Rochelle Gold brings Gaddis’s early critique of mid-century capitalism into contact with current criticism by Alan Liu and others, who suggest that humanists must bring their own questions, interests, and values to the table, rather than acquiescing to the economic logic of post-industrialism.
The size, scope, and ambition of William Gaddis’s J R (1975) has produced countless conversations about how difficult it is to read. Rick Moody, in an apparent effort to counter this dominant impression, insists that “the book is entertaining and not difficult at all” (his emphasis, VIII). Lee Konstantinou responds that the novel is undoubtedly difficult, albeit worthwhile. On the other hand, Jonathan Franzen famously describes his frustration while reading J R; he laments, “Battling through J R, I’d wanted to grab Gaddis by the lapels and shout: ‘Hello! I’m the reader you want! I’m looking for a good systems novel. If you can’t even show me a good time, who else do you think is going to read you?’” (his emphasis, 248). As this debate suggests, J R generates a range of responses, from pleasure to frustration, and reading it invites us to think about why we read and what we hope to gain through our literacy practices.
This meta conversation about readability points us toward the centrality of reading, writing, and communication technology within the novel itself, which was composed over the course of twenty years across the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, a time of significant technological transformation. Literacy, educational institutions, and experiments in writing are central in J R, and they are inextricable from the novel’s more visible critiques of post-Fordist capitalism. So we may ask, what kinds of literacies matter in the networked cultures of the 1960s and 70s? As mainframe computers became integral to the operations of large public and private institutions, various kinds of print and electronic media intersected and overlapped, and people were actively thinking about what it meant to read, write, and think within high speed, large-scale, technologically-mediated networks. Annette Vee explains that after 1945, new technological developments shifted “the concept of programming from physical engineering in wiring to symbolic representation in written code. At this moment, computers became the alchemical combination of writing and engineering, controlled by both electrical impulses and writing systems” (21). Programming and writing were becoming so intertwined that, in 1961, a computer scientist named Peter Elias argued that learning programming languages could soon become obsolete because “undergraduates will face the console with such a natural keyboard and such a natural language that there will be little left, if anything, to the teaching of programming. [At this point, we] should hope that it would have disappeared from the curricula of all but a moderate group of specialists” (qtd in Vee 22). Of course, over six decades later, this prediction has not come to fruition; programming languages remain essential. In fact, some scholars, even within the humanities, now see programming as a central part of twenty-first century literacies, whereas others remain skeptical (Long and Baker).
The meaning of “literacy” is surprisingly hard to pin down. James Gee offers the “aspirin bottle problem” as a way to think about literacy, traditionally defined as the ability to read and write (49). Gee points out that even something as seemingly instrumental and straightforward as reading the instructions on an aspirin bottle requires social and cultural knowledge. As part of a group of scholars associated with New Literacy Studies, Gee argues that “literacy practices are almost always fully integrated with and interwoven into the very texture of wider practices that involve talk, interaction, values, and beliefs” (49). In other words, literacy cannot be neutral; it is always already situated within social life, culture, and politics. This social view of literacy is valuable, but it doesn’t yet account for how we should think about digital and technologically mediated literacies, in particular. In order to draw attention to the materialities of literacy, Vee centers technology in her definition of literacy, which she defines as “a widely held, socially useful and valued set of practices with infrastructural communication technologies” (27). For Vee, computing is becoming increasingly central to literacy in the twenty-first century, and computer programming may fit just as well into her definition as writing an essay or reading a book does.
As mentioned above, some scholars in the humanities are concerned that conceptions of literacy that are attentive to digital technologies end up over-emphasizing the importance of coding and under-emphasizing the importance of cultural criticism. In other words, the demands of the sciences, which are perceived to be more valuable to governments and businesses, can swamp the demands of the arts and humanities. Or, as Alan Liu puts it in his 2012 critique of the digital humanities,
It is as if, when the order comes down from the funding agencies, university administrations, and other bodies mediating today’s dominant socioeconomic and political beliefs, digital humanists just concentrate on pushing the “execute” button on projects that amass the most data for the greatest number, process that data most efficiently and flexibly (flexible efficiency being the hallmark of postindustrialism), and manage the whole through ever “smarter” standards, protocols, schema, templates, and databases uplifting Frederick Winslow Taylor’s original scientific industrialism into ultraflexible postindustrial content management systems camouflaged as digital editions, libraries, and archives—all without pausing to reflect on the relation of the whole digital juggernaut to the new world order.” (491)
Liu suggests here that, in the case of scholars in the digital humanities, developing literacies focused on coding, processing, and managing data can lead to scholarship and projects that reproduce “today’s dominant socioeconomic and political beliefs.” Liu suggests that humanists must bring their own questions, interests, and values to the table, rather than acquiescing to the economic logic of post-industrialism, a perspective that resonates closely with Gaddis’s critique of mid-century capitalism in J R. Liu’s assessment of the digital humanities, a niche academic subfield, has implications that stretch far beyond academia; it exemplifies the broader need for critical forms of literacy that can disrupt and transform the status quo when necessary.
