Mind Blown

I thought I would emerge from my application hibernation to write about something everyone who reads my blog has to check out. One of my sources (a very kind colleague) has informed me of a new exhibit at the Folger. Bill Sherman, a curator at the Folger Shakespeare Library, has put together an exhibit called Decoding the Renaissance: 500 Years of Codes and Ciphers. Awesome. Or, as Sherman says here of William Friedman’s encoded drawing of a flower, it is “mind-blowingly clever, and fun.” This exhibit is a testament to not only the widespread use of cryptography in the Renaissance but also to our own age’s increased awareness of and fascination with the world of the clandestine services. Of particular interest to me is the unusually firm connection between Renaissance methods of encoding and our own. While Sherman is surprised by the fact that “Renaissance principles of cryptography are still its guiding principles in the 20^th century,” I have been finding this in my research for a few years now. Even in the shift to dataveillance, the underlying assumptions and modus operandi remain the same: attaining total knowledge through covert methods of acquisition. Although they are backing off this claim now, the NSA and GCHQ asserted that they sought to “own” and “master” the internet in the years following 2001. After all, humans are still needed to parse and interpret the intelligence provided by machines. Rather than rendering humans obsolete, dataveillance only intensifies their work and shines a new light on age-old questions about the epistemological underpinnings of surveillance.

I even learned from another source, who shall remain nameless (actually a renowned scholar in the field of Renaissance literature), that a former student of hers (or his) was a retired government operative who chose to do a paper on surveillance in the worlds of Hamlet, Shakespeare, and modern America. With firsthand knowledge of contemporary practices in counterespionage, this student was well-suited to compare Walsingham’s tactics with those of this age, and the conclusion was that almost nothing had changed. The tactics and overarching strategies that this student experienced as a secret agent were actually quite similar to those narrated in the biographies on Walsingham—which are flourishing now, by the way. Even though the life of Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster always makes for a good, marketable book, biographies of the father of English counterintelligence have mushroomed since 2001. This is in addition to the fictional “Kit Marlowe” and “Ursula Blanchard” mysteries and the “Spymaster Chronicles.” Since 2005 there have been five different biographies on Walsingham in English and more in other languages. It is a sign of the times—and now it has come to the Folger. This stuff is really important because we as a nation are trying to process what all this spy stuff means, and we can learn quite a bit about it from the past, especially since that past is not all that different from the present. 

    

Chaucer's House of Rumour and the Internet

I have already written about how Ovid’s House of Fame in the Metamorphoses could be read as a precursor to the Internet here. For this post I am going to talk about how Geoffrey Chaucer’s homage to Ovid’s House of Fame, a surreal dream-poem fittingly titled The House of Fame, not only resembles the internet but can help us understand digital technologies in a new light. 

Chaucer, circa 1380

Ganymede and eagle

So, The House of Fame. This is a dream-poem, which means it is about as coherent and credible as a dream would be. The narrator dreams that he is taken up to the heavens, Ganymede-style, by Jove’s golden eagle. This pricey raptor is a pompous, know-it-all philosopher type, claiming to be a master of acoustics who knows all about the physics of how all words that are ever spoken go to the House of Fame. He claims that every single story ever told goes to that House to be judged and either commemorated by the goddess Fame or consigned to Trotsky’s dustbin of history. But, before these stories get to Fame’s House, they stop at the House of Rumour, which is like a way station on the road to Fame.

Now, the House of Fame rests on top of a mountain of ice (it gets weirder/better). The House of Rumour, meanwhile, spins in the air right below the House of Fame. Think of a carousel, but one that floats, is made out of wood, measures over sixty miles in diameter, and, instead of plastic horses, is full of people standing around and gossiping. 

a la Under the Table and Dreaming

Every word ever spoken comes here and the gossips spread the word, so to speak. It is literally the opposite of Bill O’Reilly’s “No Spin Zone.” All stories, from water-cooler talk to the narratives like the legend of Troy that define and celebrate cultures and nations, arise in the House of Rumour, a place where nothing can be believed because everyone is augmenting, distorting, and fabricating narratives. This is the House that I feel resembles the Internet. Both are loci toward which all verbal communication gravitates. Both are also known for their credibility gap. But what is most intriguing is that Chaucer defines all those gossips in the House of Rumour as “spies” overlooking the world (they are up in the heavens) in lines 701-6 of the poem. Fame is able to know every single narrative ever told because of these spies. Rhetorically, surveillance grants its practitioners omniscience. It is fitting that Chaucer would imagine these gossips in the House of Rumour to be spies informing Fame of all the stories they come across. What I feel is important from this is the way we think about the credibility of the dataveillance and the data mining occurring right now. Technology lends an aura of credibility to its users. But, we should not be so quick to differentiate the unreliable web from the reliable dataveillance that is mining the web. After all, it is working with information that is about as reliable as the tales fabricated in the House of Rumour. Here’s what it’s all about: we live in an era of dataveillance, and we think it is the wave of the future. We should probably start thinking about it more as a newer version of the low-tech surveillance techniques used in the past, a digitization of rumor. 

Canon Confidential Time:

J. D. Salinger was a counter-intelligence operative for the U. S. Army in Europe. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge and interrogated German prisoners of war. His transition from counterintelligence to counterculture hero was in part aided by his keen eye for subtle details. Is it too far-fetched to say that his use of the catching metaphor could have been inspired by his experience trying to catch all sorts of information on enemy combatants?