donald Ault (ed.), William Blake and Visual Culture; Edward Larrissy, Blake and Modern Literature; Steve Clark and Jason Whittaker (ed.), Blake, Modernity, and Popular Culture; Steve Clark and Masashi Suzuki (ed.), The Reception of Blake in the Orient; and Jason Whittaker, Tristanne Connolly, and Steve Clark (ed.), Blake 2.0: William Blake in Twentieth-Century Art, Music, and Culture. For an account of Blake merchandise and “The Blake Brand” on Etsy and Threadless, in addition to what Blake means to crafting, see Roger Whitson’s “Blakesy: Crafting and Branding Blake Online.” The creative aspect of zoamorphosis is key. We agree with Claire Colebrook’s distinction between a good digitalism where “the distinction and articulation that allow sense to be expressed in a system proceed from a feeling and responsive hand” (34). Good digitalism embraces community and creativity and proceeds from a space of irreduction. The image, the blog post, or the tweet is, in other words, not reducible to the graphs and charts we may produce to run analytics or even to its relationship with Blake—but always exceeds any analysis we place upon it. A bad digitalism, or what Colebrook calls “digital in a fallen sense,” is “a series of digits that merely counts and quantifies” in which “the text or body that emerges has no life of its own and is a pale, spectral, or lifeless copy” (34). Bad digitalism, by the way, also includes cultural analyses of Blake that uses his work to disregard computational or mathematical analysis. For more information on Colebrook’s reading of Blake’s digitalism, see her book Blake, Deleuzian Aesthetics, and the Digital. For a discussion around the introduction of the term “zoamorphosis”, see Jason Whittaker, “Zoamorphosis: 250 Years of Blake Mutations”, in ReEnvisioning Blake.

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11. This is why Hayles’s notion of “medium specific materiality” is absolutely essential but also not sufficient to understand Blakean creativity. Hayles argues that “the materiality of an embodied text is the interaction of its physical characteristics with its signifying strategies” (277). Blakean materiality extends beyond the physical characteristics of a single text or a single author and embraces “network materiality,” in which the emergent ecology of media is defi ned by physical materiality, signifying strategies, and also its relation to a larger network of associations. See “Translating Media: Why We Should Rethink Textuality” for Hayles’s characterization of medium specific materiality. For an account of network materiality, see “Digital Blake 2.0” in Blake 2.0: William Blake in Twentieth Century Art, Music and Culture. 12. See Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting for more on McLuhan and Parker’s reading of Blake’s poem “Tyger.” Bryant’s post “Weird Media” on Larval Subjects contains more of his actor-inflected analysis of McLuhan. 13. Mark Amerika’s remixthebook is an example of the kind of creative remixing Deleuze imagined in several of his texts. Amerika argues that creative remix is the only way to really respond to the pace at which critical theory is being communicated. In fact, theory is increasingly testing the boundaries of the university, as Amerika targets his book to “those who find it necessary to continually invent the avant-garde strategies of the future and do not see a disconnect between the various role-playing figures they may find themselves becoming, including but not limited to some rare combination of artist, theorist, digital humanities scholar, DIY expert, and/or new media entrepreneur” (xiv). 14. Mole also mentions literary celebrities like “David Garrick, Laurence Sterne, Sarah Siddens, Edmund Kean, Letitia Landon, Mary Robinson, Anne Yeardsley, Thomas Moore, Leigh Hunt, and Walter Scott, among many others” as participating in either embracing or rejecting early discourses about celebrity (156). 15. Bucklow’s account of Blake stands in opposition to someone like Thomas Streeter, who in The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet compares Blake to Internet pioneer Ted Nelson. For Streeter, Blake and Nelson were more interested in the construction of a persona than in the commercial success of their work. “Blake’s appeal is inextricable from the reader’s developing sense of Blake as a person. In reading Blake, [ . . . ] one becomes accustomed to him the same way one might develop a fondness over time for the quirks of a loved one” (62). We suggest that such views of Blake might be more prevalent in people who limit themselves to reading Blake, rather than a participatory version of Blake found in craft circles—in which the act of creating is always engaged in mental fight with Blake’s persona. 16. Making is Connecting, for example, shows how uncovering the DIY culture of the internet lends new insights into the everyday creativity of the nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts movement in Britain. 17. “Deformance and Interpretation,” in Chapter 4 of Jerome McGann and Lisa Samuel’s Radiant Textuality, fi rst establishes deformance as a process that all critical work partakes, and which creatively deforms a text in order to produce an interpretation. Steven Ramsay extends deformance to algorithmic approaches to literary study in Reading Machines. 18. The “great outdoors” alludes to Quentin Meillassoux’s critique of correlationism in Beyond Finitude, where he argues that philosophers have abandoned “the absolute outside of pre-critical thinkers” (7). By “pre-critical” he refers to philosophers before Kant that did not focus on the human-world correlation.

