THE principle of nanopublication not only radicalizes hypertextuality; it also corresponds with the idea that narration is being superseded by the database as the new reigning model “to make meaning out of the world,”1 in the words of Lev Manovich as early as 2001. Thus, certain structures of events and information are replaced by the flexible (re)combination of data. The conceptions of the information society are different in principle from the Humboldtian educational ideal that had understood the acquisition of knowledge as a process and not as a mediation of information, and this is occasionally acknowledged in discussions of the digital humanities.2 The new technologies, according to the prognosis, replace “the Humboldtian subject filled with culture and a certain notion of rationality” with the “computational subject” that knows “where to recall culture as and when it was needed in conjunction with computationally available others, a just-in-time cultural subject.”3 This “just-in-time” mode describes the situational focus of the “computational subject,” whose accompanying experience is that of impermanence. “Just-in-time” means “at once” but also “only for now.” The cumulative acquisition and retention of knowledge give way to a masterful juggling of knowledge: “ ‘doing knowledge’ instead of ‘having knowledge.’ ”4
It is less obvious what this change in knowledge management means from the perspective of the sociology of knowledge: a change of emphasis from process to product. The situational juggling has no time for tedious processes of reception; it expects “offers” of knowledge with an exact product description for which relevant parameters are available: thesis, result, keywords, and construction of content. This procedure diametrically opposes a textual formation like that of the essay, one that invites the reader to embark on a journey whose destination remains uncertain. Why such a being-on-the-road may nevertheless be its destination will become clear if we turn to one of the most prominent representatives of the Enlightenment and a mastermind for the Humboldtian educational ideal: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing.
In 1787 Lessing wrote a small text on truth and the path to knowledge entitled A Rejoinder as part of his Philosophical and Theological Writings. He proclaims: “If God held fast in his right hand the whole of truth and in his left hand only the ever-active quest for truth, albeit with the proviso that I should constantly and eternally err, and said to me: ‘Choose!’, I would humbly fall upon his left hand and say: ‘Father, give! For pure truth is for you alone!’ ”5 The falling upon God’s left hand is a decision against the product and for the process. As Lessing maintains: “Not the truth which someone possesses or believes he possesses but the honest effort he has made to get at the truth, constitutes a human being’s worth. For it is not through the possession of truth, but through its pursuit, that his powers are enlarged and it is in this alone that his ever-growing perfection lies.”6
In a lecture in Hamburg she gave after receiving the Lessing Prize in 1959, Hannah Arendt quoted from Lessing’s Rejoinder, citing it as an example of his concept of tolerance: “Lessing’s greatness does not merely consist in a theoretical insight that there cannot be one single truth within the human world but in his gladness that it does not exist and that, therefore, the unending discourse among men will never cease so long as there are men at all.” Arendt points out Lessing’s conviction that “a single absolute truth…would have been the death of all…disputes,”7 which explains why Lessing—as he maintains in his Hamburg Dramaturgy—only wants to sow “fermenta cognitionis,” that is, according to Arendt, “to stimulate others to independent thought, and this for no other purpose than to bring about a discourse between thinkers.”8 Arendt’s image of Lessing is clearly characterized by her own historical experience and hope. From this perspective the nineteenth century, with its “obsession with history and commitment to ideology”9—and of course also the Third Reich—obstructs the access to Lessing’s heritage. In Arendt’s version, philosophical postmodernism has found a trailblazer in Lessing, and so it is no surprise that a skeptic such as Richard Rorty would later write that he prefers “Lessing’s choice of the infinite striving for truth over ‘all of Truth.’ ”10
Lessing’s drama of tolerance, Nathan the Wise (1799), is also characterized by postmodern thought avant la lettre when it declines to answer which is the best of all religions: The best religion is the one that makes its adherents “loved…in sight of God and man.” The answer given here is conceived as provisional and revocable because temporal deferral can change it when, in the competition for the hearts of the majority, another religion takes the lead. Lessing’s preference for the search for truth in Nathan is visible even when the judge in the Parable of the Ring indefinitely defers the decision about the true ring, or when Nathan comments on Saladin’s question regarding the true religion with the words: “And now it seems that what he wants is Truth! And wants it, too, as prompt and plump as if Truth were a minted coin” (3.6). What Nathan—and Lessing—refuses is the numerical value assigned to the coin; accepting it would name a winner.
Lessing’s position is interesting in our context because it highlights the shift from a process-oriented to a result-oriented approach to knowledge. While for Lessing “the honest effort he has made to get at the truth, constitutes a human being’s worth,” the value of the current management of knowledge lies in access to information as quickly and easily as possible. This is why texts are expected to have an abstract or a teaser, and this is why the app Summly is worth even more than what Nick D’Aloisio received for it. The desire for immediate access to condensed information is also the reason that newspaper publishers request money from Google and other news aggregators in exchange for the referrals to their contents instead of being grateful for links. A link no longer links if its text already contains everything that the reader wants to know, that is, the event as such rather than the circumstances or the possible contextual points of view.