So what does critical literacy look like in a technologically mediated society? Various scholars have used the term “critical literacy” in vastly different ways. For instance, Kevin Leander and Sarah Burriss argue for critical literacy as posthuman, in that it should give serious weight to a range of nonhuman actors, including algorithms and AI. On the other hand, Earl Aguilera and Jessica Pandya use the term “critical digital literacy” (CDL) to center human agency in literacy practices. For them, CDL is “a way to recognize how reading and writing are related to the historical, political, economic, and cultural circumstances of which we are a part. CDL positions all humans as readers and writers of the virtual and physical worlds we inhabit, with the potential to transform our societies through the ways in which we engage with literacies” (103). Aguilera and Pandya’s CDL usefully accounts for social context and materialities, but, most importantly, I draw on their definition because it emphasizes the radical potential of literacy to “transform our societies,” although I use the term “critical literacy” rather than CDL.
The entanglement between writing and programming, and the uncertainties about the future of reading and writing in technologically-mediated networks, make the 1960s and 70s a pivotal moment for exploring some of the competing notions of literacy that are still with us today. In J R, instrumental “aspirin bottle” literacy is frequently in conflict with critical literacy, which is historically and culturally situated and has the potential to challenge the status quo. Instrumental literacy tends to overshadow and outcompete critical literacy within the novel because its economic and applied potential is immediately clear. On the other hand, the value of critical literacy is not legible to the majority of characters, beyond the small number of struggling artists, writers, and teachers who already buy into it. Studying J R alongside ELIZA, a computer program developed by Joseph Weizenbaum in 1966 that was designed to respond to queries like a therapist, we can find an emerging pessimism about the future of literacy in information culture, where opportunities for profound human connection and critical thinking are often replaced by more surface and transactional forms of communication. At times, J R and ELIZA both seem to prove that access to large amounts of data or cutting-edge computing orients us towards the most instrumental, transactional forms of literacy. At the same time, J R and ELIZA show us the limits of instrumental literacy, which narrows the imaginative possibilities for the future, and, in doing so, they point to the need for critical literacy. While neither J R nor the people who engaged ELIZA playfully offer a fleshed-out version of what critical literacy should look like, they both offer clues for developing critical literacy in the present day, where we are always corresponding within a wide network of humans and machines.
Rapid Reading Courses and Encyclopedias Full of Errors: J R’s Instrumental Literacies
J R is seemingly a novel about everything. For Stephen Burn, it is an “encyclopedic novel.” For Thomas LeClair, it is about the “runaway waste of American energies” (600). More to the point, Mikkel Krause Frantzen claims, “it is, in short, a story about money” (95). Much has been made of the experimental style and form of the novel, and critics have offered a range of interpretations. While Nicholas Spencer argues that J R relies on “critical mimesis” to critique the rhetoric it contains, Ali Chetwynd identifies “friction” as the key to understanding “how formal shifts throughout the novel organize a constructive rhetorical arc rather than a ‘flat’ mimesis.” These critics tend to situate their readings of J R within the context of the American and global economies of the mid-century, often with an emphasis on the 1970s and with an interest in Gaddis’s work history as a corporate writer, researching and writing speeches, marketing, and promotional materials for companies such as Eastman Kodak, IBM and Pfizer. Some critics have drawn connections between J R and computing, including Joseph Tabbi, who suggests that the novel “can be seen to have anticipated developments in hypertext and other means of linking literary texts together and with electronic and digital media” (143). While Tabbi finds resonances between the style of the novel and digital “linking,” my reading will trace how instrumental literacies operate within the novel and how they respond to and are shaped by emerging technologies of the 1960s and 70s.