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NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 1. Viscomi draws attention to the fact that the periods when Blake worked most intensively on his prophetic books were often precisely those periods when he had few commissions (Blake 153–57). 2. G. E. Bentley, Jr. offers some understanding of just how much Blake’s reception suffered during his lifetime by making the comparison between Blake’s self-distribution and that for the work of William Muir in “Blake . . . Had No Quaritch.” 3. Bryant critiques Deleuze’s concept of the virtual for divorcing it from specific objects. The virtual, for Bryant, is always the virtual of an object. But objects are, themselves, composed of other objects. For Blake, this means that there is an object “Blake,” which includes both the powers and potentialities of Blake and his manifestations. Yet all of these manifestations are, themselves, objects that have their own virtualities and manifestations. The power of Blake as mediated by Rossetti’s editorial intervention, for example, does not share the same virtuality as Blake himself. In other words, it is not reducible to its relation with Blake, but can be read entirely independently of him. Bryant’s critique can be contrasted with Steven Shaviro’s account, who, in Without Criteria, reads Deleuze’s virtual as “the impelling force, or the principle, that allows each actual entity to appear (to manifest itself) as something new, something without precedence or resemblance, something that has never existed in the universe in quite that way before” (34, emphases mine). 4. Dorfman 103. She points out there was one exception to this rule, “Gwin of Norway” from Poetical Sketches, which had been reprinted as an extract by Cunningham. 5. See, for example, Bentley’s comment that “Rossetti unashamedly shook up Blake’s verse to make it more conventional in structure, and his texts are of dubious accuracy, but their historical importance is enormous” (William Blake 16). 6. Dorfman describes The Works of William Blake as “one of the most idiosyncratic and poorly put-together among literary critiques”, “albeit brilliant and revolutionary” (192). Likewise, in William Blake: The Critical Heritage, Bentley remarks that the “very great historical importance of their edition, however, was much mitigated by the occasional grotesque inaccuracy of the text and the unreliability of the lithographs” (16), and in Blake Books: “Ellis & Yeats were clearly learned about occult mysteries and secret societies, but their enthusiasm outran their knowledge, and their works should not be approached without a carefully digested understanding of the less speculative if less inspired Blake books” (30). Despite, or even because of, this enthusiasm, however, Larrissy is still able to remark that it “is not an exaggeration to say that Yeats was one of the fi rst serious scholars of Blake” (37), and Dorfman agrees that whatever their other failings, Ellis and Yeats at last laid to rest any serious notion that Blake’s ideas were mad rather than simply difficult. 7. Unfortunately, the continued existence of Concordance online demonstrates some of the most obvious vagaries of online archiving as opposed to print: whereas the original book may not be readily available, the online version at http://www.english.uga.edu/Blake_Concordance operates only erratically, sometimes displaying a 404 Not Found error to the visitor. 8. Hilton’s reference to Flash in his essay on “Golgonooza Text” is indicative of the trials that face any putative futurologist when considering the technological possibilities open to the formation of an archive of Blake’s works in the digital sphere. When Adobe purchased Macromedia (and thus Flash) in

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2005, the consolidation of what were then two giants of content authoring software into one company appeared to remove any possible barriers to the rapid extension of Flash as the de facto standard for multimedia production online. After Apple’s rather controversial decision to forgo Flash on the iOS system used on iPhones and iPads, with a developer license from 2010 actually forbidding third-party development using Flash, Flash now looks increasingly vulnerable compared with developments in HTML 5.0, and in a decade’s time Hilton’s predictions may elicit a response of bemused puzzlement among readers who have never heard of this software.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2 1. A good summary of the early critical reception of “The Tyger” is provided by Morton D. Paley, “Tyger of Wrath”, PMLA 81.7 (1966): 540–51, whereas Steven Vine offers a clear summary of more recent work in William Blake (London: British Council/Northcote House, 2007). 2. And this reader at least is immensely glad that Blake did spend so much time revising his poem. The substitution of “And did he smile his work to see” for the line “What the shoulder what the knee” (N108) must count as one of the most fortunate replacements made in the history of English literature. 3. According to Roger Clarke (1997), he moved to the UK specifically to live in the country of Blake. 4. See Christopher Bucklow’s observations that when composing The Four Zoas, Blake may have literally not understood the inspiration of his own words while writing and that the “process of gradual revelation may have come on rereading a text written only the night previously—but often it was a text written some years before” (cited in Whittaker 2012a, 218).

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3 1. Fitch dates 1916 as the fi rst performance. 2. This topic is discussed further in “Mental Figure, Corporeal War and the Righteous Dub: The Struggle for ‘Jerusalem’, 1979–2009,” as well as a forthcoming chapter, “Albion’s Spectre: Building the New Jerusalem”, in the book Mysticism, Myth and Celtic Identity. See also Shirley Dent’s “‘Thou Readst White Where I Read Black’: William Blake, the Hymn ‘Jerusalem’, and the Far Right” in Re-envisioning Blake.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4 1. See Spivak, Death of a Discipline for more of Spivak’s argument that “[i]f we are serious about advanced instruction in Comparative Literature, we have to ask the question of the formation of collectivities without necessarily prefabricated contents” (26). 2. Wada’s essay “Blake’s Oriental Heterodoxy: Yanagi’s Reception of Blake” chronicles the publication of the Japanese scholar Yanagi’s 1914 book William Blake. 3. Cathy Davidson’s Now You See It, for example, argues that “kids should be learning critical thinking, innovation, creativity, and problem solving, all of the skills one can build upon and mesh with the skills of others.” Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future demonstrates

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4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