Another well-known example of this shift from process to result is the way that Google Maps and Apple Maps encourage a user unfamiliar with an area to focus her interest only on the next street. The specification of a destination is enough to reach it; there is no need to study the map and orient oneself. This “liberation” from any information that does not serve a direct purpose is taking place on a grand scale through the use of search engines. The pointedly targeted query, bypassing threads of argumentation and associational chains (facilitated by Instant Search), reduces every book, every essay, to the index of its core statements. It passes over the process of thinking and leads directly to the supposed product of that thinking, just as Google Maps and Apple Maps lead to a destination without providing any sense of orientation. Resembling the disposition of the contemporary traveler—overly reliant on travel technology—an ignorance with respect to the “landscape” of thought seems to overcome space and time. Being on the road—the state that, for Lessing, was the meaning of a journey—has given way to arrival. There is neither space nor experience between A and B—only time reduced to (milli)seconds by the search engine that—if used for the start- and endpoint of the search—is the negation of the text as a web and of the quest for knowledge as a process. At the same time, in that it makes connections between discrete catchwords, it is the nanopublication of navigation.
Does the “the unending discourse among men” that Arendt noted as the pragmatic impetus of Lessing’s skepticism with respect to truth necessarily end when we deal with knowledge in the mode of linked data? One may easily propose a contrary expectation. Knowledge, specifically in the era of the net, more easily takes on “the form of a permanent discussion” because, on the one hand, it is no longer presented as stable and, on the other, it emerges in an uncontrolled way.11 The circumstances noted here are familiar. Nothing can be “taken home” in plain black and white. The expertocrats are drowning in the “wisdom” of the many. Weinberger’s proclamation of the new process orientation of knowledge gains support with the widespread conjectures in science and technology studies and in cultural studies. And what could better exemplify these circumstances than Wikipedia, which replaces the stabilization of knowledge in the traditional encyclopedia with ceaseless volatility? But here it should be noted that the experience of contingency becomes not so much tangible as it is “lookupable.” While the history of entries can be looked up, along with the discussion of any changes listed in the background, because of the monopoly that Wikipedia represents, there exists, in actuality, only one encyclopedia for all, with only one entry on a specific subject. Besides, if one reads Weinberger together with Lessing and Adorno, the conclusions are inverted since then the process is imagined not mechanically (as a new ordering of the data) but psychologically (as the ethos with respect to knowledge access). It is precisely the processes of orientation during gradual realization and becoming aware that are lost as an experience.12
It is possible to argue in favor of process and multiple perspectives on the Internet by making, for example, the contingency of glossaries, taxonomies, and ontologies part and parcel of the interaction with semantically annotated information. However, it is debatable to what extent this understanding of the (“raw,” credible) data as (context-sensitive) statements (that can be relativized) can be implemented within the conceptual frame of the semantic web—and whether this is even desirable. Conversely, practice shows that information that has been extracted often (for example, by Wikipedia in the case of DBpedia.org) is being invisibly entered into other contexts with no effort made to make its provenance known: how this information was generated or in what context.
One should remain skeptical when Weinberger maintains that “the new medium of knowledge is less a system for the publication of articles or books; it is a networked public sphere.”13 To what extent does the opening of discourses simultaneously demand the end of the article and book as forms of discourse? How are the form of and access to publication interconnected? One possible answer lies in the link between forms of publication and their reception. Did hyperreading—as an Internet-induced model for reading after the advent of the smart phone—change our approach to knowledge to such an extent already that for all reading—and for the production of longer texts in particular—the necessary concentration and synthesizing power hardly exist any longer? This is precisely the accusation being made from different sources—in its most popular form by Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: How the Internet Is Changing the Way We Think, Read, and Remember (2010) and with radical sociopolitical critique in Bernard Stiegler’s Taking Care of Youth and the Generations (2010). In both cases the underlying belief is that the Internet’s techniques of reception favor inattentive information processing over complex thinking and thus encourage alertness to manifold stimuli without reflection. In light of its connection to hypertext, the cultural technique of surfing on the net has generated a kind of apprehension that was already recognized before Web 2.0: “Our concerns are largely limited to discrete data of information at best. Knowledge in its true sense, let alone wisdom, never really enters the equation.”14
One can certainly agree with the findings of this undoubtedly culture-pessimistic perspective but not necessarily with its assessment. Perhaps the point of this lack of attention lies precisely in a supposed performance of Lessing’s task—subverting the narcissistic truth pathos, but in a completely different way? Dissecting knowledge into its smallest units—“discrete data,” in the quoted text, or “raw data” in the video cited at data.europeana.eu—also constitutes a countermovement to the constructions of grand narratives. Even if the decline in attention to the complexity and the interwoven characteristic of information posits a trust based on numbers and data quite apart from narrative interweaving, one could argue that such trust should no longer be ideologically exploited. Data love is the thirst for knowledge without the drive for narrative. It takes its truth as the face value of a coin or, more precisely, as a whole collection of loose change that hardly ever adds up to any bills with which one might engage in a significant exchange. From the perspective of memory theory, this means, simultaneously, that the situational focus of the juggler of knowledge undermines the possibility of collective memory. The collective memory that mediates the binding values and perspectives of a cultural or national group of people gives way to an “autological memory.”15 Collective memory withers away as it is overwhelmed by the individualized, situative linkage of knowledge generated by the unholy alliance of hyperlink and search machine. The result is the disappearance of retained memory in favor of functional memory that is no longer social. But from these circumstances there might emerge a “depth of superficiality” that might indeed be discussed, from a postmodern perspective, in terms of cultural optimism.16