Babel Tower

Something I've been thinking a lot about lately is the state of academia as a microcosm for the state of culture at large. A big part of whats going on is the explosion of possible material to be studied. There has been an exponential curve of works published and research done and keeping up with it has been a rise in the complexity and extension of bibliographies and works cited portions of works published.
What his means is that it becomes a bigger and bigger task to figure out just what is going on with a given work. If I were a monk in the middle ages, academia consisted of Aristotle and commentaries on Aristotle, and later, Plato and commentaries on Plato. I am over-simplifying some, but not much. The entire compendium of Greek literature prior to Plato (that survived and was available to study) as well as everything in Latin from the same period (again, that survived and was available) was possible to consume (via reading) over the course of a lifetime. It was in fact possible to read everything that there was to talk about. And if you kept up with what was being published, you could probably ready every academic work that was making the rounds. It helped that only a tiny percentage of the population was involved in the academic structure (which was pretty much just the monasteries) and a even smaller portion of those folks were actually bothering to create new works. And again, over-simplifying for sure, but you can still go about reading every Greek tragedy and comedy and if you are serious about it, it shouldn't take you more than a year to get through all of them (the list really isn't all that long).
In any case (as what I'm saying above is a sort of idealization/exaggeration) the real point is that whatever the case was then, with the Renaissance you get a much bigger community producing a lot more material in every branch of culture. Mostly just because there were more people involved. And as populations expand, so do the numbers of painters, sculptors, playwrights, musicians, poets, philosophers, mathematicians, biologists, physicists, geologists, astronomers, architects, politicians, historians, and on and on, and this in turn gives rise to The Academic, whose job it is is to make sense of all of this outpouring of culture in one field or another, to organize and arrange it so that it can be taught. Canons are developed. This critical and meta-historical process in turn gives rise to new sciences, sociology, anthropology and psychology that had no place in the old system but grow up out of the academic world, parasitic of the critical and meta-historical work being done, these new sciences are studies of the movement of symbols, abstracting completely from anything encountered directly in the world.
Many of these fields begin to turn their interest both inward, onto themselves, and laterally, onto the other fields. Of course while all of them could never have been completely disentangled, this concentrated effort to put the tools of one field to use on another makes the tangles themselves apparent.
Somewhere along the line (a while back I suppose) the printing press gets set up all over the place, and the libraries explode. The cost to produce a record of a work drops considerably, and so copies and copies and copies are made. Transfer of information is facilitated, and recursion is encouraged.
The turn inward, the use of tools on the tools themselves, the recursive mode, produces strange effects. It starts small of course. Shakespeare has plays-within-plays. There are countless portraits of portrait painters. Philosophy questions its own questioning. This reaches a sort of fevered pitch near the end of the 19th century, as the recursive understanding that each academic field has of itself begins to look like the picture of the world is complete, or at least completable.
But no system with a causal connection to a system which it models can ever fully predict the behavior of the system modeled without infinite fractal recursion, which is impossible to produce via causation (I won't preclude entirely the possibility of such recursion just happening, but even to speculate there is to take a trip to crazy town).

Translation: just when you think you've got everything figured out, it explodes.

And so it did: the 20th century opens with a bang, or two, and a great mirror is held up: humanity gazes itself in the eye, and is both horrified and amazed. Electronic communication begins. Bright minds see already the potential of electronic storage and movement of information. The potential for broadcast. The potential for automation. The potential for abuse, and the potential for use.
Just as the printing press made production of copies cheaper, typewriters and fax machines and telephones and television and photography and on and on and on; the means of production and storage of information explode right along with the atom bomb.