Notes that “the largest gains (in employment in the past ten years) have been in jobs that require ‘people skills and emotional intelligence’ [ . . . ] and ‘imagination and creativity’” (246). Willis Harman and Howard Rheingold’s Higher Creativity: Liberating the Unconscious for Breakthrough Insights has suggested that creativity is a fundamental skill to acquire in a world facing increasingly complex problems. “Hope seems to lie,” they argue, “in beginning to seek new creative solutions, new approaches and breakthroughs for the global dilemmas we now face” (xxiii). W. J. T. Mitchell’s Blake’s Composite Art is the fi rst, and perhaps best, source on Blake’s multidmodality. Mitchell suggests that Blake’s originality rests in the way he “reshapes the venerable doctrines of pictoralism, ut pictora poesis, and the sister arts into principles of a new form” (xvi). As a composite art, Mitchell shows how Blake created a complex dialectic between visual and verbal modalities in which one sometimes illustrated, complemented, contradicted, or was at war with the other. Georgia Tech’s WOVEN curriculum draws upon Iowa State University’s WOVE (written, oral, visual, and electronic) program, as well as the work of Gunther Kress and Carey Jewitt. The Iowa State University web page about WOVE argues that it prepares students to “communicate with expertise in multiple settings and with multiple media.” Kress’s Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication calls multimodality “the normal state of human communication” and demonstrates multimodal analysis by looking at a traffic sign designed to get drivers to enter a parking lot of a supermarket: Using three modes in one sign—writing and image and colour as well—has real benefits. Each mode does a specific thing: image shows what takes too long to read, and writing names what would be difficult to show. Colour is used to highlight specific aspects of the overall message. Without that specific division of semiotic labour, the sign, quite simply, would not work. (1) See the introduction to Jewitt’s The Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis for a useful overview of the interdisciplinary nature of multimodal communication analysis as a “field of application” (2). For textbooks on multimodal composition, see the work of Cheryl E. Ball and Kristin Arola, specifically Visualizing Composition and their forthcoming work with Jennifer Sheppard Writer/Designer: A Guide to Making Multimodal Projects. Tumblr is a blogging platform designed specifically for using images. Users are also able to “reblog”, meaning repost a specific blog entry that they fi nd interesting on their own Tumblr site. Different Tumblr sites have different themes—each with specific fonts, color schemes, and layouts—so the look of a post that has been reblogged might differ significantly depending on the theme used. Sid Meier’s Civilization series of games allows players to help form and direct the course of a specific civilization across the centuries by controlling buildings that are built, economic policies, military campaigns, etc. History teachers have used the game to teach and study larger historical trends. Lyn Lord of Kimball Union Academy in New Hampshire, for example, has made Civilization an essential part of her high school history class for the past ten years. Whereas she admits that Civilization does not always accurately portray history, she argues in an interview with the Patrick Feng on blog TheElderGeek.com that “[i]t’s less about historical events and more about process.” N. Katherine Hayles calls diff use attention “hyper attention” and defi nes it as “switching focus rapidly between different tasks, preferring multiple

Notes

9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

185

information streams, seeking a high level of stimulation, and having a low tolerance for boredom” (187). See her article “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes” for an extended distinction between hyper attention and deep attention, including the benefits of each. See Mark Sample’s series of articles on ProfHacker for an account on the demise of TwapperKeeper and alternatives for archiving tweets and for a link to Hawsky’s Google Spreadsheet formula. API refers to “application programming interface”, and is a protocol for determining what information from a specific web site can be shared with other applications. In this case, Twitter originally allowed its data to be archived on other sites and then revoked that privilege, causing the TwapperKeeper service to become useless. You can fi nd the code for Twap on Turnbull’s Github site under the username “Streamweaver.” Turchin’s work has drawn criticism from a variety of disciplines. Massimo Pigliucci, a philosophy professor at CUNY, has argued that: Pattern discovery is of course crucial, but Turchin himself admits that “the connection between population dynamics and instability is indirect, mediated by the long-term eff ects of population growth on social structures,” going on to list a good number of interacting causes that may underlie the pattern he uncovered. But how is one going to test a multi-causal, multi-level hypothesis with a chronic paucity of comparable data? Again, the situation is similar to the discussions among paleontologists about what causes mass extinctions, where people disagree even on the number of such events during earth’s history, and where the number of occurrences is barely suffi cient to reach statistical signifi cance as a pattern, let alone to provide enough discriminatory power among complex causal hypotheses. Pigliucci’s argument is well taken, and shows how pattern discovery doesn’t solve every historical problem. My point is simply that cliodynamics allows us to understand how computation could be applied to creative thinking, not whether the computational programs used by Turchin actually deliver predictable historical patterns. See Riede’s article “Blake’s Milton: On Membership in the Church of Paul” for more information about Reide’s hypothesis. See Bauerlein’s book The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefi es Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone under 30) for his argument that “the vast majority of high school and college are far less accomplished and engaged” due to the ubiquity of distractions from digital media.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5 1. See our discussion of Jenkins’s book Textual Poachers in the introduction for a more thorough explaination of the act of poaching. 2. As there are a great many Blakes on Twitter, the searches for Blake were restricted to “William Blake”, and similarly “Wordsworth” would frequently return false positives, in the form of a software application in particular, in contrast to “William Wordsworth”. Byron, Coleridge, and Keats could all sufficiently function as sole search terms, although “Shelley” was more likely to return Mary Shelley, and so the search terms used were “Percy/Percy Bysshe/P B Shelley”.

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NOTES TO CHAPTER 6 1. Lussier’s article also mentions the referencing of Blake among popular science textbooks dealing with quantum mechanics. The list is long, but Lussier shows how Blake’s work is used to explain scientific concepts in Anthony Zee’s Fearful Symmetry: The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics, Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics, and James Gleick’s Chaos, among many others. Lussier also compares sections of Blake’s Milton with the phenomenon of “quantum tunneling” in Romantic Dynamics. According to Lussier, “Blake’s poem narrates the poet Milton’s passages between two relatively flat sheets of spacetime through the agency of the vortex, which functions like a quantum bridge or wormhole that bores through the black hole of collapsed selfconsciousness, and his emergence into materiality to enact self-annihilation” (Dynamics 85). 2. Plotnitsky ultimately distinguishes Bohr and Blake by suggesting that the latter believes that vision is “capable of an infi nite reach,” whereas the former believed in the “irreducible inaccessibility of its [nature’s] ultimate constitution to human thought.” Plotnitsky’s account of Bohr and Blake, while noting these differences, nevertheless remains correlationist—in that both are invested in the relationship between human subjectivity and natural objectivity. 3. In “On Actor-Network Theory: A Few Clarifications”, Latour argues that actor networks are not social networks, which he argues are focused on “the social relations of individual human actors—their frequency, distribution, homogeneity, proximity,” whereas ANT is concerned with “extend[ing] the word actor—or actant—to non-human, non-individual entities.” Further, he suggests, ANT “does not wish to add social networks to social theory but to rebuild social theory out of networks.” I’d suggest that ANT as an intellectual movement is enabled by folksonomic forms of organizing information, especially as they transform traditional taxonomic editorial theories. 4. Punk’d ran from 2003–2005 and featured Kutcher playing pranks on various celebrities while taping them with a hidden camera. 5. Cohen briefly mentions the great unread when speaking about the primary sources she picked for her book The Sentimental Education of the Novel. Cohen mentions the problem of “charting a course through the vast number of books out there once one ventures into literature hors d’usage. With each book requiring so much labor to be rendered legible, the literary archaeologist has to give up any ambition to a thorough reconstruction of the past” (23). Franco Moretti develops Cohen’s term in “Conjectures on World Literature”, when he complains about people who talk about working on “‘West European narrative, etc. . . . ’” “Not really,” Moretti replies, “I work on its canonical fraction, which is not even one per cent of published literature. And again, some people have read more, but the point is that there are thirty thousand nineteenth-century British novels out there, forty, fi fty, sixty thousand—no one really knows, no one has read them, no one ever will.”