One indication that literacy is a central concern in J R is that it contains a single handwritten page—a school report about Alaska, riddled with minor errors in grammar and mechanics, written by 11-year-old J R. The handwriting itself is mostly legible, but not easy to read. Still, the report, titled “Alsaka,” demonstrates that J R is literate, in the “aspirin bottle” sense that he can more or less read and write. Emphasizing the deal-making and profit potential of Alaska’s natural resources, the report describes how Alaska was “bought off of Russia for $72,000,000, that was before the value of it’s many natural resources was known such as precious metals virgin minerals coal and oil shale, these oil companies paid $900,000,000 to lease some of Alaskas north slope interest alone is $199,320,52 a day” (438). The aesthetic of the report, full of dollar amounts signifying sales and profits, is meant to read as factual and objective. Not only does it contain factual errors—i.e. the U.S. paid Russia $7.2 million in 1867 for the territory of Alaska, not $72 million—but it also uncritically internalizes mid-century capitalism, viewing nature’s primary value in its use for industry. Based on this report, J R knows how to read and write, but not how to think critically or ask imaginative questions, because his literacy practices reinforce the status quo without providing any tools for challenging it. As scholars like Gee point out, literacy is always ideological and situated within our social worlds, and so the economic and instrumental rhetoric in J R’s report on Alaska reflects their pervasiveness in J R’s orbit. The lined notebook paper and the cursive handwriting of the report indicate two things at once to readers: on the one hand, that the ideas being expressed are shallow and childish, and, on the other, that they are provisional and mutable, written in a child’s notebook, but not inevitable.
J R tells the story of 11-year-old J R, who wholeheartedly embraces greed and individualism in order to build a sprawling business empire. J R is an anti-hero, and the novel offers a searing critique of the rhetorics of mid-century American capitalism that J R, and almost everyone around him, readily buy into. The school depicted in J R is a dismal, anti-intellectual place. In an environment anathema to learning, J R leverages his reading and writing skills, turning to informal texts, networks and learning spaces. He begins sending away for brochures and free giveaways through the mail, items typically thrown away as “junk mail,” and he eventually learns the ins and outs of trading stocks by asking questions on a school field trip and sending away for pamphlets that explain the basics.
J R’s view of literacy is fundamentally instrumental. Reading and writing are necessary for business communication, but they lack any broader humanistic purpose. As his business grows, J R becomes concerned that Edward Bast, his employee and former music teacher, isn’t getting through all of the mail that the J R Corporation receives. He orders Bast a rapid reading course that promises to teach students how to read at the incredible pace of “between fifteen hundred and three thousand words per minute” (387). The advertisement amplifies J R’s perspective that the volume and speed of reading matter much more than thoughtful interpretation or even comprehension. For J R, quantity, that is, in terms of counting how many words a person can read per minute, is the key measure of literacy. In addition, J R orders a set of pre-written business letters—advertised as “letters you might have to struggle over for just the right phrase completely written for you” (386)—for Bast. These letters reflect the interchangeability of the kinds of transactions that J R is involved in and the hope, presumably shared by J R’s many business associates, that writing can be mechanized, standardized, and made practically effortless, without the complications of being socially or culturally situated. Others might read such advertisements with skepticism or critical distance, but J R wholly accepts their premises because of the limitations of his own, almost entirely instrumental, literacy.
While these fictional advertisements read as satire, they draw inspiration, and sometimes direct language, from real mid-century advertisements that can now be found with Gaddis’s papers in the Special Collections archive at Washington University in St. Louis. In fact, the language in J R about the rapid reading course comes directly from a real ad for “The Internationally Famous Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics Institute” (box 56). The ad in J R for the pre-written business letters captures the spirit of a pamphlet for a private investigation course by mail correspondence called “Universal Detectives,” which states, “our course is designed to be concise and to the point, not just words to confuse you. We do not teach theories, but just present you with factual information” (box 56). The ad contrasts supposedly subjective and impractical “theories” with what is supposedly useful: “factual information.” It also implies that writing can generally obscure more than it clarifies, muddying the waters for no particular reason. The ad positions obtaining “factual information,” or what we might call “aspirin bottle” literacy, as the essential purpose of the course, prioritizing the same narrow, instrumental form of literacy that J R champions.