And so does the academic/cultural world: the explosion of media is an explosion of possibility. There are new ways to create works, and so there are new ways to analyze, synthesize, critique, lampoon, parody, reference, allude to, echo.
Where it was once the case that allusions were a witty aside, meant to be caught by nearly all of the audience due to a shared culture (everybody's read or seen the main works of Shakespeare, etc) they become a game of reference and obscurity. We enter the post-modern period with a series of works that are announced as half-finished, but never to be completed. Contemporaries critique their mentors alongside the ancients, and alongside those other contemporaries also critiquing either the mentors or the ancients. The reaction to a given work overwhelms the work itself. Duchamp places a urinal in an art show and starts a revolution. Heidegger publishes the first half of the first half of Being & Time and then promptly abandons the project to go into poetry and stand up comedy. Wittgenstein publishes a single work as his PhD thesis, then goes into hiding to teach math to elementary school students, returns to academia to mount assaults on his previous work and dies without finishing anything else. His students publish his notes and errata. Freud inspires legions of academics of one sort or another to either worship or assault, and the quasi-religious cult of psychoanalysis becomes entangled with every academic field: it proposes to explain and undermine them all. The art world becomes ever increasingly self involved, each work reacting against other works: not, perhaps, in the mind of the artists themselves who remain for the most part inscrutable, but in the eyes of the increasingly impossible to follow world of art criticism, which goes to great lengths to legitimate itself by being increasingly convoluted, technical, and obscure.
Derrida publishes Glas, a work reacting to Hegel and conceived in such a way as to avoid being an antithesis or synthesis to any Hegelian thesis. Deleuze and Guattari engage in Chaosophy and Misosphy, building off of Deleuze's career of imaginary history of philosophy and Guattari's activism, born of the rebellions of May of '68. More television programs are produced than could be watched in a lifetime. More films are produced than could be watched in a lifetime. More books are published ever year, every month, every day, than could be read in a lifetime.

The internet is born.

[If you're keeping score, I'm not keeping things in strict chronological order, the point is the state we're in much more than just how we got here.]

Globalism and global culture rise as the boundaries between physical locations melt from the heat of information flowing freely through time and space.

More information is produced and recorded at least semi-permanently every hour than could be consumed by any individual in their lifetime.

The fields of research expand at exponential rates not completely understood by anyone involved in fueling the growth.

The cost of creating new work drops close to zero.

More than half of the world's considerable population come into possession of a cell phone (4 billion of them and counting).

Following a given academic work requires not just participating in the field from which it is grown, but being a member of the generation from which it is produced, and a follower of the movement it takes part in.

McSweeney's publishes All Known Metal Bands, a 300 page list of band names, with no further information or comment. It gets rave reviews, and sells like crazy. Many bookstore employees write recommendations for it and give it prominent shelf space.

Livejournal. Myspace. Blogger. Facebook. Twitter.

The Daily show is taken more seriously than most main stream televised news, paper newspapers decline, but internet based news and NPR thrive.

This is white noise, culturally. Every frequency sounded to the limit. No chorus. Constant change. United by a single language, English, the world is divided by a lexicon that includes over 1,000,000 living words. And far more dead ones. [Most living languages have vocabularies in the 100,000 range or less, though these are statistics I've seen in places and may not be entirely accurate, but the point remains.] A greater and greater percentage of our memory is taken up by advertisements, logos, catchphrases, and jingles designed to stick to the human mind like glue. Memeology is all the rage, as we watch ideas wage war on one another for possession of the most sought after real estate in a world where every inc of solid ground is owned by someone: the inside of your skull.

This is bad. This is good.
There is more culture now than there has ever been. You could do nothing but watch opera from now until you die, and you would never have to watch the same opera twice. The fields of cultural research are vast. The amount of raw inspiration, if sunrises and sunsets and clouds and bees and dandelions and raindrops and snowflakes and beaches and the moon's phases and the stars and all the rest of the world that has always been there and just can't be forgotten about wasn't enough for you, is functionally infinite.

But then we can't go about talking about it like we used to. We can't rely on allusion and reference to get us by. A 20 page bibliography is cute, but it's a wall that won't be broken all that often.

We have to find ways of communicating simply and directly.

We must look to each other as human beings, and speak and write and create and move in ways that are not echos for the sake of showing that we are part of a clique that has consumed some common culture, but instead echos for the sake of communicating what is beautiful or haunting or joyful or terrifying or moving in whatever way of what we are echoing.

We must learn to echo what is meaningful.

For too long it has been enough to echo in such a way that it was possible to find the source of your echo. To hunt down the original (or better, to remember) to understand what was meant by the particular reference or allusion.
"To be or not to be"
"I think therefore I am"
"The Eternal Return"
"I'm MELTING"
But such echoing can no longer take the place of meaningful communication, for the rising tide of cultural creation has made it insane to think that any serious number of humans will have read all of the same books that you have.

This is a cultural Babel Tower: we have the potential to continue to create and imagine and play with more freedom and crazier toys than anyone ever before. But if we don't stop playing like we have for the last few millennia, we're not going to be able to communicate at all, and down the tower will fall.

But really: it's as easy as taking responsibility for what you do. If you're going to echo, echo in your own voice. Stop mimicking and start doing. Authenticity is the only way out. It's that or cultural solipsism from here.

I think we can do it.

I think we should try.