NOTES TO THE CODA 1. Viscomi and Robson’s article is written in response to Aileen Ward’s critique of Frederic Tatham’s “myth of the dying hero”, in which he described Blake’s death as “a prelude to the hymns of saints”, “an overture to the choir of heaven”, and “a chaunt for the response of angels” (Ward 14; Tatham 36).

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2. See, for example, Punchai Charatcharoenwitthaya and Keith Lindor’s 2006 article “Primary Sclerosing Cholangitis: Diagnosis and Management”, in which the authors admit that “the etiopathogenesis of PSC is poorly understood”, although they suggest that “PSC is believed to be an autoimmune disease” that is “mediated by immune dysregulation in patients with a genetic susceptibility” (75). The 1985 study cited by Viscomi and Robson is, however, regarded as clinically demonstrating that concentration of copper is increased in patients with PSC. Yet Viscomi and Robson are also careful to point out that their argument is not without controversy, saying that “[i]t is controversial whether chronic copper intoxication can cause or aggravate sclerosing cholangitis.” Whereas they cite “numerous reports of excess copper” and “several authors who speculate that excess copper might at least aggravate the condition,” they point out that “there is no data to prove or disprove the possible role of copper in sclerosing cholangitis.” Our argument is not to deny either a correlation or a causal relationship between copper and PSC, simply to show how imagination and speculation work in Viscomi and Robson’s article. 3. References come from the 2012 His Dark Materials Omnibus published by Knopf Books. 4. Nick Montfort defi nes screen essentialism as portraying the screen “as an essential aspect of all creative and communicative computing—a fi xture, perhaps even a basis, for new media.” Kirschenbaum and Chun show how this essentialism is complicated by the mechanisms of computing and the processes within the computer that contribute to meaning. 5. See Nowviskie’s collection alt-Academy: Alternate Careers for Academics on MediaCommons for more information about alternate academic careers. 6. See http://thatcamp.org and http://culturehackday.org to learn more about both unconferences. 7. A parallel account of the politics of computer networks comes from Alexander Galloway’s Protocol, in which he discusses decentralized power structures. Instead of a single node of power, which he identifies as Foucault’s model of the panopticon from Discipline and Punish, Galloway argues that decentralized power has “many hubs, each with its own array of dependent nodes. While several hubs exist, each with its own domain, no single zenith point exercizes control over all others” (31). Galloway’s collaboration with Eugene Thacker in The Exploit identifies with what hackers term “exploits” to challenge decentralized power structures. “Protocological struggles,” argue Galloway and Thacker, “do not center around changing existent technologies but instead involve discovering holes in existent technologies and projecting potential change through these holes” (81). 8. Interestingly, whereas Hardt and Negri published their book on Kindle, one of the electronic publishers currently verging on a monopoly, the book has also appeared for free on the document-sharing site Scribd. Whether Jernejpro is a pseudonym of Hardt and Negri, or whether they would agree with this action themselves, is unknown. But it perhaps points to the complicated process of contesting decentralized power structures that the authors mention in their books. 9. See Eaves’s “Blake and the Artistic Machine: An Essay in Decorum and Technology” for a broader reflection on Blake’s rejection of the mechanized assembly line practices of the art world during his day. 10. According to InetDaemon.com, a traceroute “is a network diagnostic tool originally written by Van Jacobson to determine whether routing problems exist on the network. Traceroute can be used to determine which IP packets are taking to get from your computer to the remote computer.” IP refers to

188

11.

12.

13.

14.

Notes “Internet protocol”, a set of rules that are applied to data, standardizing the language used in data moving from one computer to another and making it easier for both computers to understand what is happening. Roger Whitson’s “Applied Blake: Milton’s Response to Empire” has already associated Blake with Hardt and Negri’s conception of Empire, mostly to suggest that Blake should be considered as a useful figure for the future of communist militancy and to offer self-annihilation as a figure for understanding the power of Blake’s work in the context of biopower and globalization. See, for example, Jon Klancher’s The Making of English Reading Audiences, which illustrates the ambivalence Romantic authors showed to the emergent middle-class reading public. More recently, Andrew Bennett’s Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity, Lucy Newlyn’s Reading, Writing, and Romanticism, and Karsten Runge’s English Romantic Poets and Their Reading Audiences all illustrate how anxieties over obsolescence and death structured the reception of literature during the Romantic period and beyond. The critical literature about the history and presumed end of literary studies is, perhaps unsurprisingly, vast but Guillory’s Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, Graff ’s Professing Literature: An Institutional History, Viswanathan’s Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India, Spivak’s Death of a Discipline, and Berube’s The Employment of English: Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Studies are good places to start. See “Thoreau’s House” for more information about Crawford’s cabin assignment. One of Crawford’s students, Victor Lesniewski, notes on the site that the Walden project is searching for a greater understanding of Thoreau’s experience at Walden and of knowledge embodied in practices and processes. There is a case to be made for gaining perspective on the world—an additional context for meaning—through material practices. In our class’s case, this means going out and chopping down a tree. It means gaining fluency with an adze when squaring a timber. It means understanding that there is knowledge and intellect that cannot be represented through a graph, a lecture, or a college classroom; it is a tacit knowledge that can be achieved only through an interaction with the materiality of a tree, a tool, the world.