Ironically, J R’s business ventures lead him into the book publishing industry, where his corporation produces encyclopedias and textbooks. The children’s encyclopedia that his company produces, according to one character, “is doing extremely well even though it seems to be teeming with inaccuracies and a number of prominent educators have demanded its withdraw…” (693). In other words, the encyclopedia is profitable yet useless, even harmful, because it is full of errors. However, the errors don’t seem to hurt the bottom line, so there is no incentive to correct them or produce a higher quality encyclopedia. Moreover, the textbooks that J R’s company produces contain targeted advertisements geared at children, a moment in the book that feels uncomfortably prescient for readers almost 50 years later. A public relations representative explains how the ads will be targeted: “gum cereals candy bars all that stuff and junk is the primary grades bikes sports equipment records seventh and eighth on up nothing till French three and advanced algebra on deodorants tampons all that” (518). The idea to use textbooks to cross-promote the various products sold by subsidiaries of J R Corporation is exactly the kind of idea that the administrators of J R’s school might have. In this way, J R’s worldview is not anomalous; he closely mimics the attitudes and values of those around him.
Still, there are characters throughout the novel, most notably Edward Bast, who contest J R’s worldview and seek to propose alternative epistemologies that counter J R’s faith in individualism, capitalism, and techno-science. At the end of the novel, mild-mannered Bast tries to expose J R to ideas beyond the instrumentalism he readily adapts. Bast urges J R to “take your mind off these nickel deductions these net tangible assets for a minute and listen to a piece of great music, it’s a cantata by Bach cantata number twenty-one by Johann Sebastian Bach damn it J R can’t you understand what I’m trying to, to show you there’s such a thing as as, as intangible assets?” (655). Bast stumbles as he tries to convince J R of the value of vaguely termed “intangible assets.” Whereas the rhetoric around economics is understood to be concrete, quantifiable and objective by J R, even as throughout the novel we see that it is confounding, vague and highly ideological, the rhetoric around music, and other forms of humanistic creative expression and knowledge production, lacks a clear language or set of tropes for conveying its value. In this way, this interaction between J R and Bast stands in for a central problem presented in the novel: techno-capitalism is able to persuasively articulate its value to the broadest possible audience, whereas art and humanistic thought cannot, thereby making themselves “intangible” and ultimately dispensable within the powerful economic networks portrayed within the novel.
Although Bast’s rhetoric is not sufficient to sway J R, the experimental form of the novel—the length (726 pages), the unattributed dialogue, the simultaneous conversations and disruptions, and the sheer volume of characters—functions as a kind of “intangible asset,” challenging the instrumental literacies practiced by J R and his business associates, although only hinting at an alternative, more critical form of literacy. A range of critics argue that literary and art forms must critically engage with economic and instrumental discourses, and that doing so offers grounds for imagining counter-narratives rather than reinforcing the status quo. For instance, in his study of networked art of the second half of the twentieth century, Craig Saper surveys art forms, including mail art of the 1970s, that use large impersonal systems as a staging ground for “intimate bureaucracies,” which “make[] poetic use of the trappings of large bureaucratic systems and procedures (e.g., logos, stamps) to create intimate aesthetic situations, including the pleasures of sharing a specific knowledge or a new language among a small network of participants” (xii). Saper stresses that rather than creating avant-garde art forms that are completely divorced from the everyday experience of life in postindustrial cultures, networked art tends to practice the idea that “the only way out is through” (16). This idea is predicated on an acceptance of the technical noise inevitably resulting from art and literature moving “through” hyperindustrial societies as preferable to worse kinds of censorship, control, and obsolescence resulting from art and literature that avoid seemingly ubiquitous economic, social, and cultural formations.
J R models the ethos of “the only way out is through.” For Glen Stosic, Gaddis’s portrayal of the chaotic and intersecting web of characters and corporate interests destabilizes the role of author, making it so that Gaddis is no longer “the primary locus of narrative authority” (420). Instead, Stosic argues that “readers must then also learn to decipher the noise of the culture around them” (420). In other words, Stosic claims that the novel complicates the expected relationship between reader and writer, changing the kind of literacy the reader may be expected to bring to the novel, and ultimately empowering the reader to decide what to take from the text. In my reading, the novel’s engagement with economic and instrumental discourses suggests a broader literacy problem: the challenge of cultivating critical literacy practices that effectively articulate humanistic values in the face of overwhelming flows of “content.” Not only does 11-year-old J R point to the need for critical reading and writing strategies because of his lack of such strategies, but J R, the novel, demonstrates the need for critical literacy through its experimental form that is nearly impossible to read without such strategies. However, like the networked art projects in Saper’s study, J R offers an intriguing but idiosyncratic model for fostering critical literacy that is not easily replicable, leaving the question of how critical literacy might flourish more broadly unanswered.