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Index

A abstract machines, 61–62, 63 algorithmic criticism, 120 Almond, David, 64 Amazon, 49–51, 129 Amerika, Mark, 181 Andrews, Maggie, 76–77 Animatrix, The, 156 Anya, Sienna, 152 Apple, 44, 48, 49–51, 183 Aquinas, Thomas, 3 archives, 31, 33–53 Arola, Kristin 184 Asimov, Isaac, 150 Astbury, Ian, 67 Attlee, Clement, 78 Auden, W. H., 115 Auerbach, Helen, 77 Augustine, 60 Ault, Donald, 11, 92, 180 Austin, J. L., 31 Ayer, A. J., 62 Ayers, Edward, 113

B Badiou, Alain, 61 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 126 Balfour, Ian, 5 Ball, Cheryl 184 Ballard, J. G., 69 Bantock, Granville Ransome, 65 Baulch, David, 11 BBC, the, 44 Beckford, William, 52 Beeching, H. C., 74 Bemand, Ed, 64 Bennett, Andrew, 188 Bennett, Jane, 12 Bennett, Tony, 116

Bentley, Jr., G. E., 14, 22, 30, 32, 38, 39–40, 42, 45, 52, 150, 159, 182 Bergson, Henri, 28, 160 Berners-Lee, Tim, 44 Berthel, D., 81 Bester, Alfred, 132 Binkley, Sam, 79–80 Birdsongs of the Mesozoic, 67 BitTorrent, 47 Blair, Tony, 78 Blake 2.0 Cloud, the, 19–21 Blake, Catherine, 8, 150 Blake Digital Text Project, the, 43–44 Blake Multimedia Project, the, 22, 44 Blake, Robert, 103 Blake, Terrence, 160 Blake, Tim, 85 Blake, William: “A Cradle Song”, 35; A Vision of the Last Judgement, 123; All Religions are One, 91, 99; America, A Prophecy, 15–16, 91; and branding, 5, 10; and collected editions, 33–43; and history, 99–105; and pedagogy, 91–114; and religion, 99–101; and science fiction, 149–50; and self-annihilation, 172–74; and techniques of printing, 26–28, 30, 93; Auguries of Innocence, 106, 123; death of, 164–65; Europe, A Prophecy, 91, 157, 164; For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise, 8; Glad Day, 157; global Blake, 129–37; God Blessing the Seventh Day, 138; “Holy Thursday”, 34; “Jerusalem”, 21, 22–23, 65, 72–90, 176; Jerusalem, The

206 Index Emanation of the Giant Albion, 6, 7, 15, 31, 37, 91, 94, 97, 103, 123–24, 125, 127, 131, 134–36, 157; “Let the brothels of Paris be opened”, 35; “Little Girl Lost”, 165; “London”, 1–2, 7, 15–18, 97; Milton, 23, 35, 37, 64, 69, 72–74, 75, 76, 91, 103–105, 129, 172; “My Pretty Rose Tree”, 108; Newton, 152; Notebook, 33, 49, 56–57, 123; Poetical Sketches, 22, 33, 34, 35, 40, 66, 182; Songs of Innocence and of Experience, 33, 34, 44, 65–67, 91, 99, 109, 123; The Book of Thel, 33, 36, 44, 66, 75; “The Crystal Cabinet”, 7, 67; “The Divine Image”, 109; The Everlasting Gospel, 35, 40, 41, 42; The [First] Book of Urizen, 7, 101–2, 103, 105, 107; “The Fly”, 131; The Four Zoas, 6–7, 8, 67, 91, 92, 123, 183; The French Revolution, 27; “The Garden of Love”, 108; “The Human Abstract”, 109, 156; “The Little Vagabond”, 127; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 5–6, 7, 44, 64, 91, 101, 102, 106, 123, 125–28; “The Phoenix to Mrs Butts”, 39; “The Poison Tree”, 35; “The Tyger”, 9–10, 21, 22, 34, 35, 52–71, 90, 97, 112–13, 115, 117–18, 128, 131–34; There is No Natural Religion, 91, 99; Tiriel, 36, 66; Vala, 37; Visions of the Daughters of Albion, 44, 124 Blakepunk, 150–51 Blincoe, Richard, 87 Bloom, Harold, 39,127 BNP, the, 89–90 Bogost, Ian, 171 Bolcom, William, 65 Bourdieu, Pierre, 80 Boyadjian, Hayg, 65 Bradbury, Ray, 22, 64 Branagh, Kenneth, 95 Bridges, Robert, 74, 77 Bridle, James, 24, 145, 148 Brin, Sergei, 141 British Library, the, 22 Britten, Benjamin, 65

Broglio, Ron, 11 Brown, Greg, 22, 67 Bruder, Helen, 108 Bryant, Chris, 134–35 Bryant, Levi, 9, 12, 28–29, 156–60, 176, 181 Bucklow, Christopher, 15, 181, 183 Buddhism, 101–102, 173 Burnett, Rebecca, 94 Burstall, Christopher, 57–58, 59, 115–18, 128–29 Busa, Roberto, 3 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 14, 94, 119, 121–23, 185

C C#, 15 Capra, Fritjof, 186 Carr, Nicholas, 96 Carroll, James, 76 Carter, Angela, 64 Cecire, Natalia, 168 celebrity studies, 14–15 Chan, Paul, 1 chaosthetics, 63–64 Chappelle, David, 143 Chariots of Fire, 79, 85–86 Chartier, Roger, 14, 30 Chatterjee, Madhusree, 130 Chaucer, Geoff rey, 8 Chevalier, Tracy, 54, 64 Chorbajian, John, 75 Chun, Wendy, 18, 168 Cicero, 72 citizen archivists, 47 Civilization III, 96 Clark, Steve, 5, 10, 180 Clarke, Roger, 183 cliodynamics, 103–105 Clough, A. H., 75 Cohen, Margaret, 24, 161, 186 Colebrook, Claire, 180 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 52, 121–22, 185 Collington, Austin, 75 Congreve, William, 14 Connolly, Tristanne, 100, 109, 160, 180 Connolly, William, 12 Cooper, L. Andrew, 94 copy-editing, 26, 33, 48–49 Cotton, John, 64–65 Cox, Richard, J., 47 Culler, Jonathan, 13

Index Culture Hack Day, 169 culture jamming, 78 Cunningham, Allan, 33, 52, 55, 56 Cunningham, Ward, 142

D Damon, S. Foster, 104 Daniels, William, 148–51 Davidson, Cathy, 92, 183 Davies, Keri, 30, 74, 79 Davies, Walford, 75, 76 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 157 Dawkins, Richard, 161 Dawson, Peter, 81 Dead Nine, 67 de Certeau, Michel, 116 DeLanda, Manuel, 12 Deleuze, Gilles, 11–12, 28, 31, 61, 182 Dent, R. J., 58–59 Dent, Shirley, 78, 90, 180, 183 Derrida, Jacques, 31 Dery, Mark, 124 DiCaprio, Leonardo, 134 Dickens, Charles, 52 Dickinson, Emily, 40 digital creativity, 92–94, 105–14 Dimock, Wai Chee, 116 Dorfman, Deborah, 22, 33, 34, 35–36, 42, 182 Dosoo, Korshi, 22, 67–68 Douglas, Mark, 179–80 Dürer, Albrecht, 68

E Eaves, Morris, 14, 21, 30, 33, 34, 45, 47, 48–49, 91, 171, 187 ebooks, 49–51 ecosystems, 29, 33, 43–51, 53, 70, 99–105, 155–59, 162 Eldridge, Aethelred, 158–59 Elgar, Edward, 75, 77–78, 87 Eliot, T. S., 50 Elliott, J. H., 84 Ellis, Edwin J., 22, 32, 36–37, 182 Emerson, Lake and Palmer, 72, 81, 85 Ennis, Garth, 64 EPUB, 50 Erdman, David V., 22, 26–27, 32 Essick, Robert, 14, 30, 33, 45, 74 Esterhammer, Angela, 126 Etsy, 5

F Facebook, 2, 20, 49, 93, 95, 148

207

Fall, The, 81, 87–89, 157 fandom and fan culture, 13, 14–15, 75, 140–41 Fat Les, 135 Fawcett, Millicent, 77 Fish, Stanley, 13, 22, 60–61, 173, 174 Fiske, John, 118 Fitch, Donald, 75–76, 77, 81, 183 Fitzpatrick, Kathleen, 144 flat ontologies. See ontologies Flickr, 2, 21, 24, 139, 148–55, 162, 164 Flash, 43, 182–83 FOAF, 147–48 folksonomies, 47, 63, 139, 141–48 Foucault, Michel, 31 Freitas, Donna, 166 Friends of William Blake, the, 1–2 Frye, Northrop, 106 Fuller, David, 42 Furgess, Dave, 86 Fuseli, Henry, 147 Fyfe, Paul, 93

G Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 13 Gaiman, Neil, 69 Galloway, Alexander, 187 gaming, 15 Gardner, John Linton, 75 Garte, Bernard Sidney, 75 Gauntlett, David, 4, 20 Gibson, Lorna, 76 Giddens, Anthony, 80 Gilchrist, Alexander, 21, 22, 32, 33–35, 36, 40, 55–56, 139 Gibbon, Dave, 64 Gleckner, Robert F., 39 Gleick, James, 186 Golgonooza, 43–44, 172, 175 Goode, Mike, 10, 115–17, 136 Google, 19, 43, 49–51, 129, 141–42, 145; Google Books, 162; Google Docs, 23, 98, 104–105; Google Maps, 1–2; PageRank, 141–42 Gosse, Kaylee, 109–110 Graber, Sheila, 157 Graff, Gerald, 174 Grafton, Peter, 167 Grant, John, 60, 91 Graves, Robert, 22, 57–63, 64, 115 Gray, Alan, 65 Greetham, David C., 30–31 Griffi n, Nick, 89–90

208

Index

Grosz, Elizabeth, 160 Guattari, Felix, 11, 31, 61 Guillory, John, 174 Gutenberg Parenthesis, the, 13–14, 28, 81

H Hadow, Grace, 77 Haggarty, Sarah, 126 Hall, Stuart, 115, 117–18 Halpin, Harry, 145–6 Hamner, Ronald, 84 Hancock, Charles, 110–13 Hardt, Michael, 168, 169, 170, 176, 187 Harman, Graham, 70, 118, 140, 150 Harper, Nick, 67 Harris, Thomas, 64 Harwood, Graham, 15–19 HASTAC, 169 Hayles, Katherine N., 46, 181, 184–85 Hayley, William, 7–8, 103 Hawsky, Martin, 98 Head, Pamelasara, 96 Herbert, Sydney, 84 Hill, Clarence S., 65 Hilton, Nelson, 33, 41, 43, 101–102, 182 Hinduism, 100–102 hipster memes, 111 Hirsch, E. D., 61 His Dark Materials, 165–67, 187 Hobey, Charles, 81 Hobson, Christopher Z., 136 Hockey, Susan, 3, 179 Hodgson, Brian, 102 Hoff man, Theodor, 65 Hoggart, Richard, 115 Homer, 72 homosexuality, 134–36 Horovitz, Michael, 64 Hubbard, Elbert, 126 Hungerford, Margaret Wolfe, 126 Hutcheon, Linda, 134 Huttentocher, J., 124 Huxley, Aldous, 127 Hypercard, 44 hypericonomy, 53

I iBook, 49–50 Ingarden, Roman, 13 Instagram, 151 iOS, 22

iPad, 50, 183 iPhone, 151, 183 I Press, 5 Irenaeus, 60 Iser, Wolfgang, 13 isonomy, 63, 54 iTunes, 20

J Jaffee, Robert David, 132 Jarman, Derek, 79 Jarmusch, Jim, 106, 116 Jauss, Hans Robert, 14 Java, 46 Jenkins, Henry, 8, 14–15, 74–75, 78, 95–96, 185 Jobs, Steve, 49, 51 Johnson, Joseph, 21 Johnson, Mary Lynn, 91, 139 Jones, Toby, 1–2 Jones, Trevor, 66 Jones, William, 100

K Kastner, Jeff rey, 1 Keats, John, 118, 121–23, 185 Keynes, Geoff rey, 32, 37, 38–41 Kindle, 50, 170 Kipling, Rudyard, 132 Kirkup, James, 134–35 Kirschenbaum, Matthew, 3–4, 168 kitsch, 78, 79–81 Klancher, Jon, 188 Kleinberg, J., 124 Kubrick, Stanley, 83 Kutcher, Ashton, 158, 186

L Labour Party, the, 78–79 Lamb, Charles, 52 Landow, George, 44 Langland, Paul, 138–39 Larrissy, Edward, 180, 182 Last Night of the Proms, 78, 86–87 Latour, Bruno, 18, 140–41, 186 Law, John, 70 Layar, 2 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 60 Leitch, Vincent B., 40 Leskovec, Jure, 124 Levi, Pierre, 8 Lindor, Keith, 187 Linnell, John, 32 Liu, Alan, 3

Index LOD, 146–48, 162 Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, The, 81–84 Lovecraft, H. P., 151 Lussier, Mark, 101–102, 119, 127, 139, 173, 186

M Makdisi, Saree, 5, 93–94, 180 Malken, Benjamin Heath, 33, 34, 52, 54–44, 56, 58 Manguel, Alberto, 13 Marcondes, Guilherme, 22, 69–70 Marsh, Richard, 161 Marshall, Kelli, 98 Martin, Regina, 98 Marx, Karl, 170–71 Marx, Steve, 44 Matthews, Susan, 167 McGann, Jerome, 26–27, 29–30, 33, 41, 140, 150, 281 McGhee, J. Alexander, 45 McKenzie, D. F., 29 McLaren, Malcolm, 85 McLuhan, Marshall, 8–11, 30, 181 mechonomies, 141–48 Mee, Jon, 126 Meier, Sid, 184 Melville, Herman, 174 Mephisto Waltz, 67 Mical, Jason, 179 Mignola, Mike, 68 Milton, John, 24, 60, 70, 72–73, 94, 104–105, 121, 165, 175 Minton, Phil, 66 Mitchell, Adrian, 57, 64, 66, 115 Mitchell, Robert, 11 Mitchell, W. J. T., 63, 89, 93, 184 Mole, Tom, 15 Montfort, Nick, 187 Montiero, Nuno, 156–67 Monty Python, 84 Moorcock, Michael, 2 Moore, Thomas, 100 Moore, Alan, 2, 64, 143, 179 Moreno, Oliver, 106–107 Moretti, Franco, 119, 123, 124, 125, 136, 186 Morris, William, 4, 179 Morrison, Jim, 127 Morton, Timothy, 12, 19, 101, 173 mulitmodality 93–99 Muir, William, 27, 36 Murdock, Graham, 117

209

N Negri, Antonio, 168, 169, 170, 176, 187 Nelson, Hugo, 154 Nelson, Ted, 181 New Aesthetic, the, 24, 141–55, 162–63 Newlyn, Lucy, 188 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 102 Nike, 127–28 Ninomiya, Masao, 154 Nowviskie, Bethany, 10, 168, 187 Nurmi, Martin K., 39, 56

O Occupy movement, the, 93, 98 O’Gorman, Marcel, 10, 11, 47–48, 53 Olson, 156 Ong, Walter, 126 ontology, 5–8, 12–13, 28, 30, 53, 71, 117, 167 open source, 48 Ostriker, Alicia, 22, 42 Ovid, 72 Oxford, Alex, 107–109

P P2P fi le sharing, 47 Page, Lawrence, 141 Paley, Morton D., 183 Palinghi, Nick, 152 Palmer, Samuel, 32, 60 Pannapacker, William, 4 Paradise Lost, 7, 165, 175 Parikka, Jussi, 171 Parker, Hayley, 8–11, 181 Parry, Hubert, 23, 74–81 Peake, Mervyn, 95 Peake, Richard, 95 Pegritz, Derek C. F., 150 Penner, Allen R., 82 People’s Guide to the Republican Convention, the, 1 Perl, 15–18 Perry, Lee “Scratch”, 86 Perseus Project, the, 3 Peters, Isabelle, 141 Pettit, Thomas, 13–14 Phillips, Michael, 56 Pierce, John B., 126 Pimsleur, Solomon, 65 Pink, Daniel, 92, 183–84 Pirate Bay, the, 47 Plato, 72, 100

210 Index pornography, 128 post-PC, 50 Poulet, Georges, 126 Prezi, 97 Priestley, Joseph, 100 Primal Scream, 86 Prys, Edmund, 75 psychogeography, 2 Pullman, Philip, 25, 165–67, 168, 175–77 punk, 157–58 Puttnam, David, 85 Python, 15

Q Quaritch, Bernard, 27, 36, 37 Quinney, Laura, 8, 131

R Raine, Kathleen, 61, 115 Ramsay, Stephen, 4, 120 Rascal, Dizzee, 131 Ray, John R., 135 RDF, 146–48 Reddit, 141 RelioBS, 156 Reynolds, Joshua, 8 Reznor, Trent, 86 Rheingold, Howard, 2, 92, 184 Richardson, Alan, 118–19 Richardson, Tony, 82–83 Richter, Hans, 78 Riede, David, 105, 185 Rifaterre, Michael, 13 Ripley, Wayne C., 29–30 Roberts, Carter S., 134 Robeson, Paul, 81 Robinson, Henry Crabb, 52 Robson, Lane, 164–65, 186, 187 Robu, Valentin, 145 Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, The, 146 Roeg, Nicholas, 83 Rossetti Archive, The, 3, 29, 45, 47, 171 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 33–36, 55–57, 58, 60, 139, 182 Rossetti, William Michael, 35–56, 56–67 Rossler, Otto, 154 royal wedding, 131 Ruegg, Bill, 11 Runge, Karsten, 188 Ruskin, John, 4, 179–80 Russell, Dave, 84

S Sample, Mark, 4, 25, 98, 185 Sampson, John, 30, 37 Samuel, Lisa, 181 Sancho, Luis, 154 Sanger, Larry, 142 Santa Cruz Group, the, 41 Santo, Avi, 144 Sargent, Malcolm, 78 Sauerberg, Lars, 13–14 Schreibman, Susan, 3 Schuchard, Marsha Keith, 128 Scott, W. Bell, 36 Scott, Walter, 118 Searle, John, 30, 37 SEO, 19 September 11 Digital Archive, The, 3 Severin, John, 64 Sex Pistols, The, 85 Shakespeare, William, 52, 73, 75, 90, 94, 108, 121, 125 Shaviro, Steven, 12, 182 Shelley, Mary, 95, 185 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 121–23, 185 Shepherd, Hana, 145 Shepherd, R. H., 34, 36, 37, 38, 56, 60 Shirakaba Group, the, 92 Siemens, Ray, 3 Sillitoe, Alan, 81–82 Silver, David, 98 Sinclair, Iain, 2, 79, 84, 179 Sloss, D. J., 38 smart mobs, 2 Smirnov, Dmitri, 65, 66 Smith, Doug, 44 Smith, Mark E., 87–89 Smith, William Russell, 75 Snart, Jason, 125–26 social media, 120–29, 139–40, 141–48; and co-production, 72–78, 89–90 Southey, Robert, 159 Spalding, Esperanza, 131 Spivak, Gayatri, 91, 174, 183 Stanford Humanities Center, 3 Star Wars, 156 Sterling, Bruce, 145 Stevenson, W. H., 42 Stewart, Mark, 86–87 Stiegler, Bernard, 54 Stommel, Jess, 98 Strauss, Richard, 157 Suff ragettes, the, 76–77 Suzuki, Masashi, 180

Index Swayne, Giles, 66 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 34, 36, 56 SXSW, 145

T Tangerine Dream, 54, 67 Tavener, John, 22, 54, 65, 66–67 TEI, 45 Test Dept, 72 text mining, 119–20, 130–31, 136–37 THATCamp, 168 Thatcher, Margaret, 85–86 Thelema, 22, 67 Thomson, Virgil Garnett, 75 Tregaskin, Karen, 152–54 Trodd, Colin, 180 Trump, Donald, 116 Trussler, John, 20, 92 Tumblr, 2, 95, 145, 184 Turchin, Peter, 23, 103, 185 Turnbull, Scott, 98–99 Turner, Dawson, 39 Turner, Samuel, 173 Twapper Keeper, 98–99, 185 Twitter, 2, 14, 19, 23–24, 93, 96–99, 119, 148, 164, 185; and data mining, 120–29 Tyagarajan, Tiger, 134 Tyndall, John, 89

U Underwood, Ted, 119, 173 Unsworth, John, 3, 46 user-generated content, 141

V Valentin, Andrezza, 69 Valley of the Shadow, The, 45 Van Gogh, Vincent, 59 Vaneigem, Raoul, 90 Vine, Steven, 183 Viscomi, Joseph, 14, 27–28, 30, 33, 45–46, 74, 125, 164–65, 182, 186, 187 Voting America, 113

211

Watkins, Peter, 83–84 Wayback Machine, the, 146–48, 162 Web 2.0, 19–21, 46 Weir, David, 7, 100 Welland, Colin, 85 Wells, H. G., 115 Westbrook, Michael, 66 Westbrook, Kate, 66 Whale, James, 95 Whitehead, Andrew North, 12 Whitson, Roger, 180, 181, 188 Whittaker, Jason, 5, 10, 78, 85, 179, 180 wide reading, 24 WikiWikiWeb, 142 Wikipedia, 21, 24, 139, 142–46, 153 wikis, 47 Wilkinson, J. J. G., 33 Willard, Nancy, 64 William Blake Archive, The, 22, 33, 41–42, 43, 44–49, 139, 159 William Blakes, the, 162 Witkin, Joel-Peter, 22, 67–69 Wolfreys, Julian 179 Women’s Institute, the, 76–77, 80, 84 Wooden, John, 126 Woods, Eldrick “Tiger”, 131–34 Woolf, Virginia, 160 Wordsworth, William, 15, 94, 119, 121–23, 185 WOVEN, 94–95, 184 Wright, Nicholas, 175 Wright, Tim, 1–2

X x-editing, 48–49 XML, 45

Y Yahoo!, 49 Yanagi, Soetsu, 92, 183 Yeats, W. B., 22, 32, 36–37, 182 Younghusband, Francis, 74, 76, 77 YouTube, 2, 14, 20, 21, 24, 139, 148, 155–59, 162, 164

W

Z

Wada, Ayako, 92, 183 Wales, Jimmy, 142 Wallis, J. P. R., 38 Walsh, John A., 47 Wanderer Online, The, 3

Zee, Anthony, 186 Zelazny, Roger, 64 ZEROUM, 69 zoamorphosis, 4, 5–8, 19, 180 Zuckerberg, Mark, 49