Naivety and Play: ELIZA as Therapist and Computer Program
Moving from literature to computer science can help us see that the literacy problem circulating in J R—that is, the struggle to imagine critical literacies beyond instrumentalism—was also a conspicuous problem in the field of computing during the same time period. Here, we turn to ELIZA, a computer program developed by Joseph Weizenbaum in 1966 that was designed to respond to users “roughly as would certain psychotherapists” (Weizenbaum 1966, 42). ELIZA was not intended to actually serve as a therapist; instead, the program was built to demonstrate new developments in computer science related to natural language processing. Weizenbaum chose therapy as a model because it provided an unusual mode of conversation where “one of the participating pair is free to assume the pose of knowing almost nothing of the real world” (42). He notes, “If, for example, one were to tell a psychiatrist "I went for a long boat ride" and he responded "Tell me about boats", one would not assume that he knew nothing about boats, but that he had some purpose in so directing the subsequent conversation” (42). In this way, ELIZA could give the impression of understanding by identifying keywords from the user and plugging substitutions into preformed scripts. Sherry Turkle describes ELIZA as a “dumb” program in the sense that it cannot understand or “know” what the user means (105, 1997).
Still, ELIZA can be a surprisingly engaging correspondent just by echoing back keywords and phrases in the form of a question. Here is an excerpt from the famous sample conversation between a study participant and ELIZA, published by Weizenbaum in 1966, with ELIZA’s responses in capital letters:
Men are all alike.
IN WHAT WAY
They’re always bugging us about something or other.
CAN YOU THINK OF A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE
Well, my boyfriend made me come here.
YOUR BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE
He says I’m depressed much of the time.
I AM SORRY TO HEAR YOU ARE DEPRESSED
It’s true. I am unhappy.
DO YOU THINK COMING HERE WILL HELP YOU NOT TO BE UNHAPPY
I need some help, that much seems certain.
Critics call this the “ELIZA effect,” referring to the fact that although ELIZA communicates in a programmed and highly limited way, people often find it compelling, and, moreover, they often attribute a deeper intelligence that it does not have. Noah Wardrip-Fruin sums up the mechanics of ELIZA’s communication as follows: “Each statement by an ELIZA script is the result of a multistep transformation of the most recent audience statement. Many of these transformations include a verbatim portion of the statement being transformed” (30). For instance, when the participant says “Well, my boyfriend made me come here,” ELIZA responds by removing “well” and substituting “my” and “me” with “your” and “you,” so that the reply echoes the participants statement back: “YOUR BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE.” This result is a relatively basic transformation at the level of syntactic substitution that more or less repeats the user’s initial statement, but it gives the impression that the program is listening and that it has a deeper understanding than it does. Weizenbaum points out that although ELIZA may seem impressive, “once its inner workings are explained in language sufficiently plain to induce understanding, its magic crumbles away; it stands revealed as a mere collection of procedures, each quite comprehensible” (36, 1966).
Interacting with ELIZA is far from seamless. This is another excerpt from the same sample conversation:
You are like my father in some ways.
WHAT RESEMBLANCE DO YOU SEE
You are not very aggressive but I think you don’t want me to notice that.
WHAT MAKES YOU THINK I AM NOT VERY AGGRESSIVE
You don’t argue with me.
WHY DO YOU THINK I DON’T ARGUE WITH YOU
You are afraid of me.
DOES IT PLEASE YOU TO BELIEVE I AM AFRAID OF YOU
My father is afraid of everybody.
WHAT ELSE COMES TO MIND WHEN YOU THINK OF YOUR FATHER
Bullies.
DOES THAT HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE FACT THAT YOUR BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE
The transcript above illustrates that ELIZA cannot handle words it does not recognize or that do not fit into the pattern of the conversation, such as the user’s last reply—“Bullies”—which leads to a response that sidesteps the input and redirects to an earlier, and only somewhat related, part of the conversation. This sample conversation appears in nearly every piece of scholarly writing about ELIZA and serves as a basis for analysis, even though it appears to be a lightly edited transcript. Digital artist Eric Loyer notes that, based on the documentation, ELIZA’s response to “You are not very aggressive but I think you don’t want me to notice that” should be “WHAT MAKES YOU THINK I AM NOT VERY AGGRESSIVE BUT YOU THINK I DON’T WANT YOU TO NOTICE THAT” rather than simply “WHAT MAKES YOU THINK I AM NOT VERY AGGRESSIVE” (Wardrip-Fruin 39). Thus, the transcript is not raw data generated solely by a computer program but instead already edited by humans for clarity. The ELIZA transcript calls to mind the controversy over Racter, a computer program that supposedly wrote a book of poetry called The Policeman’s Beard is Half Constructed (1984). As Leah Henrickson demonstrates, the level of human involvement in the writing process was understated by its editor William Chamberlain, although the precise details are unclear as no known documentation of the code exists. ELIZA and Racter each reflect a desire by their human collaborators to automate literacy practices in order to match human writing abilities, but in both cases, this objective remains elusive as human collaboration happens at various stages, from the sentence level to the level of inputting relevant data (i.e. words, phrases, and sentences) for the respective programs to recombine. 11-year-old J R’s excitement about rapid reading courses and pre-written business letters represents a strikingly parallel hope of at least partially automating literacy. While J R’s goal of automating literacy to make his business more efficient is relatively straightforward, ELIZA and Racter reflect a more complicated set of reasons for wanting to automate literacy practices. Efficiency is likely part of it, but so are the respective human collaborator’s hopes of exploring the cutting edge of computing and of destabilizing the assumed boundaries between human and machine capabilities.
In spite of its limitations and glitches, ELIZA may be an enjoyable correspondent. Contrasting the “knowing observer” with the “naïve human participant,” Espen Aarseth argues, “the errors produced by such machines can be very funny” for the former while the latter “project[s] sentience, even intelligence, onto their mechanical partners” (130). In this way, Aarseth suggests that users either embrace humor or naiveté in their interactions with ELIZA. In terms of the naïve user, it’s hard to say how many people actually adopted this stance. Weizenbaum claims that his secretary asked him to leave the room to give her privacy when she was corresponding with ELIZA (Turkle 105, 1997), but, rather than assume that she was “project[ing] sentience” onto ELIZA, perhaps it is equally likely that she simply did not want Weizenbaum to see any of the personal data she was inputting. By contrast, Aarseth’s “knowing observer” finds pleasure in interacting with ELIZA. Wardrip-Fruin contends that some people are purposefully co-producing strange responses. Wardrip-Fruin gives this example of how a user might play around with the highly structured and often predictable nature of the program:
You are going to repeat what I say in the form of a question
WHAT MAKES YOU THINK I AM GOING TO REPEAT WHAT YOU SAY IN THE FORM OF A QUESTION (36)
This exchange exemplifies critical literacy, as users need not talk with ELIZA naively. Instead, they can interact with ELIZA in ways that undercut the premise of computer therapy. In a similar vein, Sherry Turkle points out that “As one becomes experienced with the ways of ELIZA, one can direct one’s remarks either to ‘help’ the program make seemingly pertinent responses or to provoke nonsense” (1984, 39). Taking either approach, humans are learning how to correspond with machines, and, in particular, they learn that simple and predictable communication is most legible to ELIZA, and that everything else is potentially illegible, “provok[ing] nonsense.”
Although ELIZA was intended to serve as an experimental model for AI researchers, and, according to Wardrip-Fruin, to provide an “accessible demonstration of the potential of computing, exciting to those without the specialized knowledge needed to appreciate much of the ongoing research” (27), many psychologists became interested in the possibilities for computer therapy. Turkle describes how Weizenbaum was deeply troubled by this use of ELIZA as it suggested that human emotions were simple and programmable; Weizenbaum saw this as part of a larger cultural shift towards mechanization and instrumentalism. In this way, his disagreements about the therapeutic use of the experimental program led him to become a humanist and computer critic.
The fact that psychologists were so eager to adapt techno-science, presumably to make their work more quantifiable, legible, expedient, and data-driven resonates not only with those same values that J R, the character, embraces in his business dealings, but also with a subplot in the novel about the field of psychometrics. The school does not have a psychologist, but it does have a psychometrician, Dan DiCephalis, who tries to use personality tests to “tailor testing to the norm” (22). DiCephalis’s attempt to use computing for this purpose is a dead end—the punched cards offer unreliable and unusable results, but he doubles down, manipulating the children to fit the narrow parameters of the test so that the test can seem reliable after all. Those above him, Principal Whiteback and Major Hyde, only seem to care that “the equipment can be shown to justify itself, in budgetary terms” (23). For good reason, none of the three believe that the testing will provide useful data or insights, but their primary concern seems to be covering up the limitations of the technology and denying that anything that is not machine processable is worth further study. DiCephalis’s personality tests and ELIZA both exemplify how advancements in mid-century computing did not guarantee advances for the field of psychology in the way that some techno-optimists might have hoped. Both demonstrate Wendy Chun’s point that “we need to insist on the failures and the actual operations of technology” rather than upon utopian or dystopian technological rhetoric (9). Both ELIZA and J R reveal the ways that literacy practices are always partial, contingent, and entangled with technologies of writing that we cannot fully control.
The Need for Critical Literacy, Then and Now
Ultimately, J R and ELIZA raise fundamental questions about what it means to read and write in technologically mediated networks. The case of 11-year old J R and of the naïve correspondents who believed that ELIZA could successfully perform therapy dramatize the potential for networked literacies to be dominated by instrumentalism. Still, the novel and ELIZA both provide critiques of instrumental, applied ways of reading and knowing. J R’s corporation ultimately collapses, and the novel closes with J R reminiscing about his published writing—“remember this here book that time where they wanted me to write about success and like free enterprise and all hey?” (726)—presumably planning to start his business all over again, unable to write a different kind of future for himself. The characters, like Bast, who do possess critical literacy lack a language for expressing or modeling it outside of themselves, falling back on phrases like “intangible assets” that rely on language from the very economic models they seek to challenge. By contrast, the experimental formal features of J R, its size, scope, and disjointed narration, offer a more promising model for critical literacy that can recontextualize, defamiliarize, and call into question the very literal-mindedness, ahistoricism, and ignorance depicted in the narrative. Likewise, the opportunities for self-reflexive play with ELIZA, where users may intentionally prompt “nonsense” responses, create space for critical literacy that points towards alternatives to our everyday, “common sense,” and instrumental use of computing. In all of these cases, literacies can become meaningful and generative even in contexts where instrumental literacy dominates.
But is instrumentality always limiting? And are instrumental and critical literacies inherently opposed? This brings us back to Liu’s critique of the digital humanities. Instead of rejecting instrumentality altogether, he suggests that “the goal is to rethink instrumentality so that it includes both humanistic and STEM fields in a culturally broad, and not just narrowly purposive, ideal of service” (501). In other words, Liu makes the case that people in the humanities must engage with the sciences in order to build a more just, inclusive, and open future and, by implication, that we must make our values and ethical commitments legible and compelling, especially to those people who do not already share them. If we don’t, then perhaps we can look forward to a future with uncanny similarities to the computer therapists and error-ridden encyclopedias of these mid-century artifacts.
Critical literacy, then, is essential. It is socially situated, attuned to the materialities of writing, and full of transformative potential. For Leander and Burriss, critical literacy is inherently in flux; they point out that “we must keep pace with the deixis of technology; as meanings and capabilities of computational agents shift, so too must our ideas about what it means to be ‘critically literate’” (1274). Therefore, the kind of critical literacy hinted at in ELIZA and J R, two artifacts from half a century ago, before the days of personal computing, is certainly going to look different in the present day of ubiquitous mobile computing, algorithms, and AI. Still, the literacy problems of the 1960s and 70s operating within J R and ELIZA resonate closely with current discourse around large language models like ChatGPT. Naïve readings are everywhere, and there has been a proliferation of discourse about upending curriculum and business practices. In response, Ted Chiang claims that large language models are glorified text compressors, or, as he memorably puts it, “blurry jpeg[s] of the web.” In other words, while large language models compress and summarize content from the internet, making them seem shockingly literate or even smart at times, they, like ELIZA, do not understand queries as humans do. Chiang argues that contextualizing ChatGPT as a “lossy text-compression algorithm” is important because it “offers a useful corrective to the tendency to anthropomorphize.” Around half a century after the publication of J R and the release of ELIZA, conversations about how technological change will reshape the future persist, making the case for the continued value of critical literacies, with an emphasis on critical reading of and making with technology from within the humanities, rather than naïve reading practices and technological determinism in the face of emerging technologies.
Works Cited